Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[y66]

From Be Afraid of Economic ‘Bigness.’ Be Very Afraid. by Columbia law professor Tim Wu who specializes in antitrust law:

 

In the aftermath of the Second World War, an urgent question presented itself: How can we prevent the rise of fascism from happening again? If over the years that question became one of mostly historical interest, it has again become pressing, with the growing success of populist, nationalist and even neofascist movements all around the world.

 

Common answers to the question stress the importance of a free press, the rule of law, stable government, robust civic institutions and common decency. But as undoubtedly important as these factors are, we too often overlook something else: the threat to democracy posed by monopoly and excessive corporate concentration — what the Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis called the “curse of bigness.” We must not forget the economic origins of fascism, lest we risk repeating the most calamitous error of the 20th century.

 

Postwar observers like Senator Harley M. Kilgore of West Virginia argued that the German economic structure, which was dominated by monopolies and cartels, was essential to Hitler’s consolidation of power. Germany at the time, Mr. Kilgore explained, “built up a great series of industrial monopolies in steel, rubber, coal and other materials. The monopolies soon got control of Germany, brought Hitler to power and forced virtually the whole world into war.”

 

To suggest that any one cause accounted for the rise of fascism goes too far, for the Great Depression, anti-Semitism, the fear of communism and weak political institutions were also to blame. But as writers like Diarmuid Jeffreys and Daniel Crane have detailed, extreme economic concentration does create conditions ripe for dictatorship.

 

It is a story that should sound uncomfortably familiar: An economic crisis yields widespread economic suffering, feeding an appetite for a nationalistic and extremist leader. The leader rides to power promising a return to national greatness, deliverance from economic suffering and the defeat of enemies foreign and domestic (including big business). Yet in reality, the leader seeks alliances with large enterprises and the great monopolies, so long as they obey him, for each has something the other wants: He gets their loyalty, and they avoid democratic accountability.

 

There are many differences between the situation in 1930s and our predicament today. But given what we know, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are conducting a dangerous economic and political experiment: We have chosen to weaken the laws — the antitrust laws — that are meant to resist the concentration of economic power in the United States and around the world.

 

From a political perspective, we have recklessly chosen to tolerate global monopolies and oligopolies in finance, media, airlines, telecommunications and elsewhere, to say nothing of the growing size and power of the major technology platforms. In doing so, we have cast aside the safeguards that were supposed to protect democracy against a dangerous marriage of private and public power.

 

Unfortunately, there are abundant signs that we are suffering the consequences, both in the United States and elsewhere. There is a reason that extremist, populist leaders like Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Xi Jinping of China and Viktor Orban of Hungary have taken center stage, all following some version of the same script. And here in the United States, we have witnessed the anger borne of ordinary citizens who have lost almost any influence over economic policy — and by extension, their lives. The middle class has no political influence over their stagnant wages, tax policy, the price of essential goods or health care. This powerlessness is brewing a powerful feeling of outrage.

 

After the fall of the Third Reich, the Allies broke up the major Nazi monopolies specifically so that they could not be “used by Germany as instruments of political or economic aggression,” in the words of the law used to do so. The United States took its medicine, too: In 1950, Congress passed the Anti-Merger Act of 1950 to curb politically and economically dangerous concentrations. It empowered the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission to block or undo mergers when the effect was “substantially to lessen competition or to tend to create a monopoly.”

 

It would be understandable if you assumed that the Anti-Merger Act of 1950 had been repealed. But in fact it remains on the books. It has merely been evaded, eroded and enfeebled by the corroding effect of decades of industry pressure and ideological drift, yielding hesitant enforcers and a hostile judiciary. Consequently, over the last two decades we have allowed successive waves of mergers that make a mockery of the 1950 law, and have concentrated economic power in ways that are dangerous to the polity.

 

In recent years, we have allowed unhealthy consolidations of hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry; accepted an extraordinarily concentrated banking industry, despite its repeated misfeasance; failed to prevent firms like Facebook from buying up their most effective competitors; allowed AT&T to reconsolidate after a well-deserved breakup in the 1980s; and the list goes on. Over the last two decades, more than 75 percent of United States industries have experienced an increase in concentration, while United States public markets have lost almost 50 percent of their publicly traded firms.

 

There is a direct link between concentration and the distortion of democratic process. As any undergraduate political science major could tell you, the more concentrated an industry — the fewer members it has — the easier it is to cooperate to achieve its political goals. A group like the middle class is hopelessly disorganized and has limited influence in Congress. But concentrated industries, like the pharmaceutical industry, find it easy to organize to take from the public for their own benefit. Consider the law preventing Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices: That particular lobbying project cost the industry more than $100 million — but it returns some $15 billion a year in higher payments for its products.

