It's becoming evident that Rudy Giuliani's core business in the Trump administration has been selling his own access to Donald Trump and Trump’s top officials to international figures needing favors from the U.S. government. That explains why Giuliani has not been billing Donald Trump for his services as he combs the world for conspiracy theories favorable to Trump and damaging to his enemies: He doesn't need to. Giuliani has been doing favors for Trump to curry Trump's favor and interest, then using that as the hook to convince prospective clients that he can use his influence to bend our government in their favor. For, of course, a fee.
A new Washington Post report now reveals that as Giuliani has been churning away at his Biden conspiracies, in Ukraine he's been using those contacts as business opportunities. The Post reports that Giuliani drafted an arrangement last February to represent Ukrainian prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko, for at least $200,000, and assist in Ukrainian efforts to recover allegedly stolen Ukrainian funds. The negotiations also proposed payments to Fox News analysts and lawyers Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova for the same services. A separate negotiation would have had the three lawyers being paid $300,000 directly by the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice.
Neither agreement was ever signed, but it was clear what Giuliani was expected to bring to the table. "[I]n an interview with the publication Ukrainian Truth this month, Lutsenko described how he was eager for Giuliani to help him get a meeting with the U.S. attorney general," says the Post, which Giuliani agreed he could do. But after months of delays, Giuliani then insisted that it would be impossible to arrange the meeting with new Trump Attorney General William Barr unless Lutsenko paid a lobbyist firm to procure it. Lutsenko was instrumental in the scheme to oust U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, condemning her in an interview with Giuliani-favored Hill columnist John Solomon.
All of this was happening simultaneous to Giuliani, Toensing, and diGenova’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials for "investigations" of Joe Biden and his family. It was also happening as Giuliani's now-indicted associates were allegedly making illegal campaign donations to former Congressman Pete Sessions, and as Giuliani and the pair were pressuring for the removal of Yovanovitch. It happened as Giuliani's associate, Lev Parnas, was assisting Rep. Devin Nunes in meeting with disgraced Ukrainian ex-prosecutor Victor Shokin in Vienna, also in an attempt to procure Biden "dirt."
This isn't the only instance of Giuliani using his influence with Trump and Barr as a selling point for a prospective client. Giuliani also lobbied the Trump Justice Department to drop criminal charges against a Venezuelan energy executive who had been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a billion-dollar money laundering scheme.
Giuliani also provided services to Reza Zarrab, the "ringleader of a crime organization designed to evade U.S. sanctions against Iran" operating out of Trump Towers Istanbul: In an Oval Office meeting, Giuliani asked for a "prisoner swap" of the U.S.-held Zarrab for an American, Pastor Andrew Brunson, who had been seized by Turkey on bizarre and fictional charges. (Trump actually asked then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to drop charges against Zarrab during the meeting, but Tillerson refused.)
Rudy Giuliani's core business, then, is not providing legal services to Donald Trump. It is selling his own access to Trump to the world's wealthiest criminals and to people needing specific, important personal favors from Trump and Attorney General Barr's Department of Justice. Giuliani's work on Trump's favored conspiracy theories exonerating Russia and implicating potential election opponent Biden may solely be Giuliani's means of maintaining the close connections to Trump needed to sell his own services to criminals and governments elsewhere.
ardmhacha writes: Apple has complied with Russian demands to show the annexed Crimean peninsula as part of Russian territory on its apps. Russian forces annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014, drawing international condemnation. The region, which has a Russian-speaking majority, is now shown as Russian territory on Apple Maps and its Weather app, when viewed from Russia. But the apps do not show it as part of any country when viewed elsewhere. The State Duma, the Russian parliament's lower house, said in a statement: "Crimea and Sevastopol now appear on Apple devices as Russian territory." Russia treats the naval port city of Sevastopol as a separate region. The BBC tested several iPhones in Moscow and it appears the change affects devices set up to use the Russian edition of Apple's App Store. Apple had been in talks with Russia for several months over what the State Duma described as "inaccuracy" in the way Crimea was labelled. Further reading: Apple Has No Backbone.
Kharagpur Kharagpur Kharagpur Kharagpur Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, on Feb. 16, 2017. The $ 3.2 billion of annual condom sales, dominated by pharmaceutical giants Bayer AG, Pfizer Inc. and Merck & Co., according to the last major drug company to explore the area. Photographer: Sumit Dayal / Bloomberg via Getty Images | Bloomberg via Getty Images
Some researchers are skeptical that it’s safe and effective.
Roughly half of all pregnancies worldwide aren’t planned. We can attribute this, at least partially, to the fact that half the species (ahem, women) bears most of the birth control burden. If men had access to a long-lasting contraception, researchers have projected, the rate of unplanned pregnancies would tumble.
Now, Indian scientists claim they are getting closer to giving men such an option. Officials at the Indian Council of Medical Research say they’ve successfully completed clinical testing of the world’s first injectable male contraceptive, the Hindustan Times reported.
“The product is ready, with only regulatory approvals pending with [India’s drug regulator],” Radhey Shyam Sharma, a New Delhi reproductive biologist who leads the research, told the newspaper. “The product can safely be called the world’s first male contraceptive.”
If that were true, it would mean India has found one of the holy grails of reproductive medicine — overcoming the biological and regulatory challenges that have thwarted past attempts to bring a new male birth control to market. (For more on those, and other promising male birth control options, see here.)
The product is a nonsurgical vasectomy called RISUG, which stands for “reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance,” and it’s effectively an injection in men’s penises. If that sounds like something no man would ever agree to, let me explain.
With RISUG, doctors inject a polymer gel into the vas deferens, the tube that transports sperm and semen out of the penis, under local anesthesia. This is intended to block sperm, and therefore, the chances that a man impregnates a woman, with effects that can last for 13 years, Sharma told the Hindustan Times.
In some ways, it’s similar to a vasectomy, asurgery that involves cutting or tying the vas deferens to stop sperm from entering the urethra and getting passed along to a female partner. But reversing a vasectomy requires more surgery, and the RISUG treatment can reportedly be reversed simply with another shot that breaks down the gel and could cost as little as $10.
RISUG’s potential has been highlighted by the media for years. In 2015, Vice called it “the perfect male birth control. ... It’s affordable, minimally invasive, and fully reversible—and it’s the most effective, non-permanent way of preventing pregnancy (from the sperm side) the world has ever seen, according to studies so far.”
A2017 Bloomberg feature on the efforts to develop it suggested that it would get approval by Indian regulators that year. “The procedure is 98 percent effective at preventing pregnancy — about the same as condoms if they are used every time — and has no major side effects,” Bloomberg said.
But however promising RISUG may seem, and however much the world needs a new form of male birth control, some researchers are skeptical. And a closer look at the most recent phase three clinical trial of the treatment in India suggests there’s good reason to be cautious.
A new RISUG trial raises more questions than answers
Sharma recently published the results of the clinical trial on RISUG in the Indian Journal of Medical Research, and it tells a slightly more complicated story than what he’s been telling the press. The study involved 139 men under the age of 41 who were living with their wives and had at least two children each. The men were given a single dose of RISUG and then followed up by doctors for six months. Their wives were also monitored to find out if they became pregnant. Note: This is a small, short-term study.
Importantly, the partners of the 133 men in the trial who got the shot didn’t get pregnant despite having unprotected sex.
But while the researchers recorded no severe side effects, they did note that “mild scrotal enlargement” was common, as was scrotal pain and nodules at the injection site. These issues resolved within the six-month study period — but two men experienced ongoing “fluid collection” around their scrotums.
The short-term swelling and discomfort may be acceptable to men and regulators, since it resolved quickly, said Michael Skinner, a reproductive biologist who studies male contraceptives at Washington State University. But the continued fluid buildup two men experienced is more concerning, and we’d need a longer-term trial to understand the impact of this response.
Even more curious, six of the men in the trial couldn’t tolerate a complete dose of RISUG “either because of leakage from the syringe or because of vas counter punctures,” the study’s authors wrote. The 133 men who did tolerate the shot only stopped releasing sperm between one and six months after the procedure, meaning the injection took a while to kick in. And while the partners of those men didn’t become pregnant, it’s not clear whether the sperm-fighting effects will last — and whether they will outweigh the potential harms of RISUG, since, again, the study was too small and short term to say for sure.
