James.galbraith

Joe Biden still trails President Donald Trump in cash, but he’s catching up.

Biden and the Democratic National Committee hit an all-time monthly fundraising record in May, bringing in $80.8 million. That total topped Trump and the Republican National Committee, which together raised $74 million over the same period.

But Trump — who has been able to jointly fundraise with the Republican Party at higher levels as the Republican presidential nominee for months — leads Biden in cash on hand, $265 million to $122.2 million, an all-important number that shows how much the candidate and committee can still spend. Notably, May was the first full month Biden raised money in tandem with the DNC, drafting off of a joint fundraising agreement that allowed individual donors to give more than $620,000.

Saturday night’s Federal Elections Commission filings also shed light on Republicans’ edge in spending this month, an ongoing battle among several outside groups to be Biden’s preferred super PAC and Justin Amash’s brief run for president.

POLITICO dug through the numbers and here’s six takeaways from this month’s filings:

Trump, RNC spending dwarfed Biden, DNC

The president’s campaign and the RNC far outpaced Biden and the DNC in spending in May. Trump’s team spent about $46.5 million during the month, while Democrats spent about $24.1 million — a reflection of Trump's significant cash-on-hand advantage over Biden, who became the presumptive Democratic nominee two months ago.

But the spending totals are likely not a full picture, because any spending by the candidates’ joint fundraising committees is also not accounted for. In particular, one of Trump’s joint fundraising agreements focused on small-dollar fundraising routinely spends millions on Facebook advertising over the course of a month.

Much of the president’s and Biden's spending was on advertising — a category that will continue to balloon as the campaign turns to the general election. The Trump campaign spent $19.8 million on ads through the company American Made Media Consultants, which was created by campaign officials to handle its advertising purchases. Biden’s largest expenditure was $3.6 million to the media buyer Infogroup.

The RNC spent over $1 million on “legal and compliance services” during the month, including nearly $200,000 to “Alan Dershowitz Consulting LLC."

The Trump campaign spent more than $470,000 on polling in the month of May. Most of that spending went to the polling firm Fabrizio, Lee & Associates — but the Trump campaign also paid $98,000 to the firm of the pollster John McLaughlin, who wrote a memo for the Trump campaign in June to try to discredit a national poll from CNN that showed the president performing poorly.

Democratic Super PACs battle for a fundraising edge

A handful of super PACs are jockeying to be Biden’s preferred outside group. Their fundraising totals showed that one has amassed a commanding lead.

During the presidential primary, Unite the Country boosted Biden when he needed it most, helping his campaign rebound from losses in Iowa and New Hampshire to a decisive Super Tuesday performance. That March, the super PAC brought in more than $10 million. But over the past two months, the super PACs fundraising cratered, bringing in $723,000 in April and $1.3 million in May.

The drop occurred after Biden’s campaign initially signaled Priorities USA, another group that led outside Democratic spending in 2016, would be its preferred super PAC. Those moves are closely tracked by big-money donors, who want to stick with the favored outside group.

Priorities USA, which backed Biden after Super Tuesday, raised $7.5 million last month. The group told the Los Angeles Times it secured $38 million in donations and commitments since early May, two-thirds during the last three weeks. That would mean a huge spike in the group’s June fundraising totals.

Priorities USA also spent nearly five times more than Unite the Country — $9.7 million to $2.1 million — largely on TV ads, slamming Trump.

But Unite the Country says it's still relevant. An aide told POLITICO that the group topped its May fundraising total in the first ten days of June. Unite the Country and American Bridge 21st Century — another pro-Biden outside group that files quarterly, not monthly — also forged a partnership to pool resources and research.

Pro-Trump super PAC’s fundraising dropped in May

Fundraising totals for America First Action, the pro-Trump super PAC, plummeted in May — bringing in $2.4 million. In April, the group raised nearly $11.6 million.

It's likely a one-month blip, and the Republican super PAC is not expected to struggle for cash as the election turns to the fall. But the drop-off shows how deeply the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent economic downturn hit the group, which is reliant on big-money donors who keep a close eye on a yo-yo-ing stock market.

In a statement, Brian O. Walsh, America First Action’s president, said the group eased up on seeking donations in May as the coronavirus wrecked the economy. "But we are moving forward in June," he said. Walsh noted the group is running ads against Biden in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania since mid-April, and is "in a solid financial position to continue to do so.”

An aide to America First Action said that the group, along with the super PAC’s affiliated non-profit America First Policies, had $56 million in cash on hand by mid-June. The aide also said America First Action brought in nearly $3.6 million this month as of June 19.

Dan Eberhart, a major GOP donor, also noted that the "steep drop" for America First Action's fundraising is "hopefully" a "temporary blip because of the pandemic and not an indication of reduced support for President Trump."

Still, the pro-Biden super PACs lag behind the pro-Trump super PACs in cash on hand, mirroring the official campaign fundraising. America First Action is sitting on $27 million, while Priorities USA and Unite the Country, a pair of pro-Biden super PACs, have a combined $22.7 million in cash on hand.

A Democratic money juggernaut — even in a pandemic

Even during a pandemic, ActBlue, the progressive fundraising platform, continues to be a juggernaut for the Democratic Party — giving its candidates an enormous advantage in hauling in small-dollar donors.

May — a month marked by historically bad unemployment numbers, as more than 40 million Americans are without jobs — was still the third largest month by number of contributions and unique donors, and fifth largest by total dollars raised, according to ActBlue's analysis.

The top beneficiaries are, unsurprisingly, at the top of the ticket: Biden raised nearly $28 million, while the DNC brought in $6.3 million. Donations to Biden and the national party accounted for about 30 percent of all donations that were processed by the platform in the month. The top down-ballot candidates on ActBlue this month were Amy McGrath, Mark Kelly and Jamie Harrison, a trio of Senate challengers running in Kentucky, Arizona and South Carolina, respectively.

Comparable numbers for Trump and the RNC are not available. WinRed, the Republicans’ response to ActBlue that was launched about a year ago with the blessing of the Trump political machine, files its reports on a quarterly basis.

Campaign travel spending evaporated

The coronavirus pandemic ground campaign activities to a total halt in May, and the drops in spending are staggering.

In March, before the coronavirus pandemic shut down much of the country, Biden's campaign spent over $1.3 million on air travel, car rentals and lodging for the candidate and his staff. In May, with Biden's campaign operating nearly exclusively out of the vice president's Delaware basement, the campaign spent just $53,000 on the same travel expenses. That's a 96 percent decrease.

The Trump campaign saw a similar drop-off, seeing its campaign travel spending cut in half from March to May.

The travel savings for the campaigns won't matter much in the long-term, but the drop-off shows just how dramatically the Trump and Biden campaigns had to reorient themselves for a digital-only approach.

A brief Libertarian campaign

Justin Amash was a presidential candidate for just three weeks, and he didn’t have much cash to show for it.

The Michigan congressman raised $230,000 last month for his exploratory committee, before he dropped out of the race on May 16. He spent about $90,000 and left $115,000 in his campaign account.

Amash became the only Libertarian member of Congress after leaving the Republican Party. He previously announced that he would not seek reelection to his House seat, but still has time to change his mind.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said Sunday that his agency would follow the Supreme Court's ruling on Obama-era protections for young, undocumented immigrants — but the administration is still looking "to end an unlawful program.”

The Supreme Court delivered President Donald Trump a blow earlier this week, ruling in a 5-4 decision that the administration could not block the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program because it failed to provide an adequate justification. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court majority.

DACA, introduced in 2012 by former President Barack Obama, protects nearly 700,000 young immigrants — frequently referred to as "Dreamers" — without citizenship or residency status from deportation.

While the ruling is a temporary relief, DACA supporters say the fight is not over. Trump has made it clear that he will attempt to end the program again.

“At no point in that decision did they say that the program was lawful,” Wolf said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." "They simply didn't like the rationale and the procedures that we used. And I find that a little troubling.”

Wolf said the Obama administration created the program “out of thin air” and didn’t allow the American people enough time to weigh in.

On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Wolf said Trump directed his agency to examine its rationale for rescinding DACA and write an explanation that could pass legal muster.

“We need to find a solution for this population,” Wolf said on NBC. “As the acting secretary of Homeland Security, I don't have the luxury to ignore the law. The program's unlawful.”

Wolf added that Trump is “begging Congress” to solve the problem. In the past, lawmakers have been unable to reach consensus on a broader immigration package.

“We're willing to sit down at the table and negotiate with them,” Wolf said.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said Sunday that President Donald Trump was only joking when he said he asked his administration to slow down coronavirus testing for the sake of optics.

Speaking with CNN's Jake Tapper on “State of the Union,“ Navarro repeatedly said, "Come on now, Jake. You know it was tongue in cheek. Come on now. That was tongue in cheek," cutting off Tapper as he repeatedly asked about the president's remarks.

"I don't know that it was tongue in cheek at all," Tapper retorted.

"That's news for you, tongue in cheek," Navarro said with a dismissive laugh.

Trump said during a comeback rally Saturday night that he had told officials to lower the number of coronavirus tests to temper the rising infection rate in the country. The U.S. has surged to the country with the most infections in the world.

"When you do testing to that extent, you're going to find more people," Trump said during his rally in Tulsa, Okla. "You're going to find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down, please."

Trump has made similar remarks in the past, but never as explicitly and from as large a platform as on Saturday night. The White House has since said multiple times that the president was joking.

"Come on. It was a light moment," Navarro said.

There have been more than 2 million cases of coronavirus diagnosed in the United States, causing more than 120,000 deaths.

John Hickenlooper has stumbled in the closing weeks of Colorado’s Senate primary, creating openings for his opponent and Republicans that have unsettled a critical race for Democrats in their bid to recapture the Senate.

Democrats acknowledge Hickenlooper has made serious mistakes on what was supposed to be a glide path to the Democratic nomination. After being cited for contempt this month for initially failing to appear before Colorado’s Independent Ethics Commission, Hickenlooper was fined $2,750 for two violations dating back to his second term as governor.

He’s also apologized for comments about race, including responding to a question about the Black Lives Matter protests in a recent forum by saying the phrase means "every life matters," echoing a common refrain among conservatives.

Republicans launched TV ads last week aiming to press the advantage, attacking Hickenlooper and hoping to either drag him down before next week's primary or weaken him as he emerges as the nominee.

Hickenlooper — who was recruited and immediately endorsed by national Democrats after dropping his presidential bid — remains the favorite in the tighter-than-expected June 30 primary against Andrew Romanoff, the former state House speaker, according to interviews with a dozen Democrats in Colorado and Washington last week, many of whom requested anonymity to speak candidly. Additionally, they say he maintains an advantage in the general election against GOP Sen. Cory Gardner, especially with President Donald Trump's falling poll numbers over the past few months, and in a state where the electorate tilts increasingly blue.

But Democrats' nominating contest has become much more competitive and fraught in the final stretch. Romanoff launched the first attack ad of the primary Friday, and a new super PAC created only last week immediately released a negative counterattack battering the lesser-known challenger. After his slip-ups, Hickenlooper has rolled out new local and national endorsements aiming to re-establish his pole position.

“Every mistake you make, every stumble, however magnified it is and however many [advertising] points get put behind it, always potentially makes things closer,” said Alan Salazar, who was a strategist in Hickenlooper's gubernatorial office and is now chief of staff to Denver Mayor Michael Hancock. “I can't imagine any of John's mistakes — however magnified they might be — being of such magnitude that they erase the dead weight that Donald Trump is around Cory Gardner.”

Colorado is a must-win state for Democrats as they attempt to seize control of the chamber in this fall’s elections. Democrats hope the race alters course after the primary to focus on Trump and Gardner, who are both underwater in polls. But the recent string of bad news has kept the focus squarely on Hickenlooper and given Romanoff — and Republicans — ammunition to strike.

One Democratic consultant in the state, who requested anonymity to share a candid assessment, described the errors as a “s---show.” The consultant predicted Hickenlooper would prevail and be favored against Gardner, but said “it’s just going to be a lot harder than it should have been.”

Hickenlooper apologized after comments recently resurfaced where he compared political schedulers to slave masters with whips. And he also said he tripped over his words after saying that Black Lives Matter meant “every life matters” during an online forum in late May.

In particular, some Democrats questioned the handling of the Independent Ethics Commission case against him. The hearing was delayed in March because of the Covid-19 outbreak. Hickenlooper offered to testify in person later this year, but the commission went forward with a virtual format over his objection.

The commission issued a subpoena for him to appear and held him in contempt when he did not. Hickenlooper testified the next day, and the commission found that he had violated the state’s ethics laws in two of six charges brought against him.

Democrats have called it a partisan smear because a former Republican lawmaker runs the nonprofit organization that made the allegations, which have been featured in dark-money attack ads. But some Democrats say his campaign should have fought more aggressively.

“This whole thing was a setup from the beginning, and they should have gone after it sooner,” said Laura Chapin, a veteran strategist in the state. She said the ethics ruling was “in the grand scheme of things not that big a deal,” compared to the Trump administration.

“By dragging it out, Hickenlooper people made it last longer,” she said.

One Democrat close to Hickenlooper, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, said he had a “rough couple of weeks” but predicted the ethics headlines would be a “bump in the road.”