 

We need to figure out how the classic antidote to bigness — the antitrust and other antimonopoly laws — might be recovered and updated to address the specific challenges of our time. For a start, Congress should pass a new Anti-Merger Act reasserting that it meant what it said in 1950, and create new levels of scrutiny for mega-mergers like the proposed union of T-Mobile and Sprint.

 

But we also need judges who better understand the political as well as economic goals of antitrust. We need prosecutors willing to bring big cases with the courage of trustbusters like Theodore Roosevelt, who brought to heel the empires of J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, and with the economic sophistication of the men and women who challenged AT&T and Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s. Europe needs to do its part as well, blocking more mergers, especially those like Bayer’s recent acquisition of Monsanto that threaten to put entire global industries in just a few hands.

 

The United States seems to constantly forget its own traditions, to forget what this country at its best stands for. We forget that America pioneered a kind of law — antitrust — that in the words of Roosevelt would “teach the masters of the biggest corporations in the land that they were not, and would not be permitted to regard themselves as, above the law.” We have forgotten that antitrust law had more than an economic goal, that it was meant fundamentally as a kind of constitutional safeguard, a check against the political dangers of unaccountable private power.

 

As the lawyer and consumer advocate Robert Pitofsky warned in 1979, we must not forget the economic origins of totalitarianism, that “massively concentrated economic power, or state intervention induced by that level of concentration, is incompatible with liberal, constitutional democracy.”

Donald Trump did not create this problem.

[Winstonm]

Axios notes:

 

Democrats have won at least 33 seats, but they look poised to win closer to 40 — there are 13 races that are either not called or too close to call, and Democrats have a solid chance of winning seven of those.

 

Why it matters: We're officially in "blue wave" territory. Even if Democrats didn't win any additional House seats, they've already won the most number of seats since Watergate, when the party picked up 48 seats in 1974

.

 

Presidential Clue: Who killed the Republican party? President Bone Spurs - in the West Wing - with the tail of a Fox.

[Winstonm]

V.A. Day the Dennison way.

[y66]

From The Media Can Do Better on Election Night by Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

 

It’s really time for the news media, and especially the television networks, to recognize a huge problem with the way they have been handling national election-night coverage. In fact, it’s far past time they integrate the current patterns of vote counting into their overall coverage.

 

I hold myself accountable on this one. While I did warn about evidence-free accusations of fraud in my guide to watching the returns, I should have warned about issues having to do with vote counts. We all need to do better.

 

As for the networks: They need to do a much better job of explaining how vote counting works, including regular partisan patterns in the tally — and they need to educate themselves about it.

 

There are a lot of votes counted after Election Day, and those votes tend to help Democrats. There’s nothing at all nefarious about this. Some of it just has to do with which states (most notably California) are slow counters. And a lot of it has to do with how different communities tend to vote: Some groups are more likely to take advantage of early voting; some tend to vote by mail; some tend to vote early; some tend to vote late. Some groups are more likely to cast provisional votes. Some are more likely to vote absentee from overseas.

 

It’s even more complicated than that, because everything differs by state. Similar groups may vary in their habits depending on the state, or even the region within a state. Counting speed, too, depends on the state. States have different deadlines for vote-by-mail or absentee voting; states also devote different resources to counting.

 

Add it all up, and it means a substantial number of ballots are counted after election night. And yet most news outlets still show the percentage of precincts reporting, which leads people to believe that 100 percent in means that all the ballots are counted. That’s simply not true, and it’s a terrible disservice to report that misleading number. In fact, to do their job properly, the news media really needs to educate people about how many votes remain to be counted, which party they are likely to help and why. And while it does vary from state to state, overall it means that Democrats will do better after Election Day than on it.

 

Even on election night, the polls don’t close in a random order, and overall, television news doesn’t do a very good job of explaining that. The story is clear. The first two states to close at 6 p.m. Eastern time, Indiana and Kentucky, are both Republican states. The next group leans Republican, followed by a third group at 7:30 p.m. Eastern that’s very Republican. What that means is that for the first two or even three hours of coverage — because just as a more balanced group of states start closing, contests begin to be called in the earlier groups — there’s plenty of good news for Republicans. By the time California, Washington, Oregon and Hawaii close at 11 p.m. Eastern time (leaving only Alaska remaining), it’s hard not to have adopted a story of the night that tends to be affected by what’s already happened, even if it’s perfectly obvious to everyone that what’s going to happen is equally important.

