Judges and Toddlers

The Game is On: Although it’s been only two days since Justice Kennedy announced his intent to step down from the Supreme Court, the Trump administration is already off and running in their quest to get another conservative, and by conservative think extreme conservative, seated on the court by October.  White House Counsel Don McGahn, who successfully shepherded Judge Gorsuch’s nomination and who has previously indicated to colleagues that he plans to step down from his position by year end, views the successful seating of another judge as the best possible thing that he can do before his exit.  To that end he immediately called Republican Senators Collins and Murkowski to begin the Trump charm offensive against them, the only two pro-Choice Republicans in the Senate.  Additionally, on Thursday Trump met with the two Republican outliers as well as Senators Heitkamp, Manchin and Donnelly, the only Democrats to vote yes on the Justice Gorsuch nomination.  All of those Democrats are up for reelection in states that Trump won in 2016; their vulnerability is one of the reasons that Trump and Senate Majority Leader McConnell want to push the nomination process forward now, rather than after the election when the pressure on the three Democrats will fall away.  To that end McConnell has pushed back hard at any suggestion that his phony “McConnell Rule” the rule he ginned up to keep Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland off the court in the run up to the 2016 election, should be applied here because this is just a midterm election year and it’s his rule so he knows best how to apply it.  Democrats are fighting back, in addition to citing McConnell’s hypocrisy, for whatever that’s worth, they are also questioning the appropriateness of  Trump getting to appoint a judge who could rule on whether or not he can be subpoenaed to testify while the Mueller investigation that he would be asked to testify about is going on.  Senator Collins has said that she views Roe v Wade as established law and that she always asks court nominees if they will respect precedent leaving some hope that she might actually step up here. She’s also said that whatever she decides a lot of people will be angry with her.  When asked  Murkowski was less direct but did say “There’s pressure because of the gravity of such a nomination, I am not going to suggest that my opportunity as a senator in the advise and consent process is somehow or other short-cutted just because this is a Republican president and I’m a Republican.”  Both Senators bucked Trump on Obamacare but were bought off with concessions or in Collins’ case unfulfilled promises in exchange for support of the tax bill so it’s not clear what they will do here.  Democrats and pro-choice advocates face a steep uphill battle, really steep.

Kabuki Theatre:  Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein emerged from his battle with the House Judiciary Committee a bit bruised yesterday but with his sense of humor intact. Together with FBI Director Wray he was subjected to five hours of intense questioning about all  things Mueller in a hearing that was supposed to be about the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation but that instead turned into a Republican attack of the FBI and Rosenstein’s integrity.  The usual Republican characters including Trey Gowdy and Jim Jordan ranted endlessly at Rosenstein.  Gowdy, who spent more than two years holding hearings on Benghazi, never coming up with a single indictment and only giving up his investigation after Clinton lost the election, called for the end of the one year but way “too long” Mueller investigation, punctuating his demand with a forceful and loud “damn it.”  Gowdy is leaving Congress at the end of the year and really, really wants to be appointed to the Federal bench.  His performance was most certainly geared to impressing Trump that he is deserving of such an exalted position, one that requires balance and fairness.  Jordan’s nasty questioning turned comical when Rosenstein started punching back by rejecting any assertion that he who was under oath, and takes that oath very seriously, was lying and by dismissing any suggestion that he’d been uncooperative or had subpoenaed phone calls, something that he pointed out wasn’t even feasible. He also pointed out that he wasn’t the one responsible for all those redactions that Jordan keeps wailing about. Rosenstein’s return smacks got a few laughs from the crowd.  To the extent they could Democrats stood up for Rosenstein and Wray, at one point asking both of them to state their party affiliation to make the point that they were Republicans appointed by Trump. That said, the Republicans are serious about damaging the Mueller investigation by impugning Rosenstein.  To that end the committee took a brief break so that its members could show up on the House floor to vote for a resolution demanding that the Justice Department produce a large trove of  documents about the Mueller investigation to them by July 6.  They’ve threatened to initiate impeachment proceedings against Rosenstein if he doesn’t comply even though he’s bent over backwards to be cooperative.  Essentially the Republicans, all of whom voted for the resolution, are working hard to damage the Mueller investigation by influencing public opinion and handing Trump a rationale for firing Rosenstein.  

Migrant Crisis:  Melania Trump headed down to the border again in another effort to appear compassionate.  This time she stuck to a Jackie Kennedy styled ensemble, leaving her “message” jacket at home.  During her visit she spent a lot of time expressing her concern about the pressures endured by INS agents and Border guards, but gave little more than lip service to the children separated from their families.  As to those children, it doesn’t appear that the government is making any progress returning them to their families though officials have been busy holding deportation hearings for some of the kids where children as young as three years old have been sent to court by themselves.  One volunteer lawyer talked about the absurdity of representing an unaccompanied toddler who spent much of the hearing climbing the table because that’s what little kids do, especially when they have no adult supervision and have been separated from their moms and dads for weeks if not months.    

Another Tragedy:  Yesterday afternoon five members of the staff of the Capital Gazette  were shot to death and several more were seriously wounded when a shooter with a longstanding grudge against the Maryland paper opened fired.  Milos Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart commentator who had just two days earlier called for vigilantes to start gunning down journalists, was quick to claim that he had just been joking.  Trump, who has previously signaled that he’d be fine if a few members of the “fake news” contingent were roughed up, refused to respond to any questions about the shooting when he was asked about it while he was leaving the White House on his way out of town to attend a few political rallies.  He did finally tweet out some condolences later and oddly enough his tweet mentioned that he had been briefed even before he’d left Washington. During his rally, he asserted that the head of US Steel had called him to thank him for his tariffs and to tell him that the company was in the process of opening seven new plants, all because of Trump’s business friendly policies.  The only problem with that assertion is that it was pure fantasy.  When asked to confirm the plant openings a US Steel representative refused to say that they were made-up so instead the spokesperson directed a reporter to the company’s website and SEC filings for more information.  The bottom line is that US Steel is not opening any new plants but the company is restarting one furnace.  Trump also told a crowd in Wisconsin that he was the first Republican to ever carry that state in a presidential election, another Trumpian fabrication.  The imaginative Trump is now on schedule to meet with Vladimir Putin on July 16 in Finland, immediately following the upcoming NATO summit that he is reluctantly attending.  In an editorial in today’s NY Times, the paper’s editorial board says that though it’s good for adversaries to sit down to discuss their differences, they are concerned that the meeting between Trump and Putin is really a meeting of “kindred spirits.”  In particular they note a recent statement by Trump where he complained that “NATO is as bad as NAFTA,” the free trade agreement with Mexico and Canada that he hates so much, and his comment that Crimea really should be part of Russia because the people there speak Russia.  Yesterday, Trump reverted back to his assertion that since Putin denies it, the Russians really didn’t meddle in our election.  With many really important issues to be discussed with Putin, including Syria, Ukraine, election meddling (because yes that really did happen and is still happening), and the New Start nuclear treaty, the NY Times expressed concern, concern shared by US allies and even Trump’s aides, that he will wing it and agree to something or many things to impress his good friend Vlad. As to aides, it’s highly unlikely that Trump will take any advice from Chief of Staff Kelly. The Wall Street Journal reports that Kelly is on his way out and that Trump has started asking friends who he should hire to serve as his next Chief of Staff.  Mick Mulvaney, the former Congressman and Trump favorite who is now the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Nick Ayers, VP Pence’s chief of staff are both under serious consideration. To the extent that Kelly leaves and he probably is leaving, the new guy will become Trump’s third chief of staff in under two years. Whoever is chosen shouldn’t spend much time or money on office decorations. 