To reach the US market, regulators would need studies involving thousands of participants, explained Stephanie Page, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington. The RISUG developer would also need to show that the treatment is as safe and effective as currently available birth control options.
But that might be difficult, Page said. “[RISUG] is a non-scalpel vasectomy that fails in six of 139 men. That isn’t great compared to vasectomy. And the ‘[switch] on rate’ is longer than a regular vasectomy, which is usually one month.”
A Berkeley, California-based non-profit called the Parsemus Foundation has licensed the RISUG technology in the US. And the related product they’ve developed, Vasalgel, is only in the preclinical phase of testing. According to Parsemus, the results from animal studies — on rabbits and monkeys — are promising. But there’s no human trial scheduled yet. So despite the hype, it’s also far from being approved for the market.
Even so, the Hindustan Times report said, it could be a matter of months before the product hits the Indian market.
We need more data to understand the effects of penis injection birth control
Before this new RISUG clinical trial was published, researchers have been raising concerns about the treatment. In 2014, researchers in India penned a commentary in the Indian Journal of Medical Research on RISUG’s promise and perils. “RISUG has surely created a new concept of contraception with great feasibility and long lasting sterility,” they wrote. “Unfortunately, the advancement of this injectable polymer is slow, the clinical trials are not providing enough robust conclusions.” (The lead author on that paper did not respond to Vox’s request for comment, nor did Sharma.)
A 2018 paper by researchers at the University of Virginia School similarly raised concerns about RISUG’s safety. They cited earlier stage clinical trials and studies in animals that showed RISUG may damage sperm and tissues in the male reproductive organs. “To date,” they also noted, “there has been no data reported on reversibility of RISUG in humans.” So only animal trials have demonstrated the product’s potential to be reversed.
Skinner, the reproductive biologist, echoed these concerns. “I have not seen any large clinical trails yet, nor studies on reversibility in humans, so [we] will need to wait and see how useful it becomes,” he told Vox. “It could replace need for vasectomy in future, and if reversible [be] useful for contraception. The key is some large scale trials for utility and reversibility in humans.”
So for now, it’s probably best to ignore the hype until the slow grind of science yields clearer answers about RISUG.
In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, more than 10,000 automated Twitter accounts got caught conducting a coordinated campaign of tweets to discourage people from voting. These automated accounts may seem authentic to some, but a tool called Botometer was able to identify them while they pretentiously argued and agreed, for example, that “democratic men who vote drown out the voice of women.” We are part of the team that developed this tool that detects the bot accounts on social media.
Our next effort, called BotSlayer, is aimed at helping journalists and the general public spot these automated social media campaigns while they are happening.
It’s the latest step in our research laboratory’s work over the past few years. At Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, we are uncovering and analyzing how false and misleading information spreads online.
However, we have also noticed that journalists, political campaigns, small businesses and even the public at large may have a better sense than we do of what online discussions are most likely to attract the attention of those who control automated propaganda systems.
We receive many requests from individuals and organizations who need help collecting and analyzing social media data. That is why, as a public service, we combined many of the capabilities and software tools our observatory has built into a free, unified software package, letting more people join our efforts to identify and combat manipulation and misinformation campaigns.
Many of our tools allow users to retrospectively query and examine our collection of a 10% random sample of all Twitter traffic over a long period of time. A user can specify keywords, hashtags, user mentions, locations or user accounts they’re interested in. Our software then collects the matching tweets and looks more deeply at their content by extracting links, hashtags, images, movies, phrases and usernames those tweets contain.
Our trend analysis app looks at how closely that suspicious content trends together. Our network analysis app shows how ideas spread from user to user. Our map app checks the geographical pattern of suspicious activities around important topics.
Our Botometer app then detects how likely it is that elements of the online discussion are being coordinated by a group of automated accounts. Rather than reflecting an authentic discourse of real people, these accounts may in fact be controlled by a person or an organization. These accounts usually act together, with some of them tweeting propaganda or disinformation, and others agreeing and retweeting, forming an inauthentic discourse around them to attract attention and draw real people into the online discussion.
BotSlayer brings all the pieces together, letting a person using it do all those analyses with the entire flow of Twitter traffic.
BotSlayer’s system collects all matching tweets – not just a sample – and saves them in a database for any retrospective investigation. Its web interface, in one screen, shows users in real time the terms and keywords that are part of suspicious activity around their interests. Users can click on icons to search for related information on various websites and social media platforms to look for related malicious efforts elsewhere online.
For example, during the 2018 U.S. midterm election, many bot accounts that were reported on Twitter were also found to be related to Facebook bot accounts with similar profiles.
On July 10, 2019, one of our BotSlayer systems, focusing on Twitter activity about U.S. politics, flagged suspicious activity for us to investigate. The system noticed the appearance of a large group of tweets, mostly from brand-new Twitter accounts whose names ended with a string of numbers – like @MariaTu34743110. Those are clues that their activity may be generated by a bot.
They were posting and retweeting links to a single YouTube video attacking a financier named Bill Browder, who has been at the center of a dispute between the United States and the Russian Federation. That shared focus is a clue that all the accounts were part of an interconnected system.
When we dug deeper, we identified more than 80 likely bots coordinating with each other to try to boost widespread attention to Browder’s alleged wrongdoing using the video on YouTube.
Visualization of the coordinated campaign against Bill Browder. At left, a timeline shows the volume of tweets spiking suddenly. At right, the accounts’ interactions are mapped, with likely bots in red, showing how closely interconnected they were.
These accounts are a bit more sophisticated than political-attack bots, with one lead account typically announcing that users can multiply their riches by transferring some of their cryptocurrency into the scammer’s digital wallet. Then other accounts retweet that announcement, in an effort to make the scheme seem legitimate. At times they reply with doctored screenshots claiming to show that the scheme works.
The feedback from testers has helped us make the system more robust, powerful and user-friendly.
As our research advances, we will continue to improve on the system, fixing software bugs and adding new features. In the end, we hope that BotSlayer will become a sort of do-it-yourself toolkit enabling journalists and citizens worldwide to expose and combat inauthentic campaigns in social media.
Donald Trump had gotten caught trying to extort Ukraine and he knew it when he finally decided to release some $400 million in military aid he had been withholding from the country. The New York Times reports:
President Trump had already been briefed on a whistle-blower’s complaint about his dealings with Ukraine when he unfroze military aid for the country in September, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Lawyers from the White House counsel’s office told Mr. Trump in late August about the complaint, explaining that they were trying to determine whether they were legally required to give it to Congress, the people said.
Now we know where Trump got tipped off to the notion that he didn't want a 'quid pro quo,' the terminology he offered when Ambassador Gordon Sondland called him up to inquire about the matter on either September 7 or 9 (the date hasn’t been consistent). Trump using such precise language without being prompted was always a question mark because he clearly doesn't bat around Latin phrases very often. The lawyers briefing Trump likely used the term when discussing the complaint with him, though that's pure speculation.
But given the timing of Sondland's call, Trump was almost certainly covering his behind when he allegedly professed to Sondland that he wanted "nothing" from Ukraine. The revelation shreds one of the key defenses Trump and GOP lawmakers have used to deny the fact that he had linked the military aid to political favors he sought from Ukraine. Trump’s denials were simply the product of him knowing he stood accused of wrongdoing.
Trump also denied demanding anything from Ukraine in return for the aid when he spoke with GOP Sen. Ron Johnson several days after being informed of the complaint. When Johnson asked Trump directly if the aid was contingent on Ukraine taking some other action, Trump angrily denied it.
“Without hesitation, President Trump immediately denied such an arrangement existed,” Mr. Johnson wrote in a letter this month to House Republicans.
Mr. Trump erupted in anger and began cursing, he wrote.
“‘No way,’” Mr. Trump said, according to Mr. Johnson. “‘I would never do that. Who told you that?’”