 

I mostly watched CNN on election night. The network spent a fair amount of time on Kentucky’s 6th District, a fascinating race rated as a toss-up by most analysts, which Republican incumbent Andy Barr eventually won by a margin of 3.2 percentage points. As it turned out, that was one of the best showings for the party out of the toss-up districts, and overall some 245 districts wound up more Democratic than Kentucky’s 6th. Had Democrats picked up all of those, they would have netted around 50 seats instead of the 39 or so they will win. Some of this is entirely understandable: Everyone who knew about House elections was focused on Kentucky’s 6th at that point, because it was the only place with actual vote totals to look at. The trick is to find a way to do that without misleading everyone about what’s going on.

 

And that’s really the point. Election analysts know about all of this; in fact, CNN’s Harry Enten had an excellent short appearance on election night in which he correctly said that the returns to that point indicated large Democratic gains, contrary to what the folks who were chewing up most of the airtime were saying.

 

Live television is hard. The trick is to realize the vote patterns before the night begins, and to structure the coverage around them, reminding audiences repeatedly that the early states aren’t representative and that many votes won’t be counted for several days, with Democrats likely gaining in many states.

 

Nothing is going to prevent irresponsible politicians from calling the count into question. But the more that election-night returns are presented in their full context, and the more news outlets can explain exactly how counting works and why some states are slow, the better the coverage will be.

The trick is to realize the vote patterns before the night begins and to structure the coverage around them? Yup.

[y66]

From Power play: Nike takes a big role in Oregon tax policy by Hillary Borrud at the Oregonian:

 

With the election over, Oregon lawmakers and Gov. Kate Brown are turning their attention to the 2019 legislative session a little more than two months away.

Raising billions of dollars in taxes to pour into improving schools is at the top of legislative Democrats' to-do list and there's one company in particular they see offering help: Nike.

 

The state's largest company played a central role in the election and is now poised to have significant impact shaping tax policy in 2019. Big companies go to great lengths to minimize their tax bills. By supporting Democrats' drive for revenue, Nike is in the catbird seat to push for tax policies that would be less of a financial hit to the company's bottom line.

 

Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, said he doesn't expect the broader business community to support lawmakers' push to raise business taxes. He accused businesses of burning him "very badly" when they stalled Democrats' attempt to pass a gross receipts tax in 2017 by insisting public pension savings were a prerequisite.

Enter Nike and a small group of other businesses that are meeting with public employee unions and soon also the governor's administration to craft tax policy for the 2019 legislative session.

 

At the center of the group is Julia Brim-Edwards, Nike's senior director of government and public affairs. It was Brim-Edwards who assembled a small group of businesses over the summer to fund a political action committee called the Common Good fund: Nike, Portland tech company Cloudability, an association that represents long-term care facilities, Genentech and Comcast also took part.

 

"Julia Brim-Edwards, to her credit, at Nike, is one of the ones we're really looking to ... They're really going to try to say, 'Alright, this is what we're going to do,'" Courtney said.

 

Brim-Edwards' involvement dates back to June when she asked the governor to intervene to keep the public employee unions' so-called corporate transparency initiative off the ballot. It would have forced Nike and other companies to reveal closely held tax information in state filings, although they could have avoided doing so by paying a fine.

 

As public employee unions considered how to defeat four conservative ballot initiatives and re-elect Brown, Nike offered its support. The unions agreed to play ball, tossing out the thousands of signatures their contractor had collected to get the initiative on the ballot. Brim-Edwards formed the Common Good Fund and it chipped in to help re-elect the governor and defeat two anti-tax ballot initiatives: Measures 103 and 104. Those initiatives would have banned future grocery and soda taxes and made it more difficult for the Legislature to trim tax breaks.

 

In Oregon's no-limits campaign finance environment, Nike and the other Common Good Fund members' spending was relatively moderate. Nike has reported putting in $225,000, the bulk of the fund's roughly $300,000 in reported fundraising. The company also contributed directly to the political action committee Defend Oregon, which is affiliated with the unions, and spent more than $100,000 on Brown's campaign. The nursing home industry's political action committee reported giving $150,000 directly to Brown's campaign.

 

The group's bigger contribution could turn out to be their support for raising taxes. And they haven't just come to the table: Nike hired Paul Warner, the Legislature's well-respected former top economist, to help the group develop tax policy.

 

...

 

A Portland school board member, Brim-Edwards has a strong connection to the public education system. Now a Democrat, she was a longtime Republican despite being married to Democratic state representative and then state treasurer Randall Edwards.

