Days remaining of the Trump regime if The Donald serves out a full term: 1448
Lawrence Douglas at The Guardian writes—Steve Bannon is calling the shots in the White House. That's terrifying:
That didn’t take long. From no-drama Obama to all-trauma Trump: the shift has been seismic, leaving millions in this country and abroad frightened and struggling to make sense of America’s new political landscape.
Some of the upheaval appears to be the consequence of incompetence, the predictable result of an under-qualified real estate mogul struggling to master the most powerful and demanding job on the planet.
But not so with the travel ban. In this case, upheaval was the intent – not to the degree we have seen; that clearly caught the administration off guard. But it was upheaval nonetheless.
As we now know, the drafting and rollout of the travel ban was largely the work of Steve Bannon, the president’s chief political strategist. It was Bannon who reportedly overruled the proposal to exempt green card holders from the ban. And it was Bannon who pushed the order through without consulting experts at the Department of Homeland Security or at the state department.
The Nacht und Nebel quality of the ban’s announcement makes clear that the president’s chief strategist wanted to send tremors through the world. Here was bold proof that the portentous accents of Trump’s inaugural address, also Bannon’s work, was not mere rhetoric.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—It’s time to make Republicans pay for their supreme hypocrisy:
Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) went further: “If Hillary Clinton becomes president, I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court.”
Yes, Republicans do have a principle on nominations: When the Supreme Court’s philosophical majority might flip, only Republican presidents should be allowed to appoint justices.
We are in for a festival of GOP hypocrisy in the debate over President Trump’s nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
Republicans will say that because he is decent and well-qualified, Democrats have no business blocking him. But it’s hard to find someone more decent or qualified than Garland, as many Republicans acknowledged. Garland’s experience, temperament and character mattered not a whit to the GOP. In fact, the party seemed to fear that in a hearing, he’d come off as too sensible.
Mona Chalabi at The Guardian writes—A chronicle of fear: seven days as a Muslim immigrant in America:
When the roll of toilet paper ran out this morning, I stood there, staring at my bathroom shelf for a full minute. There are three rolls left. How many new ones should I buy? The question is so difficult it makes my throat close up. I stand naked, perfectly still, staring at the remaining rolls of toilet paper. How long will I stay in America?
This rented apartment is the first home I’ve ever felt was mine. I’ve filled the space, stocking it like I’m a mother of five. The bathroom shelves are lined with spare shampoo bottles, razor blades, toothbrushes, condoms, moisturizer pots, nail files, tubs of Tylenol, sunscreens of various factors, roll-ons and, normally, lots and lots of spare toilet rolls. Somewhere around November I must have stopped buying TP stocks to invest in my future here.
Everything is on hold. I haven’t upgraded my Wi-Fi service (despite Spectrum repeatedly telling me I really, really should). I didn’t go on a second date with that nice-enough guy. And I haven’t booked an appointment to go see a doctor about the near-constant abdominal pain I’ve had for months. What’s the point? They’ll only provide me with a follow-up appointment at some point in the future and where will I be then?
I haven’t voiced these feelings to any of the native-born Americans I know. If I did, I would have to closely study their faces for signs of “it’s not a big deal, you can just leave”. Deep down, I suspect that even my liberal friends don’t really think immigrants have equal rights to live and work here.
In December, I was at a holiday party for a TV company I do research for. An executive said he was angry about Trump winning the election – I told him that I wasn’t angry, I was scared. He put an arm on my shoulder and said: “Listen, you’ve got every right to feel paranoid.” The word paranoid slapped me across the cheek: I smiled and seethed. [...]
Masha Gessen and Martina Navratilova write—How Trump Has Taken Away Our Homes:
We wrote this together because we have a few things in common. Some are obvious: Both of us came to the United States as teenagers fleeing Communist regimes; both of us are queer. We are also both moved alternately to tears and to rage by the actions of the new American president. One thing that we share is less obvious: This anger and despair make both of us feel as if we are losing our home.
