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From Stunned Shock to Starting Point (or: This is Not The Story I Thought I’d Be Writing Today)

August 16, 2017 Kara HurvitzLeave a comment

Yesterday, in the scramble to put out a weekly draft that included information on Trump’s statements, I drafted this paragraph:

“After several days of equivocating, Trump took questions on the Charlottesville rallies at a press conference about infrastructure policy. He issued very strongly-worded impromptu statements that were much more supportive of white nationalism than condemning, and it’s extremely important that we watch how the country responds to them. Among the most important things to track were his false equivalence of Robert E. Lee with George Washington; his false characterizations of “the alt-left that came charging at the alt-right” and “[a mob with torches chanting ‘Blood and soil’] protesting very quietly” on Friday; and his assertions that the white supremacist group on Saturday was unfairly characterized (despite the murder that occurred at the gathering). These statements made his affiliations sufficiently clear that David Duke, former KKK leader, thanked him for his “honesty and courage” in speaking. We need to take that seriously, because it illustrates just how much his words are further emboldening white radical groups. These behaviors are not normal or acceptable, and it’s important to contact our reps to make sure they know that.”

At the time that I wrote this, it was an accurate (if incomplete) summary of the day’s events. Today, I had planned to draft information about how and why, exactly, his rhetoric was wrong. But somewhat miraculously, I don’t need to; the nation appears to already know it. In the last twenty-four hours, we’ve started to see real consequences for Trump as more and more people moved to distance themselves from his rhetoric and his stance in general. Here are the highlights and recommended reading:

Detailed, firsthand narratives documenting Saturday’s events.

Many, many people put out credible firsthand accounts (both self-published and professionally-published) of what actually happened in Charlottesville. Though I was not personally present on the scene, by happenstance my household and I are close to several people who either live in Charlottesville or headed into the city to protect it ahead of the Unite the Right rally. As a result, many of these accounts — of activists, of street medics, of residents — were written by people I personally know, and whose narrative I definitely trust. A few of these folks are people I’ve known a decade or longer. This outpouring of stories illustrates the extent to which locals were terrified of the fascist presence pouring into their city, and exactly how and why people needed help from others to withstand intimidation and attacks. The accounts also illustrate why so many people refer to the gathering itself, as well as the vehicular manslaughter, as “domestic terrorism.”

More information on the so-called “alt-left.”

One incredibly helpful thing the Washington Post did today was publish information on antifa history in response to Trump’s statements about the “alt-left.” If you don’t have time to read, here’s a quick-and-dirty summary: “Antifa” is short for “antifascism,” and as the name suggests the groups arose to counteract national fascist activity. They first began to counter Musselini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Franco in Spain, and have popped up at various points of history (in America, first gaining real traction in the 1980s in response to the KKK). They are gaining spotlight now in 2017 for obvious reasons, but they are not a new phenomenon. Antifa, more-or-less by definition, advocates popular resistance to fascism rather than reliance on a (likely corrupted) police force or political system; because it shares roots with anarchism, it does sometimes (but not always) include destruction of property or defensive violence. Many of the firsthand accounts of Charlottesville give concrete examples of ways that the antifa and other activist movements engaged and worked together on Saturday. As the accounts suggest, antifa were not the only people working to counter white nationalism on that date, making it even less clear what “alt-left” meant as Trump used it — but specifically meaning ‘antifa’ is a common interpretation.

More instructions on the so-called “alt-right.”

Incredibly, the Associated Press instructed outlets today to limit use of the term ‘alt-right,’ noting, “it is meant as a euphemism to disguise racist aims.” This is a giant step forward that activists have been trying (in vain) to get formal news outlets to take for months. If you don’t distinguish yourself from white supremacists or white nationalists, the official instructions seem to say, then that is what we will call you.

Political consequences for Trump.

This is the really big question mark that was floating above my head as I wrote yesterday — would anyone in power care about what had happened? Would anybody do anything? In an era when politicians denouncing Trump’s actions and voting for his policies has become common, this was a very valid question, and I am relieved to discover its answer.

Only two days after Merck dropped out of Trump’s manufacturing counsel, which resulted in a floodgate of resignations the following day, both councils have disbanded. As a friend of mine noted, this is hitting Trump where he lives in a way that other political actions do not; this is other CEOs — other distinguished members of the 1% — making direct distancing statements like “The President’s most recent statement[]. . . is unacceptable and has changed our decision to participate in the White House Manufacturing Advisory Council.”
Jeff Sessions also announced today that the vehicular homicide from Saturday might be prosecuted as a hate crime, revealing his view of which way the wind is blowing, and even the driver’s defense attorneys were criticizing Trump’s statements as making the case harder to prosecute.
Countless Republicans have issued statements criticizing not only Charlottesville but Trump himself in his responses, especially after yesterday — highlighting how much the party itself is shaking its head and backing away slowly. House Democrats are asking for a censure of Trump, which is a rare act for Congress, and we’re in the equally rare position of thinking that House Republicans might actually agree to it.
Baltimore moved up its timetable to remove Confederate statues from the city last night, using emergency powers relating to the city’s security to remove all four statues in the middle of the night. This is both a valid decision in light of Charlottesville’s violence and a referendum on Trump’s statements; prior to the President’s escalation, the city was expecting this process to take months. An expert on Confederate symbols was quoting as saying he expected a “rolling cascade” of similar actions from other cities. “[I]f you do it quickly the opposition can’t build up, and the confrontations that we’ve had, not only in Charlottesville but elsewhere, will not materialize,” the expert reasoned.
Though perhaps it’s overly optimistic of me to link the two items, I don’t believe Trump’s announcement today that maybe he’ll pay ACA subsidies for August after all was a coincidence of timing; I think it relates back to all of the above.

Evolution of Journalism.

Immediately after yesterday’s press conference, CNN was (correctly) calling “alt-left” a “made-up term.” The Washington Post today described yesterday’s press conference as “the nail in the coffin for ‘both-sides’ journalism,” a problem that has plagued the press since the election cycle (and widely regarded as part of how we got into this mess). These descriptions illustrate a shift in thinking among mainstream news outlets that has been slowly building for some time as the Trump administration continually demonizes ordinary, established publications. These headlines don’t come from a vacuum, but they do suggest we’ve reached a turning point.

The Bottom Line

All of these things begin to paint a picture of a country that is slowly waking up, recognizing the state we are in, and beginning to take affirmative steps that activists have longed to see taken for quite some time. As an advocate and activist, I really cannot overstate just how welcome this is.

We have a long climb ahead of us as a country, and I won’t sugarcoat that. But it seems that we have, at the moment, reached a vista.

National News Roundup: Week 29 (August 6-12)

August 15, 2017 Kara HurvitzLeave a comment

Good Lord, this news cycle was like being whacked repeatedly with a bag full of oranges. Or possibly doorknobs. You know what, let’s go with doorknobs, on account of I want to still like oranges after I’m done writing this. And speaking of oranges, this is definitely a comfort food week, y’all; we’re deep in Bad News Cycle country. Get your tasty item at the ready.

Standard standing reminders apply: I am no journalist, though I play one in your inbox or browser, so I’m only summarizing the news within my area of expertise. This week’s news contains some detailed analysis that’s outside my expertise — still a lawyer, not a wartime strategist — but all offroad adventures are marked with an asterisk. Okay, I think that’s about it for the disclaimers. Onward to the news!

Constitutional Crisis Corners:

Most of the Russian Collusion Investigation seemed to involve Manafort this past week. That’s really interesting, for a lot of different reasons, and we’ll have to see where it leads us.

The raid is at Manafort’s Home. (And Bank Records. And Relatives.) Federal investigators staged a pre-dawn raid on Paul Manafort’s home on July 26th, and more recently spoke with his son-in-law and subpoenaed his bank records. It’s harder to get a search warrant than a summons, and it requires a judge to agree that there is a likely cause for a crime to be committed. Manafort has already provided documents to congressional committees investigating Russia’s interference in the election, so the search warrant is an unusually aggressive step. Ordinarily I would have something to say about this kind of aggression when a suspect is already apparently cooperating with the investigation, but in this case, I’m just hoping Manafort wasn’t shredding documents in the study while they were searching the kitchen.

Your “Normal” Weird:

Trump vs The GOP. Trump has spent a considerable amount of his vacation so far slagging on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and gosh, it couldn’t be happening to a nicer Yertle the Turtle. It looks like McConnell might actually have started it, which would maybe be relevant if this were a third-grade recess brawl, but fellow Republicans clearly don’t want to hear it; they’re increasingly sharing just whose side they are taking in the whole thing. At the apparent root of all of this is the fact that Trump wants to get rid of the filibuster, which is a move that doesn’t appear to have Republican support (so far). In an ideal world, that will stay the case.
Premium Pile-Up. A study this week suggests that Trump’s horrible will-he-or-won’t-he regarding the payment of healthcare subsidies has caused double-digit premium increases in individual health insurance. On the one hand, insurers are struggling with an increasingly uncertain situation, and it’s sort of understandable that this is impacting the market. On the other hand, right now it’s still a legal requirement, per the still-existing ACA, that he has to pay the damn subsidies. So it would be nice if we could accept business as usual until something actually changes in some way. At any rate, I’m sure Trump will use this premium hike as evidence that the ACA is broken, even though he’s the one who’s breaking it at the moment. THANKS, TRUMP.

The Bad :

Murder and White Supremacy in Charlottesville. Probably the biggest and most important headline to know this week was that white supremacists gathering in Charlottesville, VA murdered someone and injured thirty-five more people in a sustained and highly organized act of violence that ultimately lasted two days; while monitoring the violence, two police officers also died in a helicopter crash of unknown cause. Conflict actually began on Friday night, when white supremacists armed with (tiki) torches cornered students under a statue on campus and trapped several counterprotesters who had gathered at a local Black church. On Saturday morning, hours before a “Unite the Right” rally was scheduled to begin at noon, protesters and counterprotesters clashed in what Charlottesville police chief Al Thomas later referred to as “premeditated violence that our community experienced,” prompting the governor to declare a state of emergency and city officials to order the supremacists’ dispersal as an unlawful assembly. But what began as an assault and battery with fists, water bottles, and pepper spray escalated dramatically soon after the crowd dispersed, when a protester photographed earlier among the white supremacy crowd (and sporting a Vanguard America shield, suggesting official affiliation) drove a car into a crowd of peaceful protesters as they were leaving. The driver was ultimately identified as a twenty-year-old white man from Ohio, who is now in custody and charged with second-degree murder (among other things). The Associated Press has put together a decent timeline outlining Saturday’s events.
Let’s Have Elections Where Ohioans Can’t Vote.* Under the Obama administration, it was illegal for Ohio to remove tens of thousands of inactive voters from the voting rolls. Surprisingly absolutely nobody, the Jefferson Beauregard Sessions Department of Justice (for White People) has reversed course on this position, insisting that the state’s actions are legal under federal law. So now this question is going to the Supreme Court. Ohio’s procedure checks in with voters and requires them to confirm their voter registration by mail after two years of voting inactivity; voters who neither respond nor cast a vote over the next four years are removed from voter registration. This has obvious implications in an era fraught with voter suppression, particularly if the policy is not well-publicized; if you can’t show up and you don’t know you need to mail in confirmation, how are you supposed to stay on the voter rolls? But even without the threat of widespread suppression, given the sharp dip in voting during non-presidential election years — only 36% of registered US voters cast ballots in 2014 — this does not bode well for the voting future of Ohio.
Better Yet, Let’s Not Have Elections. Better Yet, Let’s Not Have Elections. In response to Republican assertions about voter fraud, the Washington Post ran a survey to investigate the question: If Donald Trump said that the 2020 election should be suspended in order to make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote, would you support his proposal? Among Republican-affiliated respondents, a whopping fifty-two percent thought this was a good idea — and the number went up to fifty-six percent if Republicans in Congress said they would back this play. Fortunately, this was a hypothetical situation that has not been floated publicly in the GOP. Unfortunately, if the Washington Post thought of it, Trump will probably think of it too. Especially because there’s a survey now giving him the idea. Way to spill the free election beans, Washington Post.
Ratcheting Tensions with North Korea.* The last couple of days of interaction with North Korea have been increasingly tense, as North Korea threatens America and nearby countries like South Korea and Japan in response to new sanctions from the United Nations Security Council. Adding depth to the threat, American analysts concluded on Tuesday that North Korea has successfully produced a nuclear warhead capable of fitting inside missiles. Trump responded to the threats with threats of his own, saying that the United States would respond to a missile strike “with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” North Korea responded within a few hours by threatening to send “an enveloping fire” around Guam. Then Trump said some asinine stuff about “military solutions” being “locked and loaded,” which appeared to simply refer to standard (and preplanned) American cooperation with South Korea. It’s important to note that experts still doubt that North Korea has mastered all of the technologies needed to deliver a nuclear payload on an intercontinental ballistic missile. The July test resulted in an ICBM that might reach California, and it stands to reason that if a reliable strike were within reach, Kim Jong-un would have included that in his threat to Guam. But more importantly, South Korean news sources are noting that “North Korea is likely to continue its bellicose threats as Seoul and Washington will conduct their annual joint military drills starting in late August.” Though this is a delicate time, to be sure, and South Korea and Japan are considering improving their military capabilities, experts do not appear to believe war is imminent. But Trump’s bluster doesn’t help anything. When Congress returns, they will potentially be considering a bill that would limit Trump’s ability to unilaterally use nukes, so now is a great time to call your representatives.