 

"She's formidable," Courtney said of Brim-Edwards, whose husband he served with in the Legislature. "And she has the trust of Nike and Phil Knight ... She goes wherever she wants within the Nike structure. She is that kind of player."

No doubt similar stories are playing out in every state in the union and are perhaps more interesting, relevant and challenging than Dem and Republican proposals for national tax policy. I love that Brim-Edwards has a foot in all camps (citizen, school board, Nike, Dems and Republicans). Not saying she has 5 feet.

[Winstonm]

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-warns-that-florida-recount-could-set-dangerous-precedent-of-person-with-most-votes-winning B-) :P :lol:

 

Trump said that, if the recounts are allowed to proceed, “We could be looking at a very bad, very sad situation where to be considered legitimately elected you have to get more votes than the other candidate.”

[johnu]

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-warns-that-florida-recount-could-set-dangerous-precedent-of-person-with-most-votes-winning B-) :P :lol:

 

 

This one is not satire :(

 

Urging Florida To Ignore Military Votes Fits Dennison's True Pattern With The Troops

[Winstonm]

I wondered why this was taking so long.

 

Maryland’s top lawyer is asking a federal judge to block Matthew G. Whitaker from serving as acting U.S. attorney general contending the appointment is illegal.

 

Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D) says in a planned court filing Tuesday that President Trump’s appointment of Whitaker is unconstitutional and that he should be replaced by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who was confirmed by the Senate.

 

“The Constitution and Congress have established vitally important processes for filling high-level vacancies in the federal government,” Frosh said in a statement. “Few positions are more critical than that of U.S. Attorney General, an office that wields enormous enforcement power and authority over the lives of all Americans.”

 

I would certainly think that a state has standing to challenge this appointment. When the smoke clears, we will find out Kavanaugh's true colors because this case will proceed to the SCOTUS unless Dennison withdraws the appointment, which is not going to happen.

 

(Does anyone else get the impression that WH decisions are strongly influenced by Stephen "The Smirk" Miller? It would explain the blatant stupidity.)

[Winstonm]

Now does he feel his title

 

Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe

 

Upon a dwarfish thief.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/the-end-of-trumps-reign/568480/

[y66]

I wondered why this was taking so long.

Probably because the WC's Maryland rep is on sabbatical.

[y66]

Guest post from former Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor:

 

An election provides a certain definitiveness for political candidates, win or lose. I know from experience, having lived through both the ups and the downs. For political parties, elections also provide a chance to reflect, learn and move forward with the business of attracting more voters next time. Or at least they should.

 

For Republicans, losing the House majority in last week’s midterm elections is a clear demonstration that the party must do more to appeal to suburban voters, especially college-educated women. Once a Republican mainstay, this group has been slowly moving away from us for the past few cycles.

 

The data is indisputable, and Republicans must address it. We need a Republican suburban agenda.

 

There is no doubt that some of the loss in support this year from college-educated women, for example, is a result of the negative opinion these voters have of President Trump. But it is also true that Republicans have not had much to offer suburban voters on what they consistently say are their top issues, including health care, child care, education, the environment and transportation.

 

A suburban agenda would not just address pre-existing conditions in insurance coverage but also commit to medical research that offers treatments for a child with a chronic disease or a cure for a parent’s Alzheimer’s. Republicans also need to unify around a plan to ensure that every woman who needs it has access to paid maternity leave from her job and addresses the cost of child care for working families. You wouldn’t know it from most 2018 campaigns, but Republicans actually doubled the child tax credit in last year’s tax bill.

 

No one likes spending time in traffic, but that is exactly where suburban voters are stuck a lot of the time. Republicans need to think about investments in infrastructure not just as an economic issue but also to improve the quality of life of their voters — and the people we need to bring back to our party. Finally, we should continue our commitment to reducing energy costs using an all-of-the-above approach, but emphasize energy efficiency and sustainable, renewable power.

 

Republicans, however, are not alone in not being able to reach people for whom their message used to resonate. The Senate results demonstrated that the Democratic Party continues to suffer from its loss of non-college-educated white men. Exit polls showed these men favored Republicans by a whopping 34 points. A decade ago, these voters split pretty much evenly between the parties. Not surprisingly, of the Senate seats that flipped to Republican, the share of non-college-educated white men in each state exceeds the national average by 2 points.

 

What does the Democratic Party have to say to non-college-educated white men who so often see the party as hostile to them on social and cultural issues and out of touch on issues like securing the border and law and order?

