Happy. Joyous. Solemn. Peaceful. Thoughtful. Quiet. Restful. Inspiring. Uplifting. Please select one adjective from the list and apply to the holiday of your choice.
You might note this morning that the format looks a little different than previous weeks, and not just because Daily Kos had a bit of a facelift this past week. I’m eternally looking for a better way to present what is, after all, a somewhat lengthy list of editorials and opinions, covering many different topics — almost all of which are sure to be important—without slighting any topic covered.
Rather than organizing by topic, this week I’ve grouped the articles under their original source of publication. And I’ve kept the original titles for each article rather than try to derive something more descriptive, as I have in the past.
Will I stick with this format next week? Likely not. But voice an opinion if you find this approach better or worse for you.
The Guardian
Republicans rigged our democracy. Here's how Democrats can fight back
David Farris
Gerrymandering, the Citizens United atrocity that declared money is speech, blocking US supreme court nominations and obstructing legislation are some of the Republican party’s tactics. Depraved, racist voter ID laws that obviously target people who are likely to vote Democratic, and the cruel way that many states prevent current or former felons from voting, are others.
Farris also points out how the unequal weight given to tiny red states by the electoral college system makes it more difficult to repair the intentional damage Republicans have made — and continue to make — to democracy. If you were to compare the total population of Wyoming among the counties of the United States, it wouldn’t crack the top 100, but it still gets two Senators and a Representative. (In case you’re wondering, if you got everyone in Wyoming to stand together, they’d still be only the 32nd largest city in the US, behind Milwaukee).
Democrats, now that they are in the minority for the foreseeable future, must pay homage to their Republican overlords and use what little power they have to slow down legislation, turn the public against the Republican Congress, and then retake total power in 2018 and 2020. Then, what they must do with that power is to fundamentally alter key aspects of our political system that we take for granted but that are not, contrary to popular belief, outlined in the US constitution.
Always on a hunt for a new weapon to use against their greatest fear—one-person / one-vote—Republicans are keyed up over the idea of weaponizing the census in 2020 in an effort to both suppress voters and skew the allocation of House seats. But what’s most amazing about most Republican efforts to stop voters from voting, is just how blatant they are about their intentions.
Trump distracts America from the task of facing three existential threats
Michael H Fuchs
Donald Trump’s daily assaults on American democracy and the pillars of America’s role in the world are disastrous – and they are also distracting America from even bigger global challenges. At just the moment when the United States must be joining together with the rest of the world to confront three existential threats – climate change, challenges to democracy, and the rise of China – Americans are forced to spend every waking minute mitigating Trump’s damage.
It’s not that America is failing to rise up to meet these challenges. It’s that America is charging hard in the other direction. Under Trump, America has become a world leader in discarding the future and replacing the voting booth with the bank account. Autocrats around the world are looking to US to see how it is done.
Unless national and global actions are taken, the World Bank estimates that by 2050, more than 140 million people in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia will be forced to leave their homes because of climate change. The near to mid-term effects of the heating planet could affect hundreds of millions. The long-term effects could wipe out humanity.
If Democrats can secure control of at least one chamber of Congress this fall, it will be much more difficult for the environment to be written out of legislation. But repairing, or even slowing the damage Trump is doing on this issue through everything from the dismantling of the EPA to purposely putting American strategic plans at risk, will be nearly impossible until he is removed from office. And even then, it’s much more difficult to repair something than it is to tear it down.
Here lies danger. Hungary is on the verge of full-blown autocracy
George Szirtes
Having bussed tens of thousands of supporters into Budapest for a pre-election “peace march” on 15 March, prime minister Viktor Orbán addressed them, promising that after his victory on 8 April he will deal with those who oppose him by “moral, political and legal means”.
But who are his opponents? … Surely it is George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who funded Orbán’s own time at Oxford as well as the underground presses of pre-1989 Hungary and Warsaw Pact Europe, and who now funds some of those troublesome NGOs and the Central European University. It must be him because it is Soros’s grinning face that is on countless billboards and posters around the country in the past year. It must be Soros, he who controls so many other governments and whose idea of an open society is a none-too-well disguised invitation to dangerous Islamist forces to take over Europe – don’t let Soros have the last laugh, declared the posters and billboards, invoking every antisemitic trope in the book. Don’t let this ex-Hungarian, rootless cosmopolitan foist his “sinister vision” of society on us, they echoed.