“The general election should tighten, and Hickenlooper needs to do more than just successfully raise money," this Democrat said. "He needs to improve his messaging and debate skills, which could become a significant liability for him."

Hickenlooper has focused his bid on his success as governor, pointing to Colorado’s booming economy under his leadership and other successes, including the state’s implementation of all-mail elections, which have become a national flashpoint. His latest TV ad calls the race “a moment for big change,” citing a bevy of success during his tenure.

The former governor has made a discernible effort to demonstrate his fervor for the election, a pushback against his own previous comments about not wanting to serve in the Senate. His campaign declined an interview request for this story.

“There’s no question that I have badmouthed the U.S. Senate as a place that’s broken and, for people that want to get things done, a difficult challenge,” Hickenlooper said in the most recent debate. “But at a certain point you have to decide whether you’re going to be content to sit on the sidelines, or you want to get in the ring with the mud and the sweat, as Teddy Roosevelt said, and be part of the change.”

But Romanoff appeals to primary voters eager for his message of more radical change, including the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. He argues a middle of the road approach doesn’t meet the moment and has said Hickenlooper’s ethics issue is a problem.

"If you break the law, defy a subpoena and get held in contempt, you jeopardize our chances to hold the seat," Romanoff said in a interview.

His campaign released an internal poll from mid-June showing him down 12 percentage points. That is a tighter race than many expected but a challenging margin to overcome in a short period of time — particularly given the poll came after Hickenlooper's struggles and the negative ads against him, and after ballots had already been mailed. Romanoff launched a TV ad attacking Hickenlooper on Friday, which drew condemnation from numerous Democrats including Gov. Jared Polis and Sen. Michael Bennet, who argued it played into Republicans' hands.

Within hours of Romanoff's spot going on the air, a super PAC formed earlier in the week launched its first ad, slamming Romanoff for working with then-GOP Gov. Bill Owens on a restrictive state immigration law. Because the group formed so close to the primary, it won't have to disclose its donors until after the votes are tallied.

Additionally, Senate Majority PAC, which is aligned with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, is spending $1 million running an ad pushing back against Republican attacks.

And Hickenlooper rolled out endorsements on Saturday from Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Warren's backing is especially notable: She's trusted by many progressive voters, and she just bucked the DSCC's preferred candidate in Kentucky, endorsing a liberal opponent instead — in a race far less important to Democrats' efforts to reclaim the Senate.

Republicans would clearly prefer to run against Romanoff given his fundraising disadvantage and more liberal positions. As of June 10, Hickenlooper had $5.9 million in cash on hand, more than seven times Romanoff's $792,000; Gardner had $9.3 million.

"We're running a retail campaign because we don't have the resources the other team has got," Romanoff said. "But I'm sure if and when we win the primary we'll find ourselves with a lot more friends and a lot more cash on our hands."

Republicans remain focused on hitting Hickenlooper. Gardner’s campaign is running an ad highlighting the number of times he said he wasn’t “cut out” for the Senate or didn't want the job. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is running ads highlighting the ethics scandal.

“The Democrats are in disarray,” said Rep. Ken Buck, the state GOP chairman, who called Hickenlooper’s ethics issues a “pattern of violations.”

“This is the first time that John Hickenlooper has been tested in politics,” Buck added. “This is really the first time where he will face an opponent who has the wherewithal to do research on the governor and bring out the governor’s record, and there are a number of things that will be revealed in the future that will be very interesting to voters.”

His allies expressed confidence Hickenlooper can right the ship and still has enduring favorability from voters who elected him twice.

“People understand who John is and mistakes that he makes, fumbles here and there,” said Salazar, the former aide. “John is many things. Corrupt is not one of them, and I don't think people are going to believe that about him.”

[The interest in fighting age discrimination in employment doesn't trump free speech rights.]

From Friday's decision (which I think is generally quite correct) in IMDb.com v. Becerra, written by Judge Bridget Bade and joined by Judges Johnnie Rawlinson and Mark J. Bennett:

In 2016, the State of California—at the behest of the Screen Actors Guild …—enacted Assembly Bill 1687 …, which prohibits a specified category of websites from publishing the ages and dates of birth of entertainment industry professionals. The statute appears to target a single entity: IMDb.com Inc….

The statute imposes two separate but closely related prohibitions.

First, it forbids the publication of age information (upon request) on paid-for subscriber profiles hosted by a "commercial online entertainment employment service provider." The State and SAG largely focus on this portion of the statue, which restricts IMDbPro. But the parties do not dispute that IMDb already affords its subscribers the option to remove their ages from their IMDbPro profiles (but not from any companion profile on the public site) and that it has done so since 2010. There has been no suggestion that IMDb would change this policy in the absence of AB 1687.

Second, the statute prohibits a provider from publishing age information on any public "companion" website, such as IMDb.com, without regard to the source of the information. IMDb contests this provision…. Because this aspect of the statute presents the central issue on appeal, we focus our inquiry here….

The court concluded that the law was a content-based speech restriction, because "[i]t prohibits the dissemination of one type of speech: 'date of birth or age information,'" and, "perhaps more troubling, it restricts only a single category of speakers."

We are unpersuaded by the State's and SAG's argument, relying on Cohen, that the statute merely regulates contractual obligations between IMDb and subscribers to IMDbPro…. [T]he statute reaches far beyond the terms of any subscriber agreement. It applies not only to paid-for profiles—like those on IMDbPro—but also to entries on the publicly available, non-subscription site IMDb.com, regardless of agreement between IMDb and its subscribers.

The statute does not restrict only information misappropriated through the parties' contractual relationship; it also prohibits the publication of information submitted by members of the public with no connection to IMDb. These restrictions apply regardless of whether an IMDb public profile existed independent of, or prior to, any contractual agreement between IMDb and an IMDbPro subscriber.

The court concluded that the law wasn't limited to "commercial speech," because that category covers speech that "does no more than propose a commercial transaction," and "public profiles on IMDb.com do not 'propose a commercial transaction,'" "even assuming IMDb has a financial interest in its public profiles."

The law also wasn't limited to "speech that itself proposes an illegal transaction," even though the government argue that this information might facilitate age discrimination by producers: "[W]e find nothing illegal about truthful, fact-based publication of an individual's age and birthdate when that information was lawfully obtained," even if "a third-party might use [the speech] to facilitate its own illegal conduct." "[I]t would be quite remarkable to hold that speech by a law-abiding possessor of information can be suppressed in order to deter conduct by a non-law-abiding third party." … "[T]he fear that people would make bad decisions if given truthful information cannot justify content-based burdens on speech."

And the speech couldn't be restricted on the grounds that "it restricts only speech of a purely private concern":

[N]either this court, nor the Supreme Court, has held that content-based restrictions on public speech touching on private issues escape strict scrutiny. We decline to create such a broad category of speech entitled only to reduced protection and allow expanded restrictions on content-based speech….

Although many state and federal statutes "regulate data collection and disclosure" without implicating the First Amendment, such statutes regulate the misuse of information by entities that obtain that information from individuals through some exchange. See, e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 2710 (prohibiting disclosure of personally identifiable information obtained in the course of video tape rental); 47 U.S.C. § 551 (cable subscribers); 20 U.S.C. § 1232g (educational agencies); 15 U.S.C. §§ 6501–6506 (websites). Such restrictions differ significantly from AB 1687, which by its terms prohibits the publication of information without regard to how it was obtained.

Similarly, the plethora of Freedom of Information Act ("FOIA"), 5 U.S.C. § 552, cases cited by the State and SAG do not implicate prohibitions constrained by the First Amendment. Rather, FOIA cases typically ask whether, as a matter of statutory interpretation, the government must affirmatively disclose personally identifying information. This case poses a different question entirely: whether a state can prohibit the dissemination of lawfully obtained information, albeit that of a private character.

The case that may provide the best support for the State's contention is Trans Union Corp. v. FTC (D.C. Cir. 2001). But Trans Union Corp. is distinguishable. There the D.C. Circuit rejected a First Amendment challenge against provisions of the Fair Credit Reporting Act limiting the ability of credit reporting agencies to sell consumers' private personal information. In upholding the statute, the court applied intermediate scrutiny. But although the court acknowledged the consumers' privacy interests in the data, its analysis focused on the commercial nature of the speech at issue. Moreover, the "speech" at issue—the sale of data—was itself an inherently private exchange between private parties.

Here, in contrast, IMDb posts the information on its website free of charge for the public to review. This fact alone imparts an inherently public character to the speech at issue.

We set a high bar for cordoning off new types of speech for diminished protection. Thus, although the courts have recognized some conflict between the First Amendment and privacy interests, we lack the "persuasive evidence" in this case that would permit a content-based prohibition of age information without subjecting that restriction to strict scrutiny.

Finally, the court held that the law doesn't pass strict scrutiny:

Because the State "has various other laws at its disposal that would allow it to achieve its stated interests while burdening little or no speech," it fails to show that the law is the least restrictive means to protect its compelling interest….

Similarly, a state fails to narrowly tailor a speech-restrictive law where it eliminates one form of speech "while at the same time allowing unlimited numbers of other types … that create the same problem." On its face, AB 1687 restricts only websites like IMDb.com while leaving unrestricted every other avenue through which age information might be disseminated. This presents serious concerns here because AB 1687 appears designed to reach only IMDb…. "Underinclusiveness raises serious doubts about whether the government is in fact pursuing the interest it invokes, rather than disfavoring a particular speaker or viewpoint." …

Accordingly, AB 1687 is underinclusive because it fails to reach several potential sources of age information and protects only industry professionals who both subscribe to such service and who opt-in….

Here, it does not matter that AB 1687 would accomplish what it sets out to do. An unconstitutional statute that could achieve positive societal results is nonetheless unconstitutional…. "Innocent motives do not eliminate the danger of censorship presented by a facially content-based statute, as future government officials may one day wield such statutes to suppress disfavored speech." …

Unlawful age discrimination has no place in the entertainment industry, or any other industry. But not all statutory means of ending such discrimination are constitutional. Here, we address content-based restrictions on speech and hold that AB 1687 is facially unconstitutional because it does not survive First Amendment scrutiny….

Disclosure: I signed on to an amicus brief, written pro bono by Mary-Christine Sungaila, Polly Fohn, and Natasha Breaux (Haynes and Boone LLP) supporting the result that the court eventually reached.

[It was hinted at in the D.C. Respondent's brief, but the Chief's "severability" analysis was a John Roberts blue plate special.]

I have reviewed the briefs in Regents. My goal, with the benefit of hindsight, was to trace the origin of Chief Justice Robert's anti-saving construction. The short answer is that the D.C. Respondents' brief hinted at this resolution, and the Solicitor General's brief offered a response. But the precise analysis that carried the day was a John Roberts blue plate special. It was cooked up in his chambers, and no one–as far as I can tell–saw it coming.

The starting point of this analysis was the Fifth Circuit DAPA litigation. (Again, I'll presume familiarity with Texas v. U.S.). The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas found that DAPA was a substantive policy, and had to go through notice-and-comment. The District Court issued a "nationwide injunction," though in effect the remedy was to vacate the policy in its entirety. The Fifth Circuit affirmed, and found that DAPA was both procedurally and substantively defective. Again, the remedy was to vacate the policy in its entirety. Neither court considered vacating only the illegal portions of the policy that conferred benefits, but leaving the legal portions (forbearance of removal) in place. I frankly had never considered that was even a possibility.

Next, let's consider the DACA rescission litigation. The Second, Ninth, and D.C. Circuits, as well as numerous district courts, all reached the same conclusion: Secretary Dukes's judgment was arbitrary and capricious because DACA was lawful. These courts, to varying degrees, expressly disagreed with the Fifth Circuit. None of thee courts considered whether Dukes erred by failing to separate–or consider separating–the forbearance portion of DACA from the benefits portion. Had Chief Justice Roberts simply affirmed these rulings, I would have disagreed, but my response would be far more restrained.

Now, let's consider the briefing before the Supreme Court. The litigants that came closest to the Chief's position were the D.C. Respondents. (If I am missing any other brief, please flag it). This brief was filed by Jenner & Block, and was signed by Ian Gershengorn. Ian previously served with Don Verrilli at the SG's office. He knows this litigation well. In 2016, Gershengorn's name was on the Obama administration's DAPA brief.

First, the D.C. Respondents acknowledged that DACA could be read to have two separate elements: forbearance ("deferred action") and benefits ("further consequences").

Although the contours of the Government's position are far from clear, it seems the Government concluded that the DACA Memorandum was unlawful because it not only resulted in a large number of decisions to defer action, but also triggered the further consequences that presently attend all decisions to defer action. See supra at 36.

That is, the benefits. If DHS viewed the policy in that fashion, there was no need to declare the forbearance portion also illegal.

But even assuming (for the sake of argument) that some conjunction of these policies was indeed unlawful, that in no way explains the judgment that the DACA Memorandum itself was unlawful, or that the policy of allowing childhood-arrivals to apply for enforcement forbearance therefore had to be rescinded.

In other words, people should be allowed to apply for forbearance, even if they would not receive the subsequent benefits. And the respondents are correct that Texas did not dispute the deferred action analysis.