 

Unfortunately, in the past week, both parties have so far sought to explain where they fell short in the midterms by placing the blame on factors outside of their direct control. House Republicans have linked the loss to a record number of retirements and open seats. Senate Democrats have attributed their poor night on the “map” and having to defend so many seats in states President Trump carried in 2016.

 

There are some truths in both excuses, but those small truths mask the bigger picture: Both parties have given up on competing for large portions of the electorate. Instead, it’s all about maximizing turnout for each side’s most partisan supporters.

 

There is a better way. Two of the most popular Republican governors, each re-elected in a landslide on Tuesday, happen to be from two of the bluest states in the country — Massachusetts and Maryland. They have figured out how to maintain support among base Republicans while still appealing to independents and even Democrats.

 

In my home state of Virginia, the suburbs throughout the state have been trending blue for some time. Last year in the race for governor, Democrats faced a choice: Double down on the gains they had made in the suburbs of Washington, Richmond and Norfolk or try to hold those voters while simultaneously appealing to rural areas.

 

On election night, our Republican nominee got more votes than any candidate for governor in the history of the commonwealth except one, our current Democratic governor. Both sides turned out their core voters, but the Democrats won in part by reducing the Republican margin of victory in some of the reddest areas of the state. Put another way, they broadened their appeal.

 

The 2020 election season has now begun. After last week’s niceties of calls and congratulations, what comes next will foreshadow whether these lessons were internalized or ignored. Will Republicans have something to offer suburban, college-educated women? Will Democrats have anything to say to white, non-college-educated men in the rural areas?

 

There is an added bonus for all the beleaguered voters who aren’t quite ready to dive back into a divisive political process: A campaign where you’re trying to bring more people into your party tends to be more civil and less toxic than what we just experienced.

Will Democrats have anything to say to white, non-college-educated men in the rural areas who so often see the party as hostile to them on social and cultural issues and out of touch on issues like securing the border and law and order?

 

Here are a few things Virginia Democrat Abigail Spencer had to say during her successful campaign to win the seat Cantor once occupied:

 

HEALTHCARE -- I will work to ensure that every person has quality, affordable healthcare. No one should have to choose between putting food on the table and getting the care, medication, or life-saving treatments they need. No one should lose or be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition, and no one fighting a serious illness should face the fear of lifetime coverage caps. We can improve our healthcare system, while lowering costs, ensuring greater coverage, and achieving better outcomes, but it will take tremendous political will and a commitment to creatively looking at the options.

 

PROTECTING SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE -- For decades, working families have paid into the Social Security and Medicare programs with the understanding that they were paying for retirement security later in life. I oppose any attempts to privatize these systems or to cut benefits. I am committed to ensuring their viability, and I will work to protect Social Security and Medicare so we can meet our obligations to seniors, now and into the future.

 

JOBS AND ECONOMY -- Advancements in technology have radically restructured the global economy. While these changes bring many benefits, they have also altered the employment landscape for many Americans. We must take steps to acknowledge and understand how this impacts individuals, salaries, and the economic growth across our country, so that we can plan accordingly and ensure that our workforce training meets the needs of the changing economy.

 

IMMIGRATION & BORDER SECURITY -- The United States was founded as a nation of immigrants, but our current immigration system is broken. Too many politicians use immigration as a political talking point instead of actually trying to solve the problems. I am committed to finding real, bipartisan solutions to fix our immigration system, and I will work with anyone to create a proposal for immigration reform that ensures border security, takes into account the needs of our workforce, respects our values and history, gives certainty to DACA recipients, and creates an earned pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants currently living here as long as they abide by the law, work hard, and pay taxes.

 

NATIONAL SECURITY -- I worked to keep our country safe as an officer in the CIA’s clandestine service, and I will continue to work in support of our national security as a member of Congress.

Dems can learn something from Angela Merkle when it comes to talking about jobs and the environment: "If people get the impression that CO2 emissions are considered more important than their fate, we will not have acceptance for our projects. Changes are going to happen, but we are thinking of you first."

[Winstonm]

Guest post from former Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor:

 

 

Will Democrats have anything to say to white, non-college-educated men in the rural areas who so often see the party as hostile to them on social and cultural issues and out of touch on issues like securing the border and law and order?

 

Here are a few things Virginia Democrat Abigail Spencer had to say during her successful campaign to win the seat Cantor once occupied:

 

 

Dems can learn something from Angela Merkle when it comes to talking about jobs and the environment: "If people get the impression that CO2 emissions are considered more important than their fate, we will not have acceptance for our projects. Changes are going to happen, but we are thinking of you first."

