Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[Cyberyeti]

Couldn't agree any more strongly with Brian Klaas at the WaPo:

 

 

Well you may be better off than the UK at the last election where we could have done with ONE functional party

[awm]

Well you may be better off than the UK at the last election where we could have done with ONE functional party

 

The SNP seems pretty functional to me, not that it helps folks in England much.

[Cyberyeti]

The SNP seems pretty functional to me, not that it helps folks in England much.

 

Sorry, one functional party out of the two that can form a Westminster government. The SNP is only good for trying to get as many referendums as it takes to get the answer they want.

[Winstonm]

Control the narrative - that is the one thing Trump understands better than any other candidate: if you can control the narrative, you cannot be held accountable.

 

But unlike Floyd's death — which triggered a wave of protests across the country, including in Las Vegas, and led to charges for the four Minneapolis officers involved — Williams' death drew little attention. Police released just part of the video from one of the body cameras; no bystander videos emerged. A single rally for Williams last fall drew about two dozen people. No charges have been filed against officers connected to the case.

There is a reason Trump has lots of support from police - he and they seem to think alike.

[johnu]

Millions Of Hydroxychloroquine Pills That Trump Touted For COVID-19 Are Now In Limbo

 

Tens of millions of doses of drugs that President Donald Trump touted as “game changers” in the fight against the coronavirus are now in limbo after the Food and Drug Administration stripped them of their emergency use authorization this week.

 

The drugs — hydroxychloroquine sulfate and chloroquine phosphate — were deemed too risky and likely ineffective to treat COVID-19.

 

The FDA’s decision Monday, which one Trump official denounced as a partisan attack, follows a mad dash by states and hospitals to purchase chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine after health care providers were given a green light to use the drug in March through the emergency use authorization. The drugs were otherwise not approved to treat COVID-19.

 

“What do we have to lose?” Trump asked in a March 21 news briefing that endorsed the drugs.

“What do we have to lose?” I couldn't agree more. These pills should be put to good use. Lets put out giant tubs of these pills at the Republican convention in August to protect the delegates that will be risking their lives by attending. The organizers could put out signs like "If one pill is good, 10 pills is great", "Take a pill for your President", "Trump friends are losing millions, do your part and take a handful of pills".

[y66]

Chief Justice John Roberts has come to liberals’ rescue again, this time providing the decisive fifth Supreme Court vote to strike down the Trump administration’s rescission of DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

 

It’s morally uplifting that dreamers now won’t have to live under threat of deportation; and it’s unlikely that President Donald Trump will be able to rescind DACA, with new justifications, before he leaves office.

 

But don’t think that Roberts was motivated by any liberal sympathy for dreamers. The best explanation for his ruling is that Roberts is fed up with Donald Trump’s disrespect for the rule of law. Now he’s standing up for the role of the judicial branch of government in checking careless, lawless action by the executive.

 

Earlier in Trump’s presidency, Roberts made the mistake of deferring to presidential authority in the Muslim travel ban case, Trump v. Hawaii. Roberts was probably gambling then that he could reach a kind of unspoken accommodation with the president: If Trump would show respect for the courts and try to achieve his policy aims through proper legal means, Roberts would provide his swing vote to the court’s conservatives and uphold the president’s decisions.

 

But Trump never acquiesced in the implicit bargain that Roberts was offering. He continued to criticize the courts, including by referring to “Obama judges” — a comment that elicited an extremely rare formal statement of disagreement from Roberts.

 

Subsequently, Roberts seems to have realized that Trump’s assault on the rule of law must be met with judicial supervision. The DACA decision exemplifies that supervisory authority. It’s part of an evolution that began a year ago, last June, when Roberts blocked the Trump administration from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census on the basis of the administration’s misleading claims about its justification for doing so.

 

Today’s decision, DHS v. Regents of the University of California, is based in the same statute as the census decision, namely the Administrative Procedure Act. Courts use that law to review government action and determine if it is “arbitrary and capricious.” In practice, that means that the government must provide a satisfactory rationale to explain its action.