But, as noted above, neither the Fifth Circuit nor the States that challenged the DAPA Memorandum have raised any objection to the large-scale provision of deferred action in that sense. See supra at 9-11. In other words, the legality of the sole action described within the four corners of the DACA Memorandum is essentially undisputed.

And the brief suggests that the provision of benefits need not flow from DACA itself. And those regulations can be modified independently of rescinding the DACA memorandum. (The Chief would expressly adopt this analysis).

Furthermore, the Government agrees that a decision to defer enforcement action by itself need not inherently result in any affirmative benefits. Instead, any benefits flowing from a decision to defer action are the result of separate regulations that post-date the practice of deferred action, pre-date DACA, and can be modified wholly independent of both.

The D.C. Respondents contend that the failure to consider the linkage between forbearance and benefits violated State Farm.

At the very least, their failure to consider whether their objection was actually properly aimed at the DACA Memorandum's guidance for the exercise of enforcement forbearance—or instead at certain other policies they acknowledge to be separate—means that they "entirely failed to consider an important aspect of the problem." State Farm, 463 U.S. at 43.

The D.C. Respondents anticipated the most obvious response: the Fifth Circuit enjoined the entire DAPA memorandum.

To be sure, there is a natural explanation for the Government's failure to consider that its legal objection was not properly directed at the DACA Memorandum: The Fifth Circuit had enjoined the DAPA Memorandum.

Given the disposition of the DAPA case, why should DHS have considered withdrawing only part of the DACA memorandum?

But if that explains the Attorney General's or DHS's oversight, it only underscores the shallowness of their analysis. As explained above, the DAPA case was litigated on the premise that the underlying deferred action policy and its collateral effects (which allegedly included an unbounded grant of "lawful presence") rose or fell together—a premise seemingly invited by the DAPA Memorandum itself. See supra at 8-11. There was no reason for the Government to take the same stance in its internal assessment of DACA. And still worse, the agency documents give no hint that the Government even realized the choice it was making.

The Solicitor General's reply brief addressed this point at p.21. The SG argues that the deferred action portion cannot be separated from the benefits portion.

DHS was not required to consider whether DACA's illegality could be addressed by separating deferred action—generally or under DACA specifically—from at least some of the benefits it triggers. D.C. Br. 39-44. Deferred action coupled with the associated benefits are the two legs upon which the DACA policy stands, as many of the briefs in support of respondents confirm. See, e.g., Inst. of Higher Educ. Amicus Br. 5-11. Indeed, it is largely the eligibility for benefits triggered by deferred action that allows DACA recipients to "come out of the shadows and become productive members of their communities." N.Y. Br. 2. It was not arbitrary and capricious for DHS to view deferred action and its collateral benefits as importantly linked.

The SG was aware of this argument. And he no doubt recognized that this is the sort of argument the Chief can latch onto.

During oral argument, Roberts raised this issue in a colloquy with Ted Olson, who represented the Regents. Earlier, Olson told Justice Alito that DACA memorandum itself did not confer benefits. Rather, the benefits "were triggered by the decision of enforcement policy in DACA." Then Roberts interjected:

Chief Justice Roberts: But, Mr. Olson, the whole thing was about work authorization and these other benefits. Both administrations have said they're not going to deport people. So the deferred prosecution or deferred deportation, that's not what the focus of the policy was. Yes, the other statutes provided that, but it was triggered by—by the memo. So I don't understand sort of putting what the policy really was about, which is the work authorization and the other things, off to one side is very helpful.

Here, Roberts seems to be suggesting you can't untangle the benefits and the work authorization as the SG suggested. As the SG suggested, the forbearance and benefits portion are "importantly linked." Earlier in the argument, Roberts seemed to suggest that the benefits may have been illegal:

Chief Justice Roberts: ..if DACA was illegal, that means that when the government was giving out these benefits it was acting illegally, right? …  Now it's not always the case when the government acts illegally in a way that affects other people that we go back and untangle all of the consequences of that. Did Secretary Nielsen, when she was considering the reliance interests, was she looking simply to the question of a wind-down, or was she looking more generally, for example, to the application of something like the de facto officer doctrine --

I did not see any hints at argument that Roberts was considering applying a "severability" analysis to the Secretary's decision. Indeed, to the contrary, he suggested that the fact that the benefits were illegal rendered DACA illegal, and thus rescission was proper.

Now, let's consider Roberts's decision. (I summarized it at some length here, points 4 through 6). Robert concluded that the Secretary had to do more than "draw a[] rational connection," as the D.C. Respondents suggested.  Roberts wrote that the Secretary should only have withdrawn the benefits portion of the analysis, and not the forbearance portion.

Even if it is illegal for DHS to extend work authorization and other benefits to DACA recipients, that conclusion supported only "disallow[ing]" benefits. It did "not cast doubt" on the legality of forbearance or upon DHS's original reasons for extending forbearance to childhood arrivals. Thus, given DHS's earlier judgment that forbearance is "especially justified" for "productive young people" who were brought here as children and "know only this country as home," the DACA Memorandum could not be rescinded in full "without any consideration whatsoever" of a forbearance-only policy, State Farm.

The D.C. Respondents hinted at this argument, but they did not embrace it. The D.C. Respondents argued that the failure to consider that linkage, altogether, rendered the rescission irrational. But under Roberts's anti-saving construction, DHS can now simply rescind the benefits portion, but leave the forbearance analysis in place.

Regents represents Monday-Morning quarterbacking at its worst. This form of State Farm review resembles the mirror image of the rational basis test. Under this deferential standard of review, a plaintiff must negative every conceivable justification for a state law. And even if the plaintiff manages to negative all of the government's defenses, the courts are able to make up additional justifications after the fact. That is, the court can introduce post-hoc arguments that no one considered when the law was enacted.

Usually, the rational basis test is a standard that makes it easier for the government to act. That is, the courts uphold laws under the rational basis test. Here, Roberts's State Farm framework inverts the traditional rational basis review. The government needs to consider every considerable justification to rescind an old policy. And even then, the Court can make up additional justifications that the government should have considered–including justifications no one had previously considered. With the Chief's approach, goal posts can alway be moved when appropriate.

For a generation, John Roberts was the Supreme Court's greatest advocate. He still is. Though he now sits behind the bench, Roberts still employs his superlative lawyering skills. On a consistent basis, Roberts resolves difficult cases based on narrow arguments that no other judge even considered. Often, these arguments are based on hair-splitting technicalities in the briefs. Yet, the Chief relies on his brilliant advocacy skills to make these arguments seem mundane and boring.

Indeed, John Roberts's greatest skill is to make a earth-shattering decision look conventional. When people who did not carefully follow the litigation read the decision, they think, "Huh, that seems obvious, of course that's the right solution." But for litigants involved in the case, these resolutions are excruciating. Years and years of briefing, thousands of printed pages, and countless moot sessions, and the case is ultimately resolved on grounds that no expected. And these are grounds that Secretary Dukes and Attorney General Sessions could not have reasonably anticipated.

This background helps to explain my harsh criticism of the Chief's DACA decision (here and here). I have been closely connected to the DAPA/DACA litigation for eight years–the entire length of my academic career! I have seen every twist and turn along the way. I thought I knew all of the possible ways this case could be resolved. Indeed, I spoke with a reporter from a national media outlet a few weeks ago, and spelled out every conceivable outcome. I did not see this one coming. To be sure, I understood it was possible Trump would lose. There were many rational bases on which to rule for the challengers: the Fifth Circuit was wrong, Dukes failed to consider reliance interests, and the memorandum failed to articulate sufficient policy justifications. But I did not anticipate that Trump would lose this precise way. The outcome is far less important to me than the reasoning.

Update: Professor Benjamin Eidelson (Harvard), one of the D.C. Respondent's attorneys, presented his position in a NY Times op-ed:

So even if the objection had merit, it still could not explain the decision to end DACA's promise not to deport. At most, the legal concern would be a reason for revising the separate regulations that connect deferred action to other valuable benefits.

Indeed, the administration itself has effectively conceded this critical point. As the Justice Department recently told another court, DACA and similar policies do not themselves grant work authorization; that benefit is "the result of pre-existing regulations or other guidance, not the conferral of deferred action itself." But then why did the administration decide to end DACA rather than revisit the regulations that provide the benefits some actually considered legally problematic?

The administration's failure to answer that question, or even to notice it, gives the court an easy out in this fraught case. Under long-settled principles, a court must overturn an executive action if the government failed to draw a rational connection between the problem it saw and the solution it chose. Here, then, the court need only say that the administration failed to explain why legal concerns about separate benefits warranted terminating DACA itself.

That narrow ruling would put the ball back in the president's court. He would be free to end DACA again on policy grounds, but only if he is willing to bear the political cost, rather than blaming Congress and the courts. Alternatively, he could propose changes to the decades-old benefit regulations — potentially depriving DACA of some of its salutary consequences, but leaving its core policy of forbearance intact. Faced with the extraordinary public support for DACA recipients, the president might well decide to do nothing.

However the president might proceed, the court's ruling would vindicate the principle of political accountability. And it would reaffirm the principle of judicial restraint. As Chief Justice John Roberts has said, if it's not necessary to decide more in a case, it's necessary not to do so.

President Trump’s firing of Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney in charge of investigating major crimes in the influential Southern District of New York, which includes Manhattan, is another move by the Trump administration that, though likely legal and not totally unprecedented, appears to violate core democratic values.

The firing was dramatic, with Attorney General William Barr announcing late on Friday night Berman’s resignation and a replacement. Berman issued a statement roughly an hour later saying that he had not resigned and that Barr personally did not have the right to fire him due to the nature of his appointment.¹⁵ So on Saturday afternoon, Trump himself fired Berman, and Barr designated a different person to replace Berman than the one he had named on Friday. The firing was also somewhat surprising given that Berman is a longtime Republican who not only donated to Trump’s first presidential campaign but also served on his transition team.

Yet underlying all the drama is something we’ve gotten used to in the Trump era: the breaking of democratic norms and values, which are two distinct concepts. As we’ve written about before, values are fundamental principles (e.g., free speech), whereas norms are the unwritten rules we abide by (don’t cut in line) that sometimes reinforce those values (Supreme Court justices don’t endorse political candidates, thereby bolstering the independence of the judicial and executive branches) but also sometimes don’t. So let’s look at Trump’s firing of Berman in the context of some of those values.¹⁶

Equal justice under the law

Under Berman’s leadership, the Southern District was reportedly investigating Trump lawyer and ally Rudy Giuliani, including Giuliani’s dealings with Ukranian officials that were scrutinized as part of the impeachment inquiry against Trump. We don’t know the status of that investigation, whether Giuliani was likely to face criminal charges or even whether that investigation was a factor in the decision to oust Berman. There is some logic to the idea that Department of Justice prosecutors should avoid making decisions close to the election that might influence its outcome — indicting the president’s attorney is arguably such an example. In fact, Democrats in 2016 criticized then-FBI Director James Comey on these grounds, when he announced less than two weeks before Election Day that he was reviewing new evidence involving Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

That said, if Trump and Barr were trying to protect Giuliani (and therefore Trump), it fits a pattern of Barr’s Justice Department seeming to extend special treatment to Trump allies. In February, DOJ officials overruled career prosecutors and asked for a significantly lighter sentence for longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone, who was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction of justice. All four prosecutors withdrew from the case — and one resigned — in protest of the decision. Even more unusual was the decision in May by a Barr-appointed U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., to drop charges against Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, even though Flynn had already pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Not only did a career prosecutor quit that case as well, but federal appeals judges are considering not allowing the Justice Department to drop the charges.

The democratic value at play here is equal justice under the law — a person should not get unusually lenient treatment by the Justice Department if he or she is an ally of the president’s. Arguably, previous presidents have violated this value — for example, as he was leaving office, Bill Clinton pardoned the ex-husband of a major Democratic Party donor.

Independence of law enforcement

The most alarming potential explanation of what happened to Berman is that Barr tried to fire him specifically for investigating Giuliani. A milder version may be that the Southern District, under Berman’s leadership, demonstrated that it did not care about Trump’s preferences and would investigate whichever crimes it deemed important, no matter the potential ramifications for Trump. Two years ago, the Southern District persuaded onetime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen to plead guilty to a number of crimes, including violating campaign finance law, with Cohen suggesting his illegal behavior came at Trump’s behest. (It’s worth noting that Berman recused himself from that case.)

So Barr and Trump may consider Berman insufficiently loyal to their interests and fear he would bring charges that would reflect badly on Trump or Republicans, even if Berman didn’t bring forward a case clearly linked to the president.

Indeed, the Trump administration has a long record of demoting, reassigning, firing or otherwise sidelining law enforcement officials who show independence from the White House: Comey, former FBI general counsel James Baker, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Trump or his allies often hinted that Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller would be fired during their tenures as deputy attorney general and DOJ special counsel, respectively, in a manner seemingly designed to intimidate them. Trump has also recently complained about current FBI Director Christopher Wray and hinted that he could be fired.

And Barr has implied that the Justice Department will seek to bring charges against those involved with initiating the investigations of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia — in effect, criminalizing efforts that bring scrutiny to the president.

