James.galbraith

[In which the Board of Immigration Appeals decides it can ignore appellate court rulings and is nearly held in contempt.]

Much of legal twitter is abuzz about Judge Frank Easterbrook's brief yet blistering opinion in Baez-Sanchez v. Barr, in which he expresses incredulity at the Board of Immigration Appeals' apparent willingness to disregard a decision of a reviewing appeals court.

The opinion should be read for the full effect, so here it is:

Jorge Baez-Sanchez, a citizen of Mexico, is removable as a criminal alien. His conviction for aggravated battery of a police officer renders him inadmissible. 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(2)(A)(i)(I). He applied to the Department of Homeland Security for a U visa, which would allow him to remain in the United States. The U visa is available to some admissible aliens who have been victims of crime in this country. Baez-Sanchez asked the immigration judge assigned to his case to grant him a waiver of inadmissibility, which would allow the Department of Homeland Security to rule favorably on his visa application. A statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1182(d)(3)(A)(ii), permits the Attorney General to waive an alien's inadmissibility. Exercising that authority, an immigration judge twice granted the request for waiver. After the initial grant, the Board of Immigration Appeals remanded with instructions to consider an additional issue. The immigration judge did so and reaffirmed her decision.

On appeal to the Board, the Department of Homeland Security contended that the immigration judge erred in finding that Baez-Sanchez had shown the extraordinary circumstances needed to justify a waiver and had abused her discretion in light of Baez-Sanchez's criminal history and other negative equities. The Board did not address either contention. Instead, relying on Matter of Khan, 26 I. & N. Dec. 797 (BIA 2016), the Board concluded that the power to waive inadmissibility belongs to the Attorney General alone and may not be exercised by immigration judges.

On petition for review, we held that 8 C.F.R. § 1003.10(a) permits immigration judges to exercise all of the Attorney General's powers, except those expressly reserved by some other regulation. Baez-Sanchez v. Sessions, 872 F.3d 854 (7th Cir. 2017). No other regulation withdraws from immigration judges the power under § 1182(d)(3)(A)(ii), which means that the BIA erred. See also L.D.G. v. Holder, 744 F.3d 1022 (7th Cir. 2014).

Because the Board had not addressed any other question, principles of administrative law meant that we could not do so either. See SEC v. Chenery Corp., 318 U.S. 80, 87–88 (1943). We remanded with instructions to consider two possibilities that the Attorney General had raised in defense of the Board's decision: first, that some statute, regulation, or reorganization plan transferred to the Secretary the Attorney General's power to waive inadmissibility; second, that the power to waive inadmissibility may be exercised only in favor of aliens who apply from outside the United States. 872 F.3d at 856–57. We added that the Board also (or perhaps instead) could "decide whether to exercise in favor of, or against, Baez-Sanchez whatever discretion the Attorney General possesses." Id. at 857.

What happened next beggars belief. The Board of Immigration Appeals wrote, on the basis of a footnote in a letter the Attorney General issued after our opinion, that our decision is incorrect. Instead of addressing the issues we specified, the Board repeated a theme of its prior decision that the Secretary has the sole power to issue U visas and therefore should have the sole power to decide whether to waive inadmissibility. The Board did not rely on any statute, regulation, or reorganization plan transferring the waiver power under § 1182(d)(3)(A)(ii) from the Attorney General to the Secretary. Nor did the Board discuss whether only aliens outside the United States may apply for relief under § 1182(d)(3)(A)(ii). Likewise the Board did not consider whether Baez-Sanchez is entitled to a favorable exercise of whatever discretion the Attorney General retains. In sum, the Board flatly refused to implement our decision. Baez-Sanchez has filed a second petition for review.

We have never before encountered defiance of a remand order, and we hope never to see it again. Members of the Board must count themselves lucky that Baez-Sanchez has not asked us to hold them in contempt, with all the consequences that possibility entails.

The Board seemed to think that we had issued an advisory opinion, and that faced with a conflict between our views and those of the Attorney General it should follow the latter. Yet it should not be necessary to remind the Board, all of whose members are lawyers, that the "judicial Power" under Article III of the Constitution is one to make conclusive decisions, not subject to disapproval or revision by another branch of government. See, e.g., Plaut v. Spendthrift Farm, Inc., 514 U.S. 211 (1995). We acted under a statutory grant of authority to review the Board's decisions. 8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(1). Once we reached a conclusion, both the Constitution and the statute required the Board to implement it.

A judicial decision does not require the Executive Branch to abandon its views about what the law provides, for the doctrine of offensive non-mutual issue preclusion does not apply to the United States. United States v. Mendoza, 464 U.S. 154 (1984). The Attorney General, the Secretary, and the Board are free to maintain, in some other case, that our decision is mistaken—though it has been followed elsewhere, see Meridor v. Attorney General, 891 F.3d 1302, 1307 & n.8 (11th Cir. 2018). But they are not free to disregard our mandate in the very case making the decision. That much, at least, is well established, not only in Plaut but also in many other cases. See, e.g., United States v. Stauffer Chemical Co., 464 U.S. 165 (1984). The Solicitor General did not ask the Supreme Court to review our decision, and the Department of Justice is bound by it.

The Attorney General's brief in this court does not defend the Board's decision—but neither does it confess error. Instead it asks us to remand so that the Board may "address in an authoritative decision whether an immigration judge may adjudicate an application for a nonimmigrant waiver under 8 U.S.C. § 1182(d)(3)(A)(ii) in removal proceedings." The request is bizarre. We have already held that immigration judges do possess this power, if the Attorney General himself retains it. We directed the Board to consider whether the power has been transferred by statute, regulation, or reorganization plan to the Secretary of Homeland Security. The Board chose not to address that question, and we are hardly going to remand so that the Board can write another opinion about whether we erred in construing 8 C.F.R. § 1003.10(a). That's water under the bridge. The Attorney General contends that a new decision by the Board could be entitled to deference under Kisor v. Wilkie, 139 S. Ct. 2400 (2019), but we held that the regulation is unambiguous. An agency is entitled to reinterpret an ambiguous regulation, see National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services, 545 U.S. 967 (2005), but cannot rewrite an unambiguous one through the guise of interpretation. Change requires rulemaking.

The only remaining question is what should happen next. After concluding that an administrative decision is flawed, a court of appeals normally must remand to the agency. See, e.g., Negusie v. Holder, 555 U.S. 511 (2009); Gonzales v. Thomas, 547 U.S. 183(2006); INS v. Orlando Ventura, 537 U.S. 12 (2002). Yet we have already remanded, only to be met by obduracy. The remand rule is designed to afford the agency an opportunity to have its say on an issue, a say that may reflect expertise and could be entitled to judicial deference. The Board had that opportunity and disdained it. Another remand would do little beside give the Board a free pass for its effrontery, while delaying the alien's entitlement to a final decision. That's not the goal of the remand rule. Baez-Sanchez has waited long enough.

We deem all of the legal questions settled. For the purpose of this proceeding, at least, the Attorney General retains his power to grant waivers of inadmissibility, and immigration judges may exercise that power on the Attorney General's behalf. An immigration judge has ruled in favor of Baez-Sanchez. If the Department of Justice were contending that the immigration judge had abused her discretion, then we would remand to the Board to address that subject. But the Attorney General's brief in this court does not ask for a remand on the propriety of granting a waiver to Baez-Sanchez, in particular. The brief the Department of Homeland Security submitted to the Board on remand similarly does not contend that the immigration judge erred, if immigration judges possess the waiver power. All of the issues in this proceeding therefore have been finally resolved, and there is nothing more for the Board to do.

The petition for review is granted, and the Board's decision is vacated. This leaves the immigration judge's decision in force. The Executive Branch must honor that decision, which grants Baez-Sanchez a waiver of inadmissibility so that he may seek a U visa from the Department of Homeland Security.

A Republican family-values candidate in Ohio is facing calls from his own party to withdraw from the race after it was revealed he once set up an account on Ashley Madison, a dating site for people who are already married.

Joe Dills, who is running for state House, admitted he set up the account in 2013 to “connect with women for inappropriate relationships,” calling it “a moment of weakness.” However, he says he was single at the time and never met anyone through Ashley Madison.

Nevertheless, the Ohio Republican Party is calling for Dills to drop out.

“Mr. Dills crossed a line by joining this lewd and inappropriate website,” party Chairman Jane Timken said in a statement Friday. “I call for his immediate withdrawal from the race. There is no place in our party for people that exercise such a gross lack of judgment.”

More from the Cincinnati.com: The move comes after Dills touted an endorsement from Ohio Value Voters, an organization that supports “faith, life, marriage, family and religious freedom.” He posted about the endorsement on his Facebook page Jan. 17, but it has since been removed. Dills’ Friday morning post was accompanied by a statement from Dills’ wife Nikea in which she says the couple been supported by people close to them, including their pastors. “Joe will be the first to tell you of the mistakes he has made and how God has transformed him,” Nikea Dills wrote. “I watched as God took a lost broken man and began to shape him and form him into the good Godly man with incredible morals and values that he is today.”

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Two leading House Democrats are calling on the Trump administration to hand over information regarding the separation of nearly 1,000 migrant children from their families at the southern border in the year since a federal judge’s ruling ordered a halt to this state-sanctioned kidnapping. Oversight and Reform Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney and Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Chair Jamie Raskin tell acting Homeland Security Sec. Chad Wolf, “The new separations appear to follow an opaque process and vague standards that may be causing many children to be separated unnecessarily.”

Nearly 3,000 children were taken from their families under the barbaric “zero tolerance” policy before federal Judge Dana Sabraw issued his June 2018 injunction. However, court documents filed by the American Civil Liberties Union said that officials took over 900 kids since that ruling, which made an exception if the child was in danger—an exception that officials have abused by taking kids from families for minor and petty reasons. When advocates returned to court to ask Sabraw to block these new separations and institute strict guidelines regarding when a child should be removed from a family, he stunningly sided with the Trump administration.

Legislators are now demanding answers regarding these separations. “On July 18, 2019, acting Secretary McAleenan testified before our committee that ongoing separations ‘are carefully governed by policy and court order’ to ensure the separation is ‘in the interest of the child,’” they said in their letter. “However, sworn declarations filed by independent experts—including child advocates, religious organizations, and medical professionals who have worked with these separated children—directly contradict his testimony.”

“According to these declarations, the administration has separated children based on mere allegations rather than convictions, minor or nonviolent convictions, extremely old convictions, non-serious medical issues, unsubstantiated doubts about parentage, and subjective judgments about parental fitness,” they continued. That’s included falsely accusing parents of gang ties. In one instance, a father was separated from his kids for 184 days after U.S. border officials reportedly told him, “You don’t have any rights here.”

Among the requests from legislators is documentation listing “detailed justification” for every separation since Sabraw’s 2018 court order, as well as information on whether the child in each case was subsequently reunited with their family, sent to a sponsor, or remains in U.S. custody. ”The committee is deeply concerned by the number of separations the Trump administration is causing, the lack of clear and transparent processes, the inadequate justification for taking children away from their families, and the ongoing inability to track and reunify families,” the legislators note.

Nearly two years after the official implementation of the zero tolerance policy, families remain separated. Just this week, nine asylum-seekers who were wrongfully deported without their children returned to the U.S. under an unprecedented court order, also issued by Sabraw. One of those parents, David Xol, wept as he hugged his son, Byron. He hadn’t seen him in person since they were separated in May 2018.  “He was small,” he said, according to the AP. “He grew a lot.”