 

Roberts’s opinion held that the Trump administration failed to offer a sufficiently detailed, clear and logical justification for rescinding DACA. The Department of Homeland Security initially said it was rescinding the program because it was unlawful in light of a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit striking down a similar program aimed at dreamers’ parents rather than the dreamers themselves. 1

 

Roberts focused on the fact that the Fifth Circuit only said it was unlawful for the president to extend work authorization to the program’s beneficiaries. The appeals court didn’t say there was anything wrong with not bothering to deport them.

 

Roberts pointed out that DHS had said that it had to cancel DACA altogether, when it could plausibly, even within the contours of the Fifth Circuit decision, have taken the more moderate route of rescinding work authorization from dreamers but not deporting them. In essence, he held that the Trump administration had acted arbitrarily and capriciously by failing to justify its policy decision to rescind the program entirely and push for deportation.

 

I admit to having been a skeptic of this line of argument when it was first being pressed in the lower courts by DACA supporters. It seemed to me that if Barack Obama had the discretion to initiate DACA, then Donald Trump must have the discretion to rescind it. But colleagues like Cass Sunstein, who urged me to take more seriously the administrative law doctrine that requires a complete and adequate explanation for government decisions, were right. And Roberts fully embraced the administrative law angle.

 

In response to the ruling, Trump tweeted, “Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?” He’s not totally wrong. Roberts, having sat through the impeachment proceedings in the Senate, has had plenty of opportunities to reflect on Trump’s utter unwillingness to respect legal procedures and the rule of law itself.

 

It’s not personal from Roberts’s perspective. It’s business. Roberts’s business is defending the judicial branch and its role as guarantor of the rule of law. Trump has demonstrated his contempt for judges, the judiciary, and law itself.

 

None of this means that Roberts has become some sort of a liberal. It remains entirely possible that he will join the conservatives in future high-profile cases, as he has often done in the past.

 

But when it comes to cases during the Trump presidency that involve the court’s role as supervisor of the legality of executive action, it’s fair to say that Roberts’s vote is now reliably against the Trump administration. Trump has earned his distrust, if not his dislike.

[hrothgar]

[Winstonm]

Millions Of Hydroxychloroquine Pills That Trump Touted For COVID-19 Are Now In Limbo

 

 

"What do we have to lose?" I couldn't agree more. These pills should be put to good use. Lets put out giant tubs of these pills at the Republican convention in August to protect the delegates that will be risking their lives by attending. The organizers could put out signs like "If one pill is good, 10 pills is great", "Take a pill for your President", "Trump friends are losing millions, do your part and take a handful of pills".

CBS News reporter Paula Reid asked President Donald Trump a hard question on Thursday, one that more journalists should ask him.

 

At the end of a roundtable discussion with governors on the reopening of America’s small businesses, Reid tried to get the president to answer one more very pertinent question: “Why do you keep hiring people that you believe are wackos and liars?”

 

 

 

 

Another lousy reporter, I'm sure.

[y66]

Camden’s transformation wasn’t about getting rid of police or reducing their authority. It was about increasing our legitimacy by convincing citizens that we understood our role.

 

https://wapo.st/37SFM41

[y66]

Say it under oath, asshole.

 

https://bit.ly/2Br2lAj

[Winstonm]

Incredible that we have reached the point where media is writing about high government officials declaring the violation of Trump's personal Omerta is treason.

 

Dan Scavino Jr., the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications, took to his official Twitter account in the early hours of Friday morning to claim: "John Bolton is undoubtedly a traitor who revealed classified information to the world… He has betrayed his Country. Treasonous!" Scavino's nocturnal outburst followed an intervention by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who also used Twitter to air his grievances. "It is both sad and dangerous that John Bolton's final public role is that of a traitor who damaged America by violating his sacred trust with its people," Pompeo wrote Thursday night. "I've not read the book, but from the excerpts I've seen published, John Bolton is spreading a number of lies, fully-spun half-truths, and outright falsehoods."

 

To be clear, The Secretary of State is claiming that making up stories about the president is treason - so the West Wing writers are in deep doo doo.