Again, it is not unprecedented for presidents to replace law enforcement officials. Presidents in both parties traditionally replace with their own choices all the U.S. attorneys appointed by the previous administration, which often results in a wide partisan swap. As president, Clinton fired the FBI director, and most notably, in what came to be known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” then-President Richard Nixon purged the senior leadership of the Justice Department for refusing to quash an investigation of him — he was forced to resign in part because of these moves.

The democratic value at stake here is the independence of law enforcement. That ideal, that their decisions should be divorced from politics, is hard to maintain if key law enforcement officials are constantly worried about being fired by the president, attorney general or anyone else for political reasons.

Accountability and oversight

It’s worth thinking about the initial bid to fire Berman on Friday night, because that is in part what made this move so problematic at first glance. It appeared to be an attempt by Barr and Trump to install at the top of an important law enforcement agency (the Southern District of New York) someone more likely to be friendly to their interests. Generally, when a political appointee like a U.S. attorney leaves, he or she is replaced by the No. 2 person in that office, usually a career civil service employee not formally aligned with either party. But on Friday Barr announced that Berman would be temporarily replaced by Craig Carpenito, a U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, a close ally of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, another Trump loyalist.

This is a pattern for Trump: removing the leaders of various government agencies or departments, ignoring normal succession procedures and passing over the people who would normally step in, and instead replacing them with Trump allies. The temporary replacement’s role is essentially to do Trump’s bidding in a way that the removed person would not. The most prominent example of this was when, after the 2018 midterm elections, Trump replaced Sessions with his chief of staff at the time, Matt Whitaker. Often, as in the case of Berman, Trump has removed someone appointed in a process he did not totally control (usually Senate confirmation — in Berman’s case, he was installed by the judges of the Southern District) with someone chosen solely by Trump for that particular role.

Trump’s controlling the executive branch in this way — minimizing the oversight of other branches — weakens checks on his executive power. In this instance, however, Berman’s own chief deputy, Audrey Strauss, stepped into the role.

That said, that Carpenito never actually made it into Berman’s former position doesn’t mean the move wasn’t still problematic in terms of oversight. In indicting one Trump lawyer (Cohen) and investigating another (Giuliani), the Southern District under Berman’s leadership was effectively conducting oversight of the president, since Giuliani in particular was basically executing Trump’s policy goals with Ukraine (pressuring Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden). Berman’s firing suggests Trump was unhappy with that oversight and wants to limit it.

Trump’s attempts to stop oversight of his policy moves is also part of a pattern. He has essentially refused to comply with any congressional investigations into his administration. And over the past few months, he has fired a number of the inspectors general at federal agencies, the people formally charged with scrutinizing the executive branch. The intelligence community inspector general played a key role in bringing forward the whistleblower’s complaints about the Trump administration’s dealings with Ukraine, leading to the president’s impeachment. Trump seems to now view all inspectors general as threats to his administration.

The democratic value at play here is oversight of the executive branch. The Senate’s role in confirming executive branch appointees and the presence of inspectors general are ways in which a president in theory is not able to do whatever he wants with the executive branch. Trump seems unwilling to abide by these constraints. Having his personal lawyer conduct foreign policy puts that person out of the purview of the Senate or inspectors general. Firing the U.S. attorney whose office was investigating the president’s lawyer signals that the president’s lawyer and the sphere of policy he is implementing is off limits.

Media and public scrutiny

The Berman firing, like the removals of several inspectors general, was done on a Friday night. This is not the most important of these violations of democratic values. Previous presidents — and plenty of other people outside of politics, for that matter — “dump” bad news on Friday nights, hoping it will get less media coverage as journalists take off for the weekend.

That said, these firings are important for the reasons I have laid out above. Trump’s seeming desire to obscure them suggests he wants to avoid careful examination of decisions that he no doubt is aware will be controversial.

Media and public scrutiny of presidential decisions is a core democratic value as well, even if other presidents have also neglected to maintain it.

And, again, this is a pattern for Trump. In the past few weeks, he and his aides have sought to get CNN to retract — and apologize for — a poll showing Trump trailing Biden and to block the publication of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s book, which is critical of Trump. Presidents often complain about polls and dislike books critical of them but Trump’s actions go beyond those more traditional objections.

We recently wrote about how the administration’s decision to use chemical agents and rubber bullets on protesters outside the White House violated several democratic values. Key officials involved in that incident now seem to regret it. The firing of Berman may also backfire on Trump. It could embolden more people, including some Republicans, to start criticizing the president for politicizing law enforcement decisions.

Berman’s decision to resist his firing and administration officials’ distancing themselves from the White House protest incident suggest something else that should worry Trump: People in his administration may be reading and believing polls showing him trailing Biden, thinking Trump is likely to lose reelection in November and becoming more unwilling to do questionable things to stay in good standing with a man who may not be president come January.

CORRECTION (June 22, 2020, 8:37 a.m.) An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the events that preceded former President Richard Nixon’s resignation. The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment against Nixon amid the Watergate scandal, but he resigned before the full House held an impeachment vote. Nixon was not impeached by the full House of Representatives.

CORRECTION (JUNE 23, 2020, 7:05 a.m.) An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Rod Rosenstein had served as deputy director of the FBI under President Trump. Rosenstein was the deputy attorney general.

After not just one, but two apparent false statements from Trump Attorney General William Barr on the matter, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman resigned Saturday evening—a decision he publicly said was due to "Attorney General's decision to respect the normal operation of law" in having his Deputy U.S. Attorney take over the position on an acting basis.

That doesn't end the story, however. What is still unclear is why William Barr was so motivated to remove Berman that he first issued a false claim that Berman had resigned—prompting a public response from Berman stating that he quite emphatically had not—and a second, later claim to Berman that Donald Trump had fired him—only to have Trump soon afterward declare to reporters that he was "not involved" in the firing. No matter how you parse out that series of events, it's so far impossible to come up with an explanation that is not, on Barr's part, brazenly corrupt.

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For starters, Barr needs to be forced to explain why he manufactured an alleged resignation, to begin with. Barr's first claim, that Berman had resigned, was intended to pave a path for Barr and Trump to install Barr personal friend Jay Clayton, a corporate attorney with no prosecution experience whatsoever who currently serves as Trump's chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Southern District of New York is currently either prosecuting or investigating a litany of apparent crimes by individuals close to Trump—and potentially by Trump himself.

That would have installed a reliable Barr ally as head of the top potential source of "trouble" for Trump, continuing what has been a newly brazen Barr-Trump effort to stifle federal prosecutions of Trump allies. (One notable example: SDNY is the office Trump and Barr have been pressuring to end an investigation into Turkish bank fraud and sanctions violations after Trump allegedly sought to quash that probe as a favor to Turkish autocrat Recep Erdogan.)

There is no other way to read the move to install Clayton other than as corrupt, given the proximity of SDNY to at this point an unknowable number of investigations that tie directly into Trump, Clayton's status as Barr ally, Barr's bizarre announcement of a resignation that did not happen, and Barr's now well-reported moves to "reach down" into numerous federal prosecutions that Trump, personally, has objected to.

According to The Washington Post, Barr met on Friday with Berman, "offering him a new position" heading the Justice Department's Civil Position if he would move from his current role; Berman evidently did not agree to the move.

Clayton, however, could only be legally installed if Berman resigned. In his letter disputing the resignation and in his eventual statement agreeing to resign, Berman was unsubtle in suggesting that Barr was not respecting "the normal operation of law" in his attempt to insert Clayton and bypass Berman's deputy, installing a second hand-picked choice as "acting" secretary.

The Post cites a single "familiar" source saying he "did not believe it was intended to head off any particular investigation," but gives no evidence to back that claim; three other Post sources only say they "believed Barr could have been spurred by long-standing tensions" between his office and SDNY—again, seemingly due to Barr's insistence that he be read into the loop on the status of investigations touching on Trump's allies, and SDNY's reluctance to do so due to the obvious stink of corruption in the requests.

That's all fine and well, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Barr did not just want Berman out of his office, and immediately: He also sought to install a personal friend in the role, and bypass laws governing who Berman's acting successor would be, and went so far as to invent a resignation when Berman was not willing to go along with the move. In any circumstance, his behavior would be bizarre.

When targeting the federal prosecutors' office responsible for the bulk of prosecutions and probes into Donald Trump's personal finances, alleged criminal acts, and now-demonstrated criminal acts of associates, and with Barr's now well-documented history of reaching down to halt prosecutions embarrassing to Trump (see: Flynn), suggesting that series of moves to be non-corrupt in nature is by far the harder lift.

As the Post's Aaron Blake points out, in offering Berman a job within the main Justice Department to convince him to vacate his post, Barr has demolished any pretense that Barr's move was based on "job performance issues." Barr did not want Berman to go because Berman was not performing up to the task or even because Barr, personally, did not want to work with him. Barr wanted Berman to go because he wanted a loyalist in the role.

Berman seems to believe the same. He resigned only when Barr acquiesced, allowing Berman's non-political, non-Barr-lapdog deputy to take over the position as the law indicated. That suggests that Berman's public fight beforehand was not a likely-doomed effort to save his own job, but a move to specifically prevent Barr from installing a handpicked ally.

It is evident that Berman, at least, believes Barr's motives to be corrupt. Clayton may yet be nominated and approved for the post, but Berman was willing to make a great number of Trump-allied enemies in order to secure an interim period in which SDNY investigations can still proceed as planned.

House Judiciary Committee chair Jerry Nadler has already indicated that Berman will be summoned to testify on these events, and soon. There still seems no urgency to force Barr's own testimony, however, part of a continued reluctance on the part of the committee and House Democrats to truly pressure Barr on even the most brazenly corrupt moves, whether it be the gassing of a peaceful protest on Trump's apparent orders or the order to drop charges against Trump ally Michael Flynn outright. That is not good enough. The premise by House Democrats appears to be that no matter what criminality Barr and Trump get up to, it can be tolerated until November under an assumption that it can later be undone.

There is no assurance of either. Barr's corrupt acts are focused on paving the way for further corruption by Trump, who has given ample evidence that would certainly again participate in crimes, in order to gain reelection. And Barr's current acts, sabotaging each federal probe into potential Trump criminality one-by-one, will have consequences that an election cannot so easily paper over.

Donald Trump is having what has to be one of the worst public relations days of his life and holy cow, that is saying something. Saturday was yet another day of Black Lives Matter rallies nationwide, COVID-19 cases are growing exponentially, Attorney General Bill Barr was caught publicly lying not once, but twice in the last 24 hours, Trump and Barr’s plan to takeover the office of the Southern District of New York with a handpicked crony thwarted, the media was informed six members of Trump’s advance team tested positive for COVID-19 (including two members of the Secret Service) and now……..his crowd in Tulsa is a bust in every imaginable way. 

It turns out, not that many people were willing to attend an indoor rally with the most rabid MAGA fans, many of whom have been to dozens of Trump rallies in faraway states and follow Trump like some sick twisted version of Deadheads. MAGAheads?

Despite bragging on social media that they’d gotten more than 1 million ticket requests online, they could’ve held this rally in a large high school gym. The first overhead video I came across on Twitter was an indication the crowd seemed…...light. All that goodness after the jump.

OK, but maybe there is a really huge long line down a block not seen, right? Turns out….no. It started to crystalize about 90 minutes before Donald Trump was scheduled to speak.

The Trump campaign had also set-up a large outdoor viewing area and told reporters Trump would be out to speak to the overflow crowd in person. Here’s that area around 30 minutes before Trump’s speech.

Ooooooooof. I mean, what if you threw a party and nobody came? 

Shortly after that photo of the overflow area was shared, the Trump campaign confirmed to reporters Donald Trump would not be addressing the overflow crowd after all.

Around the time Trump was climbing down the stairs of Air Force One, his campaign was already releasing excuses to reporters. Team Trump blamed……..protesters. LOLOLOLOLOL.

Here’s a glimpse of Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, who has reportedly been on the outs with Trump lately anyway, looking over the outdoor crowd while waiting for Emperor Palpatine to arrive.

That is a man who will likely be looking for a new job before he lays his head on his pillow tonight. 

Meanwhile, White House aides had hoped this rally would reenergize Trump, who is clearly not up for the job. Maggie Haberman of The New York Times said advisor believed his heart really isn’t in the fight.

In fact, just two days ago, Trump said they’d never had an empty seat and they sure wouldn’t in Oklahoma. Really.

Sure enough, before I could even hit publish on this post, the Trump campaign is going full steam ahead with the lie that protesters prevented thousands of people from attending.

OK, Brad. 

Even at the most generous angles, the crowd was light, light, light. This arena’s capacity is 19,199 and as you can see, the upper deck is largely empty. 

Outside, event workers didn’t wait. They started breaking down the overflow stage before Donald Trump even took the stage. They better hope they got paid in advance.

At the end of the day, we are in a global pandemic and it turns out, most people don’t want to die. 

The Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump group led by Kellyanne Conway’s husband George, and other disillusioned Republicans which crafted the  ‘Mourning in America’, ‘Body Bags’, and ‘Treason‘ ads, has just released its latest.

READ THIS NEXT: FOX News Sunday’s Chris Wallace Hammers Trump Spox for Lying About Empty Tulsa Rally: ‘You Guys Look Silly When You Deny the Reality’ — WATCH

The ad features a story Trump told at his under-attended rally in Tulsa about his recent encounter with a steep ramp at the West Point commencement ceremony. And it’s brutal.