How is it that Soros is at the center of so many conspiracy theories, while billionaires who are actually funding private armies and buying up media sources skate away without concern? There’s one thing about Soros that the right doesn’t like. And it rhymes with “fewish.”
“Their task, should they get to power,” says Orbán of those who oppose him, “is to execute ‘the grand plan’.” Europe, he claims, is about to be invaded by tens of millions of people from Africa and the Middle East and “if Europe does nothing, they will kick down our doors. The history of the conquered nations will be rewritten by others, and those who are still young will see how they become minorities in their own country.”
Hungary’s immigrant population is next to zero. They turned down taking even 1,300 refugees while Germany was absorbing one million. But still Orbán runs on the same xenophobic rhetoric as those who maintain that there are cities in Germany, the Netherlands, or the United States “under Sharia law.” Orbán is using fear as his weapon, and gleefully talking about how he will go after the opposition once the election is over … all of which sounds awfully familiar.
Miami Herald
Unarmed black man, white cop with gun, we know how this ends
Leonard Pitts
Maybe we should just skip to the end. ...
The district attorney will decline to seek an indictment. Or the grand jury will refuse to hand one down. Or the case will go to trial and a jury will purport to sift the evidence, then return an acquittal.
Pitts asks if this seems cynical … And I wish I could say that it did, but if course, it does not. It’s a completely justified expectation.
And the family of Stephon Clark, killed in a volley of 20 gunshots by two Sacramento police officers while standing in his own back yard armed with nothing more menacing than a smart phone, will be asked to stand before a microphone, put aside their grief and betrayal, and save the city’s collective backside. They will face a restive crowd, every person in it thinking how easily Stephon could have been Tony, could have been Ted, could have been Tanya, could have been me, and they will plead for calm.
Maybe they’ll get it and the California capital will sleep in peace. Or maybe they won’t, and the city will burn.
If that’s pessimistic, it is a pessimism well earned. In the movies, James Bond has a license to kill. In America, police have what amounts to the same thing.
Well, only if they’re scared. Or angry. Or they see something. Or hear something. Or the person they shoot matches the description of someone who committed a crime. Or if he doesn’t. And of course, if the person they shot is black.
But then, Caroline Small’s life didn’t matter much, either, and she was white. The unarmed mother of two was executed by two officers in 2010 in a small town in Georgia. An investigation found that police tampered with the crime scene and manufactured misleading evidence, yet her killers never stood trial.
Bloomberg
Trump Embraces ‘Constitutional Hardball’
Jonathan Bernstein
The census is important. But the bigger threat posed by the Commerce Department's decision to add a question about citizenship is not about the damage to Democrats or degrading an essential data source. The basic health of American democracy is at stake.
The Trump administration's move is best seen as another example of the Republican party playing "constitutional hardball," defined by law professors Joseph Fishkin and David Pozen as a "political maneuver" that "violates or strains constitutional conventions for partisan ends." Some examples include:
Bernstein lists several other ways in which the the Republicans have been willing to distort democracy before Trump, including gerrymandering districts, redrawing congressional boundaries between census years, refusing to seat Merrick Garland, and impeaching Bill Clinton over a personal matter. He leaves out the ways in which Republicans have absolutely wrecked the rules and traditions that made the House and Senate workable legislative bodies.
Messing with the census is a great example. Without question, the census is part of the constitutional system, mandated in Article I and again in the 14th amendment, where it's clear that the "whole number of persons in each state" need to be counted, not just citizens. And yet the citizenship question is pretty clearly an attempt to undercount groups that traditionally vote for Democrats.
And no matter how many times Sarah Sanders says it, this question has not been on the census for a very long time.
Veterans Deserve Reforms, Not Politics
Editorial Board
The firing of Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin may seem like just another in the recent spate of executive-branch departures. But for his efforts to reform a vast bureaucracy and to better serve America's 20 million veterans, Shulkin will be sorely missed.
The effort to make the VA work is exactly what got Shulkin fired. Republicans don’t want the VA to work. The faster they can rip it apart and hand off the functions to their friends, the better.