[Winstonm]

 

 

The day before his scheduled rally in Tulsa, Okla., President Trump warned "any protesters" that they can expect rough treatment at the hands of law enforcement, in a tweet that lumped demonstrators in with criminals.

 

"Any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Oklahoma please understand, you will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis," wrote Trump on Twitter Friday morning. "It will be a much different scene!"

 

 

 

 

Seeing how he is trapped inside, what he'd better hope is that there are no Inglourius Basterds (sic) mingling with the crowd.

[johnu]

To be clear, The Secretary of State is claiming that making up stories about the president is treason - so the West Wing writers are in deep doo doo.

By extension, the Liar in Chief is guilty of treason.

[Winstonm]

https://twitter.com/...080729186566152

 

This is 18 USC 1343 wire fraud by Trump campaign No way the other 99 really replied, so all elements are met 1) scheme to defraud 2) with intent to defraud & 3) foreseeable & actual use of interstate wire comms. Barr won't investigate, but states can under analogous state crimes

[Winstonm]

What a Friday night. First, William Barr tries to claim the head of the SDNY, Berman, has resigned, and a few minutes later Berman shot back that he was appointed and cannot be fired and he is not resigning.

 

For those unaware, SDNY is the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, which includes Manhattan, and Berman was in charge of criminal investigations of....oh, let's just say...EVERYONE in Trump's orbit.

 

https://twitter.com/...6553479/photo/1

 

Note: This is a big deal. Here is what atttorney Watler Shaub tweeted:

[shyams]

Wow, the Clown President is resembling a despot. And the much vaunted checks-and-balances are nowhere to be seen.

[Winstonm]

Wow, the Clown President is resembling a despot. And the much vaunted checks-and-balances are nowhere to be seen.

 

You are right - this is getting close to full-blown banana republic territory. Today, a women in Tulsa who claimed she had a ticket for Trumps rally was arrested for wearing an "I can't breathe" t-shirt. She was seated and causing no scene. Still, she was hauled off for expressing her first amendment right of free speech. https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-campaign-told-police-remove-204110240.html

 

And now Barr and Trump are trying to consolidate their loyalists inside the DOJ. Bad times for sure.

 

[johnu]

After Weeks Of Anticipation, Trump Rally Crowd Underwhelms

 

Trump’s aides previously claimed that more than 1 million people wanted tickets to the main rally inside the BOK Center. But the actual turnout fell well short of expectations.

 

The president was scheduled to address supporters outside the arena, which has a capacity of 19,000 people, earlier in the evening before heading inside. But Trump’s campaign canceled the outdoor remarks at the last minute.

 

At the time the cancellation was announced, only a few dozen people were reportedly gathered in the overflow area outside the venue. Inside, the upper stands were empty, and there was plenty of room in the standing-only area in front of the stage.

I don't know what these reporters are talking about. It looked to me like there were more people at the Tulsa rally than showed up for the 2016 Manchurian President inauguration. Easily 40-50000 rabid Grifter in Chief marks. I have been assured that the empty seats were because many of the crowd were in line for the bathrooms after drinking too much Kool-Aid.

[y66]

Sha-na, na, na, ...

[y66]

From David Leonhardt at NYT:

 

The list of prominent people who have publicly defied President Trump — including onetime allies — keeps growing. Consider what has happened in just the past few weeks:

 

• Senate Republicans over the weekend refused to support Trump’s firing of a federal prosecutor who had investigated two of the president’s personal lawyers. As a result, the prosecutor’s deputy, rather than the administration’s choice, replaced him.
  
• A federal judge on Saturday rejected Trump’s request to block the release of a book critical of him.
  
• The author of that book — John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser — said in an interview with ABC News on Sunday that Trump posed a “danger for the republic.”
  
• Another former administration official — Jim Mattis, a retired Marine general who served as defense secretary — said Trump was trying to divide the country and “make a mockery of our Constitution.”
  
• Trump’s top military adviser, Gen. Mark Milley, publicly apologized for participating in a photo op with him that followed the use of tear gas against peaceful protesters.
  
• The Supreme Court blocked Trump’s effort to end a signature Obama administration immigration policy. (And, yes, the court is influenced by public opinion, as The Times’s Adam Liptak has explained.)
  
