The Handmaids Are Here

Long Pens:  Before I get started with the news, here’s an interesting piece of trivia, in addition to writing the frighteningly prophetic book The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood also invented the Long Pen, a device that facilitates the remote robotic writing of documents. Now back to the present, yesterday US News and World Report published one of its best of/worst of rankings, this one ranking US states for comparative livability.  The rankings were based on a number of criteria including health care and education.  Alabama came in 49^th place, with only Louisiana ranked worse; notably Alabama was ranked 46^th in health care and 50^th in education.  Late last night the Alabama state senate proved that those rankings were no fluke, by a vote of 25 to 6, the state senate passed a bill criminalizing abortion in nearly all cases with no exception for rape or incest. Doctors who perform abortion could face about 95 years of jail time. Notably all 25 of the legislators who voted for the bill’s passage were white men none of whom will ever have to face the trauma of an unwanted pregnancy, that said the fate of the bill now falls to a woman, the state’s Governor, Kay Ivey who has not yet said whether she’ll sign it.  To be clear she’s on record opposing abortion, but it’s not clear how she feels about the lack of a rape and incest exception. If she does sign it, and she probably will, she could use one of Atwood’s Long Pens, it would be so fitting, what a great way to move Atwood’s nightmarish book that much closer to reality.  To the extent the Alabama abortion ban is signed into law, it won’t go into effect right away since it will most certainly face a number of court challenges, which is the whole point of enacting it in the first place.  The state legislators know that it goes against established Supreme Court precedent but they want more than anything to be first at something, and having given up on improving their state’s livability rankings, they would be pleased as punch if that something is the anti-abortion case that makes it to the Supreme Court docket ahead of all those other competing red states who want so much to find out if Trump’s judicial appointments are ready to send reproductive rights back to those good old days when women either flew to New York or had back alley abortions. For her part Senator Susan Collins has got to be hoping that the process of getting to the Supreme Court takes a long time, well past her 2020 election.   

Courts and Testimony:  Donald Trump Jr who was only subpoenaed to appear in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee because he failed to show up for two previously scheduled appearances despite agreeing that he would has decided to honor the Intelligence Committee’s recent subpoena to appear and answer questions, despite a very public recommendation from Senator Lindsey Graham, the current chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who said that junior Trump should just ignore that subpoena thing or invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self- incrimination.  Don Jr is now scheduled to appear in June, but we won’t get to see him since his session will be held behind closed doors.  It’s unlikely that we will be missing much more than the opportunity to see him squirm since he’s managed to negotiate a deal that will both limit the amount of time that he has to spend in the committee’s hot seat and the subjects that he can be questioned about because he’s a Trump and his dad and his dad’s lapdogs, in other words most if not all of the Republican senators have been working behind the scenes to limit his exposure.   The House Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing for former White House counsel Don McGahn for next week, but at this time there is no indication that he plans to show up. McGahn's lawyer, William Burck, wrote Judiciary Committee Chairman Nadler that McGahn “continues to owe certain duties and obligations to the president which he is not free to disregard" and that "the appropriate response for Mr. McGahn is to maintain the status quo unless and until the committee and the executive branch can reach an accommodation." Nadler’s response is that he’s prepared to hold McGahn in contempt of Congress if he doesn't appear. Separately, House Intelligence Chairman Schiff and his committee are now looking into the input that former Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen said that various Trump lawyers provided their clients, the advice that helped them “mischaracterize” the whole Trump Moscow tower timeline.   Though he’s not scheduled to appear in front of any of the investigatory committees, son-in-law Jared Kushner did spend some time in a closed door meeting with a group of Republicans to discuss his plans for immigration reform.  He was joined by nefarious immigration guru Stephen Miller and Trump economic advisor Kevin Hassett.  Reports from the meeting are that things didn’t go all that well for Kushner, that he was unable to answer a lot of questions largely because he didn’t know the answers and that Stephen Miller kept interrupting with his more strident views.  When Senator Susan Collins asked if Kushner’s plans included a resolution for DACA recipients, Kushner responded that no there was no plan to resolve their status. She then asked him why he thought that any Democrats would sign on without a DACA resolution.  He had no real answer for that but mumbled something along the lines of we’ll deal with that later.  Collins sighed and did that hand wringing thing she does best.  Kushner’s overall performance left many in the room even more concerned about that much awaited Middle East peace plan.  On the Trump “get the financial information from the Mazars’ firm”  front, his lawyer William Consovoy argued that Congress had no standing to issue any subpoena for Trump’s financials saying that investigating a president for potential wrongdoing was outside of Congress’s constitutional bounds by asserting that all congressional probes had to be tied to legislation. When a skeptical Judge Amit Mehta pointed out that the Watergate investigation wasn’t tied to legislation, Consovoy actually said that the Watergate investigation was out of bounds too.  Judge Mehta didn’t buy the argument, gave both sides the weekend to provide some more information and promised to rule soon, probably early next week.    

2020:  Montana Governor Steve Bullock announced that he too is running for the Democratic nomination for president.  He believes that his electoral victories in the largely Republican Montana, a state that Trump ran away with in 2016, is proof that he can win the 2020 election against Trump.  To get there he’ll  have to first convince a lot of Democratic primary voters that he’s better than the 21 or so other Democratic currently running.  Bullock is positioning himself as a younger Biden, a governor who has gotten Obamacare Medicaid expansion passed in his state but who can also appeal to the same set of those white Obama voters who voted for Trump last time but would come back to the Democrats if only the candidate looked more like them.  For his part Trump is now saying that he won’t take any assistance from any foreign players during the 2020 campaign because he didn’t last time, so why would he?  Right?  He also wants us to ignore Rudy Giuliani’s recent plea for help from Ukraine.  As to the 2016 election, the FBI has told Florida Governor DeSantis that Russian hackers made it into two Florida county voter databases.  However, he won’t reveal which counties were hacked because he says that he promised the FBI that he wouldn’t.  He also says that they told him no harm was done. It’s not clear why he’s been told to keep quiet, whether that direction came from the FBI or from the White House.  As to the FBI, Trump is no longer all that fond of its Director Christopher Wray, apparently he’s a bit annoyed with him for contradicting AG Barr’s assertion that the Trump campaign was spied on.

The World:  Trump says that the NY Times report that he is considering sending 120,000 troops to the Middle East is just more of that fake news stuff but then added that if he wants to send troops there to topple Iran’s government he can but that if he does he’ll send far more than 120,000.  Very early this morning the State Department ordered the departure of non-emergency US government employees from Iraq “amid increasing tensions with Iran” and warned US citizens not to travel to the country, citing a high risk for violence and kidnapping."