Washington Post
Trump’s dangerous plot to weaponize the Supreme Court
Ruth Marcus
“When I got in, we had over 100 federal judges that weren’t appointed,” Trump observed the day after the Stevens tweet, somewhere in the middle of a speech on infrastructure. “It was like a big beautiful present to all of us. Why the hell did [President Barack Obama] leave that?” Um, because Republicans, led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), did their best to stall and block nominations?
For Trump, judges are just another set of crude political actors, on Team Trump or off it. When they rule against his political or financial interests, they are to be demeaned (“Mexican” judge, “so-called judge”) and bullied (“Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril,” Trump tweeted after a ruling halting his travel ban. “If something happens blame him and court system.”)
And of course, Trump’s insistence on selecting people whose first loyalty is Trump, and whose second loyalty is … also Trump, means that there’s an extremely serious chance that we’re going to have a big crisis in the near future.
My colleague Ronald Klain has predicted a “battle of the ages” if Justice Anthony M. Kennedy retires this summer — one that Klain thinks will motivate Democrats even more than Republicans.
Perhaps, but it is disturbing to understand the judiciary as a spoil of war that can never be permitted to revert to the other side. This is overly mechanistic — judges don’t, or shouldn’t, arrive at the bench with a party platform.
I’m sure that Mitch McConnell can discover some rule that says any nominee of Trump’s doesn’t even need Senate approval. After all, he already broke the process, why pretend to be bound by the Constitution now?
Fifty years on, there’s cause for weeping — and for hope
Colbert King
Exactly 50 years ago — on March 31, 1968 — the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached his last Sunday sermon. It was at the Washington National Cathedral. Four days later, someone dear to our hearts — not just a civil rights leader, or a great preacher or orator, but our own Moses, leading us toward the Promised Land — was cruelly taken away at a time we needed him most. Washington, in a paroxysm of pain, rage and loss, went up in flames. Disorder ruled the day in 50 urban centers across the United States. Buildings were still smoldering on Palm Sunday.
Considering how many of the stories of the week involved either unarmed black men being shot down without consequence to the shooter, or Republicans openly and gleefully scheming to make it more difficult to vote, finding a good cause for hope might seem … momentarily difficult.
We mark and cheer April 2018 as the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act, which was passed seven days after King’s assassination. That will not, however, overcome the reality that Easter 2018 witnesses the sabotage of federal attempts to enforce fair-housing laws — including plans by the Trump administration’s saboteur in chief, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, to remove the words “inclusive” and “free from discrimination” from HUD’s mission statement.
In a government headed up by a man who was sued for violating those laws, it’s hard not to feel that fifty years of slow progress has been all but wiped out by one Great Leap Backwards.
The Trump administration’s plan to make people disappear
Karen Tumulty
Ours is believed to have been the first country to have required that its entire population be counted on a regular basis. The Constitution stipulated that there be an “actual enumeration” of all U.S. residents within three years of Congress’s first meeting and every 10 years thereafter. ...
The census helps determine how more than $675 billion in federal funds will be allocated annually and how congressional district lines will be redrawn to ensure that voters are equally represented. After the 1920 Census showed a massive movement from farms to cities, the rural lawmakers who dominated things at the time decided to ignore it entirely and skipped reapportionment that decade.
The Trump administration now proposes to corrupt the process in a different way: by requiring every household to report the citizenship status of its members.
They couldn’t be more obvious about this if the question was framed “Would you like ICE to come around, crash through your door, and spend some quality time with your children?” And the only possible answers were “Yes” or “I don’t exist, please give away the money and power that should rightfully come to me.”
This plan, announced this week by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, will mark the first time since 1950 that the government has asked the citizenship status of every person in the country.
Reinstating that census question at this moment, when the immigration debate could hardly be hotter, raises a danger that those who feel vulnerable will not trust the government’s assurances of confidentiality and will simply decide not to participate, throwing off the accuracy of the count.
And again, Sarah Sanders lied directly about this question at least four times in the last week, by claiming it had been on every census form “except 2010.” She was clearly trying to leave the impression that Barack Obama attempted to alter the process, but she was bald-faced lying in a way even more obvious and blatant than normal. Reporters should be challenging her on this point.
This madness will pass. Conservatives can’t give up.