This is art. pic.twitter.com/ZPJxHu20TV

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) June 21, 2020

The post GOP-Crafted Ad Hits ‘Whiny Bitch’ Trump Using Tulsa Rally Speech About ‘Brutal … Steep’ West Point Ramp: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

FOX News Sunday host Chris Wallace called out Trump spokesperson Mercedes Schlapp for lying about the emptiness of Trump’s Tulsa rally.

“We all saw the pictures last night. The arena was no more than two-thirds full. And the outdoor rally was cancelled because there was no overflow crowd. What happened?” asked Wallace.

“The key here is to understand … there were factors involved, they were concerned about the protesters who were coming in,” replied Schlapp. “We saw that have an impact.”

“Mercedes, if I can. The fact is the president talks about the attendance at his events,” Wallace responded. “We all know that he made a big issue of the attendance at his inauguration. He talks about how he can fill an arena and Joe Biden can’t. He didn’t fill an arena last night and you guys were so far off that you had planned an outdoor rally and there wasn’t an overflow crowd. … Protesters did not stop people from coming to that rally.”

When Schlapp began to flap her mouth with Trump talking points, Wallace returned: “Mercedes, please don’t filibuster. Frankly, it makes you guys look silly when you deny the reality of what happened.”

“I don’t know why you are saying that,” Schlapp countered.

Wallace interjected: “There are empty seats there. At least a third, if not half of the rally was empty. You can’t deny it.”

The post FOX News Sunday’s Chris Wallace Hammers Trump Spox for Lying About Empty Tulsa Rally: ‘You Guys Look Silly When You Deny the Reality’ — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

A supporter sits at the BOK Center before Trump’s rally on June 20, 2020, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. | Jabin Botsford/Washington Post/Getty Images

Despite boasting of more than a million ticket registrations, Trump spoke before a mostly empty stadium.

President Donald Trump had anticipated his campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday as the “real launch” of his 2020 reelection campaign, and his staff boasted that more than a million people had registered for tickets to an event they promised would be a “wild evening.”

But on Saturday night, the numbers turned out to be a tiny fraction of that: The Bank of Oklahoma Center Arena Trump spoke in was roughly two-thirds empty, and plans for a second speech to an outdoor crowd in an overflow space were scrapped because the outdoor area was sparsely populated. Ultimately, the most notable news from the event ended up being that half a dozen members of the advance team for his campaign tested positive for the coronavirus ahead of the rally.

The flopped event — dogged by controversy from its announcement due to Tulsa’s history of racist violence — marks a substantial blow to Trump’s agenda to regain reelection momentum after months of pausing his campaign rallies due to the coronavirus pandemic, and comes as presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden soars in the polls and outstrips Trump in fundraising.

At the rally, Trump reiterated some past campaign themes, but at times seemed more focused on defending himself from criticism in the media than on attacking his presumed opponent.

At one point, he called testing for the coronavirus a “double-edged sword” — because it reveals more cases of the virus — and said that he had told “his people to slow the testing down.” The White House later said the president was joking, but the remark drew condemnation from Democrats. The federal government’s failures on testing and Trump’s skepticism of it are well documented. More than 2.2 million coronavirus cases have been recorded in the US to date, and new cases are on the rise in a number of states.

While the Trump campaign had bragged for weeks about hot ticket sales and not having enough space to contain the crowds, the actual showing on Saturday night was strikingly small. The arena Trump spoke in seats 19,200 people, but fewer than 6,200 came.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Trump was also expected to give a second address to a crowd of more than 40,000 in an outdoor overflow space, according to CNN, but after a report from staff that the area held only a couple dozen people hours before the event, that speech was canceled.

It’s unclear what exactly explains the disconnect between the Trump campaign’s reports of high registration numbers and the low turnout. The Trump campaign complained about anti-Trump protesters blocking entrances, but reporters on the ground said protests were modest in size and entrances were not blocked.

According to the New York Times, hundreds of teenagers who use TikTok and fans of Korean pop music say they banded together online to flood ticket registrations in a bid to inflate the numbers and deny Trump supporters seats in the arena. Videos with instructions to register for tickets — which were free — and then not show up received millions of views online. The political prank took hold among parts of the TikTok and K-pop scene which sometimes leverage their social media networks for online activism.

It’s unclear if the efforts to overwhelm ticket registrations began early enough to deny people seats, since arena seats were reserved on a first-come, first-served basis, but it could explain why the ticket requests were so high for an event meant to cater to only tens of thousands of people.

There are reasons to think other factors may have influenced the poor turnout. This is Trump’s first campaign rally as the coronavirus pandemic rages, and Tulsa has seen a surge in cases in recent weeks. It’s possible that not very many people who had plans to attend ever registered, or that people who registered decided against coming after weighing concerns about contracting the virus, especially after news broke that six campaign staffers had tested positive for the coronavirus the day of the rally. (According to the Times, two members of the Secret Service in Tulsa also tested positive.) Those who did attend had to sign a liability waiver saying they couldn’t sue Trump’s campaign if they contracted the coronavirus.

Trump was cavalier about the safety of the crowd in advance of the event. The Trump campaign handed out masks to rally attendees, but the president made it clear he had no expectation that people wear them.

In an interview with Axios on Friday he said he recommended “people do what they want” when it came to mask-wearing, and even floated the false claim that wearing a mask could harm people. “You know, there was a time when people thought it was worse wearing a mask,” he told Axios. “I let people make up their own decision.”

While Trump declines to wear a mask in public, recent polling indicates that most Republicans view people who wear masks favorably, and just 45 percent of people who approve of the job he’s doing think it’s a good idea to hold large political events and campaign rallies right now.

Photos of the event showed that many people didn’t wear masks and sat close to each other in the lower parts of the arena.

Trump’s campaign rally was also tainted by controversy since it was originally set to take place on Juneteenth — a holiday marking the effective end of slavery in the US — and amid ongoing racial justice protests triggered by the police killing of George Floyd. After a backlash, Trump changed the date, but his choice to hold the rally in Tulsa still drew criticism since it is the site of one of the bloodiest episodes of racist violence in American history.

Trump tried to claim victory after the event despite the poor turnout. “THE SILENT MAJORITY IS STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE!” he tweeted, attaching photos that were cropped to make the arena look more filled up than it was.

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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro takes off his mask to speak to journalists during a press conference about the coronavirus outbreak on March 20, 2020 in Brasilia. | Andressa Anholete/Getty Images

1 million coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Brazil.

Brazil reported a new 24-hour record for new coronavirus cases on Friday, pushing the country’s total to over 1 million confirmed cases — an indicator that the South American nation could surpass the US as the worst-hit country in the world this summer.

Experts say that President Jair Bolsonaro’s anti-scientific attitude toward the virus and resistance to robust social distancing measures have contributed significantly to the accelerating spread of Covid-19 and its mounting death toll.

The 54,771 new cases reported on Friday bring the country’s confirmed total to 1,032,913. Total official fatalities due to the coronavirus hit 48,954, and given the pace of new infections, the country could surpass 50,000 deaths over the weekend.

Experts say the number of actual cases in Brazil is likely significantly higher. Alexandre Naime Barbosa, a medical professor at the São Paulo State University, told NBC News that he believes there is “under-reporting of a magnitude of five to 10 times.”

“There are questions about really how much testing is going on in most of the areas worst-affected, which may also influence the numbers,” Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA)’s director of the Andes, told CBS News.

Sánchez-Garzoli also added she wouldn’t “trust” the numbers released by the government.

Earlier in June, Brazil’s health ministry wiped its running cumulative totals of cases and deaths, and instead showed only data on new cases and deaths on a 24-hour basis.

Bolsonaro tweeted that the change in available data was because “cumulative data, in addition to not showing that the large part [of patients] no longer has the illness, does not depict the moment of the country.”

But the move received backlash, and Brazil’s supreme court ruled that the government had to report comprehensive data, according to CNN.

According to a University of Washington tracking model, Brazil could surpass the US with the highest number of coronavirus deaths in the world as early as August 1, CNN reports. The model predicts that the death toll could break the 100,000 mark in less than a month.

The spread of the virus poses a particularly serious threat to Brazil’s most socioeconomically vulnerable populations. Sánchez-Garzoli told CBS that the health care system was poorly equipped to provide adequate care to most people, and that the coronavirus was an “added factor that is leading to the extinction of different [indigenous] groups.”

Brazil has handled the coronavirus extremely poorly

Experts say that much of the current crisis can be attributed to Bolsonaro’s leadership style and policy decisions.

Bolsonaro has consistently downplayed the virus, calling it a “little flu” and arguing that Brazilians are well-suited for it because they can be dunked in sewage and “don’t catch a thing.” The president has also frequently defied social distancing guidelines from his own administration, encouraged massive rallies, and has opposed lockdowns initiated by governors of states, accusing them of exploiting the pandemic for political gain.

In other words, much as Trump’s rhetoric about the virus has done in the United States, Bolsonaro has turned the coronavirus crisis in his country into a polarizing culture war.

In April, Bolsonaro fired his popular health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, because Mandetta urged Brazilians to observe social distancing and to stay indoors. The dismissal came after weeks of the two offering diverging prescriptions for how the public should act to slow the spread of the virus, and raised the ire of many Brazilians.

And the health minister who took over after Mandetta resigned just four weeks into the job.

In addition to actively undermining the counsel of public health officials, Bolsonaro has promoted the use of remedies that have not been proven to treat Covid-19, like chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.

“Decisions are being made not based on evidence and empirical data but rather on anecdotal reports,” Denise Garrett, a Brazilian-American epidemiologist who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for more than 20 years, told the New York Times. “Bolsonaro invested a huge amount of money into an action that has not been proven to be effective at the expense of increasing testing and contact tracing.”

Bolsonaro has also used the pandemic as an opportunity to attempt to undermine other branches of government and amass more political power. Earlier this spring, he joined a rally of right-wing supporters who called for military intervention because they view the country’s supreme court and legislature as obstacles to his campaign against pandemic lockdown measures.

Brazil’s past health ministers predicted the spread of the coronavirus would hit its peak between May and July. But given Bolsonaro’s resistance to adhering to any scientific guidance, it’s extremely difficult to predict its course.

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SEATTLE — To hear Donald Trump tell it, the entire city of Seattle has been taken over by dirty anarchists intent on destroying America—and if the governor and mayor don’t “take care of it,” then by God, he will. On Fox News (with the assistance of faked images, of course), rioters appear to be practically burning down the city every night.

The reality, of course, bears no resemblance to any of this. I visited the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP), the center of all this controversy, earlier this week to get a close look. It became obvious that not only is the takeover of six city blocks entirely peaceful and cooperative, but the primary threat of violence is from pro-Trump thugs who have been coming to the “autonomous zone” with the intent of breaking it up.

First, let’s clear the basic misperceptions promulgated by Trump and his enablers: CHOP is only a smallish six-block section of the much larger Capitol Hill neighborhood, marked mainly by the roadblocks that close the area off to car traffic. The only violence surrounding its formation was in the initial clashes between police and anti-brutality protesters in the first week after the killing of George Floyd.

And the only signs of potential violence at the scene were from the pro-Trump provocateurs and far-right extremists who came to CHOP hoping to create a disturbance. Mostly, they failed miserably.

The zone is primarily comprised of Cal Anderson Park—which itself is comprised mainly of a large, oft-used soccer field with artificial turf, and a water storage facility surrounded by grass—and a handful of residential and business blocks adjacent to it. Its busiest street is Pine Street, the arterial from downtown that borders the soccer field and is home to both a number of businesses as well as the building which formerly housed Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct, and which is now blocked off by red plastic barriers.

The East Precinct building at 12th Avenue and Pine is the center of the zone’s activism. After being occupied by protesters, and then abandoned by the SPD, the building has been remade as the “Seattle People Department”; a large black plastic tarp covering the entryway reads, “This Space is Now Property of the Seattle People.”

Protest signs—nearly all of them referencing police brutality against African Americans—decorate the walls along the cyclone fence that encircles the building: “Mass Incarceration is Slavery.” “Police Unions Are Terrorist Organizations.” “Defund the Police.” “Arrest the Cops Who Killed Breonna Taylor.” And so on.

Pine Street itself—on which a gigantic mural reading “Black Lives Matter” has been painted—is the main hub along which various activists, nearly all of them people of color, speaking through a megaphone to the gathered crowds can be heard, mainly at the intersection with 12th Street. Some explain the rules of the zone—which began existence as Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), and then changed its name to the current one when participants and leaders agreed to do so—while others speak about the realities of police treatment of nonwhites and protesters.

All along the remainder of Pine inside the zone are booths that have been set up hawking wares, like a street fair—except that the offerings are primarily free. Signs announce the “No Cop Co-Op,” offering everything from medications and first-aid kits to food, water, and fresh produce. All of the goods on the shelves have been donated by Seattle businesses and residents, and it’s all free.

“Do Not Take One Granola Bar—Take the Whole Box,” one sign reads. “Take an Entire Case of Pop. You Do You.”