The Good :

Opiates Declared A National Emergency. In response to urging from the Governors of Arizona, Florida, Maryland, and Virginia, the CDC, the FDA, Congress, physician groups, the insurance industry, and just about everyone else paying attention, the White House eventually declared a national emergency over the opiate epidemic this week. This action could have a whole range of possible results, and some of them (such as more draconian drug laws or crackdowns on prescribers) definitely don’t go in the ‘good’ column. But at minimum, it’s likely it will make the anti-overdose drug known as naloxone more available and inexpensive, and create groundwork for legislators to authorize additional funding for the issue; if he follows the precedents set by the six states that have already declared an emergency, he could potentially do a lot of good. We’ll just have to keep an eye out and see what develops from here, and for the moment I’m cautiously optimistic.
NYC Dismisses 644,000 Warrants for Minor Charges. In a coordinated effort to address a black cloud lingering over NYC police (as well as the people being haunted by old warrants), New York City prosecutors dismissed over half a million warrants this week for very minor offenses like drinking in public or riding a bike on a sidewalk. The move is particularly beneficial to immigrant populations who had old warrants for these very minor offenses — though it’s by no means full insulation from ICE activity, a clean criminal record can dramatically reduce liability to exposure. Even for people with no immigration exposure, as NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio noted, old warrants from decades ago “can derail lives, disrupt families and lead to job loss” without real contribution to public safety. This is only a necessary first step to address decades of stop and frisk abuses, but it’s a welcome one.
Charlottesville Responses. Though the President and White House’s astoundingly lackluster (and delayed) response to this tragedy has been jaw-dropping, it’s equally striking just how many varied voices immediately condemned the attack. At least three major GOP figures have referred to Saturday’s events as “domestic terrorism,” a completely new characterization of white perpetrators of crime as far as I know; the DOJ also has declared an investigation (though I’ll believe that one when I see it). Even the tiki company that made the torches has scrambled to distance themselves from Saturday’s events, and Kenneth Frazier, Merck CEO, resigned from Trump’s manufacturing council over the events of the weekend and Trump’s non-response. But more importantly, a number of people are doing things in response. Several different medical funds organized for the 35 people injured and the deceased have been wildly successful as I write this, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in only one day. I’ve also seen multiple articles outlining concrete steps people can take to help, and a huge number of organizations have been organizing vigils, rallies, and other events to show solidarity in addition to concrete steps of support. America is listening, and America is responding.

And that’s the week’s news! We’re all a bit shell-shocked and the hits are coming in fast, but I’ll do my best to keep touching on all the key points every week no matter how bad and frenetic it gets. In the meantime, daily news summaries like WTFJHT are an excellent resource until we meet again. (Today in Resistance is a pause while Storm enjoys a much-earned vacation, although its summary of news sources is still worth reading.)

National News Roundup: Week 28 (July 30-August 5)

August 8, 2017 Kara HurvitzLeave a comment

Well, this week wasn’t all that much calmer than the last week, purely in terms of incoming news, but it certainly felt a lot less dire. Basically, this week was more a ride on the highway than a trip on a roller coaster; fewer ups and downs and nausea, but we still did cover a lot of ground!

Standard standing reminders apply: I am no journalist, though I play one in your inbox or browser, so I’m only summarizing the news within my area of expertise. This news continues to contain multiple headlines each week outside my area as a legal generalist — still a lawyer, not a spy! — but all offroad adventures are marked with an asterisk. Okay, I think that’s about it for the disclaimers. Onward to the news!

Constitutional Crisis Corners:

As predicted, there was a lot of movement on The Russia Collusion Investigation in the past week. Stuff is starting to get really real, y’all, and this might be the beginning of the snowball. (Although it might turn out that there’s no way for this snowball to gain momentum as it rolls down Capitol Hill. We’ll have to keep watching and find out.)

The Collusion Plot Thickens. The single biggest piece of Russia-related news to hit this past week is that President Trump apparently had a direct hand in covering up some of the facts about his son’s infamous 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer. This is a big deal, because it’s the first piece of news on collusion with Russia that implicates Trump directly, and even if he had no part in the collusion it’s still further evidence of obstruction of justice. In part because of this news, congressional investigators are now seeking phone records of Trump Jr.’s phone calls setting the meeting up. Meanwhile, Mueller and his team have broadened their investigation to include an inquiry into Trump’s financial ties to Russia, which you may remember is exactly what Trump was trying to avoid a couple of weeks ago.
Breaking Out the Grand Jury. The other big news of the week is that Mueller started impaneling a grand jury on the Russia investigation on Thursday. This action is significant because it shows he potentially believes there is enough information there to support an indictment, but it also allows him to issue subpoenas — and he wasted no time issuing several. (He also requested documents from the White House this week, though he didn’t issue a formal subpoena for those.) Trump meanwhile wasted no time on his end accidentally inviting speculation about which of his family members are likely to be indicted.
Chris Wray Is Better Than Ezra (Cohen-Watnick).* New FBI Director Chris Wray was sworn in this week without incident after a very uncontroversial confirmation hearing a few weeks ago. He joins FBI staff as National Security Counsel member Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a Flynn appointee, is ousted from the counsel. Both Wray’s entrance and Cohen-Watnick’s exit appear to signal that the White House is generally moving in a new direction on foreign affairs.
Mueller Protection Circle. As was forecast last week, multiple Senators introduced bipartisan legislation intended to protect Mueller from arbitrary firing while he’s doing his job. Tillis and Coons introduced legislation that subjects any firing of special counsel to subsequent judicial review, and also mandates that any Attorney General firing Special Counsel must be appointed by the Senate. The bill introduced by Graham and Booker, by contrast, forces a judicial review process before termination can take effect. Both require cooperation with federal judges, and both appear designed to avoid repeating what happened to James Comey a second time.
Animal House Judiciary. Meanwhile, while literally everybody else gears up and settles in for a lengthy Russia investigation, the House Judiciary Committee continues to ride their truck the wrong way down a one-way street. Among the latest is a member insisting that Mueller needs to resign (for… reasons…? His actual justification involves Fox News. No, seriously.) There’s also the ever-popular demanding a special counsel investigation of Hillary Clinton. Yes, again. I got nothin’.
Russia Sanctions Bill Finalized.* Perhaps because he knew it passed by a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress, Trump did sign the Russia sanctions bill on his desk this week. But just in case we thought he was a fan of the bill, he made a point to issue a separate statement making sure he called the bill unconstitutional and “seriously flawed.” Also, he signed it for the sake of national unity, not because Congress would just override his veto if he didn’t. (Also, he has a bridge to sell us.)

In other bad news, we’re back to a second Constitutional Crisis Corner this week, as The Free Press gets some major threats. We saw both threats to the press and creation of an official administration-created propaganda program.

After the Leakers. In response to leaked transcripts of Trump’s calls to Australia and Mexico early in his presidency, Jeff Sessions says he is tripling the number of leak probes being conducted by the Justice Department (though at present, the only person being prosecuted for a leak is Reality Winner). While experts are saying there is, in fact, lasting damage done by such poor national security, the Sessions method is characteristically terrifying, initially implying that they might prosecute journalists for failing to reveal sources. They eventually walked that idea back two days later on Fox News, but that was more than enough time to worry people.
Real (Fake) News. Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, began hosting a program she’s calling “Real News” on Trump’s facebook page last week. This week there’s a new video, with Trump replaced by former CNN commentator Kayleigh McEnany, illustrating that the plan is apparently to continue to make and launch these videos every week long-term. You can hold your nose and watch on the Daily Kos, which also includes several tweets correctly noting that this administration is limiting access to real press and putting out its own propaganda.

Your “Normal” Weird:

State of the Affordable Care Act. Remember how last week Trump was threatening to just refuse to pay ACA subsidies? Well, the main thing to happen since last week on healthcare was both the Senate and a U.S. Court of Appeals telling him “good luck with that, buddy.” (Okay, fine, the court didn’t really say that. I refuse to believe some of the Senate didn’t at least think it, though.) The court order permits Attorneys General from 17 different states to defend the subsidy payments — essentially guaranteeing that somebody is arguing for the states’ legal right to that money, and potentially leading to a court case ordering the government to pay. It also removes political cover for Trump, making blame fall more squarely on his shoulders if the subsidy payments don’t happen. It’s a bit of an unusual move, though good news for the country. Meanwhile, members of the GOP in both houses have been signaling that it’s time to move on for over a week now, and the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions officially announced bipartisan health care hearings will be held next month. Just for extra schadenfreude, the ranking member of that committee is Republican Senator Lamar Alexander.
Can Jersey Just Keep Him? Trump was quoted as calling the White House “a real dump” on the golf course this past week, presumably to justify the seventeen-day vacation he’s currently taking in Jersey (from the White House, but, I will note, not from Twitter). He then denied that this happened at all, even though eight different people apparently heard him say it. Weirdly, regardless of the state of the White House, Trump is not the most avid vacation-taking President in recent memory; that honor goes to George W. Bush, who took 67 days of vacation in the first 196 days of office. Trump has taken 41. (Both of them ran rings around Obama, who took a more modest 21 days, though this did not stop Trump from tweeting about how much vacation the man took.)