On Monday evening, Tucker Carlson devoted his Fox News show to informing his audience about what’s really important: not defending democracy, and not saving human lives, that’s for sure. During a discussion about Ukraine, Carlson announced his utter indifference to the slaughter of civilians and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. "Why do I care?” said Carlson. “Why do I care what's going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia? I'm serious." But that still didn’t make Carlson’s position quite as plain as he wanted. So he made it plainer. “Like, why do I care? And why shouldn't I root for Russia? Which I am.”
Carlson blew off suggestions that the United States has an interest in defending democracy against totalitarian regimes. He responded to concerns about Russia’s invasion, about people dying, and about democracy under threat the same way: “I don’t care.”
But there was something that Carlson cared about. “Now,” he said, “I know Hunter Biden, I actually like Hunter Biden, but that's totally corrupt, and you know it.”
In his statements, Carlson is not out in far-far-right field all on his own. He’s solidly beside Donald Trump. After all, in his testimony last week, Foreign Service officer David Holmes testified about how U.S. Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland described Trump’s concerns. According to Sondland, Trump also had absolutely no concern about the threat to Ukraine. "Ambassador Sondland stated that the president only cares about big stuff," said Holmes. “He meant big stuff that benefits the president like the Biden investigation."
Carlson cheering on the destruction of an ally should be shocking. But it’s not. It’s the standard Republican position. It’s been the standard Trump position since he made clear his admiration for Vladimir Putin well before his election. and now that there’s no Republican Party outside of Trump’s, “Rootin’ for Putin” is the official Republican team motto.
And of course they’re doing it, because the priority is destroying political opponents. Does Tucker Carlson have to spell out that they hate democracy? Oh, wait … he already did.
The Violence Against Women Act lapsed in February, after it was left out of a funding bill that ended the partial government shutdown. The House passed a reauthorization of it back in early April, and since then it's been languishing in Moscow Mitch McConnell's legislative graveyard.
One of the very few women in the Senate Republican conference happens to be up for reelection in 2020 and happens to not be terribly comfortable about it. That's Iowa's Sen. Joni Ernst, who spent much of her last week before Thanksgiving recess blocking Democratic efforts to bring the bill to the floor. That's because she's been working on own version of the bill, part of her reelection campaign. One that's very friendly to McConnell's masters at the NRA and very unfriendly to Native and LGBTQ women.
The House reauthorization contains a provision that eliminates the "boyfriend loophole" by expanding a current ban on firearm purchases for all abusive romantic partners. The current ban applies to spouses or formerly married partners convicted of domestic violence or who are under a restraining order. The expansion would include dating or live-in partner who were not legally married. The House bill also makes it explicit that grant money under VAWA can be used by recipients' staff to train how to respond to and stop discrimination against LGBTQ victims of violence.
Ernst's version of the bill does none of these things and makes the law worse in a significant way. It would provide less protection for Native American women from their abusers, weakening tribal courts and infringe on tribal sovereignty by putting restrictions on tribal courts. It rolls back tribes' jurisdiction to prosecute crimes by non-Native people who abuse Native American women on tribal lands. "Tribal courts prosecuting non-Indian defendants already provide the same―if not more―due process rights than state and federal courts," Mary Kathryn Nagle, a partner and counsel at National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, told HuffPost. "Placing paternalistic restrictions on tribal courts in the name of 'due process' is nothing more than a disguise for prejudice."
Ernst and McConnell made the bill—again, the Violence Against Women Act—unfriendly to women in order to appease the NRA, white supremacists, and anti-LGBTQ bigots. That it would actually endanger more women than the currently (lapsed) version of the bill makes it an absolute non-starter with Democrats and the House. McConnell knows that, and he doesn't care. He's fine, perfectly fine, with the law never being reauthorized.
The GOP keeps making the subtext obvious: white power and authoritarianism are their goals
Carlson speaks at a National Review event in March. | Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
“Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.”
On his Monday night show, Fox News host Tucker Carlson made a comment that was shocking even by his standards. He said he’s rooting for Russia to prevail in its armed conflict with Ukraine’s fledging democracy — a conflict that began when Russia illegally invaded its neighbor years ago and continues to this day.
During a segment about impeachment with former Hillary Clinton adviser Richard Goodstein, Carlson questioned why Americans should even care that President Donald Trump used hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid to leverage Ukraine into investigating his political rivals in the first place. Goodstein responded by noting that “people are dying on the front lines” there. (More than 13,000 people have died as a result of the conflict so far.)
The US government hasn’t always thought that providing military aid to Ukraine is the smartest way to maintain stability in Eastern Europe. But even Republicans who don’t think Trump should be impeached for using it as leverage for political favors generally believe that deterring Russian aggression and protecting democracy in Eastern Europe is important. Carlson, however, went on to express a view that in a previous era would have been far outside the foreign policy mainstream, but accords with the type of nihilism he’s played a leading role in promoting during the Trump era.
“Why do I care what is going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia?!” Carlson said. “And I’m serious. Why do I care? Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.”
Watch:
Tucker: "Why do I care what is going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia? I'm serious. Why shouldn't I root for Russia? Which by the way I am." pic.twitter.com/OQopoxPYD9
Carlson saying he doesn’t care what happens in Ukraine, and that he, in fact, hopes that the country is subjugated by Moscow may accord with an extreme interpretation of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, but it belies that idea that the United States stands for democracy at home and abroad. The clip of Carlson’s comments quickly went viral, and as his show drew to a close, Carlson — apparently aware of the stir he caused — tried to walk it back.
“Before we go, earlier in the show I noted I was rooting for Russia in the contest between Russia and Ukraine,” Carlson said. “Of course, I’m joking. I’m only rooting for America —mocking the obsession many on the left have. Ha!”
At the very end of his show, obviously aware his declaration that he's rooting for Russia against Ukraine had become a thing, Tucker Carlson claims that he was "joking" when he said it and that he was merely mocking "obsession" with Russia. pic.twitter.com/MxFLMRiApa
It should be noted that Carlson’s comments about Russia weren’t the only time on Monday’s broadcast that he defended an authoritarian leader. During a segment immediately following his discussion with Goodstein, Carlson defended Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad by questioning whether he was really responsible for committing war crimes against his own people — a position at odds with a mountain of evidence indicating that Assad is in fact responsible.
As former Office of Government Ethics Director Walter Shaub noted in response to Carlson’s comments on Tuesday morning, his open rooting for Russia and defense of Assad alludes to a deep fault line below the surface of modern politics. In the Trump era, it’s not so much liberals versus conservatives, but those who believe in democracy versus those who are, at best, indifferent about Putin-style authoritarianism.
Fox News host says he roots for Russia against the West. He said the quiet part out loud. This clip is just one more exhibit supporting the case that it's no longer left vs. right but democracy vs. authoritarianism. I think many still underestimate the threat to the republic. https://t.co/K18P9sPgld
But comments like the ones he made on Monday illustrate why, despite his strong ratings, Carlson has a hard time retaining advertisers. And on Tuesday, Michael Blake, vice chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), used his appearance on one of Fox News’s “straight news” shows to question why Carlson still has a job with the network.
Asked to respond to comments Carlson made about Michelle Obama, Blake instead turned his fire on Carlson.
“The core question is why the hell does Tucker Carlson still have a job here in the first place? The reality is this is someone who said white supremacy is a hoax,” Blake said. “Why does Fox still allow him to be here in the first place?”
“We didn’t bring you on to talk about Tucker Carlson, I brought you on to talk about the Democratic field,” host Bill Hemmer replied, ignoring the fact that he was the one who brought up Carlson in the first place.
Watch:
Fox Guest: "The core question is why the hell does Tucker Carlson still have a job here in the first place? This is someone said white supremacy is a hoax. Why does Fox still allow him to be here in the first place?" Fox Anchor: We didn't bring you on to talk about Tucker. pic.twitter.com/wQ2HftFiXG
Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan testify about the Court’s budget during a House committee hearing. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
It’s a genuinely tough case with no good answers.
Two stories can be told about Tanzin v. Tanvir, a major religious liberty case that the Supreme Court agreed to hear last Friday.
The first is the story of Muhammad Tanvir, the plaintiff at the heart of the case, and this first story is likely to inspire a great deal of sympathy among liberals. Tanvir says he was approached by two FBI agents who asked him “whether he had anything he ‘could share’ with the FBI about the American Muslim community.” After Tanvir told the agents that he did not wish to become an informant, those agents allegedly threatened him with deportation and placed him on the “No Fly List.”