And everywhere, there are people—most wearing masks and practicing social distancing, but strolling the area amiably and chatting with each other. Some find spots on the soccer field to sit with friends. Others walk along the rows of tent booths on Pine, as well as the various tents offering goods and services set up around the edge of the soccer field. The whole thing has the feel of a mixed street fair and summer arts festival.

One of the larger tent booths on the northern end of the field is devoted to “Future Crystals,” a kind of open market for donations. Nearby, under a blue tarp, Native American carver Ricky Williams—the brother of a man notoriously shot by Seattle police in 2015—worked on his pieces, setting wares out for people to see.

Beyond the northern end of the soccer field sits a large encampment of people in tents; a smattering of other tents appears to be working northward to the lawns surrounding the water storage facility. These folks not only have a kitchen distributing free food to participants and a first-aid tent, but have actually established several large gardens in which they are growing both food and flowers.

Many of the tenters are homeless people. “I came here after the riots,” explained Gabriella Duncan, a homeless woman who oversees one of the gardens. “It became a space for people who are struggling to escape the kind of endless harassment we receive at the hands of police in this city.” The gardens, she says, reflect a desire to build community in the camp.

She is amused by the perceptions visitors to the encampment have brought with them, fed by mainstream and right-wing news alike. “Societal gaslighting, I call it,” she says. “It’s similar to what black people have seen for years in terms of the gaslighting, and it perpetuates itself. Because another story is told the next day, and the day after that. There’s no end to it.”

The primary food supplier for people in the encampment is the “Riot Kitchen,” a substantial booth situated on the border of the tents and the soccer fields. It’s run by an energetic African American woman who goes by the name Mayhem.

“This whole thing started with sandwiches,” she explained. “I went on the first Saturday of protests, May 30, and got tear-gassed. So a group of my friends started thinking of ways to do support, and we first did medical help—we went out with our eyewash and our saline and we were out all day, and I realized people were hungry. So before we went out the next day I made sandwiches, and it made me very popular.  So I asked people to donate to my sandwich fund so I’d be able to keep making sandwiches.”

The response online was immense. “So many people donated that I started to think I could do a kitchen project,” she continued. “I figured the least I could do was get them all breakfast. That was last week. We were working out of kitchens until just yesterday. But someone suggested we set this up, and we did it. I helped put the tarp up, and everyone else came and set up the booth. The community came together and made this happen. I wouldn’t have been able to do this without all their help.”

It’s a popular spot, clean and well organized, decorated with a banner featuring a “Goodnight White Pride” logo. The food shelves are fully stocked. “All day yesterday, people were bringing us all kinds of food. The entire kitchen is being run on donations and all these volunteer workers,” Mayhem explained.

The scene is emblematic of the kind of bizarre disinformation being circulated about CHOP. As Jane Hu at Slate reported, these included claims that activists were controlling the borders of the zone, that some of the leftists were packing AR-15s (all risibly untrue), and that it was a pure socialist zone, even though kids sold T-shirts and vendors sold hot dogs and nobody blinked.

However, there clearly were people attracted to the zone for less than sympathetic reasons—and instead seemed committed to attempting to provoke a violent response from left-wing activists. This was obviously the case with a middle-aged white man wearing a “Trump Nation” T-shirt and red “Keep America Great” ballcap and carrying a large American flag—and accompanied by a camera crew ready to film. He was there to troll.

When he first arrived on the scene, he stood near a baseball backstop and read a speech mainly mimicking Trump’s declarations that “far left militants” had taken over Seattle, claiming that the takeover somehow shut down the entire city and “its hard-working, tax-paying citizens.” Then he began marching about the field, flag held high, clearly trying to draw some kind of attack.

However, the crowd wasn’t biting. While he was trailed by people talking to him, no one interfered with the man’s progress and let him. A woman from CHOP’s response team accompanied him for the entire walk, explaining loudly to the crowd that the man was there hoping to cause violence and draw attention to himself, that he nonetheless had free-speech rights and no one was to interfere with him.

At one point, someone came up and grabbed his flag, and the woman intervened, explaining: “This is not who we are.” That person let go, and the man continued his march around the field. Finally, near the end of his walk, behind the backstop near where he had started, a young man snagged the flag, ripped it off his flagpole in seconds, and ran away with it. The man marched on, finally exiting with more people defending him than haranguing him. Nonetheless, when he was finished, he complained for cameras about how viciously he had been attacked.

Joey Gibson, the leader of the far-right street-brawling gang Patriot Prayer, was there that day too. He walked around Pine Street, tried his usual pious-Christian preaching schtick, and found that hardly anyone was interested. He, too, left after awhile.

His erstwhile friend and street-brawling henchman Tusitala “Tiny” Toese—still on probation for assault that forbids him from attending protests in Multnomah County, Oregon—showed up first at the barricades and was met by people who knew him from street protests, telling him he was an “asshole,” but nonetheless letting him and his friends inside. These men included at least one well-known Seattle-area neo-Nazi.  

Apparently unable to cause a fight inside the event, Toese and his friends afterwards were recorded assaulting a man with a phone camera on one of the neighborhood side streets with few people in view. The gang of men not only take the man down and destroy his camera, but the neo-Nazi—who clearly was carrying a handgun as well—retrieved a fighting baton from his car to use in the assault.

Perhaps just as disturbing were the men who could be seen walking around the zone—some of them far-right activists—who appeared to be casing out the scene. Despite the hysterical reporting from right-wing media about the scene in Seattle—a local right-wing ranter named Jason Rantz even went on Tucker Carlson to claim that he didn’t dare enter the zone for fear of being attacked—any violence lurking in the shadows so far is almost entirely the work of extremists intent on creating chaos. And if there is a potential for future violence, it seems most likely to emanate from the Trumpian far right’s toxic cauldron.

As Eric Scigliano explained for Politico:

What’s going on in these four blocks that shook the world is indeed an occupation, but it looks nothing like the conquista touted on Fox. It’s also the “block party” that Mayor Jenny Durkan has compared it to, to gleeful jeers from Fox commentators. And it’s other things as well—a protean, issue-focused but conceptually sprawling formative community, at once silly and serious, spontaneous and disciplined. Over the course of two evenings and an afternoon in the zone (plus a night observing a police/protest showdown there the week before), it seemed by turns like a commune (as in Paris 1871), an anarcho-syndicalist and small-L libertarian dream, a ’60s-style teach-in, a street fair and street market, a campout and weekend party, a poetry slam and pilgrimage, a school service day, a mass healing circle, a humbler urban version of Burning Man, and of course a protest rally.

“All day today, people have been asking to speak with us,” Mayhem told me. “I’m just thankful that people aren’t just seeing what they are seeing on the news and accepting it, because it’s not even close to being true.”

[Generally DOJ is eager to appeal anything, and everything to the Supreme Court. Not during Blue June. ]

For a generation, legal conservatives have waged a war on Morrison v. Olson. Justice Scalia's dissent is part of our canon. The conventional wisdom was that all of the conservative Justices, if given the chance, would agree with Justice Scalia. Not now. Not during Blue June. Chief Justice has turned this term into a one-man mission: do everything he thinks necessary to save the Supreme Court.

The Department of Justice should tread very carefully with SDNY U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman. (Charlie Savage wrote a helpful explainer). The lower courts may rule that his removal–actual or de facto–by Barr is unconstitutional. The lower courts my also rule that Berman's firing by Trump is unconstitutional. And the courts also may conclude that neither Barr nor Trump can appoint Berman's replacement.

If so, the usual move would be to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. Savage writes:

But if potential litigation over the issue were to go all the way to the Supreme Court, a majority of the justices are Republican appointees steeped in a conservative ideology of White House power that includes a robust view of the president's ability to remove officials.

No. Not now. Chief Justice Roberts would be willing to give up the chance of narrowing Morrison, for the sake of saving the Supreme Court. He'll do the opposite, and limit presidential power. And in the process, he will no doubt adopt a cramped, ambiguous reading of Article II that will hamstring the executive branch for generations.

Alas, to use the phrase of the day, this horse may already be out of the barn. DOJ is headed on a kamikaze mission to the Chief. And Barr's successor will have to pick up the pieces.

President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in 2016. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

He anticipated a “wild evening” where “people do what they want.”

President Donald Trump told Axios on Friday that he anticipated a “wild evening” at his Saturday campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, while recommending “people do what they want” when it comes to wearing a mask at the event — and even suggested it could be harmful to wear one.

Trump’s comments come as the city has seen a surge in Covid-19 cases in the past few weeks. They also stand at odds with recommendations from public health officials in his own administration who recommend mask-wearing whenever social distancing isn’t possible, and with warnings from experts that indoor concerts and shows are natural superspreading events.

Trump’s rally Saturday — which will take place at an indoor arena that seats 19,000 people — will be the first one he’s held in months after taking a break from them due to the global pandemic. But despite the coronavirus still raging across the US — and surging in the very city he’s going to campaign in — he repeatedly dismissed the threat of the virus and expert-recommended mitigation strategies during his interview with Axios.

“We have to get back to business. We have to get back to living our lives. Can’t do this any longer,” Trump said to Axios. “And I do believe it’s safe. I do believe it’s very safe.”

The president also referred to the false claim that masks can harm wearers, while saying that people should wear them only if they wanted to. “You know, there was a time when people thought it was worse wearing a mask,” he said. “I let people make up their own decision.”

When told that Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recommended wearing masks in crowds, Trump was unconvinced that it applied to him. “Fauci? I’m OK with that. If people want to wear masks I think that’s great. I won’t be. Not as a protest but I don’t feel that I’m in danger,” he told Axios.

Tickets for the Tulsa rally included a form that released the president’s campaign and the arena from liability if attendees fall ill from the coronavirus after attending the rally. Trump’s campaign will be distributing masks and hand sanitizer to attendees, and giving them temperature checks at the arena.

Meanwhile, the president promised in a tweet on Friday that protesters would “not be treated” as they have been in liberal cities, and implying that they would be aggressively suppressed.

“Oklahoma’s much tougher on law and order,” he said to Axios, and dubbed the tweet threatening protesters “the least controversial of my tweets.”

Trump’s anticipation of a “wild evening” may also be a thinly veiled anticipation of clashes between his supporters and anti-Trump protesters.

The Hill reports that Tulsa reversed course on imposing a curfew in the city “apparently at the president’s urging.” Tulsa initially announced a curfew from 10 pm to 6 am for Friday and Saturday in the area surrounding the arena. The Republican mayor, G.T. Bynum, cited concerns about unrest caused by “individuals from organized groups who have been involved in destructive and violent behavior in other states” when imposing the curfew. But less than 24 hours later, he rescinded that curfew after Trump reached out to him, and after he consulted with the US Secret Service.

Trump celebrated the announcement that the city dropped its curfew. “I just spoke to the highly respected Mayor of Tulsa, G.T. Bynum, who informed me there will be no curfew tonight or tomorrow for our many supporters attending the #MAGA Rally,” Trump tweeted on Friday.

“Enjoy yourselves,” he added.

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With everything else happening over the last week, Donald Trump’s list of names to fill slots on the federal Sentencing Commission got little attention in press or on social media. But after weeks of protesting police brutality, the work of that commission goes to another hugely important aspect of law enforcement and public safety—the sentences handed down to those convicted of a crime. These sentences often disguise racist agendas and can be vastly disproportional. But when federal judges are looking for recommended sentencing guidelines, or Congress is considering changes in criminal laws, or agencies are setting policies, they all look to the same place: The sentencing guidelines produced by the Sentencing Commission. Those guidelines can also be used to extend the sentences of prisoners already behind bars … or to set them free.

As the nation is finally recognizing the importance of Juneteenth, and still protesting the police murder of George Floyd and others, what Trump is doing to the Sentencing Commission can’t be overlooked. All but one of his nominees are men, every single nominee is white, and they seem poised to roll back rules that made sentencing more fair and equitable.

In 2014, the Sentencing Commission put together by President Barack Obama voted unanimously to reduce sentencing guidelines. As NPR reports, the result of that decision, was a 50,000 person decline in the federal prison population over the last seven years. 46,000 people who were in prison at the time saw their sentences cut short. But that decline could be reversed if Trump’s reconfigured commission does what they’re expected to do—flip the guidance made under Obama and beef up the sentences to levels that Trump considers “just.” 

One of Trump’s nominees has already had to step away. Former federal prosecutor William Otis made a whole series of statements that were both racist, and simply wrong. Among other things, Otis made a “bold” defense of locking up more Black men saying that it was not caused by racism. And he wrote a blog post explaining why “Orientals stay out of jail” (that tribute to “Orientals” made in 2013, not 1913). And Otis defended a claim that “blacks and Hispanics are more violent than whites” as “true.” Reminder: Though he’s not going to be on the commission, Otis was already a federal prosecutor.

But even if Otis is no longer on the short list, that list doesn’t seem to wander far from his opinions. Those remaining on the proposed commission include District Judge Henry Hudson, whose nickname is “Hang Em High Henry" and who told The Washington Post, “I live to put people in jail." Also included are the former head of DEA under George Bush, and the director of a legal center named for Reagan’s Attorney General, Edwin Meese. The single woman on the list is a Kentuckian who only became a federal judge three years ago with the support of, of course, Mitch McConnell. 

"The administration has put forth a slate that is all white, mostly male, and lacking in diverse experiences or backgrounds," said Civil Rights activist Sakira Cook.