The Bad:

Disturbing State Department News.* The Washington Times reported this week that the State Department is considering scrubbing any reference to promoting democracy from its mission statement. Though this information comes from a circulated email and is by no means final, the fact it’s being considered as a change at all is pretty disturbing. The proposed change is particularly noteworthy because it comes on the heels of Tillerson refusing to accept $80M earmarked for fighting propaganda, with at least one aide suggesting his motivation is to avoid angering Moscow by targeting their propaganda. Legislators are understandably very unhappy with Tillerson’s refusal to use the money, particularly because it was also intended to fight propaganda from ISIS. It’s unclear whether this discontent will ultimately result in pushback from senators, but one can only hope.
Affirmative Action Antagonism. The New York Times reported this week that the Department of Justice is preparing to sue universities over affirmative action admissions, alleging that these policies discriminate against racial majorities. The internal announcement indicated that this would be handled by the front office of the civil rights department, rather than the more traditional Educational Opportunities Section, because… reasons? (Because racism, I suspect.) The White House, unsurprisingly, seems to be handling the report by deflecting and asking how the news got out. The Washington Post, not wanting to be shown up, responded with an opinion piece about legacy acceptance rates (and wouldn’t you know it, Trump’s alma mater got a special call-out).
Immigration Awfulness. Fresh from his healthcare defeat, Trump handled his lack of progress by holding a press release for an immigration bill he dug up from February called the RAISE Act, which should have been left to die in committee. The bill dramatically cuts down legal immigration to the United States, setting up a point-based system that prioritizes things like fluently speaking English, being able to donate millions of dollars to American businesses (no, seriously), and having advanced STEM degrees. If you want to learn more about the bill and also feel bad about yourself, Time issued a fun quiz to determine whether you would qualify to immigrate here. (Spoiler: Most middle-class people don’t.) This bill probably isn’t going to go anywhere, though, because it doesn’t have Senate support, it’s based on junk economics, and lots of markets depend on the labor force created by legal immigration. Meanwhile, when CNN’s Jim Acosta challenged the administration on this bill by quoting the famous poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, spokesperson Steven Miller responded by dismissively noting that the poem was added later. Then conservatives used the entire thing to argue that press briefings shouldn’t be televised anymore.

The Good:

Redistricting Progress. A three-judge panel for the 4th Circuit informed North Carolina on Monday that they have one month to fix their illegally gerrymandered districts, a necessary next step after the Supreme Court confirmed gerrymandering this past June. Though the court stopped short of special elections, they did impose a deadline two months before the date sought by the state, leaving ample time to correct any further shenanigans. It’s exciting and important to see the Supreme Court’s decision translated into real district change in North Carolina!
Republican Resistance. As mentioned earlier in this roundup, Republicans are starting to push back against Trump agenda items a lot, which is definitely net good even if it’s also kind of strange. First there’s the Senate signaling that they’re not going to back his play on healthcare, after months and months of dancing to that particular tune. In addition to that shot across the bow, Alaskan senator Lisa Murkowski — remember her from Adventures in Department of Interior Harassment like a week ago? — got her sweet revenge this week by locking in nine pro-forma Senate sessions over the month of August. What this means, in practical terms, is that she’s just blocked Trump from recess appointments, which is a big deal because he was considering replacing Sessions that way. And, of course, there was the Russian sanctions bill, which enjoyed extremely strong bipartisan support, and the multiple bills introduced to protect Mueller from firing, and the Congressional investigators requesting Trump Jr.’s phone records. And a partridge in a pear tree.

And that’s the week’s news! The news cycle has become so rapid that I bet by tomorrow we’ll be in a different posture, but I’ll do my best to keep hitting all the key points each week. In the meantime, daily news summaries like WTFJHT and Today in Resistance are an excellent resource until we meet again!

National News Roundup: Week 27 (July 23–29)

August 1, 2017 Kara HurvitzLeave a comment

Holy monkeys, what even happened this past week? (Honest answer: A lot.) It’s a wild roller coaster ride that we’re all still processing, though I’ll do my best to unpack it for you all.

Constitutional Crisis Corners:

Given everything else that was going on this week, it was very easy to miss the things happening on The Russia Collusion Investigation — Kushner sort-of-testified and then all healthcare hell broke loose. But since it’s still very important to track all of it, here’s a recap:

Kushner (Barely) Testifies.* Kushner spoke in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee last Monday (which feels like way more than a week ago, doesn’t it?). He did not, however, do this in open session or under oath, angering some Democrats even though it is illegal to lie to a Congressional tribunal whether under oath or not. Not that much was learned, however, because Kushner was too busy claiming he paid no attention at the infamous meeting with Russia and throwing Trump Jr under the bus to give real details. Angry Democrats, meanwhile, are introducing a bill designed to authorize revoking Kushner’s security clearance, so he might be “too busy” to pay attention to a lot of things moving forward.
Trump Jr. and Manafort Don’t Even Testify.* Manafort did meet with the intelligence committee this week, which is good, since they dropped the subpoena against both him and Trump Jr. There doesn’t appear to be a lot of movement other than this, though, and some Democrats are pretty mad that they won’t be testifying. We’ll need to keep watching and pressing on this point in order to avoid stalling out.
Lock Her Up, Sessions. Trump continued to ridicule Sessions in the past week, this time asking why he wasn’t prosecuting Hillary Clinton for… reasons? It’s unclear what the basis was, given that the 2016 investigation cleared her, other than “her liberal face.” Additional Republicans jumped on the Trump bandwagon, sending a letter to Sessions asking him to investigate Comey, Clinton, and former AG Loretta Lynch. This is an obvious intended distraction from the Russia collusion investigation, but these behaviors also have chilling implications — calling for imprisonment of political rivals is a hallmark of dictatorships, and it’s unacceptable behavior even if no action is ultimately taken.
Can I Fire Them? Trump apparently spent time this week investigating whether he could fire Sessions, though Republicans have warned that they won’t take kindly to Trump letting their long-time colleague go. Nonetheless, Trump was considering Rudy Guiliani and Ted Cruz as replacements. He also asked about firing acting F.B.I. director Andrew McCabe, whom he claimed had ties to Hillary Clinton. (Trump declined to explain why having ties to a former Secretary of State, who currently serves no political role at all, would make someone unfit to be an interim F.B.I. director during a candidate’s confirmation process.) In more definitive news, Trump did announce the replacement of Reince Priebus this week, replacing him with current Secretary of Homeland Security General John Kelly. They also played some Mean Girl games with Priebus on the tarmac on his way out. Then Kelly’s first act after getting sworn in (again?) as Chief of Staff was to fire Scaramucci, which honestly is the first reasonable thing to happen in this paragraph. All told Scaramucci was only Communications Director for ten days, which has got to be some kind of record. (Scaramucci had to be escorted away on his way out, too.)

Your “Normal” Weird:

Threatening Alaska (Badly). While the health care vote was ongoing in the Senate this week, Trump threatened Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski on Twitter over her lack of cooperation. Then he graduated to having Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke threaten both Alaskan senators with unfavorable policy on natural resources (even though Murkowski’s colleague had voted for the bill). None of this had much effect on Murkowski (or her vote), but the top Democrat in the House Natural Resources Committee is now pushing for an investigation into improper interference with a Senate procedure. As Rep Grijalva noted, “Threatening to punish your rivals as political blackmail is something we’d see from the Kremlin.”
State of the BCRA. Welp, Senate healthcare vote sure was a thing! I think many of us caught the broad strokes already, so I’ll just do a quick summary of how we got here: The BCRA (barely) survived a motion to proceed on Tuesday afternoon, but all attempts to get to the next step failed — repeal-and-replace, repeal-and-delay, and the “skinny repeal” all crashed and burned. The last vote, which happened very early on Friday morning, featured a surprise heel-face turn from John McCain, who joined consistent nay-sayers Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski to very narrowly defeat the bill. Despite a rumor to the contrary, McConnell returned the bill to the calendar before adjourning, which means that the Senate can return to the item between now and September. To that end, Senator Graham has also introduced another attempt at repeal; this is in addition to a bipartisan group that is talking about more moderate changes to the ACA and Dem discussion of a single-payer system. Trump, meanwhile, continues to prove he’s America’s Sweetheart by deriding the GOP and refusing to pay for insurance again; eventually the tirade turned to the filibuster (which was irrelevant) and threatening to end “BAILOUTS for Members of Congress.” But since Congress is running out of time to do everything else, they may be forced to let this go for now no matter what Trump is saying.
Transgender Service Surreality.* Trump startled half the country on Wednesday — including the military — by abruptly announcing on Twitter that transgender service members would be banned from the military effective immediately. Since he hadn’t checked with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they handled the announcement by declining to change anything based on unofficial tweets and not, y’know, actual orders. Also, the GOP clown car of Disappointed Republicans Rebuking Trump included John McCain, Joni Ernst, and Orrin Hatch of all people, showing just how badly Trump misread his own party when they asked for a much more narrow action from him.
The Worst Boy Scout Jamboree. After Trump made several bizarre and loaded comments at a Boy Scout Jamboree last weekend, the Boyscouts of America ended up apologizing for him. I guess they figured Trump was never going to apologize, so they had to pick up the slack.

The Bad:

Sessions vs the Civil Rights Act. Attorney General Sessions announced this week that the Justice Department does not have to defend LGBT people because the Civil Rights Act doesn’t protect them (spoiler: Yes it does, at least if the DoJ wants to take a posture consistent with the EEOC.) The announcement was made as part of preparation for an ongoing case, Zarda v. Altitude Express, which is a private federal lawsuit in which the Department of Justice filed an amicus brief. If that sounds strange to you, that’s because it is — the Department of Justice is literally sealioning into a case that it’s not bringing or defending to take a position directly counter to what the EEOC decided to set as precedent in 2015. It’s a slimeball move that’s also an inappropriate overreach from Sessions, but at this point when Sessions ignores settled law, evidence-based practice, and common sense, that just means it’s Thursday.
Threats from North Korea.* North Korea was in the news a lot this week, largely due to a successful ICBM test that leaves people uncertain whether the U.S. is a likely target in the near future. President Trump condemned the launch without threatening to bomb them back, which is probably one of the more normal things he did in the past week, but for now NORAD has determined that the show of force illustrated a range that “did not pose a threat to North America.” We’ll have to keep an uneasy eye on this as well.
Trump Advocates Police Violence. In a speech to the Suffolk County police force, Trump advocated that police rough up suspects in custody this week, calling gang members “animals.” Though the Suffolk County police force issued a statement afterwards, as did many police organization generally, the ACLU was less than impressed — and the rhetoric comes on the heels of several other changes in government policy that give police more latitude.

The Good:

Mueller Protection Legislation. Senator Lindsay Graham has signaled that he intends to bring a bill this week designed to protect Mueller from being fired by the Department of Justice, which is honestly probably a good idea right now. Graham worked on the bill with Democratic senator Cory Booker (and this week is probably the first time anybody has ever written that sentence). The action is part of a growing movement among Republicans to set boundaries with the Trump administration, presumably because they figure it’s better late than never.
Racial Profiling Against a Court Order: Still Illegal. Today, former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio was found guilty of criminal contempt of court by bench trial, mostly because he blatantly ignored a court order to end his racial profiling in traffic patrols. Arpaio, who doesn’t exactly have an awesome record when it comes to human rights, apparently continued the practice he had been ordered to stop for a full year and a half after the order was issued — a pretty textbook definition of contempt of court, so the verdict is unsurprising. U.S. District Judge Susan R. Bolton was less than impressed by his public statements flaunting his noncompliance, and relied on them in part to find “a flagrant disregard” for the order. Arpaio nonetheless remains convinced that a jury would not convict him, and plans to appeal the bench trial to get a trial by jury.

And that’s the week’s news! The news cycle has become so rapid that I bet tomorrow we’ll be in a different posture, but I’ll do my best to keep hitting all the key points each week. In the meantime, daily news summaries like WTFJHT and Today in Resistance are an excellent resource until we meet again!

National News Roundup: Week 26 (July 16–22)

July 24, 2017 Kara HurvitzLeave a comment

You know how I said last week that I didn’t think the good news cycle would last? …yeah, I have some bad news about that. Literally. (I promise I didn’t jinx it!)

