Hope Springs Eternal

Justice Games:  On Friday via the NY Times we learned that Trump together with his very special assistants Jared and Ivanka and even little granddaughter Arabella, waged a not so subtle charm offensive on the soon to be former Justice Anthony Kennedy in an effort to convince him to resign before the 2018 midterms.  The campaign which clearly was effective involved nominating Kennedy’s former clerks to federal judgeships and promoting at least one of them so far, Neil Gorsuch, to the Supreme Court.  The NY Times also reported that the Trump-Kennedy family relationship predates the Trump presidency,  as head of Real Estate Capital Market, Kennedy’s son Justin lent Trump’s real estate empire more than $1 billion when no other bank would touch the Trump organization  It turns out that Kennedy, the so called “swing” justice who wrote the opinion that legalized same sex marriage and who received liberal appreciation for protecting the landmark Roe v Wade decision should be better remembered for writing the Citizens United opinion, the decision that resulted in more dark money going into political campaigns, and by dark money think major buckaroos from billionaire wingnuts, and for voting with the majority on the Hobby Lobby decision which allows corporations to refuse to provide birth control coverage for “moral” reasons.  Now as Kennedy exits, with his reputation a bit tarnished, the Trump spin machine is trying to convince the rest of us that Trump’s next court nominee won’t vote to overturn Roe.  Even though Trump campaigned on the promise that he would appoint anti-abortion judges and he continues to diss reproductive choice, now he’s talking out of both sides of his mouth, saying that he won’t ask any of the judges under his consideration about their abortion views while at the same time saying that he sees a future where the decision on whether or not abortions can be legally performed returns to the states.  As to whether he’ll ask the judges directly, he probably won’t to the extent that his aides and White House Counsel Don McGahn, who is sticking around just to shepherd in a new conservative justice, can keep him muzzled, but he doesn’t have to, his picks are all coming from a prescreened list prepared by the very conservative anti-abortion Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation so whoever he nominates will be able to honestly say at his or her confirmation hearing that he or she never discussed Roe with Trump.  As part of the Trump team’s efforts to diminish the very rational concerns about the future of abortion rights, they are now trying to argue that because of stare decisis,  the doctrine of honoring precedent, regardless of who is appointed to the court, Roe would never be overturned because having been in effect for over forth years “it’s the law of the land.” At least that’s what Senator Lindsay Graham kind of wants us all to believe, though he also reiterated on NBC’s Meet the Press that he’s pro-life and  thinks the court should remain open to hearing additional arguments about abortion, hardly much of a reassuring statement.  It does seem that Senator Susan Collins is genuine in her belief that Roe should stand.  She told ABC’s This Week that she believes it is “settled law” and that hostility towards the decision is the “outcome of activism” that disrespects judicial precedent. She went on to say that she’s told Trump that he should be considering judges not already approved by the Federalist Society.  That sounds great but loses some of it weight when you consider that she also believes that newest Justice Gorsuch who she voted for and who is considered even more conservative than former Justice Scalia who he replaced,  wouldn’t vote to overturn Roe.  To save Roe, the Democrats are going to have to hold all their Senators, and that won’t be easy.  One of the candidates Trump is seriously considering is Amy Coney Barrett who currently serves on the 7th District court, the court that covers parts of Indiana, the home state of Senator Joe Donnelly, one of the most vulnerable Democrats up for reelection in November.  Donnelly and West Virginia Senator Manchin both voted for Barrett when she was  nominated to the serve on the Federal Court, a nomination that was heavily contested because of her strident religious views, views so conservative that she is the evangelical movement’s preferred choice. Another one of the leading contenders is Judge Brett Kavanaugh who has written that a president should get to decide whether and when he can be investigated, and that a sitting president should not be able to be indicted which likely explains why though they remain focused on the Roe decision, Democrats are also arguing that Trump shouldn’t be allowed to appoint another justice to the court while under investigation and though that argument probably won’t fly with any Republicans, it does have the support of Harvard constitutional law scholar Lawrence Tribe who tweeted yesterday in reference to the NY State case against Trump’s charity where Trump’s lawyers are arguing that as a sitting president he can’t be forced to testify that for his Supreme Court nominee to cast the decisive vote on that “would be outrageous.  The Senate should consider no nominee while POTUS is being investigated.“