These are the people who will be determining what those up for federal charges—people who are disproportionately Black—will face if convicted of a crime. Judges, politicians, and parole boards will all look to their work for guidance. These aren’t lifetime appointments, but the consequences of their decisions can certainly last a lifetime.

US Attorney General nominee William Barr testifies at his 2019 confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, DC. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Attorney General William Barr tried to fire Geoffrey Berman on Friday, but he refused to step down. So the president stepped in.

President Donald Trump has fired Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan who has led investigations of the president’s inner circle. Berman had refused to step down from his post Friday after US Attorney General Bill Barr attempted to oust him.

Barr, who has long been accused of protecting Trump’s close allies, announced Berman’s resignation in a press release late Friday in an apparent effort to draw little attention to the matter. He named Jay Clayton, the current chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who has no experience as a prosecutor, as Trump’s pick for Berman’s successor.

But within hours, Berman countered that he did not, and would not, tender his resignation and that the first he had heard of it was from Barr’s press release.

“I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position,” Berman said in a statement. “I will step down when a presidentially appointed nominee is confirmed by the Senate. Until then, our investigations will move forward without delay or interruption.”

On Saturday, however, Barr told Berman in a letter that the president had fired him: “Because you have declared you have no intention of resigning, I have asked the President to remove you as of today, and he has done so,” wrote Barr. Berman’s deputy, Audrey Strauss, will serve as the acting US attorney in Manhattan until his replacement is confirmed by the Senate, according to the Washington Post.

A donor to Trump’s campaign and former colleague of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Berman has been investigating Giuliani’s efforts to find damaging information in Ukraine about Trump’s political opponents to determine whether he violated laws on lobbying for foreign entities. He has also indicted two of Giuliani’s business associates and successfully pursued a case against Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about Trump’s plans to build a skyscraper in Moscow.

Berman is not the first official who the Trump administration has ousted in recent months. Trump also fired Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who played a central role in bringing the whistleblower complaint at the heart of the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry to light, and State Department Inspector General Steve Linick, who was reportedly investigating Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Berman was appointed as the acting US attorney for Manhattan in 2018 by then-US Attorney General Jeff Sessions, taking over after Trump fired his predecessor, Preet Bharara, who also refused to resign. By law, acting officials are only supposed to serve for a maximum of 120 days before the Senate confirms a permanent appointee, handpicked by the president.

But Trump, who has said he prefers acting officials because he has more flexibility to replace them, never nominated anyone else to fill Berman’s post. A federal court in Manhattan therefore invoked a rarely used power to appoint Berman to the position permanently in April 2018, allowing him to remain in the post until the Senate confirms another appointee.

How Bill Barr politicized the Justice Department

The Justice Department has historically operated independently from the executive branch, but under Trump, that paradigm has appeared to change.

Sessions, who actively campaigned on Trump’s behalf in 2016, recused himself from investigations into possible Russian interference in the president’s election in order to preserve their impartiality — a decision for which Trump publicly berated him. Barr, by contrast, has repeatedly intervened in legal matters linked to Trump while denying any political motivations.

In February, Barr’s DOJ recommended a more lenient, unspecified prison sentence for Roger Stone, a political consultant and Trump’s friend, overriding prosecutors’ petition for a seven- to nine-year sentence after the president complained on Twitter that Stone was being treated too punitively. The move prompted the resignation of several prosecutors within the department who had been working on the Stone case, which led to his high-profile conviction for obstructing a House Intelligence Committee inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election and other related crimes.

In May, Barr decided to drop charges against Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who resigned just weeks after his appointment in 2017, when reports surfaced that he had misrepresented his conversations with the Russian ambassador to Vice President Mike Pence. Flynn had pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI. Trump, who said he would consider pardoning Flynn, publicly praised Barr’s decision.

And earlier this month, Barr sought to block the publication of a memoir by Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, which asserts that Trump placed a condition on releasing security aid to Ukraine: that the country publicly pursue an investigation against Joe Biden, the former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee. If true, Bolton’s account would confirm the basis of Democrats’ failed efforts to remove Trump from office. A federal judge denied the DOJ’s request to block the publication on Saturday.

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Come together. | Photo by: Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The top 5 reasons to stitch together America’s balkanized grids.

Electricity is the fuel of the future. And as more and more of American life is electrified — transportation and buildings are already on their way — the electricity grid will face greater demands and will need to evolve to meet them.

One branch of that evolution is smaller. “Microgrids” are small grids that connect a college campus, a business, or even a single house, allowing it to act as a semi-independent island within the larger grid. Microgrids are helping to support the growth of distributed energy, with power generation, storage, and management taking place on the customer side of the power meter.

But the other branch, equally important, is bigger. The US does not actually have a national grid. Our grid is instead split into three regions — the western interconnection, the eastern interconnection, and, uh, Texas — that largely operate independently and exchange very little power.

NERC

Power nerds have known for years that this is barrier preventing all sorts of efficiencies. Earlier this week, an effort launched to finally deal with it: the Macro Grid Initiative, which “seeks to expand and upgrade the nation’s transmission network.” It is a collaborative project by the American Council on Renewable Energy, Americans for a Clean Energy Grid, the Advanced Power Alliance, and the Clean Grid Alliance.

The initiative is a welcome development; this idea of a national grid overdue for some well-funded support.

Rather than get into the policies and regulatory changes necessary to accomplish this goal — which are many, complex, and lamentably boring — I’m going to briefly cover the top five reasons why it’s a good idea. Here’s why the US should, at long last, build a national grid.

1. It will unlock renewable energy potential

The areas of the US with the most renewable energy potential are not necessarily the ones that need the most energy. A report from the Wind Energy Association found that the 15 states between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River — Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana — account for 87 of the nation’s total wind energy potential and 56 percent of its utility-scale solar potential, but are only projected to account for 30 percent of the nation’s energy demand in 2050.

This map, from a report by energy consultancy Scott Madden, shows the estimated 2030 balance of power supply and demand for each region of the country. As you can see, some regions (notably the Upper Midwest and Texas) will be producing substantially more than they consume, while others (notably in the West and Northeast) will consume much more than they produce.

The way to balance this out — to make sure that every region is producing as much renewable energy as possible and that the energy is put to good use — is to connect these regions with high-voltage transmission lines. The more each region can import and export electricity, the more it can balance its own fluctuations in supply and demand with its neighbors’ and maximize the use of renewable energy.

One example: the proposed 780-mile Grain Belt Express would carry solar and wind power from Kansas to Missouri and Illinois. It is expected to carry around 4 gigawatts of low-cost renewable energy (enough to power 1.6 million homes a year), unlock $7 billion worth of new renewable energy projects, and relieve congestion on both ends of the line.

Grain Belt Express

2. It will reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Solar and wind energy are variable; they come and go with the weather. A grid with lots of wind and solar power needs ways of smoothing out the fluctuations and filling the gaps. Energy storage, including batteries, can provide some of that flexibility, but not enough.

Transmission is a different story. In 2016, Chris Clack, Alexander McDonald, and colleagues modeled the US energy system out to 2030 at a high degree of resolution. The results, published in Nature Climate Change, show that, using only existing technologies and without any additional energy storage, US power sector emissions can be reduced by up to 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2030. And this can be accomplished “without an increase in the levelized cost of electricity.”

How is this possible? “This reduction in carbon emissions is achieved by moving away from a regionally divided electricity sector to a national system enabled by high-voltage direct-current transmission.”

3. It will save consumers money

Clack et al. also found that weaving the regionally divided power system into a single national system would save consumers around $47.2 billion a year through increased efficiency and cheaper renewable energy.

In 2018, a team assembled by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) published the Interconnections Seam Study, a close analysis of the costs and benefits of stitching together America’s fragmented grid. It found that for every $1 invested, ratepayers would see more than $2.50 in benefits. (If you’re curious, I wrote a longer post on the Seam Study.)

NREL

4. It will make the grid more reliable

There’s a lot of discussion about “resilience” in the power sector these days. As the Scott Madden report shows, various regions of the country can, during severe weather events, face fuel shortages, transmission congestion, and even rolling blackouts. If nothing else is done, the coming retirement of many coal, oil, and natural gas plants will exacerbate these vulnerabilities.

The best way to build resiliency against these events, which are increasing in frequency thanks to climate change, is to connect the regions of the country into a single national grid, so that regions facing difficulty can draw power from neighbors who aren’t.

Nature Climate Change

This already works on a smaller scale. During the prolonged cold temperatures of 2017’s “bomb cyclone,” the ability of eastern regions to exchange energy prevented blackouts and kept prices under control.

5. It would create jobs

A Green New Deal-style investment into a national grid would create thousands of construction and maintenance jobs. Given that every region’s needs and challenges are idiosyncratic, and the process of building lines is complex and egregiously slow (averaging around 10 years), it’s impossible to estimate how many. But transmission development jobs are high-quality union jobs, available in every part of the country.

So there you have it: if you want cleaner, more efficient, more reliable, cheaper electricity, join me in three cheers for a US national grid!

New submitter wb9syn7 writes: The last two days have seen a variety of Samsung Blu-ray players worldwide suddenly cease working. The symptom is that they turn on when power is applied, whereupon they reboot themselves every few seconds endlessly. The power and eject buttons are ignored and all attempts at resetting them fail. After many owners contacted Samsung support and were told they needed to send their players in for hardware repair, Samsung appears to have admitted there is a common problem, not individual player failure. As they are all out of warranty and the reboot cycle precludes the normal software update process, we are awaiting a solution from them. A community post has hundreds of users confirming the issue across various models. We've reached out to Samsung but they have yet to comment on the matter.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vice President Mike Pence was repeatedly asked if he would utter the words, “Black Lives Matter,” during an interview with Philadelphia’s ABC affiliate on Friday.

But Pence refused, instead proclaiming at one point that “all lives matter.”

Channel 6’s Brian Taff began his interview with Pence by noting that America is in the midst of a movement fueled by the words “Black Lives Matter” — and yet only handful of elected Republican leaders in Washington have been willing to utter them.

“I wonder, sir, if those are words that you will utter right here today: ‘Black Lives Matter.’ Can you say those words?” Taff said.

“Well, Brian, let me just say that what happened to George Floyd was a tragedy, and in this nation, especially on Juneteenth, we celebrate the fact that from the founding of this nation, we celebrate the ideal that all of us are created equal, and endowed with certain inalienable rights, and so all lives matter in a very real sense,” Pence said, before rambling through some talking points.

“Forgive me for pressing you on this, sir, but I will note you did not say those words, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ and there is an important distinction,” Taff said, returning to his initial question. “Of course all lives matter, but to say the words is an acknowledgement that Black lives also matter at a time in this country when it appears that there’s a segment of our society that doesn’t agree. So why will you not say those words?”

“Well, I don’t accept the fact, Brian, that there’s a segment of American society that disagrees with the preciousness and importance of every human life,” Pence responded, before launching into even more talking points.

“And yet, one final time, you won’t say the words, and we understand your explanation,” Taff said, before moving on to another topic.

Watch it below.

The post Mike Pence Repeatedly Refuses to Say ‘Black Lives Matter,’ Instead Proclaims ‘All Lives Matter’: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

[A Sixth Circuit panel rejects claims of qualified immunity for officers and Monell immunity for a Cleveland suburb. ]

Police officers often receive qualified immunity for egregious misconduct, but not always. Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed a district court's award of qualified immunity to officers accused of misconduct, as well as its grant of immunity to the city of Euclid, in part because of how the city trained its officers with inappropriate cartoons and a Chris Rock video. (No joke.)

Here is how Judge John Bush's opinion for the court in Wright v. City of Euclid  begins:

This appeal involves a Chris Rock video and a cartoon, but it is no laughing matter. In fact, this case raises a gravely important issue—police use of force—that has dominated the nation's attention in recent weeks. Lamar Wright, an African American man, brought claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 of unconstitutional excessive force, false arrest, malicious prosecution, and municipal liability, along with state-law claims, relating to the actions of certain police officers and other officials employed by the City of Euclid, Ohio.

The police officers, in plain clothes, approached Wright's parked SUV with weapons drawn. Thinking he was about to be robbed, Wright tried to back up the vehicle to get away. A flash of a badge made him realize that the men he thought were about rob him were the police. Wright stopped the SUV, and the officers pulled open the driver's side door. Wright had no weapon, and the officers holstered theirs. Nonetheless, they simultaneously deployed a taser against him and pepper-sprayed him at point-blank range, all while he remained seated in the vehicle. Wright had trouble getting out of the SUV because of a colostomy bag stapled to the right side of his abdomen. He was recovering from a medical operation for diverticulitis. The police aggravated the staples from his surgery, causing bleeding from around the bag.

The officers then arrested Wright even though there was arguably no probable cause for the arrest. The officers designated Wright's arrest as arising from a drug investigation, even though they found no drugs on him. This designation resulted in Wright's being detained for more than nine hours and subjected to an intrusive body scan for drugs well after the officers knew of Wright's medical condition. The scan revealed no drugs, and no drug-related charges
were ever brought against him.