Hours after complaining about no new evidence, John Barrasso dismissed new evidence.

A Senate Republican news conference on Friday served as an astounding example of how shameless Republicans have become in their efforts to defend President Trump.

The news conference was held shortly after ABC News reported it had obtained an April 2018 audio recording of Trump talking about firing Marie Yovanovitch, who was the US ambassador to Ukraine at the time. Her ouster was a key goal of the shadow diplomacy in Ukraine that culminated in Trump’s impeachment on charges he abused his power and obstructed Congress.

According to ABC News, the recording has Trump apparently telling Lev Parnas, Rudy Giuliani’s fixer, to “Get rid of her!”

“Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. Okay? Do it,” Trump can be heard saying on the tape, according to ABC.

The recording is a significant new piece of evidence in a few respects. First, it indicates that Trump has lied repeatedly about not knowing Parnas (though there’s already plenty of evidence of that). Second, it indicates that Trumpworld’s scheme to oust Yovanovitch and replace her with an ambassador of his liking was hatched far sooner than previously known. And third, it shows that the effort to get rid of Yovanovitch wasn’t just Giuliani going rogue; Trump was not only directly involved but perhaps ordered it.

In short, the tape is evidence that Trump’s misconduct and deceitfulness was perhaps worse than previously known — information you’d think would be of interest to the senators who are currently considering Trump’s fate.

But to hear Sen. John Barrasso tell it, news of the tape is a nothingburger.

“There will be new evidence every day. There will something new that comes out every day,” Barrasso said dismissively when asked about the tape during the news conference, his implication being that revelations about the president’s abuse of power are no big deal.

The remarkable thing, however, is that Barrasso has been one of the Republican senators laying the groundwork for a vote to acquit Trump by arguing that the Democratic impeachment managers have failed to produce new evidence of Trump’s guilt during the trial.

In fact, just hours earlier on Friday morning, Barrasso was on both CNN and Fox Business pushing that talking point.

“So I think today in the Senate is going to be Groundhog Day again — the same thing we heard yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that,” Barrasso said on Fox Business, adding on CNN: “In some ways it’s like Groundhog Day — about every hour and a half, they start over again.”

Those comments echo how Barrasso downplayed the trial on Wednesday, when he told reporters, “six hours of testimony so far today since I didn’t hear anything new, at all.” But now that new evidence has emerged, Barrasso is aggressively uninterested in learning about it.

Barrasso’s flip-flop reflects how fraudulent the Republican defenses of Trump have been as Democrats make their case against him. On Thursday, I detailed how more than half a dozen Senate Republicans (including Barrasso) have been publicly complaining about Democrats not presenting new evidence during the trial, even though their party-line votes to block Democrats from m gathering new evidence is the main culprit.

Other Republicans are throwing up smokescreens about Hunter Biden, flatly lying about what Democratic impeachment managers have said, or attacking witnesses who testified about Trump’s misconduct.

But Barrasso’s comments perhaps serve as the starkest illustration that Trump was onto something when he famously proclaimed, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

Barrasso, for one, already seems to have arrived at a place where new evidence of impeachable abuses of power is something he’s willing to shrug off. Not only does he feel no shame about pushing new talking points in Trump’s defense that contradict ones he was using just hours earlier, but he also isn’t trying to hide that his mind is already made up — even as new evidence of Trump’s misconduct emerges.

“I don’t believe that there are any Democrats who need additional information to make a decision on how they are gonna vote, and I can’t imagine there are many Republicans [who need more information] either,” added Barrasso during the news conference, before he walked away from the microphone.

The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

A massive explosion at a Houston manufacturing plant rocked a large section of the nation’s fourth-largest city early Friday, leaving two dead and damaging 200 homes. Dozens of people have also visited local emergency rooms, complaining of minor injuries and breathing problems.

The Houston Chronicle reports: The blast jerked residents awake shortly after 4:15 a.m., damaging scores of homes, knocking structures from foundations, ripping doors off hinges, and strewing wreckage across a half-mile wide debris field. Police Chief Art Acevedo said terrorism is not suspected, but said the department is launching a criminal investigation into the incident. … In the hours after the blast, environmental watchdogs excoriated “another chemical explosion” that had claimed more lives in the Houston area, and called for greater government oversight to protect workers and residents living and working near industrial plants.

More from the Associated PressL “Do a search around your own home and your own neighborhood, even if you’re a mile away from this location,” Acevedo said. “Look for any debris, any body parts, anything that may be related. If you find anything in your immediate home, in your yard, don’t touch it. Just call the Houston Police Department so we can respond.” Houston Fire Chief Samuel Pena said hazardous materials crews have secured the valve on a 2,000-gallon (7,571-liter) tank of propylene that had been leaking. Propylene is a colorless gas used to produce chemicals in plastics, synthetic rubber and gasoline. It is highly flammable and can explode in a fire. People exposed to propylene can become dizzy and light-headed, and the gas can also cause liver damage. 

More footage of the explosion and damage below.

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The Pentagon on Friday said 34 U.S. troops have been diagnosed with concussions or traumatic brain injury following an Iranian missile attack this month, more than triple the number originally reported and coming just days after President Donald Trump downplayed the injuries as “headaches.”

Chief Pentagon spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman also told reporters that Defense Secretary Mark Esper had ordered the Pentagon’s acting personnel chief, Matt Donovan, to review the department’s procedures for tracking and reporting injuries.

Trump initially said no one was harmed during the Jan. 8 Iranian ballistic missile attack on bases in Iraq that house U.S. troops, which followed the U.S. killing of a top Iranian military commander.

The military last week said it had conducted follow-on screenings and that the number of troops who were pulled out of Iraq for brain injury treatment was 11. On Friday, Hoffman told reporters that, of the 34 troops diagnosed with brain injuries, 17 have returned to duty, including one service member who was transferred to Kuwait for treatment.

Eight service members have been transferred to the U.S. for treatment after initially being sent to Germany. Nine are still undergoing treatment and evaluation in Germany.

Hoffman attributed a change in numbers to symptoms that “are late-developing” and “manifest over a period of time.”

“What we saw was a number of people who were initially screened for concussion-like symptoms … saw their conditions improve rapidly, and then others, we saw their conditions didn’t improve,” Hoffman said. “Some got worse and some had severe enough symptoms that they were transported on for further treatment.”

Trump on Wednesday played down the initial reports of injuries.

“I heard that they had headaches, and a couple of other things,” Trump told reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “But I would say, and I can report, it is not very serious. Not very serious.”

Esper on Wednesday told reporters that the Pentagon doesn't normally report such injuries. "This is mostly outpatient stuff. So we can track that if — if you're really interested in it."

He also said at the time he didn't know how many were injured. "I'm not a doctor and I'm not the ones evaluating them," he said.

Speaking Friday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Esper defended the Pentagon’s reporting of injuries around the globe.

“We’re fully committed to being transparent about what happens, but we need to make sure we’re accurate and that we categorize things properly, and that’s our commitment,” Esper said. “And it’s not just Iraq. It’s wherever troops are engaged.”

A recording made at Donald Trump’s Washington hotel on April 30, 2019, shows Trump ranting to a small group—a group that includes Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman—about the need to immediately get U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch out of the way in Ukraine. The recording not only is more evidence that Trump’s claims that he did not know Parnas were a blatant lie, but also appears to catch him red-handed participating in Rudy Giuliani’s smear of the respected ambassador—or worse.

The recording captures a moment at which Giuliani associate Parnas lies to Trump with claims that Yovanovitch has been saying bad things about him in Ukraine. Trump immediately explodes in a way that seems to support the idea that Trump wanted Yovanovitch out of her job, as well as the idea that she was under a serious threat of personal harm.

The recording, obtained by ABC News, has Parnas telling Trump that Yovanovitch is “the biggest problem” for the scheme that Giuliani and Trump had been pushing in Ukraine. According to Parnas, the ambassador was “left over from the Clinton administration” and was telling everyone that they could just wait out Trump’s demands because “he's gonna get impeached, just wait."

Trump immediately boils over. "Get rid of her!" he shouts in reply. "Get her out tomorrow. I don't care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. Okay? Do it."

The recording of Trump ordering Parnas to “take her out” comes on the heels of emails that showed that Giuliani, Parnas, and GOP House candidate Robert Hyde were coordinating to stalk Ambassador Yovanovitch and make regular reports on her location and security. In a March exchange, Parnas told Hyde that Yovanovitch was an issue in Ukraine, and Hyde replied, “Can't believe Trumo [sic] hasn't fired this bitch. I'll get right in that." Within two days, Hyde began sending Parnas updates on Yovanovitch’s location and supposed level of security.

Just days before the meeting caught in the recording, Yovanovitch received a message informing her that she was at risk and should “return to Washington on the next flight.” In fact, Yovanovitch was already in Washington on the day that Parnas and Fruman met with Trump and received the “Take her out” order.

The official State Department announcement of Yovanovitch’s removal came on May 7, with May 30 the last day of her official assignment. In his July 25 phone call to the Ukrainian president, Trump was still railing about Yovanovitch, calling her “bad news” and saying she “is going to go through some thing.”

This new recording appears to show that Trump was deeply involved in the scheme to remove Yovanovitch—and aware that she was regarded as an obstacle to Giuliani’s efforts to secure the announcements that Trump wanted. It also includes language that is clearly threatening.

The recording itself has not yet been made available. Stay tuned.

As you watch the impeachment trial, with its unrelenting single camera angle, remember that this is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s other cover-up. McConnell has most famously rigged the rules of the trial so that it’s extremely unlikely to include witnesses or new evidence. But he’s also responsible for the limited view of the Senate during the trial, and it’s not just an aesthetic issue.

Sign the petition: We need fair media access to the Senate impeachment trial.

C-SPAN, CNN, and other networks asked to have more cameras recording the historic event, but McConnell wasn’t having it—he kept the video feed limited to a government-controlled camera that shows basically nothing but the person speaking, with the occasional shot of the entire room. Combined with a prohibition on still cameras and sharp restrictions on press access to senators during the trial, this means that viewers can’t see senators’ reactions. Or senators napping. Or—and this is where it especially matters—when senators leave the room rather than honoring their duty as jurors.

As political historian Julian Zelizer told CNN, “The last thing Republicans want right now is for a camera to pan the chamber to show a bunch of the senators aren't there. That would be problematic and politically embarrassing.” But that's exactly what's happening, and what McConnell’s restrictions on cameras are keeping from public view.

We don't have a view of how many senators are playing hooky or reading books at any given time, and we don’t know what else we’re missing. ”With the Senate in control of what images are broadcast and disseminated, the public loses that right to independent access and are left reliant on what the government wishes them to see and hear,” said the general counsel of the National Press Photographers Association.

As Mitch McConnell wants it.

A municipal judge in Ohio has apologized for penning horrific anti-LGBTQ letters that were published in Ohio State University’s student newspaper in the early 1990s.

Judge Dan Hazard of Maumee wrote the letters while a sophomore at OSU, in 1992 and 1993. Although his seat is nonpartisan, Hazard is a registered Republican, according to the Toledo Blade. He was elected in 2017.