Because of this treatment, Tanvir also claims that he was unable to fly to see his ailing mother in Pakistan, and that he had to quit a job as a long-haul trucker because he could no longer fly home to New York after a one-way delivery.
The core issue in Tanvir’s lawsuit is whether he may sue these FBI agents for money damages under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a federal law protecting religious liberty.
And that brings us to the second story that can be told about Tanvir — a story that will inspire very little sympathy from anyone on the political left. If the Supreme Court holds that such lawsuits are permitted under RFRA, the biggest winner is unlikely to be religious minorities like Tanvir. Rather, the biggest winner is likely to be the Christian right.
RFRA, after all, is the same statute at issue in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), the Supreme Court’s decision allowing business owners to deny birth control coverage to their employees if the owner objects to contraception on religious grounds. More recently, in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), the Court signaled that government officials attempting to enforce an anti-discrimination law may be violating an individual’s religious liberty by doing so.
If the Supreme Court holds that RFRA permits Tanvir to sue the FBI agents, in other words, it could open up a can of worms that could deeply undermine federal anti-discrimination law. Federal officials charged with enforcing many anti-discrimination laws could risk financial ruin if they bring an action against someone who claims that their faith requires them to discriminate.
Suppose, for example, that a boss regularly goes out to drinks with his male subordinates — and often gives them plum job assignments because of the relationships he’s built with them while drinking. Suppose, as well, that this boss adheres to the “Billy Graham Rule,” and claims that it’s against his religion to spend similar time with his female subordinates. This sort of unequal treatment violates federal civil rights law.
Yet by logic similar to Tanvir’s arguments, under RFRA, that same boss would potentially be able to sue any federal official who tried to enforce the law’s safeguards against gender discrimination. The boss’s right to practice his faith — even if that faith were used to justify sexism — could give that boss a claim in federal court.
Tanvir, in other words, presents a deeply fraught conflict between the goal of protecting religious minorities and the goal of rooting out many other forms of discrimination. It’s also likely to put many civil rights advocates in the awkward position of hoping that Tanvir loses his case.
The Supreme Court typically does not favor suits against federal officials
Legally speaking, Tanvir boils down to a conflict over whether RFRA’s vague language permits government officials to be sued for money damages if they violate that law. RFRA provides that “government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” except in limited circumstances, and it allows someone who faces such a burden to “obtain appropriate relief” against a government official who violates this law.
But what is “appropriate relief?” A federal appeals court held that RFRA does permit money damages because of the Supreme Court’s decision in Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools (1992), which held that “we presume the availability of all appropriate remedies unless Congress has expressly indicated otherwise.” Franklin allowed a suit for money damages to move forward, so that opinion suggests that such damages are an “appropriate” remedy.
Later Supreme Court decisions, however, state that suits against federal officials are “disfavored.” Thus, in Ziglar v. Abbasi (2017), the Supreme Court cast aspersions on an “ancien regime” where courts “assumed it to be a proper judicial function to ‘provide such remedies as are necessary to make effective’ a statute’s purpose.”
The new regime, by contrast, calls for “a far more cautious course” before allowing federal officials to be sued.
It should go without saying that this view, which was developed by conservative justices over the last 40 years,is not especially popular among civil rights advocates, who typically want broad power to sue government officials who violate individual rights. Yet, because of decisions like Masterpiece Cakeshop, Tanvir is the rare case where civil rights advocates probably have more to lose they they have to gain from a system making it easier to sue government officials.
Masterpiece Cakeshop warns of a huge looming problem for victims of discrimination
On the day Masterpiece Cakeshop was decided, most court watchers dismissed it as a very minor decision. The case came to the Supreme Court as a grand showdown over whether religious conservatives have a constitutional right to violate anti-discrimination laws protecting the LGBTQ community.
But the Court largely punted this bigger question. Instead, Masterpiece Cakeshop held that states may continue to enforce their civil rights laws, but it also suggested that government officials have to be careful not to criticize the religious beliefs of people who object to those laws.
Not long after Masterpiece Cakeshop was decided, however, Justice Anthony Kennedy retired from the Court, and he was replaced by the far more conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Kennedy authored Masterpiece Cakeshop, and it’s likely that he wrote the opinion narrowly because he felt cross-pressured by that case. Kennedy was typically supportive of religious liberty claims — he voted with the majority in Hobby Lobby, for example — but he also authored several landmark gay rights cases.
Thus, as someone who is sympathetic both to religious conservatives and to victims of anti-gay discrimination, Kennedy tried to chart a middle course between advocates who were primarily concerned with enforcing civil rights laws and those that wanted to protect “religious liberty” at all costs.
The more conservative Kavanaugh, by contrast, is unlikely to seek such a middle ground, and more likely to give religious conservatives the unqualified victory they seek.
Decades ago, the Court’s religious liberty cases typically protected members of minority religions, such as Seventh-day Adventists who sought the right to honor their sabbath on a Saturday, or Amish who sought to educate their children in the manner prescribed by their faith. It’s only recently, in decisions like Hobby Lobby, that the Supreme Court started allowing members of a politically powerful faith to undercut the rights of third parties.
Thus, in a world where individuals can collect money damages from federal officials who violate their “religious liberty,” a federal employee charged with, say, enforcing laws barring discrimination against women, could wind up facing a very expensive lawsuit if they bring an action against a religious conservative who did.
Think of the previous example of a boss who follows the “Billy Graham Rule.” Current law thinks of this boss as a lawbreaker. But the new, conservative approach to religious liberty paints that boss as a victim — and a victory for Tanvir could turn the boss into a victim with a valuable legal claim.
Even if Kavanaugh adheres to Kennedy’s approach, moreover, that approach still lays traps for government officials who seek to enforce civil rights laws against religious conservatives.
Recall that, in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Kennedy objected to a few statements by Colorado civil rights officials which he viewed as too hostile to conservative religious beliefs — including an unambiguously true statement by a Colorado civil rights commissioner that “freedom of religion and religion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history.”
Thus, in a world where federal officials can be sued for “religious liberty” violations, a commissioner on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission could potentially be sued if they make an off-hand remark that’s dismissive or hostile toward religious beliefs that are used to justify discrimination.
That’s likely to chill civil rights enforcement. Officials could be reluctant to enforce the law if they know that their own pocketbooks could be on the line.
Yep, get Bloomberg off the stage. He's not a democrat.
It's becoming increasingly clear that the fact that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are viable contenders for the Democratic nomination for president is the primary motivation for billionaire Michael Bloomberg to get in the race. Bloomberg doesn't want any part of his billions going to paying a fair tax rate, to fully funding government and all the programs that will help people and rebuild federal institutions. He doesn't want to pay taxes. He wants to direct the millions he spends on fighting gun violence or climate change very publicly and to have his name plastered on every penny.
Because he's fundamentally a Republican. He got into the mayor's office in New York City with the endorsement of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. And he has spent millions—millions—on Republican congressional campaigns, including hosting a fundraiser for Rep. Peter King in 2018 and donating to Rep. Dan Donovan, who was defeated. He also helped Republicans hold control of the New York state Senate. "The path to win the House ran through New York,” said Monica Klein, the Democratic challenger to King. "There were seven flippable seats in the state, and he supported Republicans in two of them. […] To come down and say he wants to be the head of the Democratic Party—the hubris is unbelievable.”
He endorsed and raised funds for former Sen. Scott Brown in his reelection bid against Elizabeth Warren in 2012. He gave $2,700 to Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey and spent nearly $10 million on dark-money issue ads to keep him in office. In 2014, he gave $5,200 to Sen. Susan Collins in Maine. Protecting the status quo—and his low taxes—has been his priority, even at the same time that he's donated to Democrats. His bottom line seems to have been keeping the Senate, where his tax cuts are guaranteed, in Republican hands. Mike Mikus, former campaign manager for Toomey's 2016 Democratic opponent, Kathleen McGinty, pretty much nails it: "I'm certain his hand in giving Mitch McConnell a majority in the Senate will be remembered by a lot of Democratic voters."
