If you haven’t yet had time to scrutinize or even glance at the extensive written record of Pr*sident Trump’s choice to fill the vacancy being left by Justice Anthony Kennedy, let me recommend that you stock up on some barf bags first. Don’t skimp. Buy the jumbo box.
Dana Milbank at The Washington Post writes—Look what crawled out from under Trump’s rock:
Seth Grossman won the Republican primary last month for a competitive House seat in New Jersey, running on the message “Support Trump/Make America Great Again.” The National Republican Congressional Committee endorsed him.
Then, a video surfaced, courtesy of American Bridge, a Democratic PAC, of Grossman saying “the whole idea of diversity is a bunch of crap.” Grossman then proclaimed diversity “evil.” CNN uncovered previous instances of Grossman calling Kwanzaa a “phony holiday” created by “black racists,” labeling Islam a cancer and saying faithful Muslims cannot be good Americans. [...]
And this week, the liberal group Media Matters found that Grossman had previously posted a link on Facebook to a white-nationalist website’s piece claiming black people “are a threat to all who cross their paths.”
After weeks of delay, the NRCC finally withdrew its nomination.
Many such characters have crawled out from under rocks and onto Republican ballots in 2018: A candidate with ties to white nationalists is the GOP Senate nominee in Virginia (and has President Trump’s endorsement); an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier is the Republican candidate in a California House race; a prominent neo-Nazi won the GOP nomination in an Illinois House race; and overt racists are in Republican primaries across the country.
Alex Shephard at The New Republic writes—Facebook Is Still Abusing Your Privacy:
Facebook’s core business model is built around advertising, which means that it will always share its users’ data with advertisers. And, despite the company’s strenuous apologies, it is continuing to push the boundaries of privacy to ensure that its market dominance remains unchallenged. The latest front in that fight is facial recognition.
As The New York Times reported earlier this week, “more than a dozen privacy and consumer groups, and at least a few officials, argue that the company’s use of facial recognition has violated people’s privacy by not obtaining appropriate user consent.” The facial recognition software used by Facebook scans photos uploaded to the social network against a database of “unique templates” of user faces to help recognize them. It does so without alerting the person whose face has been identified or obtaining their consent.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Kavanaugh is qualified and likable. So was Merrick Garland:
Be prepared for a festival of hypocrisy, evasion and misdirection from supporters of the confirmation of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
Begin with the idea that because Kavanaugh is qualified, well-educated, intelligent and likable, senators should fall in line behind him.
Sorry, but Senate Republicans have already demonstrated that none of these characteristics matters. If they did, Judge Merrick Garland would be a Supreme Court justice. In blocking Garland, conservatives made clear that personal qualities have nothing to do with confirmation battles. They are struggles for power. [...]
Progressives are told they should get over the shameful treatment of Garland. What an astonishing exercise in hypocrisy from conservatives who have been reliving the defeat of Robert H. Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court for 31 years. And unlike Garland, Bork got a hearing and a vote.
Lawrence Douglas is the James J Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, at Amherst College. At The Guardian he writes—If Trump challenges the constitutional order, will Kavanaugh defend it?
While it is true that Kavanaugh published an article nearly a decade ago arguing that presidents should be exempt from “time-consuming and distracting” lawsuits, he has likewise argued for dramatically narrowing the scope of executive privilege. Indeed, the very track record that makes Kavanaugh profoundly distasteful to Democrats – his years devoted to the impeachment of President Clinton – suggests that he might have limited tolerance for Trump’s efforts to denigrate and defeat constitutional processes.
In Federalist Papers 78, Alexander Hamilton memorably described the supreme court as the “least dangerous branch.” Lacking power over both the sword and purse, the court’s most precious endowment remains its legitimacy – the perception that as the branch of government largely insulated from the political fray, it can operate as a neutral defender of the constitution.
Neutrality, of course, is the trait that most unnerves President Trump. Any person, organization or institution that seeks to neutrally assess his exercise of power becomes the instant object of the president’s calumny and insults. Kavanaugh, we may hope, will work to resist his nominator and to preserve that neutrality.
Karen Tumulty at The Washington Post writes—Where the real fight over abortion will take place:
In Rhode Island, Gov. Gina Raimondo, a Democrat running for a second term, has called for a special legislative session to codify abortion rights into state law.
In Wisconsin, former state representative Kelda Roys, battling in a crowded Democratic gubernatorial primary, has declared that if federal protection of abortion rights is eliminated, she would pardon anyone charged with violating the state’s 169-year-old law criminalizing the procedure.
In Florida, ex-congresswoman Gwen Graham, in a five-way contest for the Democratic nomination for governor, has put reproductive freedom front and center in her campaign, saying she would veto any legislation that restricts abortion — and not-so-subtly reminding voters that she is the only female candidate of either party in the race.
Most of the attention surrounding the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh has focused on the fireworks taking place in the Senate. [...]
With the coming shift in power on the Supreme Court, abortion-rights forces across the country are about to learn two things the other side figured out a long time ago: This is a battle that must be waged over the long haul. And it is one where the fight begins at home.