In the first letter published by The Lantern, Hazard argued the government should cut off funding for HIV and AIDS because “95 percent of those inflicted with the deadly disease pretty much deserve it anyway.”

“There has been a recent outcry on the behalf of these ‘citizens’ for equal treatment under the law,” Hazard wrote. “Equal treatment for people that many still think of as savages … These people think they deserve equal treatment under the law. I challenge anyone to name any civilized nation that looks at queers as ‘normal’ human beings. There just aren’t any.”

In another letter, shortly after the 1993 March on Washington, Hazard thanked LGBTQ Buckeyes who traveled to the capital for the event for “opening my eyes.”

“I now see what this campus could be like with the removal of gays from our society,” he wrote. “With most of them gone this past weekend, it doesn’t matter if the 300,000 in Washington was a success or not, it was a success here on campus.”

Hazard went on to cite statistics from the Family Research Council, since named an anti-LGBTQ hate group, about the life expectancy of gay men and people with HIV.

“Yet these immoral and unethical people continue to smother the other 99 percent of us (the heterosexual majority) with their propaganda presenting the homosexual lifestyle as a safe and normal one,” Hazard wrote. “I see these stats as good news, but I beg the homosexual community one thing: Please keep your AIDS to yourselves. You have killed many innocent children, a few innocent adults (blood transfusions) and a number of not-so-innocent and irresponsible heterosexuals. Aren’t these deaths enough to draw attention to yourselves? Do you need to hold the country prisoner any longer with your lies and deceit?”

After WTOL-TV unearthed the letters, Hazard issued an apology.

“The letter posted here was reprehensible and deplorable,” Hazard said. “I wrote this and another of the same tone as a teenage college student 27 years ago and by no means hold those beliefs today.  I have zero excuse and could not attempt to justify it then or now. It was hurtful to anyone that saw it in 1993 or today. I am sorry that it will hurt even more people today including my gay and transgendered family and friends whom I love dearly.

“Throughout my career, I have befriended and represented many gay clients.  I have done so zealously without reservation. One of the first weddings I officiated after taking the bench was of a same sex couple.  I did so with respect and dignity. Every day I treat every litigant and attorney with that same respect no matter their background, experience or gender identity and will continue to do so.

“I am glad that this allows me to clarify my views that have drastically changed over time.  Respect is owed not only in the courtroom, but in all of society.”

Watch WTOL’s report below.

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As House impeachment managers concluded their arguments Thursday evening, CBS News reported that GOP Senators have received a warning, presumably from someone within the Trump administration:

“One Trump confidante tells CBS News that GOP Senators have been warned, ‘Vote against the president, and your head will be on a pike,'” CBS’ chief congressional correspondent, Nancy Cordes, said in the report.

Alluding to the fact that all 53 Republican senators have been in lockstep thus far during the trial, Cordes added, “So far, their heads appear to be safe.”

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The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is a case study of how lawmakers make themselves richer with the bills they pass. 

When the price of Apple stock hit a then-record high in October 2018, among the shareholders counting their gains were 43 Republicans in Congress, who collectively owned as much as $1.5 million worth of the tech giant’s shares.

Apple’s stock jumped 37 percent in its runup to that record. Several variables were behind the climb, including higher-than-expected earnings. But congressional Republicans themselves had a hand in the spike, stock analysts say. Legislation they championed — the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — doled out nearly $150 billion in corporate tax savings last year alone. One effect: a big boost in stock prices.

Cutting tax rates for companies like Apple and hundreds of other stocks they own was one of many ways Republican lawmakers enriched themselves after they passed the tax law, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of the 186-page law and members’ financial disclosure forms. Democrats also stood to gain from the tax bill, though not one voted for it; all but 12 Republicans voted for the tax bill.

Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

As part of the bill, Republicans approved tax breaks in 2017 for seven classes of assets many of the wealthier members of Congress held at the time, including partnerships, small corporations, real estate, and several esoteric investment vehicles. While they sold the bill as a package of business and middle-class tax cuts that would not help the wealthy, the cuts likely saved members of Congress hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes collectively, while the corporate tax cut hiked the value of their holdings.

“It feels to me like a kleptocracy,” said Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, DC.

Such congressional self-enrichment has been thrust into the 2020 presidential campaign. Democratic candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren has said her first priority as president would be to pass an anti-corruption package that, among other things, would forbid members of Congress from owning individual stocks, bonds, and other securities so they could not benefit from tax or financial laws they passed.

“Under current law, members of Congress can trade stocks and then use their powerful positions to increase the value of those stocks and pad their own pockets,” Warren wrote in a September Medium post.

Republicans own lots of stock

Two years after the passage of the Trump tax act, its effects — some obvious, some hidden — are coming into focus. One is its cost: Contrary to Republican claims, the law is not paying for itself and is likely to burden the nation with an additional $1.9 trillion in debt over 11 years beginning in 2018, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

And while the law cut tax rates for people of all income brackets, some of its tax benefits overtly favored the wealthy, such as the 2.6 percentage point tax rate cut in the highest bracket and the doubling of the estate tax exemption to $11.2 million. Other provisions were subtler yet favored the wealthy even more: tax breaks for their investments, for instance, or changes that boosted the value of their stocks. Among the rich beneficiaries are members of Congress, more than half of whom were found to be millionaires in 2014.

The tax law’s centerpiece is its record cut in the corporate tax rate, from 35 percent to 21 percent. At the time of its passage, most of the bill’s Republican supporters said the cut would result in higher wages, factory expansions, and more jobs. Instead, it was mainly exploited by corporations, which bought back stock and raised dividends. In 2018, stock buybacks exceeded $1 trillion for the first time ever, according to TrimTabs, an investment research firm. Net corporate dividends reached a new high in 2018 of more than $1.3 trillion, nearly 6 percent more than the previous year. The result, analysts say: The buybacks boosted stock prices, and bigger dividends put even more money in the pockets of stockholders.

Promises that the tax act would boost investment have not panned out. Corporate investment is now at lower levels than before the act passed, according to the Commerce Department. Though employment and wages have increased, it is hard to separate the effect of the tax act from general economic improvements since the 2008 recession.

The boost in stock prices, however, was predictable. As the bill was reaching its final stages in 2017, Bryan Rich, the CEO of Logic Fund Management, a wealth advisory company, wrote that the proposed corporate rate cut “will go right to the bottom line of companies — popping EPS [earnings per share] and driving stocks even higher.”

Those benefits mainly went to the rich, as the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans own 84 percent of all stocks. The 10 richest Republicans in Congress in 2017 who voted for the tax bill held more than $731 million in assets, almost two-thirds of which were in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and other instruments, according to Roll Call’s semiannual assessment of Congress’s wealth.

The precise amount of Republicans’ windfall can’t be determined without a review of the members’ tax returns, which they are not required to disclose.

All but one of the 47 Republicans who sat on the three key committees overseeing the drafting of the tax bill own stocks and stock mutual funds, according to Public Integrity’s analysis. Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) was among them. A member of the Ways and Means Committee, which oversaw the writing of the tax bill in the House, Kelly reported in 2018 that his spouse owned 101 individual stocks, Apple included, with a minimum total value of $439,000.

When he voted for the 2017 tax cuts, which will be funded by nearly $2 trillion in added debt, Kelly called it “the most important vote I’ve ever cast.” Yet 19 months later, he voted against a two-year budget agreement that added to the national debt by hiking government spending for defense and nondefense programs by $320 billion. Kelly warned that “America is driving toward a fiscal cliff.”

Orrin Hatch (R-UT) was chair of the Senate Finance Committee in 2017, when he and his wife owned mutual funds and a limited liability corporation valued between $562,000 and $1.430 million, paying them between $12,700 and $38,500 in dividends and capital gains, according to Hatch’s financial disclosure forms. They also owned a blind trust worth between $1 million and $5 million. (Congressional financial disclosure forms do not require members to report the precise value of assets and income but rather in 11 different ranges, each with a minimum and a maximum value.)

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

For decades, Hatch, who retired in 2018, had been one of the loudest deficit hawks in Congress. Just 10 months before he would shepherd the tax bill through his committee, Hatch said, “The national debt crisis poses a significant and growing threat to the economic and national security of this country.”

His concern over national security lasted two months. In April, Hatch signaled he was open to a Republican tax bill that would likely add to the national debt. When Republicans passed the tax bill in December 2017, he beamed. “This is a historic night,” he said at a press conference.

(The Center for Public Integrity sought comment from 13 current or former members of Congress mentioned in this article; only two responded.)

A big bump from overseas onshoring

Republican lawmakers also boosted the value of their stock holdings when they encouraged American corporations to repatriate money they were holding overseas. The tax law decreed that future foreign profits would not be taxed at high rates, and that previously earned profits stashed abroad — an estimated $2.7 trillion — would be taxed one time at no more than 15.5 percent.

In 2017, Apple was sitting on $250 billion in overseas profits. In January 2018, the month after President Donald Trump signed the tax bill into law, the tech behemoth and third-largest American company said it would pay the new, lower tax and start bringing the cash home. Just four months later, Apple said it would buy back $100 billion of its stock and hike its dividend by 16 percent. Apple shares increased almost 9 percent by the week’s end. In April 2019, Apple announced $75 billion more in buybacks, a move analysts said would likely drive its stock price higher. A day after the announcement, shares increased in value nearly 5 percent. The stock continued to hit record highs late last year.

That increase and higher dividends augmented the holdings of 43 Republicans who voted for the tax bill, including seven senators and their spouses who owned Apple stock in 2018: John Hoeven of North Dakota; David Perdue of Georgia; Arizona’s Jeff Flake, now retired; Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma; and the spouses of Pat Roberts of Kansas, Maine’s Susan Collins, and Shelley Capito of West Virginia. A spokesperson for Hoeven said that he “follows Senate regulations and reporting requirements.” Sen. Collins’s husband’s portfolio decisions are all made by a financial adviser, a Collins spokesperson said, and he has not bought or sold Apple stock since 2015.

Perdue is one of the wealthiest senators, with a net worth of $15.8 million, $14 million of which is in stocks, according to Roll Call. In 2018, with his wife, Perdue owned $100,000 to $250,000 in Apple stock, he reported. The couple sold some of it and received annual dividends and capital gains that year between $15,000 and $50,000.

The optics that the tax cuts would boost the prices of stock he owned apparently didn’t concern Perdue. Weeks before Republicans passed the tax bill, Fox News host Maria Bartiromo asked Perdue if he was worried that the corporate cuts would result in buybacks and increased dividends instead of new jobs. “Well, Maria,” he answered, “I come from the school that, you know, all of the above is acceptable. This is capitalism.” He later added that it was all about “capital flow,” whether for jobs, economic growth, or dividends.

An affinity for “small business” — and pass-throughs

Passing a law that helped fuel increases in stock prices wasn’t the only way Republicans enriched themselves. The new law also contained a 20 percent deduction for income from so-called “pass-through” businesses, a provision called the “crown jewel” of the act by the National Federation of Independent Businesses, a lobbying group.

Pass-throughs are single-owner businesses, partnerships, limited liability companies, (known as LLCs) and special corporations called S-corps. Most real estate companies are organized as LLCs. Trump owns hundreds of them, and the Center for Public Integrity’s analysis found that 22 of the 47 members of the House and Senate tax-writing committees in 2017 were invested in them.