Masha once spent an evening in Berlin with a sociologist and a philosopher trying to define “home.” The three discussants had, among them, lived in more than half a dozen countries and counted themselves native in at least two languages each. Facts like country of birth, length of stay or mother tongue were not applicable. Other descriptors emerged: a sense of safety, a sense of familiarity, a sense of inhabiting space with certainty, a sense, indeed, of the certainty of that space — the opposite feeling of having the rug pulled out from under your feet.
President Trump has introduced fear into our households. Both of us are married to women who are not American citizens (both are Russians who carry green cards), and both of us are raising children some of whom are United States citizens and some not.
Anne Kim at The Washington Monthly writes—The Long-Term Economic Wreckage of Trump’s Travel Ban:
Corporate America has good reason to condemn Trump’s travel ban – it is a humanitarian travesty and an affront to American values. Moreover, its long-term impacts could wreak incalculable damage to the American economy.
Much of the innovative energy in the United States that’s led to new jobs and economic growth has come from its immigrants. According to the 2016 Silicon Valley Index by the think tank Joint Venture, 37% of Silicon Valley residents are foreign born, including 50% of workers ages 25-44. Many of the tech world’s most prominent entrepreneurs are also immigrants, including South African-born Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX; Google’s Sergey Brin; and Israeli-born Safra Catz, now CEO of Oracle. In fact, finds the Kauffman Foundation, more than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies in 2010 were founded by immigrants or the child of an immigrant.
Yet Trump’s travel ban sends a broadly anti-immigrant signal to the rest of the world just as other nations are vying for – and winning – the best and brightest minds in the increasingly global market for talent. Already, the United States is slipping in its ability to attract and retain the world’s top workers. A 2015 report by the Business Roundtable, for instance, ranked the United States ninth out of tenth – after Germany, Australia, Singapore and other nations – in the friendliness of its policies toward high-skilled immigration.
Trump’s continued lurch toward insularity, which includes his plans for a border wall as well as his ban on refugees, will only accelerate the flight of top-tier global talent to friendlier shores – a phenomenon that urban theorist Richard Florida noted as early as 2004 in an especially prescient piece for the Washington Monthly
Linda Greenhouse at The New York Times writes—Neil Gorsuch and the Search for the Supreme Court Mainstream:
The declaration Tuesday night by Senator Chuck Schumer, the leader of Senate Democrats, that “the burden is on Judge Neil Gorsuch to prove himself to be within the legal mainstream” poses a crucial question: Where is today’s mainstream?
In the coming confirmation battle over President Trump’s nomination of Judge Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, we’re about to find out.
The New York senator’s implied threat is a resonant one, harking back to the titanic battle 30 years ago over President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert H. Bork. Judge Bork was “out of the mainstream” and would “turn back the clock” on civil rights, his opponents charged as they succeeded in marshaling a bipartisan coalition that defeated his nomination with 42 votes in favor and 58 against. [...]
But just as the Mississippi River changes course over time and redefines the boundary between Mississippi and Louisiana, the constitutional mainstream isn’t static. No participant in the Bork battle could plausibly have maintained, for example, that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun, as the Supreme Court would decide two decades later. Few if any anticipated the degree to which the First Amendment’s protection for commercial speech would be turned into a powerful deregulatory tool.
Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times writes—Politicians aiming to cut Social Security and Medicare use weasel words to hide their plans. Let's call them on it:
In this era in which the Orwellian manipulation of language by politicians to say the opposite of what they mean has reached a fever pitch, we should be especially wary when conservatives hide their plans to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits behind a smokescreen of euphemism.
Jared Bernstein, a fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and a former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden, has put in a plea to journalists to call out policy makers when they pull this stunt—and not to empower politicians by doing the same thing.
“Though many policy makers want to cut these social insurance programs, they rarely say ‘cut,’” he writes. “Instead, because the programs are so highly valued by recipients, policy makers say ‘reform,’ ‘overhaul,’ ‘change,’ ‘revamp,’ and ‘fix’ the program. In the vast majority of these formulations, these verbs are euphemisms for cuts, and it’s very important for journalists to call them out as such…. Please stop the obfuscation. When policy makers are talking about cutting entitlements, call it like it is.”