Jean Hannah Edelstein at The Guardian writes—Abortion Are you pro-choice? It's time to shout it from the rooftops:
ADIY surgical abortion is not a nice thing to talk about. It involves the insertion of the wire from a coat hanger – or a knitting needle, or another thin rod or stick – into the cervix of a pregnant woman, with the aim of opening the cervix to induce a miscarriage. It is as horrible and dangerous as it sounds.
This kind of abortion often leads to uterine perforation, infections, infertility and the deaths of women. And prior to the passage of Roe v Wade in 1973, it was common: accurate statistics on illegal abortions were scarce because, of course, they were illegal, but annually in the 1950s and 60s they numbered in the hundreds of thousands. And thousands of the women who had them died from complication, or suffered life-changing injuries, because they lived in a country that would not allow them to safely and legally make reproductive decisions. A country that we may soon find ourselves living in again.
Now that Donald Trump has nominated Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative, to be the new justice to the US supreme court, we may see Trump attempt to fulfill his campaign promise to reverse Roe v Wade. America thus faces the possibility of a backslide into the dark ages when abortion was illegal, forcing women to take extreme measures to take care of their own bodies and lives.
Kate Aronoff at In These Times writes—I Couldn’t Help But Wonder…Is Democratic Socialism Catching On?
New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon is a democratic socialist. Nixon, who is challenging incumbent Gov. Andrew Cuomo, wrote in an email to Politico that some “more establishment, corporate Democrats get very scared by this term but if being a democratic socialist means that you believe health care, housing, education and the things we need to thrive should be a basic right not a privilege then count me in.”
This move comes just weeks after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—a self-described democratic socialist and dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—won an upset primary against Rep. Joe Crowley, until that point considered one of the most powerful Democrats in the House. In the wake of Bernie Sanders’ presidential primary, these developments have sparked a conversation about what the term ‘democratic socialism’ actually means. [...]
As Ocasio-Cortez straightforwardly put it when asked to define democratic socialism: “In a modern, moral and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live. … What that means to me is health care as a human right. It means that every child, no matter where you are born, should have access to a college or trade-school education, if they so choose it. And I think that no person should be homeless, if we can have public structures and public policy to allow for people to have homes and food and lead a dignified life in the United States.”
It wasn’t diatribes about ownership over the means of production that won Ocasio-Cortez her election, and it won’t be singing the Internationale that wins Nixon hers. What has seemed to resonate with New York voters—and with those of fellow democratic socialists Lee Carter, in the Virginia legislature, and Carlos Ramirez Rosa, a Chicago Alderman—is a tangible vision of a more humane society, backed up by a genuine commitment to listening to and fighting for the concerns of their constituencies.
Joan Walsh at The Nation writes—Brett Kavanaugh’s Confirmation Would Threaten Robert Mueller’s Investigation and the Affordable Care Act:
Wealthy, Beltway-bred Brett Kavanaugh overcame many crushing disadvantages to be nominated to the Supreme Court by Donald Trump. He has a long affiliation with the Bush family, whose dying patriarch Trump slurred just last week. And he comes with an expansive paper trail of 300 prior court decisions, endless presidential office e-mail chains, and numerous legal-journal articles—all of which will make for a long hot summer of reading for Democratic aides and progressive legal watchdogs. On everything from voting rights to abortion to his work for Clinton-hounding independent counsel Kenneth Starr in the 1990s, Kavanaugh will provide Democratic senators (as well as Republicans, if any deign to do their jobs) with plenty to question him about when hearings begin, possibly as early as next month.
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, an expert at greasing the skids for right-wing Court nominees, urged Trump to pick either Thomas Hardiman or Raymond Kethledge, two stalwart conservatives also on US appeals courts who come with shorter paper trails and no troublesome Washington political past. Trump promised to drain the swamp; Kavanaugh is Swamp Thing, a product of the conservative DC establishment and an accomplice to some of its worst mistakes. Meanwhile, top presidential adviser (secondarily, a Fox host) Sean Hannity was pushing Amy Coney Barrett, a devout conservative Catholic and abortion opponent who would have fired up Trump’s white-evangelical base.
But Kavanaugh possessed one big advantage over the rest of the field: his passionate support for almost unbridled executive power, along with an eccentric conviction that a sitting president shouldn’t be indicted and or maybe even criminally investigated, for anything. The president should be excused from “time-consuming and distracting” lawsuits and investigations, Kavanaugh wrote in a 2009 Minnesota Law Review article, as that “would ill serve the public interest, especially in times of financial or national security crisis.” Impeachment is the only remedy for a law-breaking chief executive, Kavanaugh said, urging Congress to “consider a law exempting a President—while in office—from criminal prosecution and investigation.”
Benjamin Schwarz is the former national editor for The Atlantic. He is writing a biography of Winston Churchill for HarperCollins. At The Nation he writes—It’s Time to Disrupt NATO But not for the reasons Trump gives:
NATO summits customarily amount to public-relations lovefests, in which sonorous communiqués declaring the vitality of the “Atlantic community” obscure what has become the increasingly dangerous moves of the US-dominated military pact. But President Trump, no surprise, promises to make this summit uncharacteristically uncomfortable and potentially rancorous. The issue for progressives is that, mostly inadvertently and largely for the wrong reasons, Trump will be disrupting an established pattern sorely in need of disruption and provoking hard questions about the justifications for and perils posed by NATO and the related dangerous course of US-Russia relations.