• Several Trump-friendly commentators — at The Wall Street Journal, Breitbart and elsewhere — have said his responses to the coronavirus and police violence are hurting his chances of re-election.
  
• The commissioner of the N.F.L. switched his position on player protests about racial injustice, which angered Trump.
  

These acts of defiance are both a sign of Trump’s current weakness and a further cause of it, as Matt Glassman, a Georgetown University political scientist, told me. People feel more comfortable opposing Trump because they think he is on the wrong side of public opinion on several major issues.

 

And the more people who defy Trump, the less difficult it becomes for others to do so. It was especially striking to see Senator Lindsey Graham, a frequent Trump defender, decline to support the Trump administration’s choice of a new federal prosecutor. “It’s not a random, rogue action,” Glassman said. “It’s a calculated move based on the weakness of the president.”

 

None of this means Trump is doomed to lose in November. Past presidential candidates, like George H.W. Bush and Harry Truman, overcame polling deficits bigger than the one Trump currently has against Joe Biden. But sustained weakness is very dangerous for a politician.

The way things are going, Mike Pence's wife will probably tell him to start wearing a mask.

[y66]

From Dave Lee at FT:

 

A loosely organised campaign originating on the TikTok social network is being credited with greatly inflating expected turnout at Donald Trump’s sparsely attended Saturday night rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

 

Teens on the platform for sharing short videos and other social media sites shared posts over the past two weeks calling for people to sign up for a ticket to Mr Trump’s event, but then not show up.

 

In particular, fans of Korean pop music — K-pop — are thought to have co-ordinated to register en masse. It was the latest act of cunningly effective online political activism from an unlikely source: young K-pop obsessives who have become increasingly adept at harnessing the power of social media to engage in politics.

 

The K-pop fans were previously credited with disrupting attempts by police in Dallas to solicit pictures and videos of “illegal activity” at protests related to the Black Lives Matter movement. After the police department asked people to download an app to submit material, K-poppers flooded it with “fancam” videos — clips of performances that focus on a single member of the group. The app was later taken offline because of “technical difficulties”, the police said.

 

Trump campaign chairman Brad Parscale denied the Saturday night rally had been “trolled”, claiming the media had been “duped” by a “lame attempt at hacking”. He said the campaign had discounted “bogus numbers” from the attendance projections.

 

“The fact is that a week’s worth of the fake news media warning people away from the rally because of Covid and protesters, coupled with recent images of American cities on fire, had a real impact on people bringing their families and children to the rally,” Mr Parscale wrote in a statement on Sunday morning.

 

Expectations had been high for a bumper turnout at what was Mr Trump’s first rally in months. Ahead of the event, Mr Parscale wrote on Twitter that sign-ups had “just passed 800,000 tickets. Biggest data haul and rally sign-up of all time by 10x.”

 

Yet it appears that at least some of those sign-ups were prompted by a call to action from TikTok user Mary Jo Laupp. The 51-year-old posts using the hashtag “#TikTokGrandma”.

 

On June 11, she urged her followers — in a clip that was viewed more than 2m times — to apply for two free tickets to the event, using their mobile phone numbers, and replying “STOP” to the inevitable deluge of text messages that would subsequently be sent by the campaign.

 

“Go reserve tickets now, leave him standing there alone on the stage,” Ms Laupp wrote.

 

The plan was quickly embraced by K-pop “Stans” — a catch-all term for diehard fans of pop stars or celebrities, inspired by Stan, a 2000 track by the American rapper Eminem.

 

On Saturday, pictures taken within the 19,000-capacity BOK Center showed many empty seats and a large amount of floor space in the area in front of the podium. Outside, an “overflow” event, where the president and vice-president Mike Pence were scheduled to address supporters unable to access the arena, was cancelled.

 

Mr Parscale blamed “radical protesters” for preventing supporters from getting into the event by blocking lines to metal detectors. According to Reuters and other news organisations, disruption to those entering the arena was minor.

 

“Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok who flooded the Trump campaign [with] fake ticket reservations & tricked you into believing a million people wanted your white supremacist open mic enough to pack an arena during COVID,” wrote Democrat congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter, in response to Mr Parscale.