Pass-throughs can be found in any industry. They pay no corporate taxes and steer their profits as income to business owners or investors, who are taxed only once at their individual rates. Despite their favored treatment as a business vehicle, the 2017 tax act did them another favor: It allowed 20 percent to be deducted off the top of the pass-through income for tax purposes.

Zach Gibson/Getty Images

In the Senate, the champion for the pass-through break was Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who was a Budget Committee member when the tax bill was being written. He argued that because the bill was slated to give big corporations a 14 percent cut in their tax rate, smaller businesses should get a break, too. “I just have in my heart a real affinity for these owner-operated pass-throughs,” he told the New York Times when the Senate was considering the tax bill in November 2017.

No doubt Johnson, with his wife, held interests that year in four real estate or manufacturing LLCs worth between $6.2 million and $30.5 million, from which they received income that year between $250,000 and $2.1 million, according to his financial disclosure form.

How much money lawmakers will pocket from the 20 percent pass-through deduction can’t be determined without an examination of their tax returns. There are limits on how much of the deduction can be taken based on total income and business category. But in some cases, the tax savings could run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Johnson declined to comment for this article.

And while the provision did help small businesses in certain favored categories, the benefits of the pass-through deduction are heavily tilted toward the wealthy. Sixty-one percent of the benefits of this provision will go to the top 1 percent of taxpayers in 2024, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the congressional agency that analyzes tax bills.

GOP real estate owners make out big

Besides the law’s benefits to real estate pass-throughs, real estate in general was hugely favored by the tax law, allowing property exchanges to avoid taxation, the deduction of new capital expenses in just one year versus longer depreciation schedules, and an exemption from limits on interest deductions.

“If you are a real estate developer, you never pay tax,” said Ed Kleinbard, a former head of Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation.

Members of Congress own a lot of real estate. Public Integrity’s review of financial disclosures found that 29 of the 47 GOP members of the committees responsible for the tax bill hold interests in real estate, including small rental businesses, LLCs, and massive real estate investment trusts (REITs), which pay dividends to investors. The tax bill allows REIT investors to deduct 20 percent from their dividends for tax purposes.

Real estate pass-throughs got an especially sweet gift in the form of a provision inserted into the tax bill behind the closed doors of the House-Senate conference committee. The Senate bill under consideration based a company’s pass-through deductions on the total amount of wages paid to employees. Because real-estate pass-through companies typically have few employees, however, this meant they could offer only tiny deductions to investors.

A stroke of the pen fixed that: Someone changed the law to allow real estate companies to use the value of their assets — in addition to the size of their payrolls — to calculate pass-through benefits. Because such companies can hold sizable assets, suddenly they, too, could offer the full 20 percent deduction to investors.

“In my judgment, it was a big giveaway to the real estate community, and they are very good lobbyists,” said Steve Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington, DC. That giveaway contributed to last year’s record $1.02 trillion federal revenue shortfall.

One Republican senator who benefited from the last-minute provision was Tennessee’s Bob Corker, who at the time owned or was a partner in 18 real estate businesses, LLCs, and partnerships, records show. His reported income from them was between $2.1 million and $11.1 million in 2017. Corker, who retired in 2018, told Public Integrity he had nothing to do with the provision or the 20 percent pass-through deduction. It was all Ron Johnson’s idea, Corker said.

“The budget deficit is going up so that people like Ron Johnson and Bob Corker can pay less in taxes,” said Hauser, of the Revolving Door Project.

Forbidding self-dealing would help close the loopholes

Republicans wouldn’t have had many of these apparent conflicts if Elizabeth Warren’s anti-corruption plan had been in effect.

Much of the plan was pulled from her Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, which she introduced in the Senate in 2018. Among its provisions, the bill would forbid lawmakers to own or trade individual stocks, bonds, commodities, hedge funds, derivatives, or “complex investment vehicles.” Members would be required to put their assets in “widely held investment vehicles” such as mutual funds. Warren and her husband were invested in 20 mutual funds in 2017, but no individual stocks.

Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Members could no longer own commercial real estate, though they could keep businesses with revenue under $5 million — which could include a lot of pass-throughs. Warren’s bill hasn’t moved out of the Senate Finance Committee; an identical bill in the House also remains idle.

Warren’s plan faces an uphill climb, even among Democrats. “It’s very difficult to get congresspeople to pass rules that make life exceedingly difficult for themselves,” said Beth Rotman, the money in politics and ethics director at Common Cause, a government watchdog in Washington, DC.

But it’s happened in the past. In 1978, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act in the wake of the Watergate scandal. It requires certain government officials, including members of Congress, to file annual financial forms — records the Center for Public Integrity used for this analysis. And in 2012, Congress passed a bill that made it unlawful to use insider information to trade stocks, required members to report stock trades within 45 days of the transaction, and required lawmakers to file disclosure forms online in a searchable, sortable, and downloadable database — so conflicts of interest would be easy to detect. (Within a year, Congress had removed the “searchable and sortable” language from the law. The financial disclosures are now available online, but they are not easily searched or sorted.)

Apparently just because of disclosure, stock trading by senators dropped by about two-thirds in the three years following the law’s enactment, according to a study by Craig Holman at the government watchdog group Public Citizen. But Holman said he found that some senators continued to trade in stocks in the very businesses they oversaw in their committees — a practice Public Citizen wants banned.

Ironically, it was Congress that passed laws that restrict other federal government officials from owning stocks or assets that would benefit from the officials’ decisions — or require them to recuse themselves from such decisions. Yet Congress has not passed legislation that bans itself from the same practice. “Congress should have the same rules put on them that the executive branch has,” said Rotman of Common Cause. “The executive branch conflict of interest rules are stronger.”

For the 2017 tax act, Holman of Public Citizen notes that about six years ago, researchers found that more than half of the members of Congress were millionaires. “They are passing tax laws and legislation that disproportionately favors the wealthy class,” Holman said. “And that means they personally benefit from this type of legislation.

“And, from what we’ve seen, especially from the tax cuts and jobs act of 2017,” he added, “that tax bill clearly favored the very wealthy over the rest of Americans. And that means it favored Congress over the rest of America.”

Peter Cary is a consulting reporter for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative news organization in Washington, DC.

Democrats’ lead House impeachment manager, California Congressman Adam Schiff, pleaded with GOP senators on Thursday night to vote in favor of convicting and removing President Donald Trump.

“If right doesn’t matter, we’re lost,” Schiff said, concluding his eight-minute closing argument, at around 10:30 p.m. “If the truth doesn’t matter, we’re lost. The framers couldn’t protect us from ourselves if right and truth don’t matter, and you know what he [Trump] did was not right.

“No constitution can protect us if right doesn’t matter any more, and you know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country,” Schiff added. “You can trust he’ll do what’s right for Donald Trump. … This is why, if you find him guilty, you must find that he should be removed, because right matters, and the truth matters. Otherwise, we are lost.”

As of Friday morning, #RightMattersTruthMatters was among the top trending topics on Twitter. Watch the full speech below, and check out a few reactions.

The post Adam Schiff Chokes Up in Powerful Closing Argument: ‘Right Matters. Otherwise, We Are Lost’: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The new rule could hurt women around the world, advocates say.

Midori Nishida says she was forced to take a pregnancy test before boarding a plane in November to Saipan, the US territory where she lived for 18 years. The reason, she wrote in an op-ed, was Saipan’s reputation for so-called “birth tourism,” in which parents travel to US soil to have a baby who’s a citizen.

The airline, Hong Kong Express Airways Limited, apologized earlier this month and suspended its pregnancy-testing practice, according to the New York Times. But now the Trump administration has issued a new rule aimed at stopping birth tourism, and some fear that the kind of targeting Nishida experienced could become more common.

The rule officially takes effect on Friday, but a draft was first reported by BuzzFeed News on Tuesday. And on Wednesday, Vox obtained diplomatic cables indicating that the State Department was already directing embassies to deny visas to people they suspect are coming to the US to give birth.

Under the new policy, consular officers are being directed to assume that if someone is seeking a tourist visa and is likely to give birth in the US, they are “seeking a visa for the primary purpose of obtaining US citizenship for the child.” Pregnant people applying for visas may have to submit extra documentation showing this isn’t the case.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement Thursday that the policy is “necessary to enhance public safety, national security, and the integrity of our immigration system,” asserting that the birth tourism industry strains hospital resources and invites criminal activity.

“Closing this glaring immigration loophole will combat these endemic abuses and ultimately protect the United States from the national security risks created by this practice,” she said. “It will also defend American taxpayers from having their hard-earned dollars siphoned away to finance the direct and downstream costs associated with birth tourism.”

But reproductive health and human rights advocates say the new policy toward pregnant visitors will amount to discrimination against women.

“Young women already have a difficult time securing visas for travel,” Shannon Kowalski, director of advocacy and policy at the International Women’s Health Coalition, told Vox. “These guidelines will make it harder for women, particularly young women, to travel to the United States for any purpose.”

The policy is supposed to have an exception for pregnant people who travel to the US to give birth because of concerns about infant and maternal mortality in their home countries. But in practice, some fear that exception won’t be honored, and that pregnant people in serious need of medical care will be turned away, possibly to die.

Overall, reproductive health advocates say the new policy is part of a larger pattern by the Trump administration of compromising the reproductive rights and health of immigrants and people seeking to come to the US, many of them people of color. With this proposal, the Trump administration is “extending an agenda of white supremacy to US-bound travelers,” Kowalski said.

A woman was given a pregnancy test before boarding a plane to Saipan

In a November op-ed for the Saipan Tribune, Nishida said she returns to Saipan frequently for visits, but “none of my previous experience would have prepared me for what happened during my most recent flight.”

At the check-in counter for her November 9 flight, she wrote, she was told she had been randomly selected for a “fit to fly” assessment. But she was then handed a form reading, “In our routine initial safety assessment by our ground handling staff, we have reasonable suspicion on the health condition of the passenger above. The passenger has been observed to have a body size/shape resembling to a pregnant lady.”

A woman saying she was a medical professional then escorted her to a bathroom and directed her to take a pregnancy test, Nishida wrote. When it was negative, she was allowed to board.

The practice of testing passengers “is discriminatory in that it targets passengers based on their outward appearance by pinpointing those that ‘appear’ pregnant,” she wrote. “After this incident, I can only think of how I will be suspected, investigated, and humiliated before I can return to a place I consider home.”

Nishida’s story got more attention in US media in January, and Hong Kong Express ultimately issued an apology for pregnancy-testing travelers.

“Under our new management, we recognize the significant concerns this practice has caused,” the airline said in a statement to the Times last week. “We have immediately suspended the practice while we review it. We’d like to apologize for the distress caused.”

It wasn’t immediately clear if authorities in the US had asked airlines to give pregnancy tests to passengers, or otherwise pressured travel carriers to keep pregnant people out of the US. The Homeland Security Department did not answer Vox’s question about the issue.

But it’s clear that stopping non-US-born pregnant people from giving birth on American soil is a priority for the Trump administration.

How the policy takes aim at pregnant people

The president and other administration officials have been open in the past about their desire to end birthright citizenship, under which anyone born in the US becomes a citizen, as Hamed Aleaziz notes at BuzzFeed. And now, the new rule will create additional barriers for pregnant people applying for B visas, offered to short-term visitors, including tourists, business travelers, and people seeking urgent medical care.