Michael Gerson
Is it time for anti-Trump conservatives to recognize that they have lost the political and policy battle within the GOP and to accommodate themselves as best they can to an uncomfortable reality?
This is the argument of the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Henry Olsen, one of the most thoughtful political analysts on the right. On issues such as trade, immigration and the Muslim travel ban, he argues, Republican critics of President Trump are dramatically “out of step with conservative[s].” And the possible options are limited. A primary challenge to Trump is “doomed to failure.” The creation of a third party is a pipe dream, since “there simply aren’t enough dissatisfied conservatives.”
Republicans. Conservatives. Neither of those labels means anything now. The party has folded like a cheap suit, no alternative leader or internal resistance has appeared, and those few Senators or Congressmen who dared give less than full-throated approval to having Trump drive the government like a near-sighted and excitable possum, have announced their retirement with barely a whimper.
This leaves anti-Trump conservatives, in Olsen’s view, with one viable choice — to make peace with a Trump-dominated movement. “If they are willing to work with other conservative-movement types on immigration and trade to reach common ground,” he contends, “they might find that other longtime conservatives are willing to work with them.” Olsen’s historical model is “fusionism” — a theory associated with conservative thinker Frank Meyer that asserted common political and intellectual ground between social conservatives and libertarians in the middle of the last century.
Because, sure, if you give up on freedom and democracy, you can get a tax cut. Which makes it all worth it.
Why Robert Mueller could be considering bribery charges
Randall Eliason
President Trump’s now-former attorney John Dowd allegedly told lawyers representing Paul J. Manafort and Michael Flynn last year that the president would consider pardoning the two men if they got into legal trouble. (Dowd has denied the reports.) Much of the news coverage has focused on whether offering pardons to induce a witness not to cooperate in the special counsel’s investigation could constitute obstruction of justice. But there is another potential charge that could apply more directly and that prosecutors might have reason to favor: conspiracy to commit bribery.
Okay, I like where this is going …
Federal bribery requires that a public official agree to receive and accept something of value in exchange for being influenced in the performance of an official act. In this scenario, the official act would be granting a pardon. While the Supreme Court’s 2016 decision in the case of former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell dramatically narrowed the definition of “official act,” there’s no question that a president granting a pardon would be an exercise of government power under the McDonnell v. United States standard.
So Trump providing Flynn, Manafort, or others with a timely pardon in an effort to keep them from testifying could be both obstruction and bribery. Maybe Trump’s legal team got at least this much over to him, because it’s a wonder he hasn’t been throwing round pardons like popcorn.
Ominous cracks show in the West’s united front against Russia
Anne Applebaum
In the end, Britain was not isolated. At least 28 countries have now agreed to expel nearly 150 Russian diplomats, in a coordinated response to Russia’s use of a military-grade chemical weapon in an assassination attempt in Salisbury, a provincial English town. Even as the Russian government continues to throw out dozens of counter-explanations for the attack on Sergei Skripal (according to the British foreign office, they are now up to 24 such theories), and even as the Russian government has moved toward a tit-for-tat response, a majority of Western countries say they believe the British version of events and will stick by their decision.
Unfortunately, that limited diplomatic effort represents of the limit of the support the UK is likely to receive, especially from … leaders who are sensitive to offending Putin.
Almost everywhere, in other words, the reaction to the Skripal case reflects the strength of Russian influence in local politics (or a determination to reject that influence). That striking fact brings me, finally, to the oddities of the American reaction. On the surface, it would appear the U.S. government made the most definitive statement of all, expelling 60 Russian diplomats and closing down the Russian consulate in Seattle. The move was approved by all the National Security Council principals, with particular support from the State Department.
President Trump signed off on that decision — yet his language has been peculiar. A few days after the attack, the now-former secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, called the poisoning a “a really egregious act” and linked it “clearly” to Russia. By contrast, the president himself has said nothing so definitive. On his Twitter account, where he comments regularly on Islamist terrorism, he has not mentioned the use of a chemical poison in an English city. Nor did he mention it during a telephone conversation with the Russian president. His real relationship with the Russian government remains, as before, mysterious.
That sounds like a case worthy of investigation by a special counsel. Fortunately, we have one of those on hand.
Image
Rather than put up an image directly associated with Easter , I went with this morning with Samaritans (as in “The Good”) on Mount Gerizim.