 

Hangers and Back Alleys?

Bye, Bye Roe:  Things have just gotten worse, way worse.  Yesterday, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced plans to retire in July.  Rumors that Kennedy was seriously considering throwing in the towel first started emerging last summer so the announcement of his departure isn’t all that surprising, he even hinted about his plans in his travel ban ruling concurrence where he pretty much said that someone needed to “watch out” going forward, implying that someone would no longer be him.   Kennedy was hardly a liberal, however he was viewed as the court’s most reliable swing vote, a view that was more a reflection of the consistently conservative voting patterns of the other four members of the court’s conservative wing than anything else.  Kennedy joined with those other conservatives more often than not, just this week his was the pivotal vote that upheld Trump’s travel ban, left standing political gerrymandering, unwound decades of union protections and let a florist off the hook for refusing to decorate a same sex wedding.   That said, his departure is likely to put the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade abortion rights decision into jeopardy.  To repeat, women are likely to lose the right to their reproductive freedom.  During his campaign Trump promised to appoint “pro-life” judges to the Supreme Court, a pledge that brought him the support of the religious right, a group that has become a key component of his base and that continues to support him despite his obvious violation of everything else they claim to stand for only because they want to see abortion rights curtailed. Regardless of how Trump really feels about abortion, delivering an abortion ban to his religious supporters will cement their gratitude and support forever, with an emphasis on forever.  A court challenge of an Iowa bill that bans abortions as soon as a heartbeat can be detected, a so called “heartbeat bill,” is already pending.  If, or more likely, when  Trump gets his nominee through the confirmation process, absent a move by Chief Justice Roberts to cross the aisle to support the status quo established in Roe, the court would strike down Roe, throwing the decision on abortion rights back to the states.  Eight states, including California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Nevada and Washington have laws on the books that would protect a women’s right to choose.  However, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota and South Dakota already have laws that would automatically ban abortions if Roe was overturned and other states, including Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and Ohio have laws that would restrict abortions to the maximum extent allowed by the Supreme Court.  Two more, West Virginia and Alabama have 2018 ballot measures to say that there is no right to an abortion under their state constitutions.  The right to choose isn’t the only right in jeopardy.  Kennedy was also the swing vote on gay rights, he wrote the decision legalizing same sex marriage, was frequently the pivotal vote on affirmative action and death penalty issues and at least until he punted on the recent group of gerrymandering cases, had been seen as the swing vote on that issue as well.  With regard to gay rights, its likely that Chief Justice Roberts would switch sides, leaving the right to same sex marriage intact.  Still celebrating the court’s travel ban ruling, a gloating Trump promised that he will act fast to nominate a candidate to replace Kennedy, most likely someone already on his list of very conservative judges, someone certain to pass his anti-abortion litmus test.  Senate Leader Mitch McConnell quickly announced plans to push any Trump nominee through the Senate confirmation process in time for the next court session which begins on October 1.  Democrats are in an uproar, screaming foul.  Though their powers are limited they are calling for McConnell to stick with the rule he created, the one that effectively killed the seating of Obama’s last nominee, Merrick Garland, by putting his confirmation process on hold until after the 2016 election.  They argue that at the very least no new court nominee should be put up for vote until after the 2018 midterms. Democrats lack the power to impose the “McConnell rule” on their own but they hope, more accurately pray,  to get some support from Republican Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, the only two pro-choice Republican senators.  That said preventing a vote on a Trump candidate until after the election remains an uphill battle, one that not only relies on the help of those two Republican Senators but that also requires that the vulnerable red state Democrats up for reelection in Trump states stay on board, not a given since three of them, North Dakota’s Heidi Heitcamp, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, voted for Trump’s last nominee, Justice Gorsuch.  Sadly, there’s also no guarantee that the Democrats will regain leadership of the Senate during the midterm elections, in fact holding on to some of the seats they have right now won’t be all that easy.  That said, the fight is on, Democrats are energized and maybe, just maybe some of those white suburban women who voted or Trump in 2016 will realize that their rights really are in jeopardy.  They better wake up soon  because the abortion issue will also energize conservative Republicans, spurring them to show up to vote too.    

Immigration:  Despite last minute all caps support from Trump who tweeted HOUSE REPUBLICANS SHOULD PASS THE STRONG BUT FAIR IMMIGRATION BILL….. EVEN THOUGH THE DEMS WON’T LET IT PASS IN THE SENATE. PASSAGE WILL SHOW THAT WE WANT STRONG BORDERS & SECURITY WHILE THE DEMS WANT OPEN BORDERS = CRIME. WIN!,  the House immigration bill went down in flames.  More than half of the House Republicans joined all of the Democrats, defeating the bill by a vote of 301-121.  As to the children separated from their parents, they are still separated.  It’s not clear that the Department of Health and Human Services or the Department of Homeland Security have the ability or the will to abide by Tuesday night’s court ruling, the one that orders families be reunited as soon as possible. Despite Trump’s assertion that he wants to see the kids returned to his parents, its also possible that “his” Justice department will appeal that ruling, in part because Attorney General Sessions really doesn’t care about the kids and believes that separating them from their families is an effective deterrent and in part because he knows that the government is too inept to meet the judge’s reunification demands.  In the meantime, Trump’s order to the military to build more tent facilities to house immigrant families still stands.

    Communicating:  Trump is expected to name former Fox News co-president Bill Shine to serve as his Communications Director, a position that has been held vacant since the departure of Trump’s gal Friday, Hope Hicks.  Shine, a longtime ally of the late Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, had been forced out of Fox a year ago over accusations that he had looked the other way when staffers came to him with reports of harassment by Aisles and former Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly.  For obvious reasons, none of that disturbs Trump, in fact it probably adds to Shine’s shine.  To the extent that he is appointed, Shine will likely continue espousing Trump’s party line, that former campaign manager Paul Manafort only worked for the Trump campaign for a minute, in the hope that if you repeat a lie enough times it will transform into the truth.  Distancing himself from Manafort continues to make sense for Trump, yesterday another one of Special Counsel Mueller’s court filings revealed that Manafort’s links to Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska were even closer than reported. Deripaska lent Manafort and his wife $10 million, a tidy sum that probably wasn’t dispersed out of the goodness of the oligarch’s heart.   John Bolton, Trump’s current National Security Advisor who once said that Russia's election interference was "truly an act of war" against the US, and that a policy based on trusting Russia was "doomed to failure" met with Vladimir Putin on Wednesday to discuss plans for the upcoming meeting between Trump and Putin.  Apparently he’s changed his views on Russia and Putin, saying that he would not discuss or comment on his earlier statements, he instead thanked Putin for his “courtesy and graciousness.”  It’s not clear what Putin was serving but it must have been potent and truly mind altering.  Bolton also said that readmitting Russia to the G7 economic group would be one of the things discussed during the upcoming meeting.  That’s something that is likely to further raise the already heightened concerns in Europe.  As to those allies in Europe, last night during a rally in North Dakota where he was campaigning for Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp’s opponent, Trump attacked all Democrats, especially Congresswoman Maxine Waters who is now his number one target, denied that he’d ever called for violence against protesters, something that Waters did not do, and then took another swipe at those European allies, attacking the EU as an entity that was set up to  “take advantage of the US.”  Words that must warm Putin’s heart.   

October Surprise?