The new rule will not apply equally around the globe. Citizens of 39 mostly Western countries — most of Europe, as well as Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Brunei, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea — generally don’t need a B visa to travel to the US for 90 days or less, and won’t be affected.

B visas are the biggest visa category that the State Department processes annually, numbering about 6 million. The government does not track how many pregnant travelers come to the US on B visas, but the new rule says that US embassies and consulates have reported trends showing higher levels of birth tourism. Separate 2017 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests the rule would likely affect roughly 10,000 people annually.

Consular officers can already deny B visas to people they believe are birth tourists under existing law. It all depends on the “primary purpose” of an applicant’s visit to the US. If the primary purpose of their visit is business, tourism, or to receive urgent medical treatment, that’s legitimate; giving birth so that their child can obtain US citizenship is not.

In other words, under the current system, a consular officer can’t just deny a visa to anyone who looks close to their due date, nor are they allowed to ask a visa applicant whether they are pregnant or to require pregnancy tests or other evidence that they are not pregnant. An applicant would have to affirmatively state that they’re coming to the US for the primary purpose of birth tourism, but it’s unlikely that they would be so transparent.

Pregnant people can come to the US on a B visa to seek medical treatment related to their pregnancy — and that remains true under the new rule. But the burden is on them to prove that the treatment is necessary, that they can pay for the treatment, and that it’s the primary purpose of their visit.

A former consular officer told Vox that they had to deny visas to women who wanted to give birth in the US because of high mortality rates for mothers and children in their home countries but couldn’t prove that they could pay the full cost of their treatment.

“They would break down in tears,” the former officer said. “Of course, the consular officer has no reasoning in how much this costs or how to determine what is reasonable. A lot of officers think because they or their sister or some friend’s insurance paid $19,000, that is the real cost.”

The State Department’s new rule and guidance would subject pregnant people to even more scrutiny when applying for a B visa. If a consular officer has “reason to believe the applicant will give birth during their stay in the United States, [they] are required to presume that giving birth for the purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship is the applicant’s primary purpose of travel,” the new guidance reads.

But the administration hasn’t clarified how a consular officer would have any “reason to believe” that an applicant will imminently give birth. Since they can’t ask outright, they might infer based on looks alone, which has no basis in immigration law, said Ur Jaddou, former chief counsel at US Citizenship and Immigration Services and the director of the watchdog group DHS Watch.

“I don’t even understand how they’re going to apply this in a way that is fair, that isn’t regulating women’s bodies,” she said.

More broadly, the policy could impose new hurdles on anyone of childbearing age. Since some B visas are valid for up to 10 years, a consular officer could theoretically weigh whether someone is likely to give birth over the course of the next decade. A 30-year-old, married applicant could therefore suddenly face more scrutiny, without any means of recourse or appeal, Jaddou said.

There are some exceptions to the rule — for example, travelers could show that they are not able to access adequate prenatal care in their home country. But it seems they would still have to prove that they could pay for it in the US, said Philip Wolgin, the managing director of immigration at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

The Trump administration rationalizes the new rule by claiming that foreign governments or groups could “recruit or groom” individuals who were granted American citizenship at birth as a result of birth tourism to act against the US. It’s unclear whether there is any evidence that foreign entities are engaging in such long-game schemes.

The administration also asserts that birth tourism often draws criminal actors seeking to profit from the industry.

But the policy comes at great cost to people who are or could become pregnant. Doug Rand, a former Obama administration official who worked on immigration issues, said it’s a policy “designed to cast basically all women of childbearing age as presumptive lawbreakers, which is typical of this administration.”

Imposing these kinds of disproportionate burdens runs afoul of the US Constitution, which protects against sex discrimination. But since these consular interviews involve noncitizens and are taking place on foreign soil, the US Constitution doesn’t protect them.

There could be legal challenges to the policy, however, based on US immigration law.

“There is no statutory basis to deny entry to a woman because of the state of her reproductive cycle,” Jaddou said.

Trump’s pattern of targeting immigrants and reproductive rights

Advocates are also concerned that the new policy will lead to racial profiling of Asian women attempting to visit the US. Much media coverage of “birth tourism” has focused on people from China who travel to US soil to give birth, with the Wall Street Journal calling Saipan the “latest hot spot” for the practice in 2017.

According to Nishida, Saipan’s reputation led airline workers to presume she was a birth tourist simply because she appeared pregnant to them. Under the new policy, such presumption could become more widespread.

“The Trump administration will go to any lengths to demean immigrant women,” Sung Yeon Choimorrow, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, told Vox. “Millions of Asian people come to the US to visit their families, and targeting them because of their race or country of origin is discriminatory and wrong.”

“As an immigrant woman who has experienced harassment at an airport when I was pregnant,” Choimorrow added, Nishida’s experience and the Trump administration’s rule “are disturbing, invasive, and reveal the coercive and invasive methods that our government will use to enforce the new rule.”

The Trump administration has already been criticized for denying women visas to visit the US. More than 40 women were denied visas to attend the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women conference in New York last year, according to the International Service for Human Rights. Women from African and Middle Eastern countries affected by the Trump administration’s travel ban appeared to be disproportionately affected, and a petition protesting the denials said the women had been asked for documents like marriage certificates and even proof that they have children, BuzzFeed News reported at the time.

It’s not clear whether these women faced concerns over “birth tourism” or questions about whether they were pregnant. However, according to Kowalski, the new State Department rule would only exacerbate the difficulties women face coming to the US. “The guidelines are discriminatory on their face,” she said.

Advocates say the new policy fits into a larger pattern by the Trump administration of infringing on the reproductive rights of people who come to the United States. Under previous Office of Refugee Resettlement Director E. Scott Lloyd, the administration pursued a policy of attempting to block unaccompanied immigrant minors in the government’s care from getting abortions, leading to multiple minors suing for the right to terminate their pregnancies.

The Trump administration has also been accused of failing to provide adequate prenatal care to pregnant people in immigration detention. One asylum seeker, Rubia Morales, says in a lawsuit filed earlier this year that her treatment in ICE custody led her to have a miscarriage, KPBS reports. She says a doctor at the facility told her that her bleeding was “normal,” and that she could deal with it by buying sanitary pads for $1 each.

The administration has also tried to make it harder for survivors of domestic abuse to get asylum in the United States, and has changed rules around visas for victims of crimes in ways that advocates say could harm survivors.

“This administration has a track record of detaining pregnant people and has made it impossible for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault to seek asylum,” Choimorrow said. “There is no justification for the harm they have done to immigrant women or for their xenophobic agenda.”

DES MOINES, Iowa—The contrast was unmistakable: Most people in the crowd at the venerable Brown & Black Forum on minority issues here were African American, Latino, or Asian American. But all of the Democratic candidates onstage, apart from Andrew Yang, were white.

“It is disappointing,” said Bridgette Andrews, an African American executive assistant from the nearby suburb of Johnston, as she walked into the event, which took place on a frigid afternoon earlier this week. “It would have been nice to have another candidate from a minority group up there. It does make you go hmm that they are not there.”

Many Democratic activists, especially but not exclusively those from minority communities, are perplexed and frustrated that the candidates of color who were considered most viable when the presidential contest began—Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, former Cabinet Secretary Julían Castro—have been forced from the race before the first votes are cast. While Yang has built a spirited following, it remains limited. And all this when Democrats began the primary with the most diverse field they’ve ever had.

This jarring reality could prompt the most serious revolt in decades against the decisive role that Iowa and New Hampshire, two preponderantly white states, play in winnowing the field and shaping the race. Already Castro and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg—another 2020 contender, who is white—have argued that the lack of diversity should disqualify both states from their favored roles. At the forum itself, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado argued that their status “probably should evolve.”

“It is painfully obvious and problematic that after the historic candidacy of the first black president, we have basically an all-white field, and that really needs to occasion some soul-searching on the Democratic side,” says Steve Phillips, the founder of the advocacy group Democracy in Color, who is African American. “The most workable and straightforward approach would be to reconfigure the order of the states.”

[Read: Iowans vote first, if they can vote at all]

Dislodging either state from its privileged position won’t be easy. Both Iowa and New Hampshire fervently guard their leadoff roles. And many Democratic Party leaders around the country reject the charge that the states’ prominence contributed to the fall of so many minority contenders. Instead, most Democratic operatives I’ve spoken with point to many factors—from fundraising patterns to assumptions about so-called electability—that may have contributed to their failure. “If you didn’t have Iowa [first] this year, I don’t think any of this would have changed,” said the longtime strategist Robert Shrum, who is white.

But after Barack Obama’s success in 2008, many party activists “feel like we’re going backwards” in terms of minority candidates’ ability to win the presidential nomination, as Bakari Sellers, an African-American Democratic official in South Carolina put it. That disappointment could ignite a debate within the party over all aspects of the nominating process, including the reliance on Iowa and New Hampshire.

Iowa and New Hampshire are vulnerable in any such discussion because the gap between their demography and that of the party overall is widening. While voters of color will likely cast more than 40 percent of the ballots in the party’s primaries and caucuses this year—a new record—whites still account for about 85 percent of the population in Iowa and exactly 90 percent in New Hampshire, according to census figures.

Though Iowa is slightly more diverse, its position could come under greater threat than New Hampshire’s after 2020. One reason is that New Hampshire law commits the state to always holding its primary before any other; the other is that Democrats may be more reluctant to ruffle feathers in New Hampshire, a swing state that has inclined toward them in recent years, than in Iowa, which has been tilting more Republican.

The two states’ assumed their one-two position in 1972. But by the late ’70s, and intensifying through the mid-’80s, the Iowa–New Hampshire duopoly faced growing opposition in the party, says Elaine Kamarck, who is a Brookings Institution senior fellow and a longtime member of the Democratic National Committee’s rules committee. The core grievance at the time, she told me, was that the states were elevating weak candidates (including George McGovern and Walter Mondale). But they also faced the “same complaints as they [do] now: small, unrepresentative … too white,” Kamarck, who is white herself, told me.

The controversy began to recede in the 1990s. But it never entirely abated. The DNC’s most dramatic response to the enduring concerns came after the 2004 election, when it authorized Nevada, which has a large Latino population, and South Carolina, which has a large African American population, to hold the next two contests after New Hampshire.

That shift has unquestionably provided those states more influence: South Carolina in particular proved crucial to the nomination of both Obama in 2008 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. Strategists working on campaigns this year likewise believe they’ll again have a major effect on the race’s outcome, especially South Carolina.

But the departures from the race of Booker, Harris, and Castro vividly capture the limits of Nevada’s and South Carolina’s power. Voters in those states will still be choosing only from the candidates who are viable after Iowa and New Hampshire cut down the field. The Iowa winner has ultimately captured the Democratic nomination in each of the past four contested races.

Activists I’ve spoken with almost all agree that Iowa and New Hampshire aren’t solely to blame for minority candidates’ fall. Both Phillips and Sellers, for instance, believe the principal cause was a pervasive belief among financial donors, the media, and voters that a white candidate represents the party’s best hope of beating Trump. “What I know has happened since Donald Trump and this emergence of his white identity politics is that voters, particularly Democratic voters of color, are now of this weird belief that it takes a white man who can talk to ‘Middle America’” to best Trump, said Sellers, who backed Harris before she exited the race late last year. “Our electorate has been groomed to believe something which I believe is a total falsehood.”