The district court granted summary judgment to the officers on the basis of qualified immunity, and to the City based on Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658, 690 (1978). As explained below, we disagree with the district court's qualified immunity analysis. With respect to the Monell claim, the evidence against the City includes the Chris Rock video, played as part of its use-of-force training for officers, in which the comedian makes remarks
about Rodney King and police misconduct that are highly inappropriate for law-enforcement instruction. The proof also includes an offensive cartoon in the City's police-training manual that portrays an officer in riot gear beating a prone and unarmed civilian with a club, with the caption "protecting and serving the poop out of you." . . . Based on this evidence and more, we find that Wright has introduced sufficient evidence of municipal policy to satisfy Monell.

The Chris Rock video in question is available here.

The slow-rolling disaster that is Florida continues apace, with Orange County, home to the Orlando area, reporting a massive 15.1% positive rate on coronavirus tests on Thursday, and the state leading the nation in raw new cases totals as of Friday. Being a true Trump Republican, state Gov. Ron DeSantis is abdicating all responsibility and blaming brown people for those numbers. He says it is the "overwhelmingly Hispanic" day laborers and agricultural workers who are causing the spike.

"Some of these guys go to work in a school bus, and they are all just packed there like sardines, going across Palm Beach County or some of these other places, and there's all these opportunities to have transmission," DeSantis said this week. His agriculture commissioner, Nikki Fried, disagreed, pointing out that most new cases accounting for the spike are in non-agricultural parts of the state. What's more, most of the farmworkers have already left the state, moving north to follow the harvest. But what's particularly galling about DeSantis' finger-pointing is that the failure to keep this community safe lands solidly on him.

Campaign Action

Back in April, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a Florida group fighting for farmworker rights, raised the alarm. "[I]if something isn’t done—now—to address their unique vulnerability, the men and women who plant, cultivate and harvest our food will face a decimating wave of contagion and misery in a matter of weeks, if not days," co-founder Greg Asbed wrote in a New York Times op-ed. The state didn't even start testing farmworker communities until May. That's after a coalition of 50 groups pleaded with DeSantis for assistance.

"We sent this letter to the governor more than two months ago and now he is realizing that foreign workers are more suitable to get infected," Antonio Tovar, executive director of the Farmworker Association of Florida said Wednesday. "That is very shameful because he was advised, he was told when we sent the letter." Many in the farming community were already ill, he said, when testing and assistance finally started reaching them. "It is too little too late," he said. "It was about two weeks ago when the department (of health) sent an email to a lot of organizations saying, 'Hey! We received 2 million face masks. If you want we can give you face masks.'"

How big of a failure was DeSantis? The international medical humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which works largely in underdeveloped and war-torn areas, saw the need and moved in. On May 18, it announced it was in Immokalee to help with testing and medical clinics. "Immokalee is a community where as many as 15,000 to 20,000 migrant farmworkers continue to provide essential labor during this pandemic despite having a high risk of contracting COVID-19 due to crowded living conditions and limited ability to prevent infection during the course of their work," said Dr. Adi Nadimpalli, the MSF project coordinator in Florida. "We wanted to ensure that these workers received COVID-19 health education and testing before they started to migrate north at the end of the southern Florida farming season," said Nadimpalli. “If we don’t reach them now, it may be much more difficult to ensure their safety."

MSF handed off its mobile clinics to the state at the end of May, with the harvest winding down in the state and many of the farmworkers having moved on. The state is well aware that any spike in numbers can't be blamed on these workers, and state officials aren't shy about speaking up. Franco Ripple, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, issued a statement reiterating that the rise in new cases in the past 10 or so days has not been in agricultural areas, and saying that "naming rural and farm communities as a main driver is not accurate. […] The governor is cherry-picking data in an attempt to blame farmworkers and agriculture for the spread of COVID-19, by highlighting a small sample size from one farm."

DeSantis hasn't gotten the memo, or refuses to read it. His statements are going to make it even harder for health officials to work with the permanent farm labor communities in the state, whose workers are still considered essential—and as vulnerable as ever as COVID resurges in the state.

Around the world they pay close attention to the U.S. And what do they see?

Democratic Sen. Cory Booker Thursday made an effort to pass a bill by unanimous consent that would have removed all Confederate statues from the U.S. Capitol. If no other senators had objected, the measure would have permitted their immediate removal, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had requested earlier this month of the Joint Committee on the Library.

But true to form, one Republican senator did object, blocking the bill from moving forward. Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, who chairs the Joint Committee on the Library, wanted some time to ponder whether removal of these monuments celebrating “men who advocated cruelty and barbarism to achieve such a plainly racist end," as Pelosi put it, was really warranted.

Blunt thought it was all pretty hasty. "I'd certainly like to have some time to decide if we should have a hearing on this," he said of the bill. Right. Maybe slavery and its proponents are entirely worthy of worship. Let's not be rash, say Republicans; let's think it over.

Statues of at least 11 Confederate leaders and soldiers are currently included in the U.S. Capitol's National Statuary Hall collection. Pelosi has also requested immediate removal from the Capitol of four portraits of former House Speakers who also served in the Confederacy. 

From the Senate floor, Booker said, “It is long past time to remove from our nation’s Capitol the statues that pay homage to those who took up arms against the United States and killed their fellow Americans in order to preserve the vile institution of slavery."

But Blunt thought it would be a bad look since the law allows each of the states to determine which two statues should represent them in the Capitol. Passing Booker's measure would "have the effect of abandoning agreements that we have entered into with the states," Blunt cautioned. "Now, we can do away with that program. We could do a lot of things. But we've entered into that agreement."

Absolutely. Let's not move too fast on this whole slavery thing. That Emancipation Proclamation is more than 150 years old, but Republicans are still thinking it over, mulling its efficacy and the legacy of the Confederate South. 

Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the lone member of the Supreme Court to acknowledge the impeached president’s racism in his move to terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and in her own concurring opinion said that her colleagues should have considered his history of racist remarks against Mexicans in their decision eventually finding that the Trump administration had illegally ended the popular program.

“Sotomayor agreed the government had goofed, but chided the chief justice for taking an approach that ignored ample evidence of illegal bias from the president targeting Mexican Americans and migrants,” Mother Jones’ Pema Levy reported. Attorney and NBC News columnist Raul A. Reyes said Sotomayor in fact “called out her colleagues” for not considering this: "I would not so readily dismiss the allegation that an executive decision disproportionately harms the same racial group that the President branded as less desirable mere months earlier,” her concurrence stated.

In his legal analysis Thursday, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern wrote that Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t join the court’s four liberal justices “because his heart bleeds for young immigrants who faced banishment to a foreign country,” but “because the Trump administration bungled every step of its attempted repeal, hoping the courts would ignore its sloppy, dishonest corner-cutting.” Sotomayor agreed, but the observers write that she believed the court should have gone further because you just can’t ignore the record.

“First, Sotomayor writes, Roberts was wrong to discount Trump’s myriad racist comments about Mexican immigrants as ‘people who have lots of problems,’ ‘the bad ones,’ ‘criminals, drug dealers, [and] rapists,’ and his comparison of undocumented immigrants to ‘animals,’” Levy writes. “Relatedly, Sotomayor criticizes Roberts for minimizing the disproportionate impact that ending DACA would have on Latinos given the president’s expressed views.”

What Roberts did do in authoring the majority opinion was give the administration a way to try to end DACA again lawfully (even if immorally). Trump on Friday already fired some tweets claiming his administration will keep pursuing an end to the program, not even giving DACA recipients and their advocates a full 24 hours to fucking enjoy their victory. Whether he actually does something or is just issuing empty threats isn’t yet known. What the threats do make clear is that he’s trying to end DACA not because he has to, but because he wants to—and should he win reelection in November, he’ll keep trying.

Finally, Trump also claimed that Democrats “have abandoned DACA.” This is a lie. Let’s all recall that House Democrats passed legislation putting DACA recipients, as well as Temporary Protected Status and Deferred Enforced Departure holders, onto a path to legalization and citizenship over a year ago. He could call up Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell today and tell him to put the legislation on the floor, but he won’t, because he wants to deport them. And remember that by refusing to put up the legislation on his own, McConnell is helping him to that.

Right now, let’s keep doing what we can to help protect DACA recipients and their families. Join the Home Is Here coalition’s digital rally on Monday, and if you can, please help young immigrants by chipping in for their renewal fees here. Let’s keep saying it: immigrant youth are here to stay.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Best alteration of panel 3 will be awarded 10 internet points.

Today's News:

A new feature in Windows 10 might allow Google to streamline Chrome, and we know it works because Microsoft is already using it. From a report: According to Microsoft, its recent update implemented a new memory management feature in Edge known as SegmentHeap. In the latest version of Windows, developers can opt into SegmentHeap to lower the RAM usage of a program. Microsoft says it already added support to the new Edge browser, and it has seen a 27 percent drop in the browser's memory footprint.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Undeterred by this week's Supreme Court ruling, President Donald Trump said Friday he will renew his effort to end legal protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the United States as children.

Trump denounced the high court's ruling that the administration improperly ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2017. Splitting with Trump and judicial conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the four liberal justices in the 5-4 vote Thursday.

Through executive action, Trump could still take away the ability for 650,000 young immigrants to live and work legally in the United States. But with no legislative answer in Congress in sight, uncertainty continues for many immigrants who know of no other home except America.

In a tweet Friday morning, Trump said, “The Supreme Court asked us to resubmit on DACA, nothing was lost or won. They 'punted,' much like in a football game (where hopefully they would stand for our great American Flag). We will be submitting enhanced papers shortly."

Ken Cuccinelli, acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said Friday that the administration was starting over. “We’re going to move as quickly as we can to put options in front of the president,” but those are executive branch options, he told “Fox & Friends.”

“That still leaves open the appropriate solution which the Supreme Court mentioned and that is that Congress step up to the plate,” he said.

Cuccinelli said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., made some positive comments in that direction on Thursday so the administration thinks it’s possible for a constructive conversation with Congress. But experts say there isn’t enough time to knock down the 8-year-old program before the November election and doubt the government would try because DACA is popular with voters.

Trump's tweet on Friday was less confrontational than the one on Thursday when he slammed the high court ruling. “These horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives." He apparently was referring to DACA and an earlier ruling this week where the court said it’s illegal to fire people because they are gay or transgender.

Activists are vowing to keep fighting for a long-term solution for young immigrants whose parents brought them to the United States when they were children. They not only face a White House that’s prioritized immigration restrictions but a divided Congress that is not expected to pass legislation giving them a path to citizenship anytime soon.

The court decision still elicited surprise, joy and some apprehension from immigrants and advocates who know it's only a temporary solution.

“This is a huge victory for us,” Diana Rodriguez, a 22-year-old DACA recipient, said through tears.

Rodriguez, who works with the New York Immigration Coalition, said she hasn’t been to Mexico since she was brought to the U.S. at age 2. The ruling means young immigrants can keep working, providing for their families and making “a difference in this country," she said.

But the work isn’t over, Rodriguez said: “We can’t stop right now, we have to continue fighting.”

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, appeared satisfied to let the court’s decision stand as the law of the land for now.

While Republicans protested that now, if ever, was the time for Congress to clarify the immigration system, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made it clear that Democrats were done with their legislation before the summer break and had little interest in meeting GOP demands to fund Trump’s long-promised border wall as part of any comprehensive immigration overhaul.

“There isn’t anybody in the immigration community that wants us to trade a wall for immigration,” she said.

Pelosi was reminded that Trump has said he wants immigration reform. “We’ll see,” she said, noting how few days remain on the legislative calendar. “I don’t know what the president meant — maybe he doesn’t either.”

Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden said that if elected, he would send lawmakers proposed legislation on his first day in office to make DACA protections permanent.

The program grew out of an impasse over a comprehensive immigration bill between Congress and the Obama administration in 2012. Under intense pressure from young activists, President Barack Obama decided to formally protect people from deportation and allow them to work legally in the U.S.

Immigrants who are part of DACA will keep those protections, but there are tens of thousands of others who could have enrolled if Trump didn't halt the program three years ago.

The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, estimates that about 66,000 young immigrants meet the age requirement to join the program — 15 — but haven't been able to do so because the government has only been renewing two-year permits for those already enrolled.

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights has filed a DACA application for a person who's not part of the program already, legal services director Luis Perez said, though U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services hasn't signaled whether it will accept any.

“The circuit courts have already told USCIS you must accept renewals. Now that there’s been a Supreme Court decision, really the instructions are gonna be you need to bring back the program in full effect,” Perez said.

It's unlikely the Trump administration will take new applications without being forced by the courts.

USCIS deputy director for policy Joseph Edlow said in a statement that the court’s opinion “has no basis in law and merely delays the president’s lawful ability to end the illegal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals amnesty program.”

And so the ups and downs continue, many coming from Trump himself. During the 2016 campaign, he vowed to repeal DACA. After his election, he softened his stance, saying at one point that DACA recipients had nothing to worry about. But under pressure from hard-liners, he announced in 2017 that he was ending the program.

Reyna Montoya, a DACA recipient from the Phoenix area who leads an immigrant rights advocacy organization, said she and others will keep pushing Congress.

“At this moment, the Senate needs to act, needs to come up with a proposal that will give us a path to citizenship,” Montoya said.

The fearmongering from Trump and his top officials takes another hit.