To grasp the issues at stake, we have to have to look at the history of NATO’s somewhat hidden purposes. In the mid-1950s, George Kennan and Walter Lippmann, two of America’s most profound foreign-policy critics, started to question the rationality of US foreign policy. By that time, they understood that the Red Army posed no real threat to Western Europe, and so they each proposed a mutual superpower disengagement from the Continent. Kennan and Lippmann’s aims in Europe were limited and specific. Defining America’s interest there as preventing the Continent’s military domination by a single power, they perceived American policy in strategic, rather than ideological or “world order” terms. The foreign-policy establishment was enraptured by the notion of a Pax Americana, but Kennan and Lippmann had a far more modest view of America’s future European—and global—role. They looked to the restoration of a plural world in which other powers—the major European states in particular—would dilute the nascent US-Soviet confrontation. Disengaging the United States and the Soviet Union from Europe and thereby restoring a multipolar balance of power would be, Kennan and Lippmann reasoned, in America’s long-term interest, for it would free the United States from its responsibilities for others’ security and would enormously reduce the potentially apocalyptic tensions between the superpowers.
Marc DaCosta at The Guardian writes—How to fix big tech? We need the right language to describe it first:
The biggest insight in George Orwell’s 1984 was not about the role of surveillance in totalitarian regimes, but rather the primacy of language. In the book’s dystopian world, the Party continually revises the dictionary, removing words to extinguish the expressive potential of language. Their goal is to make it impossible for vague senses of dread and dissatisfaction to find linguistic form and evolve into politically actionable concepts. If you can’t name and describe an injustice, then you will have an extremely difficult time fighting it.
In the late 19th century, rapid industrialization changed the social fabric of the United States and concentrated immense economic power in the hands of a few individuals. The first laws to regulate industrial monopolies came on the books in the 1860s to protect farmers from railroad price-gouging, but it wasn’t until 1911 that the federal government used the Sherman Antitrust Act to break up one of the country’s biggest monopolies: Standard Oil.
In the intervening 50 years, a tremendous amount of political work had to happen. Among other things, this involved broad-based consciousness building: it was essential to get the public to understand how these historically unprecedented industrial monopolies were bad for ordinary people and how to reassert control over them.
Ivan Krastev, author of After Europe, writes at The New York Times—Sorry, NATO. Trump Doesn’t Believe in Allies. Europe has to understand that in the American president’s twisted worldview, there are only fans and enemies:
Not so long ago, Europeans believed that despite Donald Trump’s harsh words, Washington would never endanger its Cold War alliances. “Do not read his tweets, follow his actions,” senior American officials told their European colleagues when the conversation turned to the future of the trans-Atlantic relations.
How wrong we were to believe them. It was the tweets that really mattered in the end.
Within hours of the religiously anticipated NATO summit in Brussels today, President Trump was castigating Germany, historically one of America’s closest allies, claiming, ridiculously, that it is “captive” to Russia and calling NATO countries “delinquent.”
Clearly, Mr. Trump is ignoring European Council President Donald Tusk’s appeal: “Dear America, appreciate your allies. After all, you don’t have that many.”
Heather Hurlbut is a senior adviser at the National Security Network and former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. At New York Magazine she writes—There Is No Cleaning Up the Foreign-Policy Mess Trump Is Making:
Too much coverage in the run-up to this week’s NATO Summit treated the conflict between President Trump and European leaders like a four-alarm fire – as if maybe it could be put out. Or at least tamped down to a smolder, so that maybe Moscow wouldn’t notice.
But fire is the wrong plague metaphor here. Think earthquakes — one after another after another, jolting the landscape of international relations and leaving behind ever-greater chaos. The list of recent temblers includes Trump’s assaults on the alliance, his ongoing efforts to harm or humiliate Germany’s Angela Merkel, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, and others. But there are also the shocks from other member states over recent months — Turkey flouting democratic and alliance norms, Poland and Hungary edging away from the rule of law, Italy joining Trump in undercutting alliance positions on Russia’s aggression in Crimea and elsewhere. Trump used this week’s summit to administer additional stress tests, of course, from a personalized assault against Merkel at the opening breakfast to late-day tweets demanding, out of nowhere, that alliance members double the proportion of their GDP they pledge to spend on defense.
After all these earthquakes, what’s left of the largest, most prosperous, most democratic alliance in human history? Well, NATO was still able to put out a unanimous communique calling on Russia to demonstrate “compliance with international law and its international obligations and responsibilities.” And it started a training program for post-ISIS Iraq. So, no, Trump didn’t destroy the Atlantic Alliance at the summit. He is not going to come home and attempt to withdraw from the treaty that commits the U.S. to the defense of its European allies, and vice versa. With all due respect to pre-trip headlines, that was never the plan.