And few Democrats seem to believe candidates of color can’t receive a fair hearing in Iowa or New Hampshire. Obama won the former and only narrowly lost the latter in 2008. Exactly two decades earlier, Jesse Jackson won a double-digit share of the Iowa vote. Wayne Ford, an African American former Iowa state representative who co-founded the Brown & Black Forum, defended Iowa’s role by citing Obama’s first win there, as well as the strong support this year for former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who is gay. “Why not Iowa?” Ford said. “Iowa gave you a black president,” and “for a while” Buttigieg “was leading the polls in the state of Iowa.”

[Read: The opportunity that Warren and Sanders passed up]

Troy Price, the state Democratic Party chair, who is white, said that the caucus process requires the candidates to reach out to all communities, even small ones. “I can’t change the demographic makeup of Iowa,” Price told me, “but I can say our process elevates voices by making the candidates go into different communities and build organization in different communities.”

But for the critics of Iowa and New Hampshire, the issue isn’t overt or even implicit bias among Democratic voters there. The question is whether voters in such overwhelmingly white states place as much priority on issues affecting minority communities, or value picking a nominee of color as highly as many members of those minority communities do. Both Phillips and Sellers argue that the race might have unfolded very differently if one highly diverse state had been among the first two contests. “If we started with South Carolina, then a Cory and a Kamala would have had a much better chance to get some traction,” Phillips said.

Others in the party dispute that, noting, for instance, that both of the African American senators in the race failed to earn significant polling support from black voters in South Carolina, just as Castro struggled with Latinos in Nevada. And as Sellers noted, even many minority voters have prioritized electability in this race—and defined it mostly as the ability to win back working-class whites.

Yet the issues most concerning minority communities simply aren’t top of mind for many of the white voters who crowd the candidates’ town halls in small Iowa and New Hampshire communities. For many in the audience at the Brown & Black Forum this week, it was striking to hear the candidates peppered with questions about how they would address racial disparities in maternal health, the elevated suicide rate among African American teenagers, the effect of climate change on minority communities, whether English should be the nation’s official language, how to unwind mass incarceration, and the gap between whites and minorities in wealth and access to investment capital.

Hearing the candidates confront those issues was “very, very, very refreshing,” Cynthia Hunafa, an African American retired teacher from West Des Moines, told me. She was especially pleased that the candidates faced tough questions about criminal-justice reform: “I’m glad to hear that brought up today because I haven’t been hearing it much of late.”

Concerns about diversity alone may not be enough to dislodge the dominance of Iowa and New Hampshire after 2020. But the states could face a more unpredictable future if they elevate a candidate next month who wins the nomination but then fails to defeat Donald Trump in the general election. If Democrats lose again, almost every accepted belief in the party about how to contest elections could be rattled—including about relying on a primary calendar that gives primacy to two mostly white states on behalf of a party that is becoming only more diverse.

Republican hypocrisy knows no bounds. It is hard to write this in new ways every few minutes, but it is the job of any honest person to acknowledge it. With Donald Trump’s impeachment trial playing out in the Senate and a Republican Party now actively colluding to cover up his crimes, old videos of very visible Republicans and Trump allies contradicting their current positions have started springing up.

Sen. Lindsey Graham is one of the more obvious examples because his 180-degree turnabout on executive powers, the abuse of those powers, and the subject of impeachment is arguably the most transparent example of how craven the Republican Party has become in its amoral quest for power. 

Dating back to Jan. 23, 1999, the clip below shows a younger Sen. Graham speaking at a press conference and basking in that camera limelight he so clearly desired and now requires.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: The law allows a different disposition if the offender comes before the court: “yes I’m guilty and I’m sorry and I throw myself on the mercy of the court.”  The sentence is usually different in a case like that versus someone who takes the legal system to the bitter end, and uses every twist and turn, and every gimmick, to try and beat the charges, for lack of a better word. So I’m going to argue that proportionality is something we need to consider, but is something that the defendant usually has to earn. And when you have someone who has flouted the law at every turn, then usually the sanctions are much more severe.

This was Sen. Graham’s attempt to dismiss the fact that the Republican Party’s “high crime” against then president Bill Clinton was that he obstructed justice in order to hide and lie about an extramarital affair he was having. The “proportionality” being brought to his mouth was the fact that none of it seemed very high crime-like, and Graham wanted to angle for the idea that Clinton’s lack of remorse showed an elitism and a belief he was above the law.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has arguably committed high crimes not only every day that he has been president, but every day since he began running for president.

“When you have somebody who has flouted the law at every turn, then usually the sanctions are more severe.”—@LindseyGrahamSC OTD in 1999 pic.twitter.com/a8OI0zng8I

— Windsor Mann (@WindsorMann) January 23, 2020

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos compared the abortion rights debate to the battle to eliminate slavery during remarks at a Colorado Christian University event in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday night.

DeVos, a Christian conservative, discussed the Trump administration's record of opposition to abortion, and said she was reminded of President Abraham Lincoln. "He, too, contended with the 'pro-choice' arguments of his day," she said, according to prepared remarks shared Thursday by the department with POLITICO. "They suggested that a state’s 'choice' to be slave or to be free had no moral question in it."

She said Lincoln reminded "those pro-choicers" that a vast majority of Americans viewed slavery as a vast moral evil. “Lincoln was right about the slavery 'choice' then, and he would be right about the life 'choice' today," she said. “Because as it’s been said: Freedom is not about doing what we want. Freedom is about having the right to do what we ought.”

Similar comparisons between slavery and abortion by conservatives have drawn intense criticism. For example, minority members of the Utah Legislature, all of them Democrats, condemned comments by GOP Lt. Gov Spencer Cox comparing abortion to slavery at an Eagle Forum convention earlier this month.

Department officials had said the event at the Museum of the Bible, which included a Q&A session led by conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, was closed to press coverage. However, a reporter for the Colorado Times Recorder attended and wrote an article first reporting the DeVos remarks.

Students from the university are in the nation's capital for the annual March for Life on Friday that protests the legalization of abortion, Colorado Politics reported.

Last week, DeVos was in attendance as President Donald Trump in his effort to court evangelicals rolled out new guidance on prayers in schools and a proposed Department of Education rule protecting the rights of religious student groups at public universities.

DeVos, an avid school choice proponent, also said at the Colorado Christian University gathering there is “irony” in being pro-choice for the mother who seeks an abortion but not for the mother who seeks a different school for her child.

“There are many in the pro-life movement who heroically work to make abortion unconstitutional. Tonight, let’s talk about making it unthinkable,” she said.

In addition, DeVos in her Q&A session with Hewitt said the department’s much-criticized final rule on the Title IX law, which protects students from sexual discrimination or harassment, is coming “soon," according to the Colorado Times Recorder.

She defended the administration’s efforts to establish a new Title IX framework that is “right and just for all involved,” according to the newspaper.

“We’re very close to a final rule,” DeVos said. “But the goal is to ensure that all students are treated justly and fairly, and we believe that the rule that we will ultimately finalize will be good for all involved.”

Earlier on Wednesday, DeVos had attended oral arguments before the Supreme Court in Espinoza v. the Montana Department of Revenue, a case that could expand the use of public funds to pay for religious schools.

School choice advocates including DeVos hope a ruling in the case will end so-called Blaine Amendments, constitutional provisions in nearly 40 states that bar public funds from being used for religious schools. They note that the amendments were originally enacted to discriminate against Catholics.

“We are especially eager for the Supreme Court to put an end to the ‘last acceptable prejudice’ made manifest in bigoted Blaine Amendments which deny students the freedom to pursue faith-based education,” she said, according to the remarks.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn is well-known around these here parts for being a pretty detestable human being. Then again, detestability seems to be the only qualification for being a Republican senator these days. And Blackburn has indeed been doing her job as a Republican senator: groveling at the feet of Donald Trump while dismantling our democratic processes. 

As Donald Trump’s impeachment trial goes into another day, Republicans in the Senate are spending their time not paying attention with the deck already loaded, the fix already in. But having all of this obdurate criminality in place does not stop Republicans like Marsha Blackburn from being dumb as dirt. The senator from Tennessee decided to go and give her two cents, in a classic Republican attempt at gotcha-style politics:

Adam Schiff is hailing Alexander Vindman as an American patriot. How patriotic is it to badmouth and ridicule our great nation in front of Russia, America’s greatest enemy?

— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) January 23, 2020

Sorry! I should have warned you that your mind might be blown clear from your skull by Blackburn’s wit and wisdom. The Twitterverse very quickly realized that Marsha Blackburn had said something—something too stupid and unbelievably hubristic to let lie.

Aren't you supposed to be listening to the impeachment and not Tweeting or even having use of your phone?

— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) January 23, 2020

But people were also pissed.

Lt. Alexander Vindman has served our country 'Honorably' since 1999 to present day. Including a tour in Iraq in 2004-05 where he received a Purple Heart commendation. How DARE this guttersnipe @MarshaBlackburn try to attack an American HERO! @DeptVetAffairs @VFWHQ

— Kirsten Dinesen (@onevoice2) January 23, 2020

Damn. “Guttersnipe” sounds awful.

Omg you are awful. This man shed blood for our country. Shame on you

— marybl (@marybl62) January 23, 2020

How patriotic is it to read a book or conduct a FOX interview during a presidential impeachment trial? How patriotic is it to attack a war veteran and support a lying draft dodger? How patriotic is it to ignore facts and blabber garbage on Twitter?

— Joyce Lynn Garrett (@JLG1017) January 23, 2020

And it didn’t stop. In fact, the ratio just took off on Sen. Blackburn

Damn that escalated quickly! 🤣😂 pic.twitter.com/YDsgHFSJrE

— ⚖️I HONOR VETERANS (@veterans_i) January 23, 2020

In the event that you’re confused... you’re the elephant. 🤨 pic.twitter.com/zjQr8hWume

— Jo (@JoJoFromJerz) January 23, 2020

Some literature for Blackburn to read while she doesn’t fulfill her sworn oath on the Senate floor:

For your reading pleasure, Marsha. https://t.co/EcN7XDXBpR

— Liddle’ Savage (@littledeekay) January 23, 2020

And some more reminders:

What you CLEARLY fail to understand, and the exact reason you have NO business in the Senate is Lt. Col Vindman pledged an OATH to the United States of America - Not the @FoxNews propaganda news (or Rupert Murdoch) not to the @gop, and NOT to 45, but to his Country.

— (Freedom Fighter #1) (@Gwmitchell151) January 23, 2020

Before you knew it, #Marsha was trending. And not because The Brady Bunch is getting a reboot.

How dare you. You're knee deep in Russia money & contacts. Col Vindman shed blood for this country, put his life on the line to defend each & every one of us & now you have the gall to question HIS loyalty & open him to threats? You're despicable madam. SHAME ON YOU! pic.twitter.com/r71xMLX009

— Bimmerella🌞🇺🇸 (@bimmerella) January 23, 2020

That Tweet is to remind people that Sen. Marsha Blackburn is trash.