When George W. Bush was president, Bloomberg gave donations to Bush, and only to other Republicans. He has never donated to Joe Biden, or Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren. It's hard to resist the notion that Bloomberg's political interests lie entirely in Michael Bloomberg, whether in preserving his wealth or in stroking his ego.
Yesterday a federal judge ruled, forcefully but unsurprisingly, that the "absolute immunity" from congressional investigations claimed by the Trump White House and Trump Attorney General Bill Barr is absolute bunk, antithetical to our Constitution and ridiculous on its face. This morning, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform filed a new lawsuit demanding the enforcement of House subpoenas for testimony and documents from Attorney General Barr and Trump Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.
Both officials have flatly refused to appear before Congress or provide the requested documents, repeating their fraudulent claims of immunity, but the investigation in question is not the monthslong pressure campaign to use the office of the president to extort Ukrainian officials into providing the administration with election help. This investigation is over Wilbur Ross' now-proven lies (including perjury) on the origins of the citizenship question the administration attempted to stuff into the 2020 census over the strong objections of census officials. Documents have now shown that Ross himself pushed for the question.
It is self-evident that Congress has the power to investigate charges of executive branch corruption. While the House Oversight Committee is pushing for a speedy ruling compelling both officials to sit themselves down and explain themselves, under oath, to Congress, it is unclear whether the courts will compel that act anytime soon. Barr has demanded that his Justice Department take a maximally obstructive approach in each of these cases, a plain attempt to stonewall Congress for as long as possible—ideally, until after Trump wins or loses reelection.
GOP leaders in the Kentucky legislature are pushing a bill that would effectively remove Democratic Gov.-elect Andy Beshear’s control over the state’s Department of Transportation, the latest move in an accelerating trend of Republicans stripping power from Democratic governors before they can take office.
The legislation would limit the governor to nominating a transportation secretary from a list chosen by a new a board whose nine members would be selected by the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce and local government associations, with those members subject to a veto by the Republican-run legislature. Lawmakers would also have veto power over Beshear’s nominee, making this the only cabinet position in the state requiring Senate confirmation.
This bill would therefore hand over control of a key government post to moneyed corporate interests, and with Republicans firmly in charge of the legislature, it can become law even if Beshear were to veto it. Only intervention by the courts could stop it.
This power grab comes after top Republicans floated the idea of using an obscure constitutional provision to steal the Nov. 5 election for Republican Gov. Matt Bevin, who made unsupported claims of "irregularities" in the vote. Republicans backed off that ploy amid a public backlash, but they've now set their sights on weakening the governor’s office instead.
It also follows similar lame-duck maneuvers by Republican legislators in Michigan and Wisconsin in 2018 and North Carolina in 2016—all of which came only after the GOP lost elections for governor in each state. These schemes amount to a refusal on the part of Republicans to acknowledge that Democrats are a legitimate opposition party entitled to govern when they win elections.
This is an ominous trend, and one that could rear its head at a level far above state politics. Prior to the 2016 elections, Donald Trump refused to say he would honor the results if he lost, and ever since, he’s repeatedly claimed without any evidence that widespread voter fraud cost him the popular vote. The GOP establishment has given its full support to these power grabs in the states. They could culminate in Trump rejecting a legitimate election loss and refusing to leave office next year—a prospect that Americans must be prepared for.
Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, appeared on Fox News on Nov. 25 and declared that stories to the effect that while he was in Vienna last year with a squadron of aides, he spent $63,000 on … something, and that the something might have been a meeting with corrupt former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, were “the mother of all fake news stories.” And of course, Nunes immediately followed by putting CNN and The Daily Beast with cartoon cows and a parody account from his mom on the list of people he is going to sue, sue, sue. Because Nunes wants to be just like Trump when he grows up—suing everyone and stomping on the First Amendment.
Nunes’ performance all through the impeachment inquiry was so reliably filled with non sequiturs and conspiracy bits that it generated endless internet memes and laughs on Twitter. At this point, we can be certain that none of the witnesses who appeared know Nellie Ohr, but if Taco Bell did not see a spike in sales of chalupas over the last two weeks, it certainly wasn’t Nunes’ fault.
The problem with Nunes’ latest threat to sue isn’t just that it’s ridiculous, but also that both CNN and The Daily Beast were reporting on statements made by indicted pal of Rudy Giuliani (and Donald Trump) Lev Parnas. A real estate wrangler and founder of the company Fraud Guarantee, Parnas has been hanging around Florida politics for years, and the list of possible charges that he, his partner Igor Fruman, and potentially Giuliani have racked up could generate a sentence longer than War and Peace.
Those decades of potential charges certainly provide Parnas with incentive for cooperating and providing information on other possible culprits, but seeing that he’s already in federal custody and facing that A-to-Z registry of charges, there’s less than zero incentive for him to offer up additional false testimony. So, when CNN and The Daily Beast report on Parnas’ claims,: 1) they’re reporting on Parnas’ claims; 2) they have good reason to believe there is substance behind those claims; 3) those claims are connected to a major ongoing investigation of money laundering, obstruction of justice, conspiracy to defraud the United States, etc., etc.
Nunes can sue all he wants—or at least he can sue to the extent of what’s left in his campaign funds after he used that money to buy $14,638 worth of tickets to a Celtics game along with a $5,500 limousine ride and $7,000 in food, topped off with another $2,000 for cocktails. Because that’s clearly how his donors expect him to use his funds. Or at least it’s what they should expect. He can sue all he likes.
Except he won’t.
Nunes isn’t just the guy who once leaped from an Uber, leaving a startled aide behind, and went off into the night only to return claiming he had discovered huge, huge information that had to be shared with the White House—only to end up facing the Ethics Committee because the information was actually generated by the White House. Nunes has been defending Trump and Russia at every turn to such an extent that it’s worse than ridiculous.
His claims that a Ukrainian official having the temerity to pen an op-ed critical of Trump’s willingness to hand Crimea to Russia permanently means Ukraine is at least equally guilty of interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election were ludicrous on day one of the hearings. They were still ludicrous two weeks later—but they had also become the standard Republican line.
In his Fox News interview, Nunes claimed that he was itching to get CNN in court: “We can get discovery. We can sit people down for depositions.” And he declared that “CNN and The Daily Beast are going to run for cover." But of course, CNN and The Daily Beast have an easy answer to discovery: They can direct the judge to Parnas, whose claims they were repeating.
If anyone is going to run for cover, it’s Nunes. In fact, the odds of him suing in this case are much less real than a cartoon cow. Because if there really is discovery, CNN and The Daily Beast can also insist on testimony from Nunes and his assistants about what they were really doing in Vienna.
And the last thing that Devin Nunes wants in any situation is the truth.
Yeah, this will be a disaster. And AZ and FL had better buckle up, because no one wants their shitty whites only communities.
By 2037, one quarter of the U.S. for-sale housing stock, or roughly 21 million homes will be vacated by seniors. That is more than twice the number of new properties built during a 10-year period that spanned the last housing bubble [the link may be paywalled]. From a report: Most of these homes will be concentrated in traditional retirement communities in Arizona and Florida, according to Zillow, or parts of the Rust Belt that have been losing population for decades. A more modest infusion of new housing is expected in pricey coastal neighborhoods of New York or San Francisco where younger Americans are still flocking in large numbers. On the face of it, this doesn't sound all bad. Dying homeowners have always needed to be replaced by younger ones and the U.S. has for a number of years suffered from a shortage of housing, a development that has dampened recent home sales activity and kept many millennials stuck in rentals.
But the buyers coming behind the baby boomers, the Gen Xers, are a smaller and more financially precarious generation with different preferences, posing a new kind of test for the housing market. One problem is that the bulk of the supply won't necessarily be in places where these new buyers want to live. Gen Xers and the younger millennials have shown thus far they would rather be in cities or suburbs in major metropolitan areas that offer strong Wi-Fi and plenty of shops and restaurants within walking distance -- like the Frisco suburbs of Dallas or the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. They have little interest in migrating to planned, age-restricted retirement enclaves in sunnier corners of the U.S. lined with golf courses, community centers and man-made lakes -- like The Villages, a community of 115,000 in central Florida. Innovations such as voice-recognition technology and ride-share drivers are also making it easier for older people to stay in their existing homes and eschew these retirement communities altogether.