We second the motion. We’ve been particularly wary of plans described as “fixes” to Social Security and Medicare. As we’ve observed, these are invariably “fixes” in the same sense that one “fixes” a cat.
Jack Stilgoe and Andrew Maynard at The Guardian write—It's time for some messy, democratic discussions about the future of AI:
In February 1975, 140 people – mostly scientists, with a few assorted lawyers, journalists and others – gathered at a conference centre on the California coast. A magazine article from the time by Michael Rogers, one of the few journalists allowed in, reported that most of the four days’ discussion was about the scientific possibilities of genetic modification. Two years earlier, scientists had begun using recombinant DNA to genetically modify viruses. The Promethean nature of this new tool prompted scientists to impose a moratorium on such experiments until they had worked out the risks. By the time of the Asilomar conference, the pent-up excitement was ready to burst. It was only towards the end of the conference when a lawyer stood up to raise the possibility of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit that the scientists focussed on the task at hand – creating a set of principles to govern their experiments.
The 1975 Asilomar meeting is still held up as a beacon of scientific responsibility. However, the story told by Rogers, and subsequently by historians, is of scientists motivated by a desire to head-off top down regulation with a promise of self-governance. [...]
Fast-forward 42 years and it is clear that machine learning, natural language processing and other technologies that come under the AI umbrella are becoming big business. The cast list of the 2017 Asilomar meeting included corporate wunderkinds from Google, Facebook and Tesla as well as researchers, philosophers, and other academics. The group was more intellectually diverse than their 1975 equivalents, but there were some notable absences – no public and their concerns, no journalists, and few experts in the responsible development of new technologies.
Stephen Rose at The Washington Monthly writes—Trump Is in for a Rude Awakening After His Promises to Coal Workers:
There was only a brief moment of time when coal was a major U.S. employer. The height of the industry was in 1920, when coal employed nearly 800,000 workers. Today, the industry’s workforce is only 8 percent of what it was in 1920, with about 66,000 employees. Moreover, this decline in employment took place at the same time that the overall size of the U.S. workforce more than tripled—from more than 40 million workers in 1920 to over 140 million in 2013.
Despite this huge decline, however, total output of coal is up by 40 percent. [...]
So, ‘bringing back coal jobs’ is a typical Trump initiative, much like the Carrier deal that saved 800 jobs, in that it is big on atmospherics and small on actual employment. Currently, coal employment is five one-hundredths of one percent of all employment. It is hard to see how a new Trump plan could do anything more than raise this total to six one-hundredths of one percent of employment. [...]
The better promise Trump should have made to coal country is to offer employment retraining and other economic development initiatives for rural workers. In general, the decline of coal employment was driven by productivity gains that are good for the economy as a whole and that can’t and shouldn’t be reversed.
Brian Beutler at The New Republic writes—The Left Needs to Get Real—and Get Ready to Lose Many Fights:
One of the most baffling things that’s happened since congressional Democrats began organizing opposition to President Donald Trump and the GOP was when Elizabeth Warren—the Massachusetts senator whom many expected to help lead the Trump resistance—decided she would support Ben Carson’s nomination to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development. [...]
That Warren is facing reelection this cycle, and an unexpectedly uncertain future, was a troubling sign for those expecting Democrats to lead an effective opposition. If a progressive champion like Warren will bend the knee, which Democrats won’t?
Severe backlash to every perceived act of surrender can be an effective source of political pressure, as Republicans learned during the Obama years, but it can also herd the opposition party into traps. Resistance can be galvanic, but a false sense of strategic failure can be demoralizing. Quite frequently, at the urging of people who should’ve known better, conservatives scapegoated their elected representatives for allowing things to happen that those members lacked the power to stop. It was this sort of blind thirst for impossible victories that drove Republicans to shut down the government and nearly send the U.S. government into default on its debt.
There is a better balance, but it can only be struck if liberals and progressives accept that they are about to lose a whole lot of fights.
Jim Hightower at Other Words writes—Uncle Sam Wants… Your Social Security Check:
Uncle Sam wants you!
Not the Uncle Sam who’s the symbolic caricature of our country, but Sam Johnson. Although he’s been a member of Congress for more than a quarter of a century, you’ve probably never heard of him.
