With his chaos moves, what is Bannon up to? Who does Trump gain? Who does Trump lose?
LA Times:
Not just 'bad hombres': Trump is targeting up to 8 million people for deportation
Up to 8 million people in the country illegally could be considered priorities for deportation, according to calculations by the Los Angeles Times. They were based on interviews with experts who studied the order and two internal documents that signal immigration officials are taking an expansive view of Trump’s directive
As to what’s behind the strategy (with tips for looking at how people react to it), try this (Honesty, Rule of Law and the rewriting of our shared American values).
Michael Mullen /NY Times:
I Was on the National Security Council. Bannon Doesn’t Belong There.
In his first weeks in office, President Trump has outlined plans to reorganize the White House’s National Security Council. This is in keeping with tradition: New presidents regularly reconfigure the council to fit their management style and national security priorities. Some of Mr. Trump’s plans, such as including the director of the C.I.A. as a full voting member of the council, are welcome.
But some of Mr. Trump’s other plans are unsettling and should be remedied as soon as possible — in particular the role he has given to his top political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon.
Bannon’s power grabs are meeting resistance from within.
Yair Rosenberg/WaPo:
For a phenomenon often dubbed “the world’s oldest hatred,” anti-Semitism is not well understood. From top Iranian officials who blame the Talmud for the international drug trade to British political activists who claim that the Mossad is stealing their shoes, anti-Jewish bigotry can be bewildering and bizarre. But given the prejudice’s longevity, virulence and recent resurgence in Europe and America — witness the waves of bomb threats against dozens of Jewish centers nationwide in the past month and the controversy over the Trump administration’s repeated refusal to include Jews in its Holocaust memorial statement — it’s well worth debunking common misconceptions that impede our ability to fight it.
WaPo:
The big thinker remains chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who has used chaos as a tool for implementing transformative policy but who aides said is now trying to adapt to working within Priebus’s structure.
“Some of us are a little more aggressive than others, and others have a more calming influence, and it’s what makes a perfect partnership,” Bannon said. “There’s no daylight between us, and there’s really no daylight with the president.”
One senior White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid, said the issue isn’t so much about areas of responsibility but about whether people can stay within them.
Alex Burns/NY Times:
While President Trump’s travel ban threw American airports into chaos last weekend, Bob Ferguson, the attorney general of Washington State, was biding his time on an airplane.
On his way home from a conference of Democratic attorneys general in Florida, Mr. Ferguson landed a week ago in the center of a political and legal firestorm. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport was in disarray, with protests massing. Gov. Jay Inslee, a fellow Democrat, had sent word to the attorney general’s staff that he wanted to mount a battering-ram attack on the president’s decree.
Within two days, Mr. Ferguson had become a leading combatant in a battle with the president of the United States, filing a dramatic challenge to Mr. Trump’s travel ban that yielded a ruling from a federal judge on Friday freezing the order’s implementation.
Politico:
Will This Man Take Down Donald Trump?
They’ve been squaring off for years. Now New York’s attorney general is emerging as the leader of the Trump resistance.
CNN:
Trump must explain himself to supporters like me
The problem is, at one point in his campaign,
Trump promised to ban Muslims. He even promised to create a Muslim registry. These proposals are at odds with the man whom I understand Trump to be.
I understand why the left and the media are up in arms. This weekend, the ambiguity of Trump's order and his past rhetoric on Muslims collided and seemed to confirm their worst fears about the new US leader. He deserves some of the blame for this; he also needs to prove they're wrong.
Oy. We’re not wrong.
Aaron Blake/WaPo:
"Judicial checks on executive orders appear to be infrequent, in keeping with the view that the judiciary seeks to avoid 'political' questions," said Meena Bose, an executive-authority expert at Hofstra University.
But that might not necessarily be the case with Trump. As a man who has expressed admiration for authoritarian rulers and used his early executive orders to deal with hot-button and often-controversial issues, Trump almost seems to be spoiling for a fight over this.
The White House's momentary use of the word "outrageous" in its statement Friday night would seem to be further proof of that.
Linda Greenhouse/NY Times:
Will that hands-off attitude define the Roberts court in the Trump era? Is it limited to foreign policy or does it extend to civil liberties and other domestic issues? Because Republicans won’t press Judge Gorsuch on such questions — or any questions — Democrats better be prepared to do it themselves. And they shouldn’t accept the formulaic response of “I can’t answer because it might come before the court.” As Tocqueville observed nearly 200 years ago, in this country, everything and anything is likely to come before a court. That answer isn’t good enough.
A decade ago, two Yale law professors offered a proposal in an article that has received too little attention. The authors, Robert Post and Reva Siegel, maintained that rather than ask nominees how they would decide current or future cases — questions that nominees properly refuse to answer — senators should ask how they would have decided past Supreme Court cases. “Such questions,” the two professors wrote, “serve the democratic design of the confirmation process by revealing the operational content of the nominees’ constitutional commitments.”
Asking Judge Gorsuch — or any other nominee — to describe how he would have approached the Boumediene case does not bind him to any result in a future case. All his answer would do is reveal how he might approach a high stakes, high salience clash of constitutional principles. Is there such a case in the Roberts court’s future?