McConnell’s Court:  This week’s  Supreme Court decisions provide another reminder that regardless of how they are won, elections have consequences especially elections that result in the appointment of conservatives like Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Yesterday, in a 5-4 decision with Gorsuch aligned with the conservative majority,  the court ruled in favor of the third iteration of Trump’s Muslim travel ban.  Essentially, the majority concluded that presidents need the power to protect the country from marauding hordes trying to do nefarious things, even if those marauding hordes are just benign tourists, businessmen, family members or students all who happen to be Muslims.  The majority noted Trump’s despicable anti-Muslim campaign rhetoric but decided that since his words weren’t reflected in the language of the executive order they weren’t all that relevant.  That said Justice Kennedy did manage to throw some shade Trump’s way, he isn’t all that happy with Trump’s language but isn’t distressed enough about it to jump ship from the conservative majority.  In a very biting dissent Justice Sotomayor pretty much slammed Trump as well as her conservative colleagues.  She cited Trump’s countless anti-Muslim statements and equated the court’s majority opinion with the controversial decision in the Korematsu case, the 1944 decision that concluded that the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II was both justifiable and constitutional.  Korematsu’s conviction was voided in 1983 after it was revealed that the government had knowingly misrepresented the threat that Japanese Americans provided to national security at the time of the war but the decision was never formally overturned, that is until yesterday.  In an unusual move that might have had as much to do with his desire to send a message to Trump that internment camps are a really bad thing especially when they are justified using falsified “facts,” as with his disapproval of Sotomayor invoking the case in the first place,  Chief Justice Roberts said that Korematsu was ”gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and-to be clear-has no place in law under the Constitution.”  The travel ban ruling was just one of the truly depressing and very conservative decisions announced by the court during the week.  The court also ruled against a California law that required anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers to advise women about abortion options, concluding that requiring such clinics to tell women the truth was a violation of the centers’ First Amendment rights.  In other decisions the courts pretty much punted on a few gerrymandering cases and sent a case concerning whether or not a florist could refuse to create floral arrangements for a same sex wedding back to be reconsidered in light of their recent decision about the wedding cake baker.  Senator McConnell who has proudly said that the finest moment in his career so far is his decision to refuse to allow hearings for the confirmation of Merrick Garland, Obama’s moderate and qualified Supreme Court nominee, to proceed was positively gleeful about the outcome of all of these cases as was Trump who spent the day crowing about his travel ban success.  To celebrate, McConnell’s office tweeted out a picture of him reaching out to touch the hands of Justice Gorsuch, Sistine Chapel style. Trump will just spend the rest of the month, year and his life bragging about his success at banning Muslims from the US shores. The court isn’t done yet, one more notable decision is due shortly.  That decision concerns a union case, Janus v AFSCME, where the court is expected to decide whether or not public-sector unions can compel nonunion members to pay certain fees without violating their First Amendment rights.  Given this court’s conservative bent, the unions have every right to be nervous.  As to those internment camps, especially the pediatric ones, Melania Trump is planning another trip to the border since her last one was so well received. No news yet on what she plans to wear.  Despite the government’s assertions that they’ve made a lot of progress returning separated children to their parents, they haven’t so to the extent that Melania really wants to show some compassion there probably will be plenty of babies for her to touch or even faux hug.  But she’d better hurry, late last night just hours after Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told the Senate Finance Committee that parents would have to give up their asylum claims and agree to be deported if they want to see their kids anytime soon a really angry San Diego federal judge issued a preliminary injunction calling for all children affected by the zero-tolerance immigration policy to be reunited with their parents ASAP, if not sooner. The judge’s ruling requires that children under five be returned within 14 days and that children over 5 be returned within 30 days. The ruling also requires that children and parents be put in contact within 10 days.  For his part Jeff Sessions, who continues to believe that zero tolerance is the way to go actually joked about the separation of the kids from their parents by attacking the liberal elites and their friends in the press.  In a Los Angeles speech to a conservative criminal justice group he called those overwrought liberals the “lunatic fringe” and their concerns about the condition of the children exaggerated, hysterical and hypocritical, especially coming from people living in “gated communities.”   Trump may hate Sessions and love to make fun of his Mr. Magoo-like features  but if you close your eyes and ignore their regional accents you won’t be able to tell the two guys apart.  

Primary Tuesday:  While most open eyes in New York were focused on the Staten Island Republican primary between the Trump-like former Congressman and convicted felon Michael Grimm and the Trump-supported current Congressman Dan Donovan, the real action took place in Queens in Archie Bunker’s old neighborhood between Congressman Joe Crowley and a twenty-nine year old Bernie Sanders supported newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While Donovan easily beat his Staten Island rival,  Crowley, the fourth ranking Democrat in the House who until last night was touted as a possible successor to Nancy Pelosi, lost big to Ocasio-Cortez.  Crowley, like Eric Cantor, the former number two in the Republican party who was earlier run out of Congress by a Tea party candidate, had grown complacent, although he spent a lot of money on his campaign he sent a surrogate to attend a debate in his place.  That, combined with the dramatic change in the ethnic make-up of his district, an area of New York where white working class voters have largely been replaced by a mix of Hispanics, Blacks and Asians, an anemic voter turnout and an enthusiastic campaign by Ocasio-Cortez, doomed his chances for reelection and his killed his ambition to someday become Speaker of the House.  We’re likely to hear a lot of political pundits say that Ocasio-Cortez’s victory represents a seismic shift in the Democratic party and it might but to a large extent it just represents a shift in the make-up of Queens. For his part Trump who hails from Queens was quick to tweet out his joy about Crowley’s defeat.  In South Carolina, Trump’s preferred candidate current Governor McMaster won a runoff and will move into the general election against Democratic State Representative James Smith.  Former Massachusetts Governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney easily won the Republican senatorial runoff in Utah, absent a political earthquake he will become Utah’s next Senator.  Romney promises that he will call Trump out whenever he thinks that he’s gone too far, whatever that means. Romney may be way more civil than Trump but at the end of the day they share a lot of policy views, after all Romney once promised that undocumented immigrants would “self deport” if he ever became president, so his assurances aren’t worth all that much.

Mueller Moments:  Even though he earlier expressed sympathy for Paul Manafort’s plight, T.S. Ellis, the federal judge presiding over Manafort’s Virginia fraud case rejected Manafort’s lawyer’s assertion that Special Counsel Mueller had overstepped his boundaries by going after Manafort for actions unrelated to Trump’s campaign.  Though he continues to believe that Mueller is being deployed as a “political weapon” against Trump, Judge Ellis ruled that "No interpretive gymnastics are necessary to determine that the investigation at issue here falls within" his authority.  As to the rest of the Mueller investigation, Bloomberg News reports that Mueller and his team are accelerating their efforts, closing in on completing their investigation into Trump obstruction and moving to establishing a case for collusion with Russia.  Bloomberg  expects that the collusion case and any related indictments will be completed by the fall, as in right around the time of the midterms.   Similarly Vanity Fair is predicting an October surprise.  As to NYC’s former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who recently pledged to contribute $80 million to Democratic candidates running in the 2018 midterms,  reports are that the 76 year old real billionaire is once again considering a run for the presidency, this time as a Democrat.  For his part Trump continues to disrupt the status quo, having achieved peace with North Korea, he plans to sit down with Vladimir Putin soon, probably in Helsinki.  Depending on his mood and how much he wants to make his good friend Vlad happy, European allies and some aides are very concerned that Trump might give away something small like the country of Estonia.  As to peace with North Korea, things are moving really well on that front, particularly if you don’t mind that, surprise, surprise, Kim Jung Un is rapidly upgrading the nuclear reactor that his regime uses to make atomic bombs.