Johnson’s been what’s known in legislative circles as “furniture.” That’s a lawmaker who holds a congressional seat, but just sits in it, achieving so little that he’s unnoticeable.
But — look out! — Johnson has suddenly leapt into action. And we all need to take notice, because this Texas Republican has unveiled what he calls his “Plan to Permanently Save Social Security.”
To get you to support the plan, Uncle Sam wants you to believe that our nation’s very popular retirement program is “going bankrupt.” He knows that’s a lie, but he hopes it’s a big enough lie to panic you into doing anything to save the program
Sarah Posner at The Nation writes—Leaked Draft of Trump’s Religious Freedom Order Reveals Sweeping Plans to Legalize Discrimination:
The four-page draft order, a copy of which is currently circulating among federal staff and advocacy organizations, construes religious organizations so broadly that it covers “any organization, including closely held for-profit corporations,” and protects “religious freedom” in every walk of life: “when providing social services, education, or healthcare; earning a living, seeking a job, or employing others; receiving government grants or contracts; or otherwise participating in the marketplace, the public square, or interfacing with Federal, State or local governments.”
The draft order seeks to create wholesale exemptions for people and organizations who claim religious or moral objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity, and it seeks to curtail women’s access to contraception and abortion through the Affordable Care Act. [...]
The breadth of the draft order, which legal experts described as “sweeping” and “staggering,” may exceed the authority of the executive branch if enacted. It also, by extending some of its protections to one particular set of religious beliefs, would risk violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution.
“This executive order would appear to require agencies to provide extensive exemptions from a staggering number of federal laws—without regard to whether such laws substantially burden religious exercise,” said Marty Lederman, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and an expert on church-state separation and religious freedom.
Joel Bleifuss at In These Times writes—Voting Doesn’t Have To Be Winner-Take-All:
Thanks, in part, to a flawed candidate with a flawed campaign, all three branches of the federal government are in the hands of the far Right. At a state and local level, the Left has been consistently out-organized by school-privatizers, granny-starvers and water-poisoners. There can be no electoral substitute for the challenging work of organizing grassroots opposition to these reactionary ideologues. But reforming the mechanics of American elections is a necessary, albeit insufficient, element of a left resurgence. [...]
Nonvoters consistently give two reasons for not voting: They are “too busy” or “not interested.” The Pew Research Center reports that nonvoters are also more likely than voters to think “issues in D.C. don’t affect me” and “voting doesn’t change things,” beliefs that reflect their alienation from our nation’s political life.
One way to counteract such disaffection is to give people a chance to vote with enthusiasm, to believe that when they vote for a member of Congress, they will be helping elect someone who will represent their interests rather than those of corporate Democrats or right-wing Republicans. To make that happen, we must change our winner-take-all voting system, which is the foundation of our two-party system, and replace it with proportional representation.
Victoria Bassetti is the author of “Electoral Dysfunction” and a contributor at the Project on Government Oversight and the Brennan Center for Justice. Caroline Fredrickson is president of the American Constitution Society and the author of “Under the Bus.” At The Washington Post, they write—Is Sessions ready to say no to Trump?
The Justice Department under Jeff Sessions, if he is confirmed as President Trump’s attorney general, will be free to prioritize marijuana prosecutions over civil rights investigations of police departments, or to focus more on voting fraud than environmental crimes. Elections have consequences. Changed law enforcement priorities are among them. That’s politics.
It is not, however, “politicization” of the Department of Justice. That’s an altogether different — and more dangerous — phenomenon. It’s what happens when an attorney general or president employs the enormous power of the department, with its 10,000 lawyers and 13,000 FBI agents, to pursue personal or partisan goals. It happens when impartiality is thrown out the window and vindictiveness and vendetta take over.
Is Sessions the man to ensure this does not happen? This week’s showdown between President Trump and acting attorney general Sally Yates changes the equation. The independence of the department is under threat. Protecting it must be Sessions’s top priority. Yet thus far he has offered little more than bland assurances of fairness — combined with worrying hints of blindness to the gravity of the situation.