This is the most inane thing I've seen on Twitter today. Congrats to you and @DavidAFrench for making it possible. pic.twitter.com/qivaqWTXTD

— 🤔Hyper-rational, stoic Noel Mac🤷‍♂️ (@StrangeTonic) January 23, 2020

And finally:

This should clear it up for you. pic.twitter.com/H6kOePTBit

— 🧘‍♂️Wes Lassiter 🧘‍♂️ (@RPottery) January 23, 2020

A federal judge in October ordered the Justice Department to turn over notes from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by CNN and BuzzFeed. The deadline to comply with the order was Jan. 17. Included in the the information to be released were notes taken when FBI agents interviewed a series of potential witnesses or suspects. But when the information was turned over, one big item was missing—the notes on interviews with Jared Kushner.

Now, according to CNN, the Department of Justice is saying that an unnamed intelligence agency is reviewing the information on Kushner’s interview, and that the notes will eventually be released, “with the appropriate redactions.” How much will be left, and when those lines will appear, is still unknown.

Somehow the DOJ managed to produce notes on interviews with Paul Manafort, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and other Trump associates questioned with regard to the Russian collusion scheme, and to do so by the court-mandated deadline. It’s just the notes on Kushner that are still missing in action.

All of the information that has been produced to date has included redactions, since the FBI and other agencies look for information that might reveal sources or methods, mentions of individuals not associated with the case, and information related to any ongoing investigations and trials. The releases, which have come in stages starting in November, have coughed up hundreds of pages. More information is slated for release in February.

But it’s notable that it’s only the Kushner notes that didn’t make it by the court-ordered deadline, and the DOJ seems pretty content to be in violation of the law. It’s given no date on which the information will be complete. Some of this information has been reviewed by the House in closed session—but even that material was redacted, and none of it has been made public.

On Tuesday evening, the Office of Management and Budget responded to FOIA lawsuits over information related to the withholding of Ukraine military assistance by releasing over 100 pages of emails. However, those emails were so redacted that every line of substantive information was removed.

Republicans are using an astoundingly self-refuting talking point to lay the groundwork for Trump’s acquittal.

As Democratic impeachment managers made the case against President Donald Trump on Wednesday and Thursday, Republican senators rolled out a rationale for their future vote to acquit: that the trial is a waste of time because Democrats aren’t presenting new evidence.

“So far what [head impeachment manager Adam Schiff] has said we’ve heard before,” said Mike Braun (IN) on Wednesday. “I didn’t hear anything new today. We’ll see,” added Pat Toomey (PA). Rick Scott (FL), alluding to the lack of new evidence, repeatedly characterized the trial as “boring” during TV interviews.

But on Tuesday night, every Republican senator took vote after vote to block impeachment managers from gathering new documents and compelling witness testimony. So Republicans are complaining about Democrats not doing something they’re preventing them from doing.

This point was made succinctly by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) during a news conference held just before Wednesday’s hearing.

“What are the Republicans saying? Well, they’re saying they heard nothing new. But these Republicans voted nine times on Tuesday against amendments to ensure new witnesses and new documents,” he said. “The same Republicans saying they heard nothing new just voted nine times to hear nothing new.”

Kamala Harris (CA) made the point as well.

This is apparent to anyone who has been following the trial. But the fact that Republicans are pushing the “no new evidence” talking point illustrates the extent to which their strategy to defend Trump rests on deflection and dodges instead of an actual case.

Senators took an oath to be impartial jurors, but they want to acquit without a full accounting of the evidence

More than a half dozen Senate Republicans have used the “nothing new” talking point to dismiss the impeachment trial this week.

“Six hours of testimony so far today since I didn’t hear anything new, at all,” said John Barrasso (WY) on Wednesday. “So this overwhelming evidence that’s going to be presented to the Senate, I guess they did it yesterday because I’ve seen, heard nothing new whatsoever,” added Tim Scott (SC).

It has also gotten a lot of play on Fox News, which Schumer described during his news conference as an outlet where “at best things are left out, and at worst terribly distorted.” Josh Hawley (MO) joined Tucker Carlson’s show on Wednesday evening and lamented that Democrats are “not even trying to put on evidence. They don’t even have any evidence.”

It was also showcased during a Fox & Friends discussion on Thursday featuring former congressman Jason Chaffetz.

The GOP position might be defensible if there was no evidence to present. But a number of key figures didn’t testify during the House impeachment inquiry (John Bolton and Mick Mulvaney arguably foremost among them), and Schiff pointed out on Wednesday that investigators haven’t been able to get their hands on key documents because of Trump administration stonewalling.

“Would you like me to read that to you right now?” Trump said, referring to an unusual first-person cable former acting US ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor sent to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in which he expressed concerns about the Trump administration’s hold-up of military aid to the country. “I would like to read it to you right now, except I don’t have it, because the State Department wouldn’t provide it. But if you’d like me to read it to you, we can do something about that. We can insist on getting that from the State Department ... it’s just for the asking, and a document called a subpoena.”

You don’t have to take it from Schiff, however. Ironically, comments made by staunch Trump defender Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) perhaps best illustrate the absurdity of the GOP’s position that a fair trial can be conducted without all the evidence.

“I think most if not all senators are hearing the case by the prosecution and the case by the defense for the first time,” Kennedy said during a break on Wednesday evening. “If you polled in the United States Senate, nine out of 10 senators will tell you they have not read the transcript of the proceedings in the House and the tenth senator who says he has or she has is lying.”

Kennedy, in short, is acknowledging that Republican senators largely aren’t familiar with the evidence that’s already available, let alone testimony and documents the Trump administration has blocked. So on the assumption that the jurors intend to follow through on their oath to “do impartial justice” and render a verdict based on the facts, you’d think they’d want to see all the relevant evidence first.

But as the votes on Tuesday indicated, Republicans seemingly resolved to acquit Trump before the proceedings even began. And many of them apparently can’t even be bothered to come up with a non-circular rationale for doing so.

Weak talking points in Trump’s defense might be sufficient for Fox News, which went to drastic lengths to spin the first day of the trial. But Schumer warned at the end of his news conference on Thursday that he doesn’t think it’ll be good enough for voters.

“I will say this to my Republican friends: If the American people believe this is not a fair trial, which right now they seem to believe because there are no witnesses and documents, acquittal will have zero value to the president or the Republicans,” he said.

The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

Rep. Jerry Nadler spoke today during the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump. At one point during his statement, Nadler wanted to make it clear to everyone that the top Republicans in the room were full of shit, especially by their very own standards. Nadler played a clip of Sen. Lindsey Graham recorded during the 1999 Senate impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton giving his opinion of what a “high crime” is.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: What is a high crime? How about if an important person hurt somebody of low means. That’s not very scholarly, but I think it’s the truth. I think that’s what they meant by high crimes. Doesn’t even have to be a crime. It’s just using your office and you’re acting in a way that hurts people. You’ve committed a high crime.

Rough stuff. Graham seems to have known this would be coming, and, according to The New York Times, Graham slipped out a few minutes before Nadler played the clip. Because there is at least one constant in the universe: Republican cowardice.

Rep. Jerry Nadler plays video clip of Senator Lindsey Graham contradicting Trump’s claim that he can’t be impeached for abuse of power:“What’s a high crime? How about if an important person hurt somebody of low means...Doesn’t even have to be a crime.”pic.twitter.com/JBea0e9jrN

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) January 23, 2020

Enlarge / Traffic moves through an interchange along Interstate 580 on July 25, 2019, in Oakland, California. (credit: Justin Sullivan | Getty Images)

The Trump administration has for several years been working to weaken federal vehicle fuel-efficiency standards. To justify these changes, regulatory agencies argued that more stringent standards would both cost consumers more and reduce road safety. A draft version of the new final rule, however, seems to directly contradict those lines of reasoning.

The draft of the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles rule has not been released publicly, but Sen. Thomas Carper (D-Del.) has seen it. In a letter (PDF) to the White House, Carper says not only is the rule "replete with numerous questionable legal, procedural, and technical assertions," as well as "apparent typographical and other errors," but it also completely fails to provide the safety or economic benefits initially claimed.

Why SAFE?

The SAFE rule is part of a back-and-forth that hasn't literally been going on since the dawn of time, but it kind of feels that way. The kerfuffle all began in 2012 when the Obama administration adopted a fuel-economy standard that would gradually increase the average miles-per-gallon rating for most cars to 54.5mpg by 2025 (about 40mpg under real-world conditions). The Environmental Protection Agency finalized that standard in December 2016.

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Tulsi Gabbard also might want to break up Jack Dorsey’s company.

Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard approached Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about hosting a fundraiser on her behalf, Recode has learned. Dorsey, who has given money to Gabbard’s campaign, ended up turning her down.

What makes her request unexpected is that she has run a campaign that is deeply critical of Big Tech and, at times, of Twitter. In fact, unlike other candidates who have simply talked, she’s taken things a step further by suing Google for temporarily suspending her advertising account following a Democratic debate, part of a generally unsupported argument that tech platforms are politically biased.

And Gabbard, a member of Congress from Hawaii, has said that, as president, she would “absolutely” consider breaking up Twitter, too, along with other tech companies that she deems “monopolies” that are “censoring” critical voices.

That Gabbard still asked Dorsey to fundraise for her shows how Democrats in 2020 are both talking tough about Silicon Valley’s power while also asking some of its billionaires and biggest celebrities to raise money and vouch for them. It’s another sign of the tightrope that almost all Democratic politicians have to walk these days.

Gabbard’s team made the request late last year. Dorsey initially expressed interest in hosting an event alongside Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, said a person familiar with the situation, but interest died as they struggled to find a date. Then came Gabbard’s controversial vote on impeachment in December. Dorsey ultimately declined to host Gabbard’s fundraiser, saying he was trying to stay focused on policy areas and therefore was not eager to wade so fully into backing specific candidates, according to a person close to Dorsey.

Gabbard’s aides didn’t return multiple requests for comment.

The presidential candidate has said in the past that she spoke with Dorsey, who is also the CEO of the payments giant Square, only after a donation he made to her campaign became public last July.

“I had not met or spoken to him. I saw that the contribution was made and reached out and said ‘thank you so much,’ and he expressed his support for my candidacy,” Gabbard told reporters in Iowa, adding that she wouldn’t return Dorsey’s check despite her thoughts on his company. “Nothing changes my position.”

In that same conversation, though, Gabbard acknowledged that Twitter would “absolutely” be among the companies that she would consider breaking up.

Gabbard has struggled to raise the big money needed to run a competitive presidential campaign. And so having the financial firepower of Dorsey — the only known billionaire backing her campaign — could seriously help, especially if he were willing to go beyond writing one $5,600 check and instead would invite other rich friends of his to do the same at a high-dollar fundraiser.

But while cutting a personal check is one thing, hosting a fundraiser for Gabbard would be another level of public support from a CEO whose company is facing ongoing battles over disinformation, regulation, and hate speech on its platform. Plus, Dorsey is still an undecided voter.

Dorsey has explained that he admired Gabbard’s distaste for foreign intervention. But like many Democratic primary voters, he has also shown support for and donated to a second candidate: Andrew Yang.

“I’ve made personal contributions because I appreciate Andrew’s focus on the coming displacement of work due to AI and automation, and Tulsi’s strong anti-war stance,” he tweeted last summer. “Along with systematically addressing climate change and economic injustice, these are the key issues of global consequence I want to see considered and discussed more.”

The 1990 law banned documenting animal abuse on factory farms.

Kansas cannot bar people from conducting undercover investigations on factory farms, the a federal court in Kansas ruled Wednesday.