Motorcycles and Hens

Caged Hens:  Trump continues to rail against the Democrats and the migrant hordes that they, the party that controls none of the three branches of government,  are letting into the country, asserting that their failure to back any form of immigration legislation that he would support is the source of the problem.  And to be clear, he’ll only support legislation that provides him with $25 billion for his wall, an amount that he wants funded upfront.  Not one to be all that concerned about facts, his focus continues to be on migrants crossing the Mexico border even though those crossings, even with this Spring’s bump, are the lowest they have been since at least the 1970s.  In fact, the Washington Post reports border crossings don’t even account for a majority of the people joining the unauthorized population since visa overstays by people lawfully entering the country account for about two thirds of the total number joining the undocumented population in any given year.  Those kind of details don’t make for very good soundbites and are unlikely to energize his base and certainly won’t help him get funding for his wall so Trump doesn’t mention them when speaking to his crowds.  He doesn’t like to spend much time talking about the kids who’ve been separated from their parents either, yet more than 2000 remain in limbo, spread across the country while their parents are either imprisoned or already deported without them.  Yesterday, more stories emerged about the techniques used to remove children from their parents and a few reporters were finally allowed into a few more of the detention facilities where some of the children are being held.  Borrowing from recent history and not in a good way some parents were convinced to “temporarily” release their children with the claim that the kids were just being sent for showers, a “proven” technique.  As to the facilities, the reporters likened them to the military detention facilities that they’d seen in places like Iraq, only this time the prisoners are somber faced children.  At the end of one of the tours, a senior manager at a child detention camp in Texas told the reporters that the decision to separate families was “dumb” and “stupid” going on to say that “all it did was harm children.”  Referring to his detention center, he said that it would not have been necessary had it not been for the separation policy.  As to that separation policy, the zero tolerance that led to the forced separation of the children from their parents in the first place, despite a series of murky denials from various members of the administration, including Sarah Huckabee Sanders, it has been put on hold, at least for the time being, not because any of the Trumpsters think that its morally abhorrent but because immigration authorities have run out of  places to house intact families.  After avoiding the podium for a week, Huckabee Sanders finally held one of her not so daily news conferences yesterday.  Sticking with the Trumpian policy of ignoring real issues, she led off with a discussion of her “horrible” restaurant experience, the one where she was asked to leave a Red Hen, the restaurant that Trump attacked by tweeting “The Red Hen Restaurant should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopies, doors and windows (badly needs a paint job) rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside.” Humorous only because the restaurant in question has an impeccable cleanliness record, more than can be said for many of Trump’s dining establishments which have been repeatedly cited for fairly notable health code violations. For his part Trump also managed to attack the outspoken Congresswoman Maxine Waters, threatening her for encouraging people to keep pushing back on members of his administration in public spaces, like restaurants, department stores and gas stations. While Waters comments, statements that were walked back by Democratic leaders Pelosi and Schumer who are trying to discourage their members from getting trapped in the Trump personal attack rabbit hole, were somewhat imprudent, it’s worth noting that they pale in comparison to the threatening comments that Trump and his supporters routinely make at his rallies.  Unlike Trump Waters didn’t suggest anything violent and didn’t offer to pay legal fees for supporters “roughing up” hecklers, something Trump has done.  In addition to attacking Waters and all Democrats, Trump also attacked any suggestion that more judges were needed to process any of the migrants crossing the border because that “due process” thing is just so annoying and unnecessary.  In response, a number of lawyers led by the Chairs of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison and Lowenstein, Sandler wrote an Op-Ed which appears in today’s NY Times.  Speaking on behalf of 34 major American law firms they said that they “cannot stand by as our government, under the pretext of enforcing the law, violates it and traumatizes children and their parents.” They called “upon the administration to develop an immediate plan for reunifying children with their families, to release families who pose no threat to our country and to terminate the policy of criminally prosecuting asylum seekers” and announced that their law firms which collectively employ about 30,000 lawyers in nearly every state, will help “reunify families and ensure representation for legitimate asylum seekers.” Nice.

The Mueller Front:  Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, continues to languish in a jail cell because witness tampering has its consequences.  That said, he hasn’t turned or given up yet.  His defense attorneys filed an official notice with the DC Circuit Court of Appeals  appealing the decision that got him tossed into the clinker in the first place.  His team also filed another appeal over a decision that the same judge, Amy Berman Jackson, issued nearly two months ago tossing out a civil suit that they hoped to use to block any further prosecutions of him by the Special Counsel.  While Mueller toils on in relative silence, opponents of his investigation continue to question his authority.  Focusing on the text messages sent by the much maligned FBI Agent Peter Strzok, in a now much cited Wall Street Journal op-ed, two of Trump’s defenders argue that even if the “honorable” Mueller concludes that Trump and his team are guilty of lots of nefarious act, the whole investigation is tainted and that any evidence of evil acts should be thrown out as “fruit of the poisonous tree.” Somehow or other all, the writers miss or refuse to acknowledge that the FBI sat on information about the investigation into the Trump campaign, even going so far as to deny it to the NY Times when that paper was about to publish a story about the Trump investigation right before the 2016 election, all while they had no problem coming forth with information about the Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop just days before the election.  Anti-Trump bias, hardly.

International News:  International Front:  Son-in-law Kushner has been running back and forth to Israel with Trump’s Middle East peace envoy Jason Greenblatt as part of their continuing efforts to broker a peace agreement between the Palestinians and Israel.  Even though Palestinian leaders refuse to meet with them, they report that they will be ready to release their proposal shortly and they promise that it will be well received by everyone, except for the Palestinians.  Jordan’s King Abdullah visited with Trump at the White House.  Proving that he has Trump’s number, the King threw a few compliments Trump’s way saying “If the rest of the world just took a little of your humility and your grace to help us, we’d be in a much better position.”  Trump ate it up. responding “Remember, he used the word humility with respect to me, so I am very happy with that one, that’s probably the nicest compliment I’ve gotten in a long time.”  The White House announced that Trump will be calling Turkey’s President Erdogan to congratulate him on his election victory. No doubt Trump is just a wee bit envious of Erdogan who just solidified his control over his country by winning “sweeping” new executive powers, pulling Turkey further away from democratic rule.  Lastly, the Dow Jones Industrial stock market index dropped well over 400 points yesterday before settling in to a 328 point loss.  Just another response to Trump’s new tariffs, part of that trade war that he insists won’t have any lasting effect on the US economy, unless of course you count the announcement by Harley Davidson that they are moving some of their production facilities and jobs to Thailand in order to avoid paying tariffs on motorcycles sold to Europe.  Trump responded by saying that he’s was surprised "that Harley-Davidson, of all companies, would be the first to wave the White Flag,” going on to say that "Taxes just a Harley excuse - be patient!"  Speaker Paul Ryan was less happy and Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker, a one- time presidential aspirant, who is facing a tough reelection campaign might find that patience thing just a tad problematic.  

Keeping America White?