 

Two words: Sherrod Brown

 

https://www.brown.senate.gov/newsroom/in-the-news/article/brown-says-aid-to-auto-industry-is-investment-in-middle-class

[barmar]

Have we really gone a full day with nothing cringeworthy coming out from or about the White House?

[y66]

Two words: Sherrod Brown

 

https://www.brown.senate.gov/newsroom/in-the-news/article/brown-says-aid-to-auto-industry-is-investment-in-middle-class

From his issues webpage:

 

Economy & Jobs

 

For much of our nation’s history, Ohio’s talented workforce has been at the center of economic growth and prosperity. Ohio workers built our cars and appliances and laid down the rail lines and roads that connected our shores. As Ohio manufacturers, small businesses, farmers, and entrepreneurs helped turn our nation into an economic superpower, wages climbed, productivity increased, and more people joined the middle class.

 

As our economy continues to recover, Sen. Brown will fight for economic policies that strengthen Ohio’s middle class. We need to create jobs, rebuild American manufacturing, invest in our small businesses, and train workers for new opportunities in new industries.

 

Our state has a rich manufacturing heritage and network of innovative small businesses. Sen. Brown has traveled across our state to facilitate partnerships that put Ohioans to work in good-paying manufacturing jobs in the auto, aerospace, biotech, and clean energy industries. Sen. Brown has also worked to ensure that our state’s small businesses – which create nearly two-thirds of new jobs – have the resources they need to expand operations and hire new workers.

 

We need a jobs agenda that:

 

Promotes Ohio businesses expansion by strengthening small business lending programs and boosting U.S. exports so Ohio’s businesses can expand.

 

Develops Ohio's workforce so that Ohioans are prepared to fill the jobs of the 21st century.

 

Revitalizes the state's infrastructure in order to attract global industries.

 

Counteracts China's currency manipulation and subsidization of domestic industries to ensure that Ohio workers and suppliers aren’t undermined by unfair trade practices.

That's an effective message, especially the part about the role of small businesses in job creation. The Foxconns and Amazons of the world are not the solution for Ohio's economy or anyone else's.

[y66]

“I’m waiting with a pen,” Donald Trump says as he backs federal justice reform bill.

 

From Republicans and Democrats Cannot Agree on Absolutely Anything. Except This. by Shaila Dewan and Carl Hulse at NYT:

 

From immigration to tax cuts to who won Florida, there is very little that Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on these days. But there may be one thing: the need to repair the nation’s criminal justice system.

 

It is a cause that has made for strange alliances, including the liberal Center for American Progress, the conservative Koch brothers, law enforcement groups, Kim Kardashian and now, President Trump, who on Wednesday endorsed a bill that would improve prison conditions and lower some sentences.

 

The view that punishment is too harsh, and rehabilitative measures too scarce, is broadly supported in public opinion polls, especially as crime has hovered at a 20-year low. That popular support has translated into political backing. “Out in the real world where people live, it’s not even controversial anymore,” said Mark Holden, who leads Koch Industries’ work on criminal justice issues.

 

Of course, not all the everyday people and the politicians who represent them arrived at this shared conclusion via the same path. The left is persuaded by vast racial disparities and the fact that the United States is a global outlier, with the world’s highest incarceration rate. Those on the right often point to unsustainable costs. The policy wonks arm themselves with reams of data on the system’s failure to lower recidivism or protect from wrongful conviction.

 

And, somewhere in the mix, is the notion of redemption and second chances.

 

The bill endorsed by Mr. Trump on Wednesday has been years in the making, bolstered by state-level changes — often led by Republicans in party strongholds like Georgia, South Carolina, Oklahoma and, more recently, Louisiana — that repeatedly demonstrated that prison populations could be reduced with no increase in crime.

 

The trend can be traced back to Texas in 2007, when Rick Perry, then the governor, saw a projection that the state would need 14,000 more prison beds at a cost of more than half a billion dollars. Marc Levin, a lawyer, had recently started a criminal justice program at a conservative think tank, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and he was ready with an alternative: treatment and drug courts that would give judges an alternative to locking people up.

 

“There was a lot of luck involved that it turned out in 2007 things all came together,” Mr. Levin recalled. “And obviously, it was Texas — if Vermont had done this, no one would have noticed.”

 

Instead, Mr. Levin found himself fielding inquiries from state after state.

 

“Tough on crime” had been a political mantra. Mr. Levin called his campaign Right on Crime. Later, the Obama administration would chime in with Smart on Crime.