Constitutional Crisis Corners:

Nearly half the total news this week relates in some way to The Russia Collusion Investigation — way more than is ordinary, even as we navigate growing constitutional crises. It’s a whole new brand of weird and scary, and I’m not yet sure what is going to happen from here.

Trump Still Hates Lawyers. An oval office interview with three New York Times reporters ended up making this week feel like a Comey redux in a number of ways. First Trump, apparently upset to learn that Mueller could go through his tax records, warned off the independent counsel in the interview, saying he hadn’t ruled out firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller if he misstepped. He then subsequently started investigating Mueller’s team of attorneys, which some experts speculate is Trump’s way of laying groundwork to fire Mueller. In the interview, Trump also complained about Sessions, saying it was “unfair” that the Attorney General had recused himself from the Russia investigation, and noting, “[I]f he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else.” This is actually a huge admission on Trump’s part — if you think about it, he’s basically saying that he wanted someone he hand-picked to be in charge of investigating any of his own wrongdoings. (It also belies a lack of understanding of how our judicial system works, but that’s not particularly new.) The press then had a field day covering Trump’s criticism of Sessions, which frankly probably didn’t merit this much attention. Also, Trump changed his own legal defense team this week, probably because they told him not to fire Mueller and/or Sessions.
Sessions Strike Two. Sessions responded to Trump’s statements publicly by publicly noting that he plans to stay in the role “as long as that is appropriate,” but given the way this week ended that might not be too much longer. We learned on Friday that Sessions did indeed discuss campaign-related matters with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in 2016, indicating yet another lie told under oath repeatedly. This information reflects badly on Trump even though it also might give him an excuse to fire Sessions (if he’s truly disgruntled about the Mueller investigation).
Can I Pardon Myself? This week’s I Wish I Were Making This Up Award goes to reports that Trump is investigating whether he can pardon his aides, his family, and himself. By Saturday, apparently because simply asking the question settles it in Trump’s mind, he was tweeting that “all agree” he has complete power to pardon people. (Spoiler: Larry Tribe does not agree, at the very least, and in fact Trump’s referencing an unanswered legal question, because no sitting President has ever tried to pardon himself. That said, the Washington Post has a helpful summary of the parts of his questions with settled legal answers.) It’s very hard to suss out what exactly Trump plans to do with any of this, though logic would suggest it won’t involve anything good; with so much in the air right now we’ll need to watch the Russia investigation carefully and see what happens.
Dinner Date with Putin. Another gem to come out of the New York Times interview was the knowledge that Trump apparently had an impromptu dinner date with Putin during the G20 summit. We don’t know much about what was said, because the White House released no details and there were no press were present; the dinner in question was only for heads of state and their spouses. Russia, in contrast, might have a transcript of the conversation, since the only other person present was a Kremlin interpreter. Meanwhile, Russian ambassador and all-around jerk Sergey Lavrov has started trolling us on the topic, saying they met more than three times and “maybe they went to the toilet together.”
Testimony Schedule. Several people high-up in the Trump administration (and/or related to Trump) have been subpoenaed to testify before Congress this upcoming week, and some of them have more of a hill to climb than others. As forecast earlier, Trump Jr. is testifying on Wednesday in a public hearing; though he’s not a member of the administration, the Senate Intelligence Committee wants to question him about his June 2016 meeting with a Russian attorney, so he was added to an existing panel. (Paul Manafort will be on the same panel.) Today, Kushner testified in closed session; I would have loved to be a fly on the wall for that, because it was revealed on Friday that he failed to disclose dozens of assets when completing his clearance paperwork and I’m sure the committee will have a lot of questions for him about this. That said, he appears to have said nothing of real substance (unless you count throwing Trump Jr. under the bus).

And just like last week, we have some horrifying news about Emoluments, or at the very least about personal enrichment.

Trump Tower Is Hella Expensive. This past week, we learned through a Freedom of Information Act request that the U.S. military is paying $130,000 per month to rent space at Trump Tower. The lease, which extends from April 2017 through September 2018, will cost the government $2.39 million all told; that’s expensive even by Manhattan standards, and this definitely overthrows last week’s story as the single biggest instance of personal enrichment reported to date. To add insult to injury, Trump has not stayed at Trump Tower once since this lease was signed — so that’s clearly $2.39 million of taxpayer money well-spent. (Note: the Wall Street Journal broke this story, but since their excellent reporting is behind a paywall, I have linked primarily to other sources.)

Your “Normal” Weird:

That’s a Spicey Walk-Out. Sean Spicer resigned as Press Secretary on Friday, reportedly in protest of Trump hiring on Anthony Scaramucci as his communications director. Sarah Huckabee-Sanders was named the new Press Secretary later that day. You may remember Scaramucci, who is a long-time associate of Trump’s, as That Guy Three CNN Reporters Resigned Over a few weeks ago; there’s speculation that bringing him on board was also intended to alienate Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. Though Priebus is still among us, I can see why this was a final straw for Spicer, given the rate at which Scaramucci appears to be alienating people in his new job.
State of the BCRA. What’s going on with the BCRA right now? No one knows. No, seriously, no one knows much of anything; it’s a chaotic, confusing mess. McConnell has announced an intention to vote again on Tuesday, but no one knows which version of the bill is being voted on — the old BCRA, the Cruz Amendment BCRA, or the 2015 bill that McConnell mentioned earlier last week. (FiveThirtyEight has your back, by the way, and has compiled a summary of all the options.) Incredibly, Senator John Cornyn called knowing which bill was being voted on tomorrow a ‘luxury we don’t have.’ Confusing the issue further, the Senate might not even be able to vote for the BCRA under reconciliation rules — a fact which has Paul Ryan badmouthing the CBO in an apparent attempt to discredit them. Never one to skip the action, Trump has been leaning on politicians more over the past few days, and gave a speech illustrating his own ignorance on Monday. Needless to say, this is an incredibly strange process we are watching unfold in real time, and it’s definitely worth it to call your Senators on Tuesday — if they’re a hard no, thank them; if they’re leaning no, try to persuade them. (If they’re a hard yes, calling them won’t necessarily change their minds but at least you can vent your spleen.)
Debt Erasure. On the more positive end of the “what the hell” spectrum, the New York Times reports that tens of thousands of people with defaulted private student loans may be off the hook now, because their paperwork is missing. The loans in question total at least $5 billion, and are all held by National Collegiate Student Loans Trust — assuming they can find the paperwork, that is. Judges in multiple states have already tossed out lawsuits, noting that the organization had not proved it owned the debt on which it was trying to collect.

The Bad:

Police Seizure of Personal Property. The latest in Sessions terribleness is a push to increase police seizure of assets in instances where police aren’t issuing charges or searching under warrants. This practice is known as civil asset forfeiture, and Sessions is undoing policies put in place by his predecessor Eric Holder to bar it. If the new policy sounds kind of like it lets police steal from random citizens, that’s because it does; at the time that Sessions’s predecessor Eric Holder removed the policy being revived, police took more from people’s houses than burglars did. Just like when Sessions pushed for mandatory minimums, even conservatives think this is a bad idea; it’s a deplorable practice that blatantly enriches police departments on the backs of ordinary people who can ill afford it.
Smuggling Deaths in Texas. News broke this weekend that thirty-nine people were found packed into a sweltering tractor-trailer in San Antonio, Texas; as of the time I’m writing this, ten of those people have passed away. Seventeen more have life-threatening injuries as a result of prolonged exposure to severe heat and dehydration. Survivors reported that over one hundred people were originally in the trailer; when police called ICE to the scene, many people who were able fled. The police chief noted that he expects those who survive in hospital care to be returned to ICE custody. Needless to say, stories like this illustrate the sheer desperation many people experience when they are forced to flee their location without safe immigration pathways.

The Good:

Reporter Ignored White House Streaming Rules. This past week, a reporter named Ksenija Pavlovic said “screw this” and streamed a White House press conference like it’s 2015. Pavlovic, who runs her own news site, simply ran Periscope during the conference, which is such a simple and elegant solution that I’m surprised it took the press this long to try it. It’s unclear what consequences will fall on Pavlovic’s head from this; I hope nothing too serious happens to her, though I can’t imagine she’ll be welcome at the White House anytime soon.
Travel Ban Minor Win. The Supreme Court put out an extremely brief order this week clarifying that they weren’t going to touch last week’s Hawaii District Court holding about which relatives should qualify to make a traveler exempt from the President’s travel ban. (They did, however, stay the court’s holding as it pertained to refugees with ties to resettlement programs.) As with the Supreme Court’s first order, all of these provisions are simply discussing what will be the policy while the case is pending; oral arguments will be heard on the merits of the order on October 10. By refusing to put a stay in order, the Supreme Court has effectively required the administration to add most family members (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews) to the list of qualifying relationships while the case is pending.

This is a disorienting, strange, and scary time, and I’m afraid knowing all the news this week doesn’t necessarily help with that. It’s vital that we make as much sense of it as we can, and stay informed and engaged in the coming weeks.

National News Roundup: Week 25 (July 9–15)

July 18, 2017 Kara HurvitzLeave a comment

Well it’s not quite porcine pilots, but we appear to have a net-positive news week when I’m writing this on Sunday evening, which by this point is strange in its own way. At any rate, enjoy for now, and I’ll try not to jinx it! I can’t imagine positive news is long for this world.

Constitutional Crisis Corners:

As news on Donald Trump Jr’s now-infamous Russia meeting continued to unspool, we gained new insight into The Russia Collusion Investigation, though it’s still hard to make heads or tails of much of it.

Donald Trump Jr.’s Admission Gets Worse. Remember last week, when I thought simply saying that “[The attorney] had no meaningful information” was a major admission? Oh, to have the simple naivety of one week ago. In the time since that happened, Donald Trump Jr. has tweeted the entire contents of his email correspondence on the matter, which clarified that Trump Jr understood this material to be part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy — in other words, a textbook example of collusion. We also learned there were at least eight people present for the meeting, including a Russian-American lobbyist, Jared Kushner, publicist Rob Goldstone, and Paul Manafort. Some media outlets were claiming the story was a smoking gun immediately afterwards, and Trump Jr. has been asked to testify before the Congressional committee next week. That said, though, it’s a bit early to break out the impeachment china, and Republicans certainly don’t have a lot to say on the topic. We’ll have to keep watching and see where things go from here.
The Wray Hearing. Against the bizarre backdrop of Trump Jr’s never-ending bombshells, the Senate conducted an FBI Director confirmation hearing of Christopher Wray on Wednesday. Unsurprisingly, several senators wanted confirmation that he wouldn’t bow to pressure to drop an investigation, and Senator Graham also wanted his opinion on the Trump Jr mess as well. (Wray was reluctant to give a direct answer on that.) In general, the Democrats seem supportive of the appointment, which may be a reflection of their eagerness to have a fully-functioning FBI again.
DOJ Fails to Meet Court’s Deadline for Russia Meetings Info. The Department of Justice missed a deadline this week to provide a court with more information about Sessions’s contact with Russian entities — information which had been ordered by the court after a Freedom of Information Act request was filed on the topic. They eventually did release the information, a day late, but Sessions’ failure to comply on the topic of Russian contact in a timely fashion was not a good look. (Not coincidentally, all this was happening at the same time that Donald Trump Jr’s own contact with Russian officials was being slowly revealed.)

And just like last week, we have some miscellany I’m calling a Constitutional Crisis Grab Bag. They’re all symptoms of a larger, more serious threat, which I’ll talk more about below.