For nearly 30 years — since 1990 — a Kansas state law made it illegal to take photographs or record video in a factory farm or slaughterhouse “with the intent to damage an enterprise conducted at the animal facility.”

The law was the earliest example of what are now called “ag-gag” laws, which criminalize undercover investigations, often by animal welfare groups, that reveal abuses on farms. Since Kansas’s law was enacted, half a dozen states have passed such laws — and more have considered it. Legislators have been forthright about their motives: They’re worried that evidence of what goes on on these farms will outrage Americans, so they want to ban it.

So far, the courts aren’t impressed. Last year, the federal court for the southern district of Iowa ruled that Iowa’s ag-gag law was unconstitutional. On Wednesday, a federal judge in Kansas agreed. “The prohibition on taking pictures at an animal facility regulates speech for First Amendment purposes,” the court concluded, dismissing arguments that prohibiting the taking of pictures did not constitute a restriction on speech.

Even worse from a constitutional standpoint, the restriction on speech is not viewpoint-neutral, the court concluded: “The law plainly targets negative views about animal facilities and therefore discriminates based on viewpoint.”

Such restrictions are rarely constitutional — subject to a high standard called “strict scrutiny,” where the government must prove that there is a compelling state interest in suppressing the speech, and that the law is necessary to preserve that interest and narrowly tailored to prohibit as little as possible. This law didn’t meet that bar. (Trespassing is of course still illegal on farms just the same as on any other private property.)

That makes Kansas the fourth state — after Utah, Idaho, and Iowa — to see their ag-gag law struck down. But laws in Alabama, North Carolina, Montana, North Dakota, and Arkansas remain standing, with new ones passed as recently at 2017 — the product of a powerful agriculture industry furious about the animal rights movement.

What ag-gag laws are trying to hide

Undercover investigations in other states give us a hint as to what the investigations now legal in Kansas might uncover.

Iowa’s ag-gag law passed shortly after the results were revealed from an undercover investigation of Sparboe Farms in 2011, by the activist group Mercy for Animals. An investigator, working for Sparboe on a traveling crew that visited eight facilities in three states, got footage of workers burning the beaks off baby chicks, throwing chickens by the neck, and leaving dead chickens to rot in cages they shared with live birds.

The footage aired on Good Morning America, 20/20, and World News Tonight With Diane Sawyer. Almost a million people watched the footage on YouTube. People were infuriated and horrified. McDonald’s, Target, and other major egg purchasers cut ties with Sparboe Farms.

But it wasn’t just Sparboe Farms. Other investigations — in Iowa and all over the country — have turned up similar atrocities elsewhere.

An investigation by Direct Action Everywhere in North Carolina found that Smithfield Farms was using gestation crates on pregnant pigs, despite claiming it had ended the practice.

This video by the Humane Society of the United States was captured in Iowa in 2010, and depicts abuses at Rose Acre Farms and Rembrandt Enterprises. It would have been illegal to film after 2012, when the state’s ag-gag law was enacted. The investigation found cages with weeks-old decomposed hen carcasses, live hens with severe infections and abscesses, and hens suffering uterine prolapses (a consequence of the strain of laying far too many eggs), including a hen whose internal organs became caught in the floor of the cage.

Importantly, these incidents are not the result of a few maliciously cruel slaughterhouse workers. They occur routinely on factory farms — they’re systemic problems.

“In virtually every instance where we’ve exposed a factory farm, they claim there is a mythical ‘humane barn’ where the animals were well treated,” Wayne Hsiung, an investigator with Direct Action Everywhere, told Vox after one such investigation. “The reality is that they must do this because the public does not have a stomach for animal torture.“

Ag-gag laws successfully keep atrocities on farms hidden

Ag-gag laws are rarely actually used to prosecute activists. But they’ve nonetheless succeeded at their mission of squelching dissent. That, the federal judge in Kansas decided, is why the Animal Legal Defense Fund, which sued the state, had standing to sue: “ALDF wishes to conduct an undercover investigation in Kansas but has refrained from doing so out of fear of criminal prosecution under the Act. If the Court finds that the Act is unconstitutional, ALDF will commence an undercover investigation in Kansas.”

ALDF is fairly typical of other animal organizations in its reluctance to defy ag-gag laws.

The organizations that arrange undercover investigations mostly avoid putting themselves at legal risk, Josh Balk, vice president of farm animal protection at the Humane Society, told me last year. “Most organizations will not go into a state to actively break a law,” which means that ag-gag laws have been effective at shielding farms from scrutiny.

One person has been arrested under an ag-gag law so far: Amy Meyer of Utah, who stood in a public thoroughfare filming the treatment of cows in a slaughterhouse visible from the road. Utah’s law shouldn’t have applied to her, as it only prohibited recordings that were made while an investigator was there on “false pretenses.” Charges were quickly dropped once the case attracted national attention. Nonetheless, the whole episode put the lie to the insistence of ag-gag proponents that the laws would only be used to charge people for extreme and outrageous behavior.

Animal advocates have responded with caution. “None of the major animal protection groups have done anything in Iowa in the last seven years,” Harvard’s Chris Green told me last year. The ag-gag laws worked. And when Iowa’s law was overturned, animal activists went back to work in the state.

Our nightmarish food system

Ultimately, though, ag-gag laws aren’t the real problem, they’re a symptom of it. The problem is that what goes on on our farms is so horrifying, and so unconscionable to the typical American consumer, that agribusinesses have turned to trying to hide it.

“The situation agribusiness faced was this,” Balk told me. “They tried for many years” to defend the treatment of animals in industrial farming — blaming systemic abuses on individual bad workers, claiming that their practices were good for animals. “They lost every time. They lost ballot measures, they lost their customers — fast-food chains and major grocery stores.”

That’s why there was a sudden surge of interest in banning undercover investigations of factory farms. Ag-gag laws, in other words, came about because agribusiness concluded the horrors of our food system couldn’t stand up to the light of day.

People want affordable meat. They also don’t want animals treated cruelly. Right now, the industry is trying to provide the meat and hide the cruelty. But we can do better. It’s fair to expect a food system that doesn’t have to hide its conduct from its customers — and fair to be very concerned that our current food system considered ag-gag laws a better solution.

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Senate Republicans are united again in saying they've heard absolutely nothing new in the House impeachment managers presentation against Donald Trump. That's after they voted en masse, as a unified bloc, against 10 amendments from Democrats to provide more information at the outset of the trial. They don't want to hear anything new, which is glaringly apparent in their disdain for the rules and blatant flouting of them.

They're acting like a bunch of middle school kids bored in their civics class. "Gum-chewing, snacking, yawning and alleged napping could be seen throughout the cramped chamber," AP's Laurie Kellman reports. "Some openly snickered when lead prosecutor Adam Schiff said he’d only speak for 10 minutes. And when one of the freshman House prosecutors stood to speak, many of the senator-jurors bolted for the cloak rooms, where their phones are stored." Which is the least of it. Numerous Republican senators have been reported to have just left for long stretches at a time. Rand Paul brought in a crossword to play with. At one point more 1/5 of the Senate—21 members—were out of the chamber. Which leads to one major question: what in the hell is Chief Justice John Roberts doing in the meantime, since he's refusing to enforce the rules?

He is presiding over this trial, which is supposed to mean enforcing the rules, not acting like a potted plant and doing whatever it is he's been doing—catching up on reading? Crossword puzzles? We don't know that either, because Mitch McConnell didn't let any cameras in besides the ones controlled by him. We get one camera view, the person who is speaking, so all the senators who are supposed to be remaining in their seats, paying attention, not talking can do whatever the hell they want, it seems.

Republicans clearly don't give a damn about anything, Trump could steal the entire treasury and if they got a kickback, they'd be fine with it. But they're being just a little too obvious in that, underestimating the extent to which the voters are turning against them, both in hearing new witnesses and documents, and in convicting and removing Trump from office.

They're playing with fire, increasing the likelihood that they'll be severely burned in November.

Viewers were shown video without the audio, allowing hosts to spin the proceedings in real time.

As the impeachment trial got underway in the Senate on Wednesday, Fox News covered it in a way that gave the appearance of journalism but was actually propaganda.

In fairness, the network did cover the entirety of Rep. Adam Schiff’s two-hour opening statement. But after that, while CNN and MSNBC continued to broadcast the trial, Fox News turned to spin.

Back in November, Fox News spun the House impeachment hearings by featuring short, out-of-context clips of Republicans defending President Trump that portrayed things in the best possible light for them. But that option wasn’t available on Wednesday, as the entirety of the day was allotted to Democratic impeachment managers.

Starting with The Five, the network’s early evening roundtable commentary show, and continuing throughout the evening, Fox News broadcast portions of screen-in-screen video of the trial. But instead of playing the audio, network hosts provided the normal Trumpian spin. So while someone who just looked at the screen may have concluded Fox News was covering the trial, in fact it wasn’t covering it at all.

The network went as far as to broadcast screen-in-screen video of the trial during commercial breaks — but, again, without the sound that was necessary to make any sense of what was being discussed.

Fox News primetime hosts did everything they could to diminish the significance of the impeachment trial. Tucker Carlson began his show by comparing it to “a movie written and directed by children whose ending you already know, and by the way, it’s 20 hours long, in Hungarian, with misspelled subtitles.” He even offered a tongue-in-cheek apology to viewers when he did show brief clips from the trial.

During the 9 pm hour — just before Schiff closed the day’s proceedings by emotionally imploring Republican senators to have the same courage that witnesses like Fiona Hill and Alexander Vindman did in coming forward to testify, even at risk of their careers — Sean Hannity began his show by immediately cutting away from the trial, telling his viewers “none of this will matter,” and describing Schiff as a “lunatic” (a characterization at odds with other primetime segments that criticized the trial for being boring).

Hannity later played a supercut of snippets of Schiff’s testimony that framed things in the most demeaning possible light.

Say what you will about Adam Schiff, but nobody who actually watched his presentation on Wednesday was likely to come away with the impression that he’s insane or, as Carlson suggested, so unlikable he’s incapable of making friends. But those are the takeaways Fox News viewers were force-fed.

Things didn’t get much better on Thursday morning. Fox News’s coverage of the trial had a circular quality, criticizing Democrats for not presenting new evidence while ignoring the fact that they’re unable to do so because of GOP stonewalling.

Why does this matter? Fox News’s coverage of the impeachment trial’s day-long rules debate on Tuesday was easily the highest-rated on broadcast and cable. The network drew record ratings in 2019, and its viewers constitute a large portion of Trump’s base. Trump rewards the network for its loyalty by relentlessly promoting its programming on social media and granting it exclusive interviews, including as recently as Wednesday morning.

The 2.7 million people who have been watching Fox News’s impeachment trial coverage at any given time are being told a story about it that’s completely untethered from reality — one that reinforces America’s deep polarization between the roughly 50 percent of voters who want Trump removed from office and the 40 to 45 percent who continue to support him through scandal after scandal.

There’s nothing Schiff could have said on Wednesday that Fox News’s evening and primetime hosts wouldn’t have spun as evidence of his mental instability, his obsession with taking down Trump. And while viewers were being spun on Wednesday, they were shown soundless video of the trial, the misleading implication being that they don’t have to bother watching it since Fox News is on top of it for them.

The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.