White Extinction Anxiety:  After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election to Barack Obama the Republican Party spent a little bit of time trying to better understand the results of the election with the intent of developing an inclusive strategy to win the presidency in 2016.  One of their conclusions was that the party needed to reach out to Hispanics, believing that their historically conservative family values should made them a “natural” fit for the Republican message.  Then Trump showed up with his own strategy, one that focused instead on energizing downtrodden white people, playing on their fears about the changing face of America, something that NY Times columnist Charles Blow calls “white extinction anxiety.”  With the assistance of his like-minded advisors Stephen Miller and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Trump continues to exploit that anxiety, in fact it’s the basis of his immigration strategy.  So after feigning distress about the separation of children from their families during the week and sending out the First Lady on a faux compassion mission, he reverted back to form, lambasting all those migrants as violent invaders, misquoting crime statistics in order to assert that they are all hooligans, drug traffickers and murders whose violent ways are infecting US border cities and then parading out families who have lost relatives at the hands of illegal aliens.  As sad as those families stories are, and they genuinely are sad, statistics don’t lie. For the most part undocumented immigrants are law abiding, more so than the rest of us because they know that one mistake will doom any chance they have of staying in the country and border cities such as El Paso and San Diego actually have low crime statistics.  Moreover, few of the migrants detained at the border are violent gang members or drug smugglers, so few that only 180 out 180,000 detained during the year were identified as felons.  Trump’s zero tolerance policy is, however, sucking up resources, straining the legal system and diverting attention from the real bad guys, the gang members and the drug smugglers and other bad players that the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department should be focusing on.  It also costs far more to detain people than to release them with monitoring technology like ankle bracelets something Obama started to implement and a policy that results in almost all of them showing up for their hearings, but that the Trump administration, now spending millions on tent cities and child care, decided was too expensive.  As to those children, the 2000 plus who have been separated from their parents,  DHS claims to know where all of them are, says that they have already returned a few hundred and has set up a crisis taskforce to try to reconnect the remaining with their families, something far easier said than done because while authorities may know where many of the children were placed they don’t know where a lot of the parents are located because so many of them have already been deported.   Still the zero tolerance policy continues.  The military is in the process of building tent cities to house tens of thousands of detained migrants including families with children, the Trump Justice Department is trying to get the court to agree to allow them to intern those children with their families beyond the current twenty day limit specified in the long standing Flores Settlement Agreement and a number of Republican members of Congress who so far have been unable to pass immigration legislation are in the processing of writing legislation intended to override the Flores restrictions altogether.  And Trump, he just wants to override the Constitution, the document he probably still hasn’t read, by stripping due process rights from the immigrants.  On Sunday he tweeted “We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order.”  Though the week may not have gone as planned for Trump, he probably didn’t really want anyone to discover just how many kids had been taken from their parents or to learn about the plans to set up tent internment camps, he’s gone on the offensive, turning the children tragedy into another midterm, anti-Democratic talking point.  The immigration problem is their fault because they are obstructionists who won’t pass his legislation or fund his wall.  It’s all Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Obama’s fault.  Sadly, that’s a strategy that seems to resonate with his base, who appear to support him more than ever. The rest of the electorate and at least one restaurant owner in Virginia not so much.  Sarah Huckabee Sanders learned about that the hard way when the owner of a Red Hen restaurant asked Sanders to leave her restaurant because of her belief that she “works in the service of an inhumane and unethical administration.”  As to Huckabee Sanders, don’t feel too bad about her predicament.  Over the weekend her father, former Arkansas Governor, one time presidential candidate and a Southern Baptist minister, tweeted out a picture of five heavily tattooed Hispanic men who appeared to be making MS 13 gang hand signals with a heading saying  “Nancy Pelosi introduces her campaign committee for the take back of the House.”  Nice going Mike, and thanks for confirming what we all kind of knew, the Sarah apple doesn’t fall far from your tree. Trump wasn’t just focused on “violent migrants,” he also found time to coin a new nickname, this one for Congresswoman Jackie Rosen who is running against Nevada’s Senator Dean Heller, the most vulnerable Republican up for reelection this fall, he’s now calling the very serious challenger Wacky Jackie, he’s also back to calling Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas.  So presidential.

Cohen and Manafort:  The cast of characters involved with Michael Cohen continues to grow.  On Friday, Tom Arnold, the very quirky actor and comedian who was once married to Roseanne Barr represented that he’d been spending time with Cohen and that the two of them were planning to release some of those tapes that Cohen may or may not have of Trump saying and doing things that he’d rather us not see.  Arnold, an outspoken and frequent Trump critic, is in the process of filming a series with Viceland, one that focuses on uncovering Trump related dirt.  He doesn’t appear to have a real relationship with Cohen though the two have met in what Cohen describes as a “chance, public encounter in the hotel lobby where he asked for a selfie."   Arnold is however, very good at getting attention, his story went viral for awhile on Friday, so much so that he actually appeared and initially was taken somewhat seriously on a number of MSNBC shows, not one of MSNBC’s shining moments. He also gave a very rambling interview to CNN.  As to Cohen, his future continues to look murky.  So far out of 300,000 files examined by Judge Kimba Wood’s neutral arbiter only 161 have been determined to be protected by attorney client privilege.  It was also reported that Stormy Daniels was scheduled to sit down with the attorneys from the Southern District today to discuss the payment that she received from Cohen on behalf of Trump but her interview was canceled, at least for now, because of their concerns that it was attracting too much publicity, which it probably was.  Paul Manafort hasn’t been having a good month either.  He's still in jail and Amy Berman Jackson, the judge overseeing one of his cases  turned down his lawyers’ request to nix money laundering charges.  As to Special Counsel Mueller, his ratings have been sinking too.  Already low among Trump’s base, they’ve are even lower among independents and some Democratic voters.  It turns out that remaining silent and discrete while everyone around you attacks your credibility hurts.  Senator Mark Warner may have an answer to that.  Over the weekend he was heard “joking” with some donors  on Martha’s Vineyard “If you get me one more glass of wine, I’ll tell you stuff only Bob Mueller and I know. If you think you’ve seen wild stuff so far, buckle up. It’s going to be a wild couple of months.”  

Sartorial Selection

Immigration Mess:  While the Trump administration is no longer separating children from their parents, the news on the immigration front still isn’t all that good, in fact it’s depressing and confusing.  Immigration officials are now bumping families with children to the front of the processing line but despite a few early reports that they were otherwise granting some leniency, they aren’t.  The families are still being detained and placed in confinement, but now they are being left intact. Running out of room and anticipating the need for more space the administration plans to build tent cities capable of housing 20,000 more unaccompanied minors on military bases in Texas and Arkansas.  It’s not clear if the bases will also house families with minors since the original plans were made when families were still being broken up but the way things are going it’s  likely that some families will end up in those sweltering tent cities.  Defense Secretary Mattis has also agreed to temporarily detail 21 military attorneys (JAGs) to the Justice Department to help in prosecuting border immigration cases, “with a focus on misdemeanor improper entry and felony illegal reentry cases.”  That decision isn’t going down well with a number of Senators including Iowa Republican Joni Ernst.  She broke ranks with her Republican colleagues to coauthor a letter with Democrats Leahy and Gillibrand.  The letter points out that "these 21 JAGs are being directed to practice wholly outside of their training, within the vast and complex immigration arena,"  going on to say that the senators are "deeply troubled" by the Defense Department's decision to send military attorneys to handle immigration matters in part because "pulling 21 trial counsel from military courtrooms to prosecute immigration cases is an inappropriate misapplication of military personnel.”  So far there’s been no response from Mattis or Trump.  As mentioned in Trump’s so called executive action, the one intended to make him appear kind for “undoing” his policy of separating minors from parents, the Jeff Sessions led Justice Department is trying to get Dolly Gee, the Judge responsible for monitoring compliance with the Flores Agreement, the agreement that dictates how immigrant minors should be treated, to lift some of that agreement’s requirements.  Specifically, Sessions is asking the judge to suspend requirements that immigrant kids can only be held in facilities that meet state child welfare licensing regulations. A suspension of that requirement would allow the government to keep underage migrants in detention alongside their parents in locations that are not intended to house children, places like the hot tent cities at military bases.  Additionally, Sessions is asking that the judge extend the period of time that children can be held in custody way beyond the current twenty day limit. The oh so charming Sessions, who has been known to lie when it suits his purpose and even when it’s downright stupid and he is likely to get caught, acknowledged to the Christian Broadcasting Network that he knows the pictures of all those kids crying didn’t make for good optics but that he never intended for the zero tolerance policy to separate children from parents.  He said this with a straight face despite having previously said on the air that the plan specifically did intend to break up families as part of the administration’s efforts to deter future illegal immigration.  First Lady Melania Trump tried to show that she really cares about children, that is children other than Barron, yesterday.  She went on a “humanitarian” visit to one center in Texas yesterday, a visit that the White House claims was all her idea and that had been scheduled days before the news about the imprisoned, separated children went viral.   The center she visited, one that was previously cited for failing to dispense medicine to its wards, currently houses only 55 adolescents.  After saying that everything looked hunky dory to her, she left early without hugging even one little child, missing her opportunity to have a Princess Di moment, mostly because local floods were hampering traffic but also because she really doesn’t get it. Then as she climbed the stairs to her plane, she was seen sporting a Zara jacket with the words “I really don’t care, do u” emblazoned on the back.  Her spokesperson later denied that the jacket was intended to send a message by saying that it was just a jacket something hard to believe given that former model Melania appears to spend a considerable amount of her time making sartorial choices. Trump doubled down by later tweeted that the words refer to the “Fake News Media. Melania has learned how dishonest they are, and she truly no longer cares.”  So much for the first lady’s attempt at appearing humanitarian.  The House’s attempts at passing immigration legislation are going about as well as Melania’s flood shortened visit.  As expected the House voted down the really harsh immigration plan put forth by hardliner Congressman Goodlatte and his Freedom Caucus cronies and pushed off plans to vote on the only alternative under consideration, the slightly less harsh plan that they are calling the moderate compromise.  Still by taking a vote, the House has for procedural reasons eliminated the chance that a discharge petition could proceed with a limited DACA only solution.  As of now it’s not clear that the so called moderate plan will pass because it doesn’t have and was never designed to obtain any Democratic support, the few remaining moderate Republicans don’t like it, the right wingers are still trying to pull it further to the right and lastly because Trump may have doomed it earlier in the day by tweet lamenting  “What is the purpose of the House doing good immigration bills when you need 9 votes by Democrats in the Senate, and the Dems are only looking to Obstruct (which they feel is good for them in the Mid-Terms).”  As to the 2000 plus children separated from their parents and dispersed to more than a dozen locations around the country, plans to reconnect them with their families remain murky in part because of shockingly inadequate record keeping and in part because at least so far it is not much of a government priority.         