State Department Spending. This past week, we learned through a Freedom of Information Act request that the State Department paid $15,000 for board at a Trump hotel in Vancouver in February. The costs apparently were to cover secret service people’s stay in the hotel, which was necessary as a form of protection detail because several family members were visiting to attend its grand opening. Given that the travel appeared to have had absolutely nothing to do with political obligations, and the family still billed the State Department for staying at the hotel to provide security relating to business obligations, this may be the single biggest instance of personal enrichment to be officially reported since Trump took office.
Sessions Speech Revealed. This week, Sessions gave a speech to the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — a conservative Christian law firm that was designated a “hate group” in 2016 by the Southern Poverty Law Center — and refused to release the text of his speech. Weirdly, The Federalist is here for us, and released a transcript of the entire thing. (Note: While the text of that speech certainly could be worse, it’s still full of dog whistles like “Western heritage,” “religious freedom,” and “enshrined in the Constitution,” and I recommend exercising caution if that sort of thing is triggering for you.) As several advocates have noted, the speech itself suggests an aggressive agenda of discrimination, which is certainly in keeping with the rest of what we’re seeing from him.

Your “Normal” Weird:

The Rocks Run for Office. Both Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Kid Rock have apparently filled out paperwork to run in 2020 elections (though there’s some evidence to suggest the latter is a publicity stunt). The Rock’s paperwork was filled out and filed by someone in West Virginia, so it’s unclear if the Rock wants to run or someone else simply really, really wants him to. At any rate, apparently people would rather vote for Rocks than the current President.
State of the BCRA. We’re in a weird, schadenfreude-filled position with the Better Care Reconciliation Act right now. Mitch McConnell released text of a new version of the Senate bill on Thursday, indicating that the August Congressional recess will be postponed to permit more time for a vote — an expected move, since conventional wisdom says that Congress needs to act soon if they are going to act at all. The bill itself was still pretty terrible, and it’s not surprising that both Susan Collins and Rand Paul said they would not vote for it. What is surprising, at least if you’re McConnell, is that McCain then went into the hospital for emergency surgery, ensuring that the Senate GOP definitely cannot get the votes they need this week unless they force one of the other two Senators to change their position. McConnell has announced that he’ll need to postpone the vote as a result, opting to wait until McCain gets back; doctors have suggested that might not be for a week or more. In the meantime, two more Senators have announced they won’t vote for the bill, so McConnell will have his work cut out for him when McCain returns.

The Bad:

“Healthcare Fraud” DOJ Sweeps. You can probably tell what I think of this from the title, but I feel I owe readers some context: The opioid crisis is an issue extremely near to my heart, because I worked to connect people addicted to substances to treatment every day for several years. I absolutely do not dispute that we have a terrible epidemic in this country, and that people are exploited every day in service of selling a dangerous and highly addictive substance. I also cannot tell you how many times I verified that people with drug-related criminal charges had been originally prescribed medications for pain, and traced their addiction back to a reliance on those medications. But this administration’s official statements blend together real descriptions of an actual epidemic and bizarre rhetoric about “fraudsters” and “hard-earned tax dollars,” and more to the point, these charges are a way to keep down costs. For that reason alone, I would be suspicious of anything being billed as “the most sweeping enforcement to date” and “the biggest takedown of health-care fraud in U.S. history” with an allegation of $1.3 billion in damages. Though the administration insists that the 400 people charged are defrauding health care, some of the charges, such as “prescribing unnecessary opioids,” sound less like healthcare fraud and more like… doctors prescribing things that the administration says aren’t needed. If this administration really wanted to address the opioid epidemic in this country — and I wish they would — we wouldn’t be cutting the funding for opioid treatment built into the Affordable Care Act, and we wouldn’t be returning to mandatory minimums for possession of substances, a policy that has been shown over and over again to be ineffective, costly, and exacerbate substance use.

The Good:

Net Neutrality Day of Action. This past Wednesday was a Net Neutrality Day of Action, organized by many, many efforts across the tech sector. Although some critics point out that major companies could have done more, both companies and consumers participated at incredibly high rates, leaving literally millions of comments with the FCC and Congress. Fortune Magazine wrote up a good summary of tech companies’ participation, as well as a good summary of our overall situation.
ACLU Sues the Election Integrity Commission. Adding to the list of names from last week, the ACLU has brought a suit against the Election Integrity Commission alleging that the committee violates federal public access requirements because they don’t make their meetings accessible to the public. The suit is the latest of several, and the collective suits prompted Vice President Pence to send a letter to the commission asking them to hold off on gathering data.
Media Backlash Backlash. Though this isn’t national news per se, I do think the representation reflected is relevant (and try saying that five times fast!). Two very awesome announcements were made this week on the fiction side of things: Disney released an official trailer this week for their new adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, which features several awesome and interesting casting decisions, including a multiracial Meg and Charles Wallace, a male Happy Medium, and famous actors of color for Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which. This representation is perhaps not surprising, as Ava DuVernay was announced as the director in February 2016, but it’s still awesome! Also, within hours of the trailer’s release, BBC also announced its plans for the thirteenth Doctor on the popular television show Doctor Who — which, unlike A Wrinkle in Time, definitely was decided post-Trump (because Peter Capaldi didn’t announce he was leaving the show until January). The next Doctor will be played by Jodie Whittaker, a decision new director/head writer Chris Chibnall says he had planned since he rejoined the series. There has never been a female Doctor in the show’s fifty-something year tenure, and it’s a topic that has been weirdly controversial for years. Mr. Chibnall is definitely making an intentional statement about representation with this casting.
Articles of Impeachment. Rep Brad Sherman officially introduced an article of impeachment this past week, charging Trump with obstruction of justice because of the way the Comey investigation was handled. It’s not clear how much traction this will gain, if any, but he had at least one co-sponsor: Fellow Dem rep and impeachment enthusiast Al Green. Right now, there’s not a lot to indicate the House will adopt the articles, or that the Senate will conduct a trial, but with the Donald Trump Jr. bombshell out there, anything is probably possible. We’ll have to watch and see where we go from here.

And that’s all the news this week, like a slightly tarnished oasis in a desert of suck. Drink it in, folks! The news so rarely grants us any respite, we all need to enjoy it while we can.

National News Roundup: Week 24 (July 2–8)

July 11, 2017 Kara HurvitzLeave a comment

This past week was a wild, terrifying, bizarre ride all around — after almost a month of bad news cycle, we’re suddenly deep in I Can’t Believe I’m Not Making This Up territory. I’m afraid it’s dark carnival almost all the way down, which means it’s only a marginal improvement.

Constitutional Crisis Corners:

Trump met with Putin for two hours this week, giving us new data on The Russia Collusion Investigation, though it may be hard to untangle it all.

Looking for Puppet Strings.* As many, many people anticipated, this week’s meeting between Trump and Putin suggested a complex connection and the close of a play-acted rivalry, at least on Trump’s end. After meeting for nearly two hours, Trump and company emerged with a partial agreement on a Syrian cease-fire but no real other progress on long-term conflicts such as U.S. sanctions and the Ukraine crisis, and conflicting stories about election interference. (Tillerson told reporters afterwards that the disagreement on the election interference question was “intractable” and the two countries should try to “move forward.” The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Larov, simultaneously reported that Trump “accepts” statements from Putin “about this being untrue.” Disturbingly, I am not actually sure which man is accurately reporting, if either of them even are.) It’s legitimately a bit hard to watch Trump tell Putin “It’s an honor to be with you” in front of cameras, given the conversations happening and the larger, troubling context of the G20 summit. And regardless of everything else going on, Trump’s apparent focus on “moving forward,” which he says includes forming a “Cyber Security unit” with Russia (!), is extremely disturbing. (Though he did walk that one back only twelve hours later.)
Russian Hacking Update. Barely a day after Trump announced that he wanted to work with Russia on a cyber security unit, news came in that Russian government hackers have penetrated American nuclear power companies’ networks (and other energy companies’ as well). Officials said that the hackers accessed personnel files and other databases related to business operations. Though there were no signs of disruption around the power systems, officials are concerned that we may see more severe cyberattacks in the future. On the plus side, that type of concern presumably also means security will be tightened.
Donald Trump Jr’s Stunning Admission. (Note: I cannot take credit for this headline, but seeing as I was, in fact, truly stunned by this news, I’m gonna go ahead and borrow the headline from the Washington Post.) Donald Trump Jr, who has a persistent habit of saying the quiet bits out loud, told the New York Times that he met with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign because she promised him compromising dirt on Clinton. He then, incredibly, further contextualized this by saying that “she had no meaningful information” when he did meet with her (along with Manafort and Jared Kushner) and “[i]t became clear to me that . . . the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting.” Yes, you read that right; Donald Trump Jr went on the record complaining that a sketchy Russian lawyer had failed to deliver the collusion goods. This is a really, really big admission, even if it doesn’t look like it, in no small part because it torpedoes a bunch of earlier collusion denials from the Administration. Richard Painter, a former George W. Bush ethics lawyer, point-blank called this behavior treason, noting, “He must have known that the only way Russia would get such information was by spying . . . In the Bush administration we could have had him in custody for questioning by now.”

I don’t even know how to classify the other items below, which is why I’m just going to call them a Constitutional Crisis Grab Bag. They’re all symptoms of a larger, more serious threat, which I’ll talk more about below.

The Controversial Declaration of Independence.* As has been their broadcasting tradition for decades, NPR tweeted the text of the Declaration of Independence to celebrate the Fourth of July on Tuesday. In response, a handful of Trump supporters lit them up, responded with what appears to be a mix of trolling and actual outrage at the text of one of our most treasured national documents. Then tons more people lit up the people lighting up NPR, and it was just all one great big American firework. (Though some people, as the previous link notes, managed to have very civil discourse on the topic and own their mistakes.) Needless to say, the whole incident marks a curious combination of defensiveness of a despotic President, apparent ignorance of what the Declaration of Independence actually says, and growing animosity towards the free press. Happy Fourth, y’all.
Ivanka the Presidential Stand-In. Incredibly, Ivanka Trump stood in for her father at some of the G20 summit this past week, taking his seat at a working session on “Partnership with Africa, Migration and Health.” Though the White House has tried to pass this off as not a big deal, noting that “[w]hen other leaders stepped out, their seats were also briefly filled by others,” Ivanka Trump has no official capacity beyond being an “assistant to the President” and being his daughter. She also has absolutely no experience or training as a diplomat or leader in foreign policy, and to my knowledge has zero actual training in health for that matter. Perhaps more importantly, this model of sending family members to do the jobs of elected officials is a hallmark of hereditary dictatorships, which often emerge from former or nominal republics. This type of transition is a very real threatened endpoint for this administration, and Trump’s use of his children as lieutenants keeps getting more and more brazen on the international stage. (As one article notes, we did see echoes of this in the 1960s when JFK appointed his younger brother Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General, though in that instance the latter at least had done prior work as a government attorney; this type of dynamic is not without precedent in American politics but it is definitely worth watching.)
White House Time Warner Merger Standoff. The current Administration is threatening to withhold approval of a merger between Time Warner and AT&T, which in a vacuum doesn’t seem noteworthy — our government has considerable antitrust power over mergers and that merger is controversial at best. What is noteworthy, however, is the administration’s apparent motivation — there’s a lot to suggest that Trump might be withholding approval to spite CNN, which has a rocky relationship with Trump even by news media standards. Needless to say, the entire situation draws attention to the current President’s notably antagonistic relationship with the free press, which is another hallmark of dictatorships.
Trump Poland Pep Talk. Trump gave a pep talk to the folks in Poland on his way to G20 this week, which started out more-or-less normal but veered into some creepy Islamophobic territory by the end. As the Atlantic notes, his constant use of language like “the West” and “our civilization” is a dog-whistle for white supremacist thought, which is also a common thread between the Trump administration and the very conservative current Polish government. Against this backdrop, perhaps it’s not surprising that Trump neglected to visit the site of the Warsaw ghetto uprising while he was there, ending a multi-decade tradition among visiting American Presidents (despite giving his talk less than a mile away).
Ethics Officer Steps Down. The current director of the Office of Government Ethics, Walter Shaub, announced he was stepping down this week. He noted when making the announcement that “the ethics program needs to be strengthened,” and that his new position at the Campaign Legal Center in Washington will allow him to take more steps to change the system. Nonetheless, this news leaves an important check against the Trump administration vacant, and we should be watching further news on the position very carefully.

