Days of Our Lives

Another World: Keeping it on the brief side today, or at least I am going to try.  Trump will be “officially” launching his 2020 campaign today in Florida, his home away from home and one of the key states that he needs to win to stay in office.  Since bashing migrant immigrants is the thing that energizes so many of his core supporters and is something he brings up whenever he wants to divert attention from other things like bad interviews, all of those investigations into his criminal behavior and obstruction, yesterday the State Department announced plans to cut humanitarian aid to  Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, the three Central American Northern Triangle countries that are the current source of the problem or at least the source of the kind of immigrants that he most despises.  Since dire circumstances drive migration in the first place, expect that strategy to backfire but not to worry because, borrowing a phrase from the Senator Elizabeth Warren playbook, Trump has a “plan for that.” Yesterday he announced that he’s directed ICE to start rounding up thousands of “illegal” men, women and children.  His plan is to go the mass arrest route to get millions of migrants out of the country as soon as possible.  Keeping with the mayhem theme, yesterday Trump’s acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, who is still auditioning for an official nomination, announced plans to send 1000 more US troops to the Middle East for defense purposes, part of that buildup against Iran, the country that Trump or at the very least his hawkish advisors, national security advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Pompeo, want to punish for their bad deeds, including their violation of the JCPOA nuclear agreement. The Iranians are nefarious players, but going after them for violating the terms of the nuclear agreement that Trump pulled out of seems Orwellian, or should I say Trumpian?

Guiding Light:  Yesterday the Supreme Court handed down a few rulings and one punt.  First the punt, the justices sent another one of those “don’t let them eat my cake” cases back down to the lower courts with instructions to reconsider the case in light of their earlier Masterpiece Cake ruling, the one where SCOTUS said that decisions about the legitimacy of a baker refusing to bake a fancy cake for a same sex couple should not be influenced by animosity towards the baker’s religious beliefs.  In a 7-2 vote, the court reaffirmed its 100-year-old rule declaring that state governments and the federal government may each prosecute a person separately for the same crime, without violating the Constitution's double jeopardy clause; that case had gotten attention over concerns that changes in the precedent would have made it possible for Trump to give Paul Manafort and others in his orbit get out of jail free cards without any concern about state prosecutions.  On the gerrymandering front, an unusual coalition of justices, including liberals Ruth Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor and conservatives Gorsuch and Thomas joined together to let stand decisions by lower courts finding that eleven of  Virginia’s state house districts were racially gerrymandered in violation of the Constitution. SCOTUS didn’t really rule on the actual gerrymandering instead they said the Republican-dominated Virginia House of Delegates had no legal standing to appeal to the Supreme Court on its own when the state Senate and the state's attorney general had decided against appealing. More decisions related to gerrymandering are due shortly as is the decision on the constitutionality of including a citizenship question in the census questionnaire.  Going back to Paul Manafort, in a highly unusual move Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, not to be confused with Rod Rosenstein who he replaced, intervened to divert Trump’s one time campaign manager Manafort from being transferred to New York State’s Rikers Island prison facility, sending him instead to the Federally run Metropolitan Correctional Facility where he will stay while facing state charges.  Trump, that old softie, couldn’t bear the thought of Manafort at Rikers. Immigrant children in cages, no problemo; Manafort at Rikers, nunca, never.      

General Hospital:  More people, mostly Democrats, are warming up to impeachment or at least to the initiation of impeachment proceedings.  Speaker Pelosi’s strategy of letting her members get to the impeachment place on their own time while allowing her progressives to wine and stomp about getting there sooner may actually be working which shouldn’t be all that surprising since Pelosi’s strategies usually work.  Egypt’s ousted elected president and one time Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi dropped dead in court yesterday.  Morsi who suffered from a few health problems had not received much if any medical care since being arrested so his death while shocking, because most 67 year-olds don’t actually die in court, was probably not as surprising as it should have been. Trump is talking health care again, promising to have a really great plan to announce in a few weeks, that and a lot of change will get you a can of Diet Coke, his beverage/health elixir of choice.  The Democrats who really have a lot to say about health care are getting ready for their upcoming debates.  I’ll get into who’s on which night tomorrow, assuming something more compelling doesn’t pop up first.