Other Government News: Yesterday Budget director Mick Mulvaney announced the Trump administration’s first step in its plan to overhaul the government.  This step calls for combining the Departments of Education and Labor into the Department of Education and the Workforce.  The plan reflects the Trump administration’s view the purpose of education is to train workers for the workforce and nothing more.  That said the Department of Education has only been around as a separate entity since the Carter administration and other administrations have looked into combining departments.  However, given that this is Trump and he and Betsy DeVos aren’t all that interested in public sector education anyway, the plan is likely to meet a lot of resistance.  Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, is already on record saying that "in any normal administration, combining some of the core functions of the Education and Labor departments might make sense," but that "there is nothing normal about this administration, so we're extremely skeptical of the motives here given how hostile Betsy DeVos and President Trump have been to public education, workers and unions."   In other news, the House finally passed the farm bill, an otherwise ordinary occurrence that had been held up by those problematic Freedom Caucus members.  The bill had no Democratic support because it also contains new work requirements for food stamp recipients.  Twenty Republicans also voted against it but Freedom Caucus support brought it across the finishing line.

Manafort Update:  Paul Manafort is still in jail awaiting his trials and still hasn’t indicated any willingness to flip on Trump. However, the case against him got a boost yesterday when Washington DC Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson declined a request by his lawyers to suppress evidence that had been seized from a storage unit by Special Counsel Mueller’s investigators.  Manafort’s lawyers had claimed that the person who had allowed the investigators into the unit had lacked the authority to grant access, the judge didn’t buy that argument since the guy in question had a key and authorization to access the locker so the evidence obtained during the search is now in.  As to fixer/lawyer Michael Cohen, he hasn’t flipped yet either but reports are that he is quite upset that Trump won’t pick up his legal expenses and with evidence mounting against him is getting closer to turning every day.  Or so we keep being told by his good friends at various press outlets.  

Tacos and Cerveza

Executive Inaction:  After days of claiming that only Congress could cancel the child detention policy that he created, Trump kind of, sort of caved, temporarily putting an end to the crisis by executive action.  He did that flanked by a strident Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen who only the night before had been shouted out of a Washington DC Mexican restaurant while trying to chow down on tacos and cerveza, and the ever obsequious VP Pence who gazed at him lovingly while he wielded his presidential pen. Trump’s decision to relent wasn’t based on any change of heart, or for that matter any heart, but rather resulted from pressure from within the Republican party, the awful optics of pictures of caged, crying children appearing in the newspapers and on various cable channels, fears that those images would turn suburban Republican voters away in the Fall, and to the extent that their publicists are to be believed, pressure from favorite daughter Ivanka, her husband Jared and wife Melania.  Trump’s executive action does not call for the end of the “zero tolerance” policy that led to the separation and institutionalization of the children in the first place, nor does it mandate that the more than 2000 children who were affected by the policy be returned to their parents anytime soon, if at all.  The problem was and is that by mandating the arrest and detention of all people crossing the border illegally, even first offenders and those seeking refugee status, the zero tolerance policy forced the separation of children from their parents due to the terms of the “Flores Settlement Agreement” which essentially says that children are not supposed to spend time in adult detention centers. To meet the terms of the Flores Agreement, the Obama administration minimized the problem by limiting the detention of first time border crosses to those that they perceived to be dangerous and only separated parents and children if they believed that the children were in an abusive situation.  The Trump administration plans to continue detaining everyone crossing the border “illegally,” but will provide for children to stay with their parents in detention facilities even though the overflow of detainees is overwhelming the system.  The problem is that the Flores Agreement prohibits the detention of children in those facilities  for more than twenty days and given the backlog in the immigration courts caused to a large degree by the zero tolerance policy, the detention of the children will almost immediately violate the terms of the Flores Agreement. If Trump really wanted to make this problem go away, he would have just directed Attorney General Sessions to call off the zero tolerance policy, he could have done that with one phone call to the Justice Department.  The bottom line is that the kids will still end up in pens at least until a court or two rules that they can’t be placed with adults, but at least for now, they will be with their parents.  At least the “lucky” ones will be with their parents, as of last night, there are no plans to return the more than 2000 babies, toddlers, and adolescents who have been dispersed to centers and foster homes around the country to their parents or guardians, partially because the dispersal has been so poorly handled that in many cases few, if any, of the agencies involved know how to get in touch with any of those parents and in some cases the parents have already been deported.  As to the dispersal, late yesterday several major airlines including American, Southwest, United and Frontier announced that they will no longer transport immigrant children separated from their parents because their mission is to “bring people together” not to pull them apart.  While signing his executive order, the one that he said he couldn’t sign, Trump announced that Congress was on the verge of passing immigration legislation. Not surprisingly his optimism on that front is misplaced.  Though House Republicans have been wrestling with two versions of immigration legislation, a harsh one and a really harsh one, current expectations are that neither version will have enough votes to pass the House and even if something ekes through it will be dead on arrival in the Senate.  At least for now, the Senate is only considering legislation to permanently prevent the separation of children from parents and is having a hard time doing even that. 