Your “Normal” Weird:

Hobby Lobby Breaks At Least Three Commandments. High up there on the “how am I not making this up?” list is the news that Hobby Lobby was smuggling clay Iraqi artifacts into the country. A federal suit was brought in Brooklyn alleging that the company had been illegally transporting thousands of ancient Iraqi artifacts (namely, cuneiform tablets, clay bullae, and cylinder seals) that were falsely labeled as ‘tiles’ to evade U.S. Customs. The federal complaint also notes that the artifacts were mishandled once unpacked, describing them as “spread on the floor, arranged in layers on a coffee table, and packed loosely in cardboard boxes, in many instances with little or no protective material between them.” The company has been fined three million dollars, and all of its thousands of artifacts have been forfeited as contraband.
Robots are Welcome (But Not Teen Creators). Teams of teenage girls from Afghanistan and Gambia have each been denied visas to compete in the FIRST Global Challenge, an international robotics competition happening in D.C. in mid-July. It’s unclear why they were banned, since neither country is on the list prohibited from travel under the travel ban. Even more strangely, both teams will be permitted to send their robots, which they will have to watch compete via Skype. No clarification appears available on why these girls in particular were denied.
Trumpcare Non-Update Update. The lack of Trumpcare news has been in the news a lot this week, and I’m just not sure I trust it — a lot of us were lulled into a false sense of security after the first failure in the House. I don’t see a lot to suggest this will be different; McConnell is still insisting he’ll find a way to limp this thing across the finish line, and it’s not over until it’s over. In the meantime, however, the Atlantic did put out a good analysis of the bill’s impact on Medicaid, and the Department of Health and Human Services put out a report noting that the ACA is still ‘working as intended.’ So you can enjoy both of those alongside McConnell’s endorsement of Congress not killing each other this week; hopefully we’ll have more news once Congress resumes after the break.
Pence Touched Expensive NASA Equipment because Rubio Dared Him. The headline pretty much sums this one up, actually — he got photographed touching the equipment labeled Do Not Touch, and then tweeted an explanation: Mark Rubio dared him to. Afterwards, he tweeted a photoshopped image of himself petting a porcupine as well. I seriously got nothin’. (NASA did clarify that he hadn’t damaged the equipment, though.)

The Bad:

No One Feeling So Fly at the G20. Even independent of The Great Polish Pep Talk, substitute President Ivanka Trump, and the Trump/Putin saga, G20 had a lot of issues over the past week. To start with, the site experienced massive protests throughout the week for a variety of reasons, culminating in police use of teargas and water cannons. Then Trump wouldn’t stop tweeting about unrelated matters (e.g. John Podesta, Fake News, MAGA, reviews of his Poland speech…), and alienated literally everyone else there with his unwillingness to negotiate on topics like climate change. After the event, critiques from other countries looked pretty scathing, and nobody seems quite sure where we go from here.
Multiple Shootings in the Bronx. This past week saw multiple tragic shootings in the Bronx. First a doctor opened fire in a hospital where he used to work, killing another doctor who was covering a shift and injuring six more people. (The assailant also sprayed gasoline into the nursing station.) But only a few days later, an active police officer was assassinated in her vehicle while covering a Fourth of July shift. The assailant was fatally shot by police very shortly afterwards about a block away.
KKK Rally and Counter-Rally in Charlottesville. The KKK held an armed rally in Charlottesville, Virginia this weekend, protesting the city’s removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee from a public park downtown. The protest drew hundreds of counterprotesters, which resulted in clashing and ultimately culminated in twenty-three arrests. State police also released three canisters of tear gas into the crowd. Three people were taken to the hospital.
Environmental News Roundup. Per popular demand, guest writer Matthew Kamm gives us a quick rundown of what’s going on in environmental news this week: “For those who haven’t been following the environmental news closely since the election, The Guardian has a depressing, but excellent, rundown of the various ways the current administration has weakened environmental regulations. This week specifically, The Department of the Interior led by Secretary Ryan Zinke released a request for comment on their plan to open up new offshore drilling in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic oceans, pursuant to an executive order the President signed back in April. Trump insisted at the time that he was undoing the Obama-era protections for the Arctic Ocean that banned drilling there, but since those protections were not an executive order but rather an application of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, it’s not clear that he can actually do that. This week also saw an official recommendation from Secretary Zinke that the President consider shrinking the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. This is a contentious and complicated issue, but the linked article gives a good summary. In legal news, a bunch of state prosecutors are getting together to sue the EPA over a decision EPA Director Scott Pruitt made back in March — he refused to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to neurological problems in children as well as autoimmune disorders in adults, from use in US food agriculture. Especially considering that the EPA itself had decided to ban chlorpyrifos under the last administration, the prosecutors seem to have a viable case. Finally (and mercifully), a federal appeals court ruled earlier this week that enforcing regulations on methane leaks for oil and gas operations was, in fact, still the job of the EPA, despite its decision earlier this spring to delay enforcement (presumably because preventing poisonous gas leaks now falls outside their mandate as dictated by one of the villains from Captain Planet).”

The Good:

More Voter Log Backlash. We’re now up to 40-something states refusing to comply with the voting commission’s voter logs request, which the Hill reported this week is likely illegal in the first place because it didn’t go through the proper channels. In addition to this challenge, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (a privacy rights watchdog group) is suing the election integrity panel, claiming (in my opinion correctly) that the panel’s request violates informational privacy laws, and the ACLU is suing as well. The panel has been forced to reconvene this month in the face of considerable opposition and refusal to comply. Also, as Nate Silver notes, it would be difficult to collect accurate data through the commission’s methods anyway.
Attorneys General Sue DeVos. Attorneys General of eighteen different states and District Columbia are suing Betsy DeVos over her failure to enforce student loan protections. (The suit is in addition to a separate suit being brought by a consumer advocacy organization with similar allegations.) Maura Healy, Massachusetts Attorney General and all-around all star, explained to reporters that she brought the suit because DeVos is cancelling predatory lending rules without opportunity for comment or notice. The regulations were due to go into effect on July 1, but DeVos suspended them and said she would overhaul them in the near future; the Attorneys General are demanding implementation of the existing regulations as a remedy instead.
Fair Representation Act Introduced in the House. This past week, House Rep Don Beyer introduced the Fair Representation Act, which would open up elections, introduce ranked-choice voting, and require independent redistricting of all congressional districts. All in all, it represents a significant departure from entrenched (and unfair) voting practices in the country. Even if this legislation goes nowhere, the fact that it was introduced at all is both heartening and worth noting — it represents a growing response to the kinds of voter suppression and gerrymandering that have become more widespread in the past year.

And that’s all the news this week, in its bizarre glory. Tune in next week, when I’ll probably be reporting on porcine pilots sailing past my window.

National News Roundup: Week 23 (June 25-July 1)

July 3, 2017 Kara HurvitzLeave a comment

Well this week… happened; it was mostly a mixed bag at best. There was a lot of fighting back against terrible news, and some good news in its own right, which some weeks is the best we can hope to see. Resistance is how progress is made; we’ll try again next week.

Constitutional Crisis Corners:

We saw some concrete movement on The Russia Collusion Investigation, though a lot of it got buried under tweets about what’s-her-name.

Evidence of Collusion.* The biggest news to be buried this week is that concrete evidence of collusion to disrupt the 2016 election has emerged. The Wall Street Journal reported on connections between GOP operative Peter Smith, who was seeking deleted DNC emails to tank the Clinton campaign, and Flynn, Bannon, Conway, and Clovis. Smith reported that he was working at the behest of Mike Flynn. Unfortunately, all of that thorough reporting is behind a paywall, but Amy Siskind wrote a summary in the course of her ordinary weekly Authoritarian Watch, ThinkProgress has a good in-depth summary, and Time Magazine and the Hill has picked up the story as well. Mr. Smith will not be giving any further exclusives anytime soon, as he died shortly after speaking to the Wall Street Journal last month (as so often happens to Kremlin-connected informants).
Russian Recall.* Russia is recalling Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, which is probably a sign of increased heat from the investigation here in the United States. Russia is also denying that they are doing so, which is another sign of the same thing. Apparently he was a fairly pleasant ambassador, which also probably means his replacement will not be an improvement.
Trump is Meeting with Putin Next Week. Incredibly, spokespeople for the White House say there is “no specific agenda” when Trump meets with Putin next week. Maybe they’ll talk about the weather. Maybe they’ll talk about the government. I have no idea, and there’s so much wrong with that I don’t know where to start.

Thankfully that’s the only front to see movement this week, which is probably for the best.

Your “Normal” Weird:

Trump TIME. Your weekly Trump weirdness is that he apparently hung a forged TIME cover of himself in several properties around the world. Even more bizarrely, Trump has been on the cover of TIME for real about fourteen times (as TIME helpfully reminds us), and several of them were perfectly flattering covers — so he didn’t even need to forge anything. I don’t even want to speculate about what would make someone with several real covers to choose from do this, on the grounds that I think it would kill brain cells to try. But, uh. That guy’s our President for another 3.5 years.
Bona Fide Relationships. You may remember that the Supreme Court issued a ruling on the travel ban last week, which went into effect this past Thursday. As part of implementing the ban, the Trump administration issued guidelines on what constitutes a ‘bona fide relationship’ with a person or entity in the United States. Their definitions contain a major oversight that I find baffling — namely, it ignores the millions of kids living in kinship placements in the United States; those arrangements by definition involve a child in the custody of other family members, and frequently are not “formalized” through adoption for a variety of reasons. Since the definitions are otherwise fairly broad, I can only imagine that the lack of a custody-based exemption is an oversight rather than a malicious omission, but it’s still likely to impact grandparents, aunts/uncles, and cousins of U.S. residents who need to travel home to one of the six countries on the ban list for any reason. The rules also omit nonprofits dedicated to helping refugees resettle from the list of ‘entities’ that count, which does seem intentional (as well as heartless). All in all, it’s a strange and arbitrary list that seems almost like they simply made up rules on the fly, and it’s not surprising that it’s already being challenged.
Weird Politician Behavior Roundup. This has been a super weird week for political behavior, even by our modern standards. The splashiest headline is Chris Christie closing New Jersey beaches due to a government shutdown, and then being photographed on one of said closed beaches. Incredibly, Christie’s response to being photographed was to say “That’s the way it goes.” But in addition to Christie’s crusade to be the country’s least popular governor, Jason Chaffetz is leaving the House to join Fox News mid-term. Given that Chaffetz is the current chairperson of the House Oversight and Government Reform, I really cannot stress enough how strange of a move this is — it’s like a police chief who’s investigating the mayor of his city for kickbacks suddenly leaving mid-investigation to become an ESPN announcer. That said, though, Chaffetz also randomly announced this week that he thinks Congresspeople should get housing stipends because their salaries are insufficient, so your mileage may vary on that one all around. Oh also, Trump had about a million distracting and obnoxious tweets, but at this point that’s not even news anymore.