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing on September 4, 2018. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The Supreme Court now has five votes to sabotage the next Democratic presidency.
If you’ve spent any time around the Federalist Society — the hugely influential conservative legal society that plays an outsized role in choosing President Trump’s judicial nominees — then you’ve probably noticed their obsession with a singular issue.
Kavanaugh’s opinion is not especially surprising. The Trump appointee to the Supreme Court keynoted the Federalist Society’s annual banquet earlier this month and he spent much of the Obama years frustrating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other federal agencies. But his opinion is nonetheless significant because it shows that there are almost certainly five votes on the Supreme Court to slash agencies’ regulatory power.
Last June, in Gundy v. United States, all four of Kavanaugh’s Republican colleagues indicated they want to limit agency regulation. Kavanaugh, however, did not participate in the Gundy case because he was not a member of the Court when it was argued.
On Monday, the Supreme Court announced it would not hear Paul v. United States, a case asking whether a federal law delegates too much authority to the Justice Department to determine whether certain sex offenders need to register with the government. That’s the very same issue that the Supreme Court considered in Gundy.
Kavanaugh, however, took the unusual step of releasing an opinion explaining why he thought the Court should not hear Paul. His brief opinionpraises Justice Neil Gorsuch’s effort to toss out decades of settled law regarding the power of agencies to regulate. Indeed, if anything, Kavanaugh’s Paul opinion suggests that he would restrict federal power even more than Gorsuch would.
It’s impossible to exaggerate the importance of this issue. Countless federal laws, from the Clean Air Act to the Affordable Care Act, lay out a broad federal policy and delegate to an agency the power to implement the details of that policy. Under Kavanaugh’s approach, many of these laws are unconstitutional, as are numerous existing regulations governing polluters, health providers, and employers.
A revolution against the regulatory state looms on the horizon, and the biggest losers are likely to be Democrats who hope to regain the White House in 2020.
The Nondelegation Doctrine, briefly explained
Both Gundy and Paul concern a largely defunct legal doctrine known as “nondelegation.”
Broadly speaking, Congress can make laws in two ways. The most straightforward way is it can simply command a person or industry to conduct their business in a certain way. If Congress wants to restrict pollution, for example, it can pass a law commanding power plants to use a particular technology that reduces emissions.
The problem with this approach, however, is that acts of Congress are difficult to change. If Congress had enacted a law in the 1970s requiring power plants to use the best emissions reduction technology that existed back then, it could have locked those plants into using technology that is vastly inferior to the methods of reducing emissions that exist today. At the very least, Congress would have struggled to keep abreast of new technology and to update the law as better methods of reducing emissions were invented.
Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call
Representative Ed Whitfield (R-KY) speaks at the House Triangle during the Coal Caucus’ news conference on the EPA’s proposed greenhouse gas standards for new power plants on September 26, 2013.
So that’s not what Congress did. Instead, the Clean Air Act provides that certain power plants must use “the best system of emission reduction” that currently exists, while also taking into account factors such as cost. Congress also tasked the EPA with studying what technology is available to reduce emissions and with creating binding regulations instructing energy companies on which systems they must use to reduce emissions.
As the technology evolves, the EPA may update its regulations, so that power plants in 2019 use the best system of emission reduction that exists in 2019 — not the one that existed in the 1970s.
In this way, federal policy can be both democratic and dynamic. It is democratic because the goals of federal policy are ultimately set by the people’s representatives in Congress. But it is also dynamic because Congress doesn’t have to pass a new law every time a new innovation arrives on the scene.
“Nondelegation” is the idea that the Constitution imposes limits — potentially very strict limits — on Congress’s power to give regulatory authority to federal agencies.
Under current law, “a statutory delegation is constitutional as long as Congress ‘lay[s] down by legislative act an intelligible principle to which the person or body authorized to [exercise the delegated authority] is directed to conform.’” That is, Congress has broad authority to delegate power to federal agencies so long as it explains with sufficient clarity what the agency is supposed to accomplish with its power.
In Gundy, however, Gorsuch sharply criticized this long-standing rule and called for the Court to revive the Nondelegation Doctrine.
In that opinion, Gorsuch suggested that current law risks giving agencies “unbounded policy choices.” His explanation of what new limits he would impose on federal agencies is vague and it’s hard to find a clear legal rule in the opinion. Nevertheless, Gorsuch writes that a federal law permitting agencies to regulate must be “‘sufficiently definite and precise to enable Congress, the courts, and the public to ascertain’ whether Congress’s guidance has been followed.”
As a practical matter, when the Supreme Court hands down such a vague and open-ended legal standard, it is effectively shifting power to the judiciary. What does it mean for a statute to be “sufficiently definite and precise” that people can “ascertain whether Congress’s guidance has been followed”? I honestly have no idea. But, as a practical matter, the answer to this question will be decided by the Supreme Court’s Republican majority whenever it is confronted with an agency regulation.
Gorsuch, in other words, would give the Republican-controlled Supreme Court a veto power over all federal regulations. That prospect should chill each of the Democratic presidential candidates to the bone. If any of them prevail, their administration would have to seek a permission slip from the Court if it wants to regulate, if Gorsuch’s view holds sway.
Now, Gorsuch’s Gundy opinion was actually a dissent — but only for reasons that are unlikely to repeat in a future case. As mentioned above, Kavanaugh did not participate in the case. And Justice Samuel Alito wrote an unusual opinion where he said that “if a majority of this Court were willing to reconsider the approach we have taken for the past 84 years, I would support that effort.” Nevertheless, Alito voted to keep existing law in place until such a majority sits together on the same case.
It’s unclear why Alito did so, but Alito is a former prosecutor with very pro-prosecution instincts, so he may not have wanted to side with a sex offender in a case where he lacked the votes to move legal doctrine to the right.
The two remaining Republican justices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas, both voted with Gorsuch. So that’s four votes to revive the Nondelegation Doctrine.
Kavanaugh’s solo opinion in Paul makes five.
The issue in Paul is very similar to the issue in Gundy, so the Supreme Court ultimately decided not to hear the Paul case — most likely because it wanted to avoid the spectacle of reaching two opposite conclusions on the same legal question in just two years. Nevertheless, Kavanaugh used this occasion to write that Gorsuch’s “scholarly analysis of the Constitution’s nondelegation doctrine in his Gundy dissent may warrant further consideration in future cases.”
That’s the sort of language justices often use to signal that they would like to see a past dissent become a future majority opinion.
Kavanaugh reads Gorsuch’s opinion to state that Congress may not allow an “agency to exercise regulatory authority over a major policy question of great economic and political importance.” Again, this standard is vague and would effectively give the Supreme Court broad authority to veto regulations that its Republican majority dislikes. Kavanaugh’s Paul opinion also signals that he would shrink agency power to only include “less-major or fill-up-the-details decisions.”
Nondelegation would be a disaster for Democrats and a big win for Republicans
In theory, the Nondelegation Doctrine could be applied in a neutral way to administrations controlled by either party. In practice, it would be a boon to Republicans and an albatross around the neck of Democrats.
One reason why is that Democrats tend to support robust regulation while Republicans do not. An anti-regulatory doctrine inherently favors conservatives.
A second reason is that the Supreme Court is controlled by Republicans. So, even if it is possible for the Nondelegation Doctrine to be applied in a neutral way, this Supreme Court seems unlikely to do so.
Meanwhile, the biggest problem facing Democrats for the foreseeable future is Senate malapportionment. Currently, the Republican Senate “majority” represents 15 million fewer people than the Democratic “minority,” and that’s a significant Republican gain over the previous Senate. In the Senate that confirmed Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, the Republican “majority” represented almost 40 million fewer people than the Democratic “minority.”
Similarly, when the Republican Senate “majority” refused to give a hearing or a confirmation vote to Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, Democratic senators represented about 20 million more people than Republicans.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) walks with Supreme Court nominee Judge Merrick Garland before a meeting on Capitol Hill on March 22, 2016.
Republicans, in other words, owe their Supreme Court majority to the fact that the Senate, which gives each person in Wyoming about 66 times more representation than residents of California, is malapportioned to strongly favor the GOP. That same thumb on the scale in favor of Republicans, moreover, also gives Republicans an enormous advantage in the legislative process.