Other Plans:  Immigration legislation isn’t the only thing that’s floundering.  Trump’s plan to pass a rescission package that would shave $15 billion from the Omnibus spending bill, targeting social programs like the Children’s Health Insurance Program, has also hit a road block in the Senate.  A procedural vote to send the legislation to the Senate floor for a wider vote went down after Republican Senators Susan Collins and Richard Burr joined Democrats by voting against it.  Collins had been on record opposing components of the bill for awhile but Burr’s defection was a surprise.  He is fighting against cuts in certain water and land conservation programs.  On the health care front, Trump handed Obamacare another blow on Tuesday by announcing plans to make it easier for small businesses and trade groups to purchase health care coverage outside of the Obamacare markets.  The problem is that since the proposed plans provide only “skinny” coverage, they are cheaper, and as a result they drive up Obamacare premiums by drawing healthier participants away from the Obamacare market.  Trump continues to chip away at Obamacare so that what he hasn’t been able to do legislatively, he is doing through a series of these administrative actions.

Michael Cohen Saga:  Michael Cohen, Trump’s one time fixer/lawyer resigned from his role as deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee, not all that shocking when you consider that raising money is kind of hard to do when you are widely known to be the subject of at least two federal investigations.  The most interesting thing about his letter is that he rebuked Trump’s children separation policy on the way out by writing “As the son of a Polish holocaust survivor, the images and sounds of this family separation policy is heart wrenching. While I strongly support measures that will secure our porous borders, children should never be used as bargaining chips.”  This chip in the Trump-Cohen wall is fueling more speculation that Cohen is getting closer to turning on his “father figure,” the guy he famously said he would take a bullet for.  In other Cohen news, American Media Inc., the publisher of National Enquirer, was recently subpoenaed by federal authorities as part of an effort to determine if they helped suppress anti-Trump information before the 2016 election.  The Feds are seeking records related to the $150,000 payment made to former Playmate and one time Trump girlfriend Karen McDougal, the payment that squashed her tell all story.  The Michael Cohen countdown goes on and on.

Womp Womp

Tender  Mercies:  Yesterday, during a Fox News panel discussion former Trump campaign manager and long term Trump supporter Corey Lewandowski reacted to reports that an undocumented child with Down’s Syndrome had sobbed while being separated from her mother by mocking her panic, sarcastically uttering  “womp, womp.”  He then went on to defend his disturbing insensitivity by saying "When you cross the border illegally, when you commit a crime, you are taken away from your family because that's how this country works."  Lewandowski’s total lack of compassion explains  his love for Trump and typifies the overall reaction of the Trump administration to the news reports about the treatment of undocumented children.  Yesterday, the NY Times included an article about Stephen Miller and Jeff Session’s long term fight against immigration and their deep seated belief that immigrants, particularly immigrants from undeveloped countries, are just criminal elements who should be kept out of the US at all costs. From their perspective a few bad news stories about children being torn from their mothers arms, thrown into ill equipped detention centers, and the absence of a system or policies to provide for reunification is just not a bigly deal and certainly isn’t enough to cause them to change their minds about the “sacred, solemn inviable obligation to enforce the laws of the US to stop illegal immigration.”  Miller in particular wants us all to know that there is no straying from this mission and sadly in Trump he’s found a soulmate.  As to Trump, despite concerns allegedly raised by favorite daughter Ivanka,  the outcry from dozens of Senators from both sides of the aisle, the withdrawal of national guard support by a growing list of Republican and Democratic Governors and the criticism of all of the prior first ladies and various medical associations, Trump doesn’t give a hoot.  He wants his wall, he wants it now and he really doesn’t care if any of those “brown” kids are collateral damage. That’s basically the message that he delivered during his late afternoon meetings, first with Republican members of the Senate and then with Republican members of the House.  Following a day where he once again laid into Democrats, blaming them for forcing him to “follow the law” that’s not a law, and for failing to cooperate by passing immigration legislation, he ripped into the Republican Senators for failing to provide him with the full $25 billion he wants for his wall.  During his visit with House members he refused to throw his support to one of the two immigration bills under their consideration, saying that he’d be happy with either one as long as he gets his full wall funding and as long as the path to citizenship for the Dreamers remains very long and preferably full of pitfalls.  As to stopping the separation of children, the House and Senate continue to dither.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and a number of other Republican Senators have signed a letter asking Trump to put his zero tolerance, child separation policy on hold while they work up some legislation, but McConnell can’t quite figure out what that legislation should say though he’s leaning towards the Senator Cruz approach and isn’t satisfied with the Senator Feinstein plan because he believes it’s too broad.  Minority leader Schumer just wants Trump to stop the policy, pointing out that the legislative process will take too long and is essentially unnecessary given that a statement from Trump is all it would take.  As to the so called Cruz plan, Senator Cruz supports families remaining intact during their incarceration and calls for the hiring of hundreds of more judges to expedite their processing, i.e. get them out of the country quickly.  Critics believe that his plan would lead to rapid deportation by a “kangaroo” court system which is probably Cruz’s intent .  For his part early yesterday during a speech to small business owners a seriously off kilter Trump, attacked Cruz’s judge hiring plan, alleging that all of those new judges would be corrupt so what’s the point.  He then hugged the flag, literally. As to the children, the ones being used by pawns in order to facilitate Trump’s wall funding, no one outside of the government has seen or even figured out where the separated young girls are being held likely because Trump’s team has figured out that seeing young girls in cages would be even more disturbing, especially for teetering Republican soccer moms, than seeing similarly caged young boys, but news about the facilities holding babies and toddlers did leak out.  Apparently, the most vulnerable are being held in three facilities that are being euphemistically called “tender age shelters.” Reports are that the centers are clean but that the children aren’t being held or cuddled, good only if your objective is to raise a generation of people with detachment disorders.   No plans are in place to return these children to their parents anytime soon, but no worries there because a fourth shelter will be up and running soon. As to reunification, one mother Beata Mariana de Jesus Mejia-Mejia, a Guatemalan woman whose 7-year-old son was forcibly taken from her after the two of them crossed into the US to seek asylum is suing the government, saying that the separation violated rights given to her by both the Constitution and international conventions.  She’s been released on bail but it has been a month since she’s seen her son. Officials won’t even tell her where he is.  The ACLU has filed a case on behalf of a Congolese woman who was separated from her 7-year-old daughter for four months. That lawsuit seeks to halt the practice of separations altogether. A judge in that case ruled in a preliminary hearing that the separation of the mother and child “shocks the conscience,” and said the “separations may violate the Constitution’s due-process clause.” NY Governor Cuomo said that NYS, also plans to sue the Trump administration over the practice.

Human Rights:  Calling it a “cesspool of political bias” yesterday UN Ambassador Nikki Haley announced the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council over the council’s unending criticism of Israel. To give this decision some perspective it’s worth noting that the US has always had problems with the council.  The US didn’t join until 2009, three years after the council was formed and it’s fair to say that the council has a history of overlooking some countries abuses while constantly criticizing all things Israel.  That said, the fact that the withdrawal came just one day after Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, the UN’s Human Rights Commissioner called Trump’s child separation policy “cruel and unconscionable” makes the decision look petty instead of justified. Withdrawing from the council will probably limit the US’s ability to effectively call out other country’s for their abusive human rights behavior but that’s unlikely to concern Trump given his preference for autocrats and dictators as well as his general disdain for multilateral organizations.  