The Bad:

Church Playground Case Blurs Church and State. The Supreme Court reached a decision this week that was innocuous on its face, but has the end result of blurring the separation between church and state. In a 7–2 decision, the court concluded that a church playground should not be exempt from a government grant to fund resurfacing its playground purely on its basis as a religious institution. The danger in this case is not in the immediate result, but in the precedent it might set for later cases; though Roberts did write a footnote emphasizing the non-religious use of the funds in this instance, it could potentially pave the way for government funding of religion in future cases. On this basis, Sotomayor wrote a pretty impassioned dissent; given that Gorsuch did not join on the Roberts footnote, complaining that he “doesn’t see why it should matter” what the use of funds was, she appears to have a valid concern. (Side note: the Gorsuch concurrence is super gross and made me yell things at my computer. You have been warned.)
Betsy DeVos Roundup. Per popular demand, this week includes a quick summary of what Betsy DeVos has been up to lately — which hasn’t been getting much attention, but is nonetheless a weird miasma of terrible. There’s been a lot of activity around higher education student loans, mostly boiling down to “it will become harder to borrow,” “you’re more likely to be defrauded in the borrowing process,” and “hope you enjoy paying exorbitant collection fees.” The most recent (and stunning) news along this vein is her decision to have a loan company CEO head Federal Student Aid, but all of these changes are likely to have a chilling effect on middle-income American consumers seeking higher education. On the primary education level, DeVos has been mostly hinting she may fund school discrimination, eroding civil rights enforcement in schools, and, of course, pushing for a “school choice” agenda generally. In general, most of her actions seemed designed to turn the American education system in the Wild West on all levels.
Show Us Your Voter Rolls. A letter from the vice-chair of the Commission on Election Integrity demanded access to state voter rolls this week, asking for information such as social security number, name, birthday, voting dates, and registered political party for every registered citizen. Given that this commission was created because Trump claimed fraudulent voting cost him the popular vote, it’s a bit disconcerting that it’s asking for this information (to say the least); it doesn’t help that the commission only gave states a few weeks to comply. States are required to keep these lists under federal law, but that doesn’t mean they’re required to give them to the federal government or make them broadly available — and in many places the data is protected by state law.
Kate’s Law and Sanctuary Cities. The House passed two laws this week cracking down further on immigration practices; one cuts funding from so-called “sanctuary cities” and the other imposes harsher sanctions on people who illegally reenter the country. Both provisions more-or-less passed along party lines, and both further blur lines between immigration enforcement and criminal procedure.

The Good:

BCRA Belated. Mitch McConnell was forced to postpone the BCRA vote in the Senate this week, in part because of opposition from various members of his own party. Cruz, who helped draft the bill and then refused to vote for it, offered suggested changes to be made in light of this delay, mostly repealing provisions about pre-existing conditions. In general, the bill is very unpopular among constituents, and that is making it hard to get moderates on board. But despite these setbacks, Republicans seem to believe they still can pull a rabbit out of this hat, and given what happened with the House bill, that’s very possible. If nothing else, McConnell is trying to get an amended CBO score in place by the time the Senate returns to session in mid-July; we’ll all need to keep a close eye on this to avoid a repeat of the House voting experience.
Same Sex Marriage Approved in Germany. Same-sex marriage was approved by the German Parliament this week by overwhelming majority, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel voting against the bill but not impeding the vote. The way the vote evolved, and Merkel’s decision to make the issue a vote of “conscience,” illustrate how she allows her stances to evolve to reflect changing popular opinion on issues. The decisive victory, with over 150 more “yeas” than “nays,” also illustrates the popularity of the position in mainstream Germany.
Attorney and Activist Response to the Travel Ban. When the travel ban went into place again on Thursday, attorneys across the country were ready for it. Hawaii’s attorney general has already requested official clarification for the ‘close family’ definition under the regulations, noting that many close familial relationships in Hawaii are excluded under the regulations. Attorneys all over the country also headed to airports, alongside observers, to ensure the ban was not improperly enforced. Attorneys and activists headed to protests as well. The next few weeks will tell us a lot about what we can expect from here.
Voter Conscientious Objection. Over twenty-nine state Secretaries of States have already refused to comply with the Advisory Commission on Election Integrity’s demands on disclosing voter registration information — including, somewhat bizarrely, the guy who heads the commission, Kris Kobach (who is also the Secretary of State for Kansas). Many of the Secretaries of State had a few choice words for Kris Kobach and the commission while they were at it.

And that’s this week’s national news! Happy fourth, everyone. I’m Jake Tapper, and nothing makes sense anymore.

National News Roundup: Week 22 (June 18–24)

June 27, 2017 Kara HurvitzLeave a comment

Holy monkeys, the news this week was horrible even by our current low standards. I suggest you have your comfort food of choice at the ready, y’all, because this week’s a really rough ride. But we’ll keep fighting to make next week better.

Constitutional Crisis Corners:

Still in the ring and even more horrible than usual: The Russia Collusion Investigation, which somehow manages to be gaining ground in both directions this week.

Russian Hacker Highlights.* There has been a huge amount happening on this front, and I’m not even convinced I understand all of it, but here’s a good faith stab at a summary. After hearings this week on the 2016 election cyberattacks, a bunch of further information has come out on the topic. We now know that Vladimir Putin personally ordered an “influence campaign” to harm Hillary Clinton’s electoral chances and “undermine public faith in the US democratic process.” The resulting hacking campaign impacted at least twenty states, and we found at least one instance of a voting log being successfully altered by the campaign (though not much further evidence of systemic changes to voting rolls). We also learned that President Obama knew of this order, but feared undermining the integrity of the elections further by reporting on it. Also, Trump has done very little to prevent a repeat attack, but is now saying that Russia hacked the DNC and criticizing President Obama for not doing more. For a surprisingly thorough and good secondary-source summary as far as I can tell, by the way, check out the wikipedia page on this (which has 332 citations!).
No Tapes, Just Obstruction of Justice.* Trump announced this week that there were no tapes of Comey, after a week of build-up and self-imposed deadline that the New York Times correctly identifies as designed to shift attention away from the healthcare bill in the Senate. (The same article also notes that legal experts rightly identify “I bluffed to threaten you not to testify” a classic example of obstruction of justice, because it is.) Then as an encore he inexplicably said that it was “bothersome” that Mueller has ties to Comey — both men were career FBI investigators, and it’s not like there are two FBIs — and insinuated that Mueller should step down. Because when you publicly admit you just engaged in obstruction of justice, it’s definitely the biased investigator’s fault when he investigates you.
Our Attorney General Now Has an Attorney. Since getting your own defense counsel is de rigueur for all sketchy members of the Trump Administration, the latest person to hire one is Attorney General Jeff Sessions. I’m going to repeat that, because it bears repeating: The current Attorney General of the United States — the highest prosecutor in the land — now has a defense attorney representing him in an ongoing investigation. Folks, I seriously cannot stress enough how incredibly strange and jarring that should be for all of us; regardless of whether he has anything to hide or not, an Attorney General retaining defense counsel is really seriously not normal and it’s a measure of the strange times we find ourselves in, regardless of what happens from here.

I genuinely can’t believe where we are with regard to the Emolument Clause this week — though there’s only one news item this week, it’s more than enough all by itself.

President Fundraising for His 2020 Campaign at His Own Hotel. The headline pretty much says it all on this one, but, this plan to fundraise for 2020 at the Trump International Hotel next week sure was reported by the Associated Press. This one manages to be gross on multiple fronts — the sitting President generally doesn’t fundraise for a Presidential election this early, and it’s also probably against federal campaign finance law, in addition to being yet another way the Presidency draws in business for the Trump brand. So, that’s fun.

And on top of all that, we’re back to battles on three fronts, because there’s also bonus Suppression of the Press.

The Incredible Shrinking White House Briefing.* (Note: I am merely borrowing that headline from The New York Times, who appears just as disgruntled as I am about all of this.) This week’s White House briefings have to be seen to be believed — oh, my mistake; you can’t see them because television coverage was banned three times. At first, the White House said that there would be no live coverage permitted this week’s press conferences. Then, after CNN literally sent in a sketch artist for visual coverage (I love you CNN, even when your reporting is uneven as all get-out), the White House started to say that nobody was allowed to report on the instructions not to report. Any takers on the next thing to be restricted? My money’s on being told next week not to report the color of the residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Your “Normal” Weird:

Iowa Rally Nonsense. Trump held a rally in Cedar Rapids, IA — what appears to be a campaign rally, in fact, though the next election isn’t for another 1200 days — and spoke for seventy rambling minutes about his various achievements and virtues. I swear my ability to even went down about ten points permanently just by reading articles on this, but it’s so bizarre that I need to report it anyway — I recommend checking out Fact Check’s writeup if you want to source this, though you may suffer as I did. Highlights include promising to bar immigrants from access to cash welfare benefits for five years after their arrival (which Bill Clinton already did back in 1996); falsely claiming the Paris Agreement is a binding agreement; and exaggerating how much the U.S. has spent in the Middle East by about five trillion dollars. Murrica.

The Bad:

AHCA: Second Verse, Worse than the First. Okay. So. The Senate released its version of the AHCA this week, which it’s calling the “Better Care Reconciliation Act” or BCRA (spoiler: It’s not actually better care in the slightest.) The CBO also issued its report on the bill today, and estimates it would leave 22 million people uninsured by 2026. It does a lot of the same things the House version does to the private insurance market (ends the personal insurance mandate, ends the employer mandate, drops health care essentials, refuses coverage of abortions, defunds Planned Parenthood for one year, expands use of health savings accounts, and uses all the money this saves to create a big ole’ tax cut for the rich), but it does them generally more slowly and, over time, more harshly. In particular, people with pre-existing conditions may be priced out of most markets. As Vox put it: “It’s not complicated. Just cruel. Poor people pay more for worse insurance.” (For a very good, very comprehensive comparison of the Senate version, the House version, and current law, check out this NASHP chart.) But, as the New York Times correctly points out, the really big story of the BCRA is that it’s also a rollback of Medicaid as we know it. In the program’s current form — the form it has had since its inception in the 1960s — Medicaid is an entitlement program, which means anyone who qualifies for it can expect coverage for their medical bills as they accrue. But under the BCRA, states are heavily restricted both in terms of amount of funding and in terms of how many people they can help; in fact, states have a penalty imposed if they help more than a national average of people even if they don’t overspend doing it. This is some pretty Dickensian stuff, and it’s a really major change.
Immigration Instigation. This was a really rough week on the immigration front. Between ICE showing up at a human trafficking court, an emergency care organization getting raided in the desert, and a mixed outcome at best from the Supreme Court on the travel ban, it’s all a little bit dizzying. That said, though, the show is far from over on that last one, and it’s not all bad — I’ll do a bit of unpacking here. The Supreme Court decided to remove the stay on Trump’s travel ban today, which means this administration can start enforcing it again. However, the court also held that the travel ban may not be imposed on anyone who can show “a bona fide relationship with any person or entity in the United States.” Which will be double plus unfun for CBP to try to enforce, and also hard to interpret, which is a thought that keeps me warm and cozy at night. (Incidentally, this is just a temporary measure before the case is heard on the merits; the case is on for oral arguments in October, which means we’ll hear more then if not before.)
Ossoff lost special election. The Georgia Sixth District election came and went, and ended in victory for Karen “my faith calls me to prevent gay families from adopting” Handel by less than four points. The press has been all over the map in its reactions— I’m seeing everything from “this is a major loss” to “this is still a victory for Dems” to “let’s blame Nancy Pelosi for this for some inexplicable reason” — so I’m going to take a page out of my very wise researcher’s book and just provide you with some election statistics. It happened, it was no fun, and we’ll keep working towards a better House in 2018.
ADAPT Protests and Police Response. Disability advocates from ADAPT, a disability rights organization, staged a die-in on Thursday in front of Mitch McConnell’s office on Capitol Hill to protest the draconic BCRA — which, as noted above, experts believe really is likely to result in deaths for many disabled persons. Countless activists were carried out by police, many without necessarily health devices like wheelchairs needed for mobility or ventilators needed to breathe safely. All told, forty-three disability advocates were arrested and removed.