Republican presidents are likely to serve alongside Republican Senates, and thus they will be able to enact a legislative agenda unless Democrats control the House. Democratic presidents, by contrast, must win by commanding margins to even have a shot at a Senate majority. And, even then, they must overcome the Senate’s filibuster rules — which allow just 41 Republican senators to block any regulatory legislation — in order to pass a bill through the Senate.
Thus, if a Republican Supreme Court disables major legislation like the Clean Air Act, that law is likely to remain disabled for the foreseeable future.
That is why the Nondelegation Doctrine could be a recipe for one-party rule. Republican justices can disable regulations at their leisure — or even strike down the very laws permitting such regulation. And Democrats are unlikely to ever win a Senate majority large enough to do anything about it.
At least one former Republican has finally had enough of his party after almost three years with President Donald Trump leading the nation to filth.
Twitter user Ryan Hussey, a self-described “older” millennial from suburban Kansas, penned a letter over the weekend to his congressional representatives, informing them that he is “relieved to say” he no longer considers himself a Republican. “To say I’m disappointed would be an understatement,” Hussey said in his opening paragraph.
He said that he had been a Republican since the day he cast his first ballot 17 years ago and that he thought that meant standing for “limited government, fiscal responsibility, market based policies,” a strong national defense, and support for free democracies around the world. “But in 2016, I witnessed my party begin the slow degradation of casting aside those values for the sole purpose of capitulating to the ego of a reality television host,” Hussey said.
Hussey wrote that Trump “boasted of the utility of trade wars, touted empty promises of curbing budget deficits, incited rising nationalism, and regularly elevated the declarations of authoritarianism over the voices of democracy.” With not a single lie told so far, Hussey explained that he’s registering as an unaffiliated voter and participating in the Democratic primaries moving forward. He called Republican congressional members’ handling of the impeachment probe into Trump the “straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back.”
At the center of the probe is a July phone call in which Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate political rival and former Vice President Joe Biden. Hussey was particularly disturbed by day three of the public impeachment hearings, during which Republicans attacked witness Lt. Col Alexander Vindman, who testified that he thought Trump’s demand was “inappropriate.” In turn, Republican counsel Steve Castor implied that Vindman couldn’t be trusted because he had received a job offer from Ukrainians.
“I was disgusted to hear members of my former party challenge the patriotism of a career military veteran and intelligence officer simply because his testimony did not subscribe to their shallow narrative,” Hussey said. “I was enraged to hear conspiracy theories of ‘Ukrainian interference’ proffered like scripture, willfully ignorant of the fact that our intelligence community has debunked that theory as textbook Russian disinformation.”
Hussey wrote that his problems with the current administration started long before the impeachment probe and stem from Trump’s “refusal to condemn white nationalism” and “his expansion of policies permanently and intentionally separating children from their families immigrating through our southern border,” among other things. ”While the metaphorical straw of these past few weeks was not insignificant, in fairness, my camel was already carrying a particularly heavy load before the impeachment inquiry began,” he said.
He ended his letter by directly addressing the congressional members he voted for, Rep. Jerry Moran, Sen. Pat Roberts, and Rep. Sharice Davids, and by telling them he would no longer vote for Republicans who support the direction their party is going in. He concluded with a mic drop of sorts and a word to staff members who might read his exclamation of disapproval. He predicted that to those staff members, his opinion probably doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things.
“I would tend to agree with that assessment, except for one, slight, inescapable consideration—“ Hussey wrote. “—I am pretty damn sure that I am not the only one.”
Walter Shaub is a former director of the United States Office of Government Ethics who served under President Barack Obama and briefly under Donald Trump. Shaub resigned from the position in July 2017 in frustration, saying he could do no more to curb ethical violations within the Trump administration. He cited the administration as proof that there was a need to strengthen the ethics program. On Sunday, he posted a thread on Twitter outlining the dangerous precedents being set by the Republican Party in its truly unethical handling of its mad king Trump.
x
1/ Senate Republicans are setting a dangerous precedent that threatens the republic itself. I'm not naive enough to think they would hold Democratic presidents to the low standard they've applied to Trump, but all future presidents will be able to point to Trump to justify:
2/a. Soliciting foreign attacks on our elections;b. Using federal appropriations or other resources to pressure foreign governments to help them win reelection;c. Implementing an across-the-board refusal to comply with any congressional oversight at all;
This is simply the last couple of weeks. But there is so much more.
x
3/d. Firing the heads of the government's top law enforcement agencies for allowing investigations of the president;e. Retaliating against whistleblowers and witnesses who testify before Congress;f. Investigating investigators who investigate the president;
4/g. Attempting to retaliate against American companies perceived as insufficiently supportive of the president;h. Attempting to award the president's own company federal contracts;i. Using personal devices, servers or applications for official communications;
5/j. Communicating secretly with foreign leaders, with foreign governments knowing things about White House communications that our own government doesn't know;k. Abandoning steadfast allies abruptly without prior warning to Congress to cede territory to Russian influence;
8/q. Operating a supposed charity that was forced to shut down over its unlawful activities;r. Lying incessantly to the American people;s. Relentlessly attacking the free press;
The thread is extensive. These are the rest of the items as Shaub lists them:
t. Spending 1/4 of days in office visiting his own golf courses and 1/3 of them visiting his private businesses;
u. Violating the Emoluments Clauses of the U.S. Constitution;
w. Misusing the security clearance process to benefit his children and target perceived enemies;
x. Drawing down on government efforts to combat domestic terrorism in order to appease a segment of his base;
y. Refusing to aggressively investigate and build defenses against interference in our election by Russia, after the country helped him win an election;
z. Engaging in a documented campaign of obstruction of a Special Counsel's investigation.
aa. Lying about a hush money payoff and omitting his debt to his attorney for that payoff from his financial disclosure report (which is a crime if done knowingly and willfully);
bb. Coordinating with his attorney in connection with activities that got the attorney convicted of criminal campaign finance violations;
cc. Interfering in career personnel actions, which are required by law to be conducted free of political influence;
dd. Refusing to fire a repeat Hatch Act offender after receiving a recommendation of termination from the president's own Senate-confirmed appointee based on dozens of violations;
ee. Calling members of Congress names and accusing them of treason for conducting oversight;
ff. Attacking states and private citizens frequently and in terms that demean the presidency (see Johnson impeachment);
gg. Using the presidency to tout his private businesses and effectively encouraging a party, candidates, businesses and others to patronize his business;
hh. Causing the federal government to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars at his businesses and costing the American taxpayers well over $100 million on boondoggle trips to visit his properties;
ii. Hosting foreign leaders at his private businesses;
jj. Calling on the Justice Department to investigate political rivals;
kk. Using the presidency to endorse private businesses and the books of various authors as a reward for supporting the president;
ll. Engaging in nepotism based on a flawed OLC opinion;
mm. Possible misuse of appropriated funds by reallocating them in ways that may be illegal;
nn. Repeatedly criticizing American allies, supporting authoritarian leaders around the world, and undermining NATO.
What does this all mean? We know that Trump is a liar and a wannabe dictator.
x
18/None of the Republican Senators defending Trump could say with a straight face that they would tolerate a Democratic president doing the same thing. But, given this dangerous precedent, they may have no choice if they ever lose control of the Senate. Is that what they want?
But Shaub’s final statement is chilling. “At this point, I would remind these unpatriotic Senators of the line ‘you have a republic if you can keep it,’ but a variation on this line may soon be more apt when Trump redoubles his attack on our election: You have a republic, if you can call this a republic.”
Shaub was replaced by OGE acting Director David Apol in July 2017. Then Apol made the mistake of suggesting that Trump’s lack of ethics, and more specifically his unwillingness to divest from his personal business interests, was hurting Americans’ confidence in our democracy, saying, "Nothing you could gain economically or politically could possibly justify putting our democracy at risk. These are perilous times." Apol was replaced by Emory Rounds III. Rounds’ biggest battle to date was this past July, when he warned Trump’s political appointees that they could not change their ethics agreements without his signature.