 

Advocates acknowledge that they vary their tactics depending on the audience. “It’s common sense but we look at it through three different lenses: It’s a moral, constitutional and a fiscal issue,” Mr. Holden said. With other sea changes, he said, “People have seen some type of moral outrage — abolition, suffrage, civil rights, marriage equality, they’ve all been, basically, people coming together from all sides.”

 

The Koch brothers were attracted to the topic because of the proliferation of criminal statutes — too many on the federal level to even count, Mr. Holden said. But they went on to tackle issues like high bail and poor legal representation for the poor. Mr. Levin, for his part, thought that if conservatives were going to be skeptical of the government’s role in areas like education and welfare, they should also be willing to apply that scrutiny to criminal justice.

 

He also saw an argument that appealed to the Tea Party’s distaste for government interference. “There’s a group of people that could be self-sufficient if we just remove the barriers that the government’s imposed,” he said, referring to laws that bar former felons from obtaining certain kinds of licenses. “We’re doing more harm than good by keeping people in prison who don’t need to be there.”

 

Crime has long been an issue in election season. Few political veterans can forget the 1988 presidential campaign in which President George H.W. Bush bashed Michael Dukakis for releasing a prisoner, Willie Horton, on furlough who later went on to commit assault, armed robbery and rape.

 

Six years later, President Bill Clinton signed a major anti-crime bill that set lengthy prison sentences and flooded the streets with police officers. It is often cited as a driver of mass incarceration.

 

 

“Both parties were competing for who can be the most tough on crime throughout the 1980s and ’90s, and then the Republicans came to their senses first, for financial reasons,” said Inimai Chettiar, director of the Brennan Center for Justice. “So now you’re going to have this happen, if it happens, under a very conservative president.”

 

In Ms. Chettiar’s view, reining in the criminal justice system did not become a mainstream Democratic issue until 2016, when Hillary Clinton came out in favor of it and Bill Clinton apologized for the 1994 bill.

 

Bipartisanship on the need for change has helped inoculate candidates from Willie Horton-style attacks, and conservatives have been willing to give liberals political cover.

 

In 2012, when Gov. Jerry Brown of California was considering a bill that would allow reconsideration for people sentenced to life without parole as juveniles, his office asked Right on Crime for help, Mr. Levin recalled. Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker, and Pat Nolan, a Republican legislator, became active in prisoner advocacy after serving time on a racketeering charge, wrote an op-ed in The San Diego Union-Tribune in favor of the bill, and ten days later Mr. Brown signed it into law.

 

Of course, Mr. Trump’s endorsement will provide more cover for wavering politicians than perhaps anyone else could.

Of course also, what Mr. Trump endorses on Wednesday is no guarantee of what he will endorse on Friday.

[Winstonm]

From his issues webpage:

 

 

That's an effective message, especially the part about the role of small businesses in job creation. The Foxconns and Amazons of the world are not the solution for Ohio's economy or anyone else's.

 

Then there is this.

 

Almost all of Sen. Harris’s $2.8 trillion tax plan would help middle and working class, study finds

 

I don't think it is difficult to find the right message; the right messenger, though, is another matter entirely.

[johnu]

Of course also, what Mr. Trump endorses on Wednesday is no guarantee of what he will endorse on Friday.

 

What Dennison endorses in the morning is no guarantee of what he will announce later in the same speech or the next tweet. He may endorse different things depending on who is in the audience. Sometimes he will promise something he has no intention of following up on because he hasn't lied enough that day, or wants to distract from some controversy of his own making.

[johnu]

Almost all of Sen. Harris’s $2.8 trillion tax plan would help middle and working class, study finds

 

Tax cuts for the middle and working class are only going to work if we recapture with interest the tax giveaways to the top 1% and corporations passed out in the last tax cut bill. Lyin Mitch McConnell has promised to cut Social Security and Medicare. Why is that? Because the last tax cut cut revenues 1.5 trillion and we are going to have to print money to cover the shortfall.

 

U.S. Federal Budget Breakdown

 

Interest on the debt is estimated as 363 billion in 2019 (and projected to rise to 900 billion by 2028). For comparison, the entire military budget is 886 billion but the total discretionary budget is only 1.2 trillion. If there was no national debt, we could double the non-military discretionary budget.

[Winstonm]

Justice Department Preparing To Prosecute WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange: WSJ

 

This headline probably explains the latest Dennison Twitter explosion. I think Dennison massively underestimated the investigative power of the U.S. government when he made gaga with Roger Stone, et al, thinking that if they were not directly connected to the campaign no one would find out what they did.