The Good:

Go Home BRCA, Nobody Likes You. About the only good thing I can say about the Senate’s healthcare bill is that nobody likes it (and that might end up being a saving grace). Just like last time, Congressional lawmakers find themselves stuck courting several ultra-conservative Senators and more moderate counterparts as well as the entire list of Dems; a total of fifty-six senators have indicated they will not vote for the bill in its current form. Even more damning is the low number of Senators who have actually expressed support — only seventeen so far, with the remaining twenty-eight making noncommittal statements leaving us guessing. If the current numbers hold, the bill will not have a majority to pass (which some news outlets are speculating is McConnell’s real plan). Outside of Capitol Hill, the laundry list of prominent and relevant figures who have condemned the bill is even more staggering — vocal opponents include former President Obama, the Koch network, several pediatrics organizations, a coalition of ten insurance organizations, several governors of states that took the Medicaid expansion, the American Hospital Association, and the American Psychiatric Association.
SCOTUS Still (Mostly) Works. There were several cases out of the Supreme Court in the past week that were encouraging or noteworthy, so I’m throwing in a few highlights for your perusal. In Maslenjak v. United States, a 9–0 court decided that denaturalization (the process for stripping a naturalized citizen of citizenship) should not be a penalty for misrepresentation of nonmaterial facts on a citizenship application. (Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch, who are rapidly becoming The Alt-Right Triplets, filed a concurrence but did not dissent). In Pavan v. Smith, a 6–3 court decided that same-sex married people have a constitutional right to list both names on a birth certificate for any children of the marriage, regardless of the fact that both parents are not biological contributors to the child. (The dissenters were, you guessed it, Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch.) It’s a bit strange recognizing Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy as a new-order moderate and liberal, respectively, but we live in strange times indeed.

And that’s all for now, but tomorrow’s a new day. (And so’s the next day. And the next day…) Stay tuned for more updates and anecdotes next week!

National News Roundup: Week 21 (June 11–17)

June 20, 2017 Kara HurvitzLeave a comment

This week, the vast majority of news that flew by was Russia-related. I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing — I guess at minimum, it’s good that people are paying attention. The non-Russia-related news was mostly pretty rough, as a warning, though it’s important for us to know it anyway.

Standard standing reminders apply: I am no journalist, though I play one in your inbox or browser, so I’m only summarizing the news within my area of expertise. This week also contains multiple headlines outside my area as a legal generalist — still a lawyer, not a spy! — but all offroad adventures are marked with an asterisk. Okay, I think that’s about it for the disclaimers. Onward to the news!

Constitutional Crisis Corners:

Surprisingly, movement on both relevant crises this week was net-positive for the second week in a row. Let’s hear it for our system limping along under an auspice of democracy!

Still standing despite a repeated pummeling, at least for now: The Russia Collusion Investigation, which is probably going to be a recurring theme for the foreseeable future.

Russian Hacker Highlights.* The latest news on the actual election hacking from 2016 is that there’s evidence that Russian hackers breached voting systems in 39 different states before the November election. Most notably, evidence was found that in at least one state hackers tried to change or delete voter data. About 90,000 records were compromised. To make heads or tails of what we know, I recommend this helpful timeline.
From Senate, No Love.* In a turn of events that honestly surprises the socks off of me, the Senate had some concrete things to say about Russia and sanctions this week. Most notably, the Senate bilaterally agreed to issue sanctions against Russia for their interference with the 2016 election, and to limit President Trump’s ability to unilaterally lift said sanctions. The bill was originally intended to focus only on sanctions on Iran, but bipartisan support for the Russia-related provisions dramatically increased after more news broke about the sheer breadth of Russian interference in American politics. (Ironically, the only people in the entire Senate to vote against this measure were Bernie Sanders, Mike Lee, and Rand Paul.) The bill would still need to pass in the House and be signed by Trump, and I think we can expect a veto on this one; more news as it develops.
Sessions Testimony Session. Well, the Sessions testimony… happened… but to be honest, the inconclusive nature of his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee only raises more questions. Though he was pretty consistent that he never discussed the election with any Russian representatives, and claims there was no third meeting, some of Sessions’s comments can be read to suggest he wouldn’t recuse himself from an investigation into obstruction of justice. This is a much narrower understanding of his recusal than had previously been believed, and is bad news bears for any ongoing investigations about Trump’s behavior post-election. (You can catch full real-time coverage through the Washington Post and the Hill, by the way, Politico also put out a transcript for the truly dedicated. That said, though, I warn you that the third one is mostly just pages and pages of Sessions making up executive privileges, refusing to answer questions, and smirking as Burr interrupts Kamela Harris.)
Obstruction of Justice Inception. Unsurprisingly, a rumor was circulating this week that Trump might try to get Mueller fired because Mueller was starting an investigation into obstruction of justice — nothing goes with illegal obstruction quite like a side order of illegal obstruction, that’s what I always say. (Yo dawg, I heard you like obstruction of justice.) Since Mueller leads an independent investigation, Trump doesn’t have the power to do this — that’s pretty much exactly what ‘independent investigation’ means in practical terms — but it’s certainly believable that he might try to harass Rosenstein into it. Several members of Congress appeared to take the rumor seriously, or at least were quick to publicly note that they were pretty unimpressed by this idea. The White House ended up denying the rumor, and who only knows if they were seriously considering it or not.
Trump’s Attorney Now Has an Attorney. President Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, hired an attorney of his own this week to help him navigate the Russia investigation. Nothing says “nothing to see here” like an attorney hiring his own attorney because he represented someone! (For those of you reading this who are not aware, generally attorneys can expect that their work product in the course of representing someone will not be subpoenaed and they cannot be compelled to testify — this is commonly known as ‘attorney-client privilege.’ So if he’s hiring his own attorney, that…suggests there’s some reason why he might be personally liable, not professionally liable as Trump’s attorney. So that’s fun.)

In addition to all your by-now-ordinary Russia weirdness, we also saw some breaking excellent news on The Emolument Clause! More specifically…

Emoluments Suits Multiply. Continuing the momentum from last week, nearly 200 Congressional Democrats are now suing the President for violation of the Emoluments Clause as well, becoming the largest group of representatives ever to sue a sitting President. The group is arguing that they are uniquely suited to resolve the standing issue that makes these cases hard to prosecute, because a President is constitutionally required to obtain the consent of Congress before accepting gifts. (This is the third suit of its type since Trump took office, and though there may be standing issues both the Virginia/DC case and the CREW case are still ongoing.) The suit was filed shortly after the Justice Department officially took the position that the President is allowed to accept money from foreign governments. Needless to say, it will be interesting to see what the courts do with this.

Your “Normal” Weird:

The American Weird Behavior Act. There are quite a few things to dislike about how the AHCA is being handled as it progresses through the Senate — more on that below — but this week has also uniquely highlighted just how strange the whole ordeal has been. Recent polls suggest that not a single state actually favors the passage of the bill, which is probably why Trump called the legislation ‘mean’ this past week in a talk with Republican senators — a major departure from his original appraisal of the same bill. It’s also almost certainly why the Senate tried to block reporters from covering anything in their hallways this week, which was a major break from precedent they ended up walking back fairly quickly. It’s so unusual for Congress to double down on a dramatically unpopular bill like this that FiveThirtyEight has written about possible motivations.

The Bad:

Gun Violence in Multiple States. This week we saw multiple heartbreaking instances of gun violence on the same day. The most publicized incident was the politically-motivated shooting of a Republican representative at a Congressional softball practice, which thankfully had only one fatality (the gunman, during a shootout with police). The incident did injure multiple people, including Representative Steve Scalise and police officers Crystal Grines and David Bailey. There was also a fatal shooting at a UPS building in San Francisco, resulting in the deaths of four UPS staff members including the shooter. Unlike the Alexandra shooting, police are still trying to determine the motivations in that incident, which does not appear to be politically-motivated. Lastly, there was also a shooting in Brooklyn on the same day, resulting in one injury.
Unprecedented AHCA Process. The National News Roundup haven’t covered this story much lately, simply because after all this time, there’s just not much info — but that’s because Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is exploiting a provision called Rule 14 to refuse to release the text of the Senate’s version of the AHCA before the vote. Even Secretary of Health and Human Services (and resident bridge troll) Tom Price hasn’t seen the Senate bill. This is deeply concerning, both because there’s not a lot to suggest the AHCA has changed much and because it goes against the heart of our democratic principles to try to pass such major legislation in utter secrecy. It is imperative that we stay on top of this and also call our representatives — all of us; even those of us with Senators in liberal areas! It’s still looking likely that they’ll release some information to the Congressional Budget Office in the next week, so we might know more (and see a vote!) soon.
Sessions v. Medical Marijuana. Sessions personally made sure he asked Congress to let him prosecute medical marijuana cases this week (because apparently sick people aren’t getting steamrolled fast enough for him under the AHCA). At the moment, there is federal law essentially prohibiting this prosecution, though apparently he isn’t going to let pesky things like “existing laws” or “human decency” get in his way. Just as a quick reminder, there is ample evidence that medical marijuana does not lead to increased recreational consumption and can have significant health benefits for people with very serious illness. (Also, on a personal note, this topic is hard for me to write about neutrally because a cannabis-based prescribed drug helped my father-in-law hold down food in the last stages of his cancer treatment.) At any rate, this is a terrible idea that’s probably not truly motivated by public safety, and you can read the whole horrible memo here, though I’m not sure it will improve your day at all.
Black Lives Still Matter. This was a rough week in terms of violence against black people, between police shooting a 30-year-old pregnant woman in Seattle named Charleena Lyles instead of deescalating the situation and a jury acquitting Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez of all charges in the shooting of Philando Castile. (The Philando Castile case is particularly upsetting to many people because it happened during a routine stop for a broken taillight, because there’s no concrete evidence that he failed to comply with instructions during the stop, and because his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, had live-streamed and narrated the entire incident.) Needless to say, our country still has a lot of work to do to create more responsible police interaction with people of color.
London Woes. This was also an extremely rough week for England, which has been having a hard time of things for a few weeks now. First there was a fire in a high rise in London, burning a 24-story building to ash and killing at least 58 people. Then there was an attack outside a mosque, also in London, in which a driver tried to run down people exiting the building; the attack is believed to be an act of retaliation for the London bridge attacks. The vehicular attack killed at least one person and injured ten others.

The Good:

Flint Officials Charged with Manslaughter. After literally years without potable water in Flint, Michigan, five public officials have been charged with manslaughter for their role in the ongoing crisis. The charges come in the wake of an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease, which is linked to poor water quality and caused at least one death in 2015. Though it feels ghoulish to call anything connected with the Flint water crisis ‘good’ news, the charges represent a significant signal that public officials are starting to be held accountable, which is a very important step towards preventing this type of crisis happening elsewhere or happening further in Flint.
Adorable Dog News Palate Cleanser. A black lab crashed a Russian news report, startling the anchor and earning himself a place in Youtube fame. Also, and unrelatedly, this adorable video of an elderly pitbull getting contact lenses exists. These things are admittedly not really news, but I figured you could use a palate cleanser after all the bleak things above.

And that’s all for now, but the news comes in pretty fast. Stay tuned for more updates and anecdotes next week! (No guarantees about more dog videos.)