I do love my threadripper :) which as we speak is pegged at 100% encoding several files
MojoKid writes: Intel and AMD have been duking it out in the high-end desktop processor space lately. AMD's return to competitive footing versus Intel has propelled the company forward and the brand has a loyal, passionate following due the competitive performance-per-dollar its 3rd Generation Ryzen processors bring versus Intel offerings. Today, both companies have launched new flagship many-core CPUs, the Intel Core i9-10980XE, which is an 18-core chip, and the AMD 3rd Gen Threadripper 3970X and 3960X, which are 32-core and 24-core chips, respectively. Intel's Core i9-10980XE brings a lower price of $999 and competes more favorably versus AMD's lower-end 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X that's priced at just $750. Meanwhile, the new AMD Threadripper 3960X at $1399 and Threadripper 3970X at $1999 leave Intel's fastest desktop chip in the dust in multi-threaded workloads, sometimes by a wide margin. In addition, while Threadripper 3960X and 3970X pull only about 26 to 36 Watts of additional power versus Intel's new Core i9-10980XE, they do it with 33-77% more core resources. Regardless, it's impressive how the tables have turned, as AMD is now firmly entrenched with some better value propositions in high-end desktop processors, and better performance in many cases as well.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The California Department of Motor Vehicles is generating revenue of $50,000,000 a year through selling drivers' personal information, according to a DMV document obtained by Motherboard. DMVs across the country are selling data that drivers are required to provide to the organization in order to obtain a license. This information includes names, physical addresses, and car registration information. California's sales come from a state which generally scrutinizes privacy to a higher degree than the rest of the country.
In a public record acts request, Motherboard asked the California DMV for the total dollar amounts paid by commercial requesters of data for the past six years. The responsive document shows the total revenue in financial year 2013/14 as $41,562,735, before steadily climbing to $52,048,236 in the financial year 2017/18. The document doesn't name the commercial requesters, but some specific companies appeared frequently in Motherboard's earlier investigation that looked at DMVs across the country. They included data broker LexisNexis and consumer credit reporting agency Experian. Motherboard also found DMVs sold information to private investigators, including those who are hired to find out if a spouse is cheating. It is unclear if the California DMV has recently sold data to these sorts of entities. In an email to Motherboard, the California DMV said that requesters may also include insurance companies, vehicle manufacturers, and prospective employers. Marty Greenstein, public information officer at the California DMV, said that its sale furthers objectives related to highway and public safety, "including availability of insurance, risk assessment, vehicle safety recalls, traffic studies, emissions research, background checks, and for pre- and existing employment purposes."
"The DMV takes its obligation to protect personal information very seriously. Information is only released pursuant to legislative direction, and the DMV continues to review its release practices to ensure information is only released to authorized persons/entities and only for authorized purposes. The DMV also audits requesters to ensure proper audit logs are maintained and that employees are trained in the protection of DMV information and anyone having access to this information sign a security document," Greenstein wrote.
“Abortion was not legal when I went to Vietnam. It was passed later,” Moore continued. “We had abortion laws in our country and our state. We did not have same sex marriage. We did not have transgender rights. Sodomy was illegal. These things were just not around when my classmates and I went to West Point and Vietnam.”
“We have drag queens teaching kindergarten children in this state and this community….in Huntsville in Mobile they taught kids and they dress them up in drag,” he continued, during a tirade against a number of other topics. “Where does this come from? Gender identity is being taught in California to young kids and parents have no choice but to let their kids be taught that.”
In October, a federal appeals court held in Trump v. Mazars that President Trump’s accounting firm must turn over many of Trump’s financial records — including, most likely, his tax returns — to the House Oversight Committee. Trump asked the Supreme Court to stay that decision, and the justices granted that stay on Monday.
Yet, while the Court stayed the lower court’s decision, it also ordered the case to move forward at an unusually fast pace. Trump’s lawyers must file a petition formally asking the Court to hear the case by noon on December 5.
There were no public dissents from the Court’s order, although it is possible that one or more justices voted not to grant the stay but decided to keep that vote private.
The stay will last until the Supreme Court disposes of the case, either in an order announcing that the Court will not hear Mazars on the merits or in an eventual decision reviewing the lower court’s opinion. If Trump’s lawyers do not make the December 5 deadline, the stay will also terminate in that event.
As a practical matter, that means the Supreme Court is likely to agree to give the case a full merits hearing and that a decision is likely by this June. Should Trump lose in the Supreme Court, in other words, the House Oversight Committee will get to see his financial records well before the presidential election.
Trump’s legal arguments, it should be noted, are exceedingly weak.
Because the requested documents could inform the House’s decision about whether such legislation is necessary, they concerned “a subject on which legislation may be had.”
Moreover, as the Supreme Court explained in Clinton v. Jones (1997), “we have never suggested that the President, or any other official, has an immunity that extends beyond the scope of any action taken in an official capacity.” Thus, because the House seeks records unrelated to Trump’s actions as president, Trump’s argument that he can resist this particular subpoena is especially weak.
Two weeks ago Sen. Lindsey Graham went from a White House meeting with Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the floor of the United States Senate to hastily block a bipartisan resolution formally recognizing Turkey's genocide against Armenians just over 100 years ago.
Axios has the background on how exactly that happened. Short version: Trump's staff asked him to block it. Long version: Because it would make Erdogan, currently engaging in a sweep of Kurdish areas of Syria after President Crimes ordered a hasty, scurrying withdrawal of the U.S. troops that had been protecting their erstwhile Kurdish allies, mad.
That's it. No big underlying principle. Erdogan was in town, and because Erdogan was in town and in a bad mood, Team Trump and Graham thought it would be bad form to upset him by recognizing a past Turkish atrocity. The last time Erdogan was in town, his security staff attacked both American protesters and law enforcement officials. Heaven knows what his thugs would do if they faced an actual slight from the Senate.
Any theory that this was a temporary effort to avoid upsetting Erdogan while he was in town—the "poor timing" that Lindsey Graham is claiming—fell apart last week when the resolution was re-introduced and, sure enough, the White House asked Republican Sen. David Perdue to block it this time around. Evidentially it is still "poor timing"; evidentially it will be "poor timing" for as long as Donald has taken a liking to the thuggish leader.
Still, it's uncanny how Erdogan seems to be getting whatever he wants out of this White House. Including, of course, the ability to direct U.S. troops. What are we getting out of this in exchange again?
A federal district judge ruled Monday that former White House counsel Don McGahn must comply with a congressional subpoena despite an assertion by the White House of “absolute immunity” for the former aide. Judge Kentanji Brown Jackson ordered that McGahn was “not immune” from being compelled to testify by Congress but added that he may not have to provide every piece of information Congress seeks.
“Whether or not the law requires the recalcitrant official to release the testimonial information that the congressional committee requests is a separate question, and one that will depend in large part on whether the requested information is itself subject to withholding consistent with the law on the basis of a recognized privilege,” Jackson wrote. “But as far as the duty to appear is concerned, this Court holds that Executive branch officials are not absolutely immune from compulsory congressional process—no matter how many times the Executive branch has asserted as much over the years—even if the President expressly directs such officials’ non-compliance.”
“Per the Constitution, no one is above the law,” Jackson continued. “That is to say, however busy or essential a presidential aide might be, and whatever their proximity to sensitive domestic and national-security projects, the President does not have the power to excuse him or her from taking an action that the law requires.”
The Trump administration will surely seek an immediate stay of the decision, which could have broader implications for other current and former executive branch officials from whom Congress seeks testimony. Even with an appeal imminent, the ruling was an unambiguous rejection of the Trump administration’s sweeping and suspect immunity claim that has served as a giant roadblock to congressional oversight of the executive.
Kharagpur Kharagpur Kharagpur Kharagpur Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, on Feb. 16, 2017. The $ 3.2 billion of annual condom sales, dominated by pharmaceutical giants Bayer AG, Pfizer Inc. and Merck & Co., according to the last major drug company to explore the area. Photographer: Sumit Dayal / Bloomberg via Getty Images | Bloomberg via Getty Images
Carlson speaks at a National Review event in March. | Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan testify about the Court’s budget during a House committee hearing. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing on September 4, 2018. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
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Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call
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Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
President Trump smiles as he delivers the State of the Union address on January 30, 2018. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