 

She thanked “K-pop allies” for “contributions in the fight for justice too”.

 

Dubbing Mr Trump’s speech the “Emptysburgh Address”, former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt wrote on Twitter: “My 16-year-old daughter and her friends in Park City Utah have hundreds of tickets. You have been rolled by America’s teens.”

 

TikTok, owned by Chinese tech group ByteDance, is increasingly being used for political activity, despite its policies banning official campaign activity or advertising.

 

Last month, former Disney executive Kevin Mayer was appointed as TikTok’s new chief executive. The move was designed to soften criticism about the network’s Chinese ownership and concerns over the data gathered by the app, which has been downloaded more than 2bn times.

Is that a nice thing to do?

[y66]

From Roberts to Trump: Don’t Take the Supreme Court for Granted by Linda Greenhouse at NYT:

 

Suppose there had been a leak from the Supreme Court early Thursday morning: The court was about to issue its long-awaited decision in the DACA case on the fate of nearly 700,000 young immigrants known as Dreamers; the vote was 5 to 4; and the majority opinion was by Chief Justice John Roberts. But the leaker didn’t know, or wouldn’t say, which way the case came out.

 

Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.

 

Among the Dreamers and their supporters, hearts would have been in their throats. This was the chief justice, after all, who two years ago wrote the opinion upholding President Trump’s Muslim travel ban, and who five years before that wrote the opinion dismantling the Voting Rights Act. The vote in both was 5 to 4. Why wouldn’t the conservative chief justice defer to the president’s decision to end a program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, that his predecessor had instituted by executive action without even seeking Congress’s approval?

 

But the president’s allies would have had ample reason to be anxious. Wasn’t this the chief justice who just a year ago wrote the majority opinion that by a vote of 5 to 4 blocked the president’s plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census? The proposal failed the essential requirement of administrative law for “reasoned decision making,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in that case. He dismissed the administration’s proffered good-government rationale as pretextual; or, as the dictionary puts it, “dubious or spurious.”

 

Now, of course, we know that it was the Chief Justice Roberts of the census decision, which an enraged President Trump came within inches of defying, who arrived on the scene in time to save the Dreamers. His opinion assured readers that in holding that the administration’s effort to undo DACA was invalid, the court was not endorsing the program. That is conventional administrative law talk — and the case, as the chief justice framed it, was a conventional one about administrative procedure.

 

The administration’s explanation for why it was terminating DACA — explained in a single sentence by an acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (“Taking into consideration the Supreme Court’s and the Fifth Circuit’s rulings in the ongoing litigation, and the September 4, 2017 letter from the Attorney General, it is clear that the June 15, 2012 DACA program should be terminated”) — was so inadequate as to make the decision “arbitrary and capricious,” Chief Justice Roberts said.

 

While the department came up with a more elaborate explanation nine months later in response to an unfavorable Federal District Court ruling, the chief justice said that it was a “foundational principle of administrative law” that an agency, once challenged, has to defend its action on the grounds it initially invoked, not on an after-the-fact rationalization, unless it wants to restart from scratch the process of arriving at a decision.

 

The dry procedural language of the opinion, including its invitation to the Trump administration to start over and find a new way to defend terminating DACA, seems to have lulled many readers into assuming that the victory for the Dreamers is less than complete. No doubt many eyes had glazed over by Page 24, when the chief justice began a crucial discussion of the “reliance interests” in favor of continuing the program that permits DACA recipients to live and work lawfully in the only country that most of them have ever known.

 

Citing statistics in briefs filed by, among others, a group of 143 businesses, Chief Justice Roberts emphasized that those with a stake in continuing the program included not only the Dreamers themselves but also their families, “including their 200,000 U.S.-citizen children,” “employers who have invested time and money in training them” and state and local governments that would lose tax revenue from DACA recipients’ earnings.

 

Administrative law requires the agency to take reliance interests into account, Chief Justice Roberts said. “DHS may determine, in the particular context before it, that other interests and policy concerns outweigh any reliance interests,” he said, adding, “Making that difficult decision was the agency’s job, but the agency failed to do it.”