Staffing:  While most attention has been focused on immigration and the “children” problem, the Senate has been looking into that other big problem, the FBI’s unfair treatment of Trump, the treatment that helped him beat Hillary Clinton in the last election.  Yesterday, FBI Peter Strzok, the agent who foolishly texted his scathing politician critical messages, some of which burned Trump, to his girlfriend  was escorted out of FBI headquarters.  He’s not fired yet but is under investigation.  Though he wasn’t frog marched anywhere, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin announced that he will be jumping ship shortly.  Hagin, a Bush era Republican, was responsible for organizing Trump’s Singapore and Saudi Arabia trip.  He’s either returning to the private sector or looking for another government job, anything that will get him out of the White House.  Though he has no stated plans to follow suit,  reports are that Chief of Staff Kelly has been spending an unusual amount of his day time hours in the gym and that he’s said that he really doesn’t care if Trump continues to do the kind of things that would get him impeached.  On the cabinet front, there’s been surprisingly little news about EPA head Scott Pruitt this week but there have been a few reports about some of his colleagues.  Department of the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and his wife are involved in a real estate joint venture with Halliburton, one that has raised all kinds of conflict of interest concerns but none that Trump cares about.  Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross apparently engaged in some odd trading activity early in his term, shorting stock in Navigator Holdings a day after a reporter from the New York Times contacted him seeking comment about his stake in the company and its dealings with a Russian energy firm. The transaction at issue was worth between $100,000 and $250,000, according to disclosure forms Ross filed with the Office of Government Ethics.  Again, no one in Trumpland seems to care because that swamp thing isn’t real. The embattled Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen has hired a new lawyer named Guy Petrillo.  Petrillo is a former chief of the criminal division of the Southern District of NY.  Depending on who is reading the tea leaves, this means that Cohen is about to cooperate with the Feds or that he’s planning to fight any future charges.  The guessing game continues.

Some Orchestra

Go to the Videotape:  The Trump administration has outdone itself and now may finally be facing some consequences.  Well maybe. Yesterday’s daily news conference was delayed a few times either because Sarah Huckabee Sanders was unwilling to stand up before the press and deny that separating children from parents was a bad thing or because someone, most likely Trump and/or his squirrelly anti-immigrant whisperer Steve Miller, thought that she wasn’t up to the task, so instead Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was flown in to face the music.  Speaking in a stern and disturbingly unemotional tone Nielsen stuck to the Trump line, that the administration had to separate children from their parents because that was the law, a law that she blamed on prior administrations and the failure of Congress, specifically Democrats, to pass new immigration legislation.  She refused to acknowledge that the decision to separate families was Trump’s, that he had the power to keep families intact or that the children were being used as bargaining chips in exchange for immigration legislation and wall funding.  She asserted that the children were being well cared for, denied knowing that any of them were being held in cages and appeared unable or unwilling to respond to any questions about where any of the youngest children or girls were being held, relevant because no probing members of the House or the Senate or the press have been able to visit or even locate the facilities housing those children.  Moments before Nielsen spoke, ProPublica released a truly gut wrenching videotape of crying children begging for their mamas and papas.  The tape, which had been secreted out of one of the facilities and provided to ProPublica by a public defender,  also included the voice of one young girl repeatedly pleading for help calling her tia (aunt) using a phone number that she had memorized.  While the children wailed uncontrollably, an official is heard in the background joking that the crying sounds like an orchestra.  For her part caustic right wing pundit Ann Coulter later weighed in claiming that those kids are just crisis actors.  As Nielsen asserted that all of the kids were happy, had toys, were being well fed and cared for and that the press was purposely manipulating the facts, the sound of the tape could be heard playing off of one or more of the reporters’ phones.  Nielsen also tried to sidestep any responsibility for the children, saying that once they were transferred into the hands of the Department of Health and Human Services, they fell out of her jurisdiction.  Though she promised that children would be reunited with their parents, she failed to mention that the overtaxed system wasn’t really working.  Parents and relatives have been kept from calling and locating children and many kids get lost in the system and end up staying in one or more shelters for months instead of days.  At current rates of incarceration a system that was built to deal with a few thousand children will soon be handling upwards of 30,000 unless something changes.  To that end, all 49 Democratic Senators, including those up for election in Republican strongholds, have signed on to Senator Diane Feinstein’s legislation banning the separation of children from parents absent any threat to their safety  A number of Republicans Senators, including Lindsey Graham, Orrin Hatch, Ben Sasse, Susan Collins Lisa Murkowski and Jeff Flake have spoken out against the policy but to date none of them have expressed a willingness to join Feinstein and the Democrats.  Facing pressure from Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke who is running against him for Senator, a panicky Ted Cruz has proposed his own, more conservative legislation, a plan that would keep families intact by providing more money for family incarceration.  Two Governors, John Hickenlooper, Colorado’s moderate Democrat and a possible presidential candidate, and Charlie Baker, Massachusetts’ Republican have pulled back from allowing their National Guards units to help with border protection and/or anything related to family separation.  Nevertheless Trump has dug in his heels and with the encouragement of his aides and advisors has decided not to relent.  Not only does he want to stick with breaking up families, but apparently under the guidance of Miller he plans to impose more restrictions going forward, part of his strategy to harden his base in the run up to the midterm elections. According to Marc Short, the White House Director of Legislative Affairs who plans to leave his post in the not too distant future, Trump will explain the “logic and history behind the decision to split up families” to Republican members of the House later today when they meet to discuss immigration legislation.  Good luck with that.  Last night The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board weighed in on the folly of Trump’s position by saying that “if Mr. Trump wants to lose the House and risk impeachment, he will take Mr. Bannon’s bad advice and keep giving Democrats a daily picture of children stripped from their parents.”  As to the history and logic of Trump’s position, Attorney General Sessions refuted claims that the current policy is reminiscent of anything that the Nazis ever did by claiming that the Nazis “were trying to keep Jews from leaving Germany.” Apparently Sessions is woefully ignorant of history and has no idea that those trains taking Jews to the death camps were headed  out of Germany.  Anyway, it’s fair to say that when you have to deny analogies to Nazi actions, you are not in a good space.  For his part Trump may not find the past all that objectionable.  Yesterday, he railed against German Chancellor Angela Merkel, claiming that due to her refugee policies, Germany was facing higher than ever crime rates, another one of his bold faced lies.  Merkel is facing a tough internal fight over German refugee related and though she is expected to survive she could do without Trump’s comments.  As to that Nazi analogy it’s not far off, Germany’s interior minister Horst Seehofer  said that  Rome, Vienna and Berlin should work together in the areas of security, fighting terrorism and the core issue of immigration.  Sebastian Kurz, Austria’s right wing Chancellor, happily added that in his view, “we need an ‘axis’ of the willing in the fight against illegal migration."  What could go wrong with that?  Sadly, it appears that Trump would happily join that axis.       

Gerrymandering:  Hopes that the Supreme Court would issue a ruling outlawing political gerrymandering were dashed, for now, on Monday when the court sidestepped the issue in two cases on procedural grounds.  One of those cases related to Wisconsin, the other to Maryland. The plaintiffs in Wisconsin had claimed that the gerrymander by their state legislature had harmed their interest “in their collective representation in the legislature,” and in influencing the legislature’s over-all “composition and policymaking.” Writing for the majority, Justice Roberts said that the Constitution “did not protect such vague, general rights; the plaintiffs had to assert a more specific legal injury in order to have their claim heard on the merits.”  He did give the plaintiffs a road map for how to rework their claims in such a way that the courts would hear them again at some future date, probably in a year or two.  One problem with that is that Justice Kennedy, who is viewed as the likely swing vote on any decision against gerrymandering, is rumored to be considering leaving the court sooner rather than later.  In any case, if Democrats want to retake the House in 2018 they will have to do so without any further court assistance.  

Major Don: In one other piece of news, Trump announced that he wants the Pentagon to immediately begin the creation of a sixth branch, a  Space Force, to protect US interests on the high frontier.  Although this sounds farfetched, its actually something that the Pentagon has been looking into.  In classic Trump form, he decided not to wait for the results of an ongoing Pentagon study.  He wants his Space Force and he wants it now.  Anyone interested in sending him out on the first official exploratory mission, one with no return trip, raise your hands now!   Take your protein pills, okay make that Diet Coke, and put your helmet on.