Migrant Morass: Nationwide tens of thousands demonstrated against Trump’s policies this weekend. Nevertheless the separated migrant children are mostly still separated from their parents and going forward the Trump administration plans to start incarcerating kids with their parents for far longer than the thirty days permitted under the longstanding Flores Consent Agreement, setting up another inevitable lawsuit against the Trump administration.  Over the weekend NBC reported that the administration has been separating children from their parents for far longer than was originally revealed.  Apparently even before the “zero tolerance policy” was announced and possibly even before Trump took office, a pilot plan was being run by Department of Homeland Security officials in El Paso, Texas.  Somehow or other during all the time that DHS was running that “pilot” program it never occurred to anyone there to figure out a better tracking system, one that would facilitate the reunification of families.  In the meantime, a number of Democratic politicians, many of them 2020 presidential aspirants, have called for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to be abolished, or reorganized, a view that would sound more radical if it wasn’t shared by nineteen ICE officials who sent a letter to DHS Head Kirstjen Nielsen expressing their belief that Trump’s crackdown on undocumented migrants has made it “more difficult for them to conduct investigations into significant national security issues.”  They go on to say that they are supposed to “be out there making these major cases, these big cartels that are smuggling guns, drugs, money,” but “because of this whole immigration rhetoric -that immigrants are bad, that they’re criminals and rapists and all that -the focus is totally off mission.” Ignoring the ICE agents concerns, Trump instead tweeted that the Democrats who he says are for open borders and crime are “making a strong push to abolish ICE, one of the smartest, toughest and most spirited law enforcement groups of men and women that I have ever seen. I have watched ICE liberate towns from the grasp of MS-13 & clean out the toughest of situations. They are great!” Sadly, though Trump’s comments aren’t true, there hasn’t been a whole lot of town liberation, his spin is potent especially when amplified by the likes of Judge Jeanine Pirro, not one of his Supreme Court nominees, but someone most definitely in his court.   

Prevarication File: On Friday, Trump’s economic advisor Lawrence Kudlow, back from his heart attack, insisted that as a result of the tax bill the deficit is shrinking even though it has grown significantly.  Kudlow, formerly of CNBC, made that claim on Fox Business News in the hope that no one would contradict his assertion.  Unfortunately for him his own colleague,  White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, acknowledged last week that the deficit was “skyrocketing.”  Remember when Trump insisted that the North Korean nuclear threat was no longer a threat, well that was either extreme wishful thinking or another Trumpian lie.  New satellite imaging reveals that North Korea is completing a major expansion of a key missile-manufacturing plant, just another indication that Kim Jong Un has punked Trump and is pushing ahead with his nuclear weapons programs.  And that trade war, the one that will be so easy to win, Canada has now implemented a bunch of retaliatory tariffs. As to Harley Davidson, Trump’s once favorite company, he insists that since every single person whoever bought a Harley hog voted for him, that the company’s decision to move some manufacturing overseas in response to the trade war will lose it all of its customers.   Over the weekend someone at the White House leaked a draft document to Axios detailing Trump ‘s plans to enact a bill that would effectively abandon the World Trade Organization, just another one of those multinational organizations that Trump hates even though it keeps the world’s economies on an even keel and benefits the US.  It’s unlikely that Trump would ever be able to get his plan through Congress, but still he’d like to try.  As to the plan, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin denies that it even exists.  Trump also continues to deny that the Russian’s meddled in the US election so as he prepares for his upcoming summit he doesn’t really think it will be all that necessary to discuss the subject with Putin.  That said, his National Security advisor, John Bolton, insists that he will bring it up.  Who should we believe?  The guy with the bushy moustache or the one with the weird combover?  As to that guy with the weird hair, despite rumors to the contrary he wants us to know that he and the very bald Chief of Staff Kelly are getting along really well because he is a “great guy,” in other words he’s on his way out and now a new name, Hope Hicks, yes that Hope Hicks, the one with the long locks, has been added to the list of his possible successors.