 

And can the Trump administration do it now? Theoretically yes, under still another acting homeland security secretary, but any newly justified rescission announcement would find the administration back in court within hours, the clock ticking all the while toward Election Day. Although the chief justice nominally left it up to the administration to weigh the reliance interests against its policy goal, his exposition of the strength of those interests sets a very high bar for this or any subsequent administration to clear.

 

Where was the other Chief Justice Roberts this week, the one of the disastrous Shelby County v. Holder voting rights decision and of the travel ban decision? Was the Chief Justice Roberts who silently joined Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion bringing L.G.B.T.Q. people within the protection of federal anti-discrimination law the same chief justice who wrote a snarky dissenting opinion five years ago when the court upheld the constitutional right to same-sex marriage?

 

Contemplating this head-snapping week at the Supreme Court, I’m reminded of the amazing 2002-2003 term, when the court under another conservative chief justice, William Rehnquist, seemed to pull its robust conservatism up short. In the space of a few weeks in the spring of 2003, the court upheld affirmative action in higher education; granted constitutional protection to gay men and lesbians for their private sexual lives; and upheld the application of the family-care provision of the Family and Medical Leave Act to state employees.

 

Chief Justice Rehnquist himself was in dissent in the first two of those cases, but he surprised nearly everyone by writing the majority opinion in the third, a case that may sound obscure now but that effectively spelled an end to the federalism revolution on which, under the chief justice’s leadership, the court had been embarked.

 

What could have accounted for that surprising turn of events at the dawn of the new century? Wrestling with that question, I eventually concluded that the court was realigning itself, as it has done historically, with its own sense of what the public wanted and expected from it.

 

“No great Supreme Court case is only a question of law,” I wrote then. “It is always also an episode in the ongoing dialogue by which the court engages with the society in which it operates and in which the justices live.”

 

Just so with this week’s cases. Monday’s ruling on the right of gay and transgender people to be free of discrimination in the workplace showed a court that by a refreshing vote of 6 to 3 decided not to stand in the path of a tide of social change. The DACA decision contained a message threaded through its dry language of administrative procedure — a warning to the Trump administration not to assume that it gets a free pass, not to take the Supreme Court for granted.

 

“This is not the case for cutting corners,” the chief justice wrote. That’s a sentence sure to be echoing in the halls of the solicitor general’s office, where Chief Justice Roberts once worked and where he honed his ability to speak to the Supreme Court. Now, with four colleagues to his left and four to his right, he speaks for the court from a center chair that must often feel like a lonely place.

 

Given the decisions due in the next few weeks on abortion, religion, the president’s tax returns and the Electoral College, among other cases, it’s too soon to place a label on this pandemic-disrupted Supreme Court term. The justices will issue decisions that will infuriate, reassure, surprise and even break hearts, as they evidently broke Senator Josh Hawley’s on Monday. The Missouri Republican took to the Senate floor to bemoan “the end of the conservative legal movement.”

 

But as the ambitious young senator, a former law clerk to Chief Justice Roberts, surely knows, there is no end, only a new beginning.

[Winstonm]

From David Leonhardt at NYT:

 

 

The way things are going, Mike Pence's wife will probably tell him to start wearing a mask.

 

Among other things she says he must wear.

[Winstonm]

From Roberts to Trump: Don't Take the Supreme Court for Granted by Linda Greenhouse at NYT:

 

 

 

That the SCOTUS responds to changing mores is antithetical to originalism it would seem. On a different note, I think the big issue of the day is "why now" about Berman's firing.

[barmar]

I'm not really sure what to make of the SCOTUS decision on DACA. They explicitly said that they weren't ruling on the merits of DACA, they just said that Trump didn't follow the proper procedure to rescind it. Yes, it's encouraging that they didn't just fall in line behind the President like Republicans in Congress, but this was really just a technical matter. To some extent they may even have given him a roadmap for how to do it right the next time. That's essentially what happened with the Muslim travel ban: he just kept trying again until he dotted and crossed all the I's and T's correctly.