[Winstonm]

Tax cuts for the middle and working class are only going to work if we recapture with interest the tax giveaways to the top 1% and corporations passed out in the last tax cut bill. Lyin Mitch McConnell has promised to cut Social Security and Medicare. Why is that? Because the last tax cut cut revenues 1.5 trillion and we are going to have to print money to cover the shortfall.

 

U.S. Federal Budget Breakdown

 

Interest on the debt is estimated as 363 billion in 2019 (and projected to rise to 900 billion by 2028). For comparison, the entire military budget is 886 billion but the total discretionary budget is only 1.2 trillion. If there was no national debt, we could double the non-military discretionary budget.

 

I agree. First priority is rolling back the Dennison cuts or at least modifying them to a higher corporate level. At the same time, as I've posted many times before, when you take money away from the hoarders (1%) and distribute it among those who spend all or most of their income, you increase demand, spurring growth, investment, and economic growth.

[y66]

Guest post from Paul Krugman at NYT:

 

Last week’s blue wave means that Donald Trump will go into the 2020 election with only one major legislative achievement: a big tax cut for corporations and the wealthy. Still, that tax cut was supposed to accomplish big things. Republicans thought it would give them a big electoral boost, and they predicted dramatic economic gains. What they got instead, however, was a big fizzle.

 

The political payoff, of course, never arrived. And the economic results have been disappointing. True, we’ve had two quarters of fairly fast economic growth, but such growth spurts are fairly common — there was a substantially bigger spurt in 2014, and hardly anyone noticed. And this growth was driven largely by consumer spending and, surprise, government spending, which wasn’t what the tax cutters promised.

 

Meanwhile, there’s no sign of the vast investment boom the law’s backers promised. Corporations have used the tax cut’s proceeds largely to buy back their own stock rather than to add jobs and expand capacity.

 

But why have the tax cut’s impacts been so minimal? Leave aside the glitch-filled changes in individual taxes, which will keep accountants busy for years; the core of the bill was a huge cut in corporate taxes. Why hasn’t this done more to increase investment?

 

The answer, I’d argue, is that business decisions are a lot less sensitive to financial incentives — including tax rates — than conservatives claim. And appreciating that reality doesn’t just undermine the case for the Trump tax cut. It undermines Republican economic doctrine as a whole.

 

About business decisions: It’s a dirty little secret of monetary analysis that changes in interest rates affect the economy mainly through their effect on the housing market and the international value of the dollar (which in turn affects the competitiveness of U.S. goods on world markets). Any direct effect on business investment is so small that it’s hard even to see it in the data. What drives such investment is, instead, perceptions about market demand.

 

Why is this the case? One main reason is that business investments have relatively short working lives. If you’re considering whether to take out a mortgage to buy a house that will stand for many decades, the interest rate matters a lot. But if you’re thinking about taking out a loan to buy, say, a work computer that will either break down or become obsolescent in a few years, the interest rate on the loan will be a minor consideration in deciding whether to make the purchase.

 

And the same logic applies to tax rates: There aren’t many potential business investments that will be worth doing with a 21 percent profits tax, the current rate, but weren’t worth doing at 35 percent, the rate before the Trump tax cut.

 

Also, a substantial fraction of corporate profits really represents rewards to monopoly power, not returns on investment — and cutting taxes on monopoly profits is a pure giveaway, offering no reason to invest or hire.

 

Now, proponents of the tax cut, including Trump’s own economists, made a big deal about how we now have a global capital market, in which money flows to wherever it gets the highest after-tax return. And they pointed to countries with low corporate taxes, like Ireland, which appear to attract lots of foreign investment.

 

The key word here is, however, “appear.” Corporations do have a strong incentive to cook their books — I’m sorry, manage their internal pricing — in such a way that reported profits pop up in low-tax jurisdictions, and this in turn leads on paper to large overseas investments.

 

But there’s much less to these investments than meets the eye. For example, the vast sums corporations have supposedly invested in Ireland have yielded remarkably few jobs and remarkably little income for the Irish themselves — because most of that huge investment in Ireland is nothing more than an accounting fiction.

 

Now you know why the money U.S. companies reported moving home after taxes were cut hasn’t shown up in jobs, wages and investment: Nothing really moved. Overseas subsidiaries transferred some assets back to their parent companies, but this was just an accounting maneuver, with almost no impact on anything real.

 

So the basic result of lower taxes on corporations is that corporations pay less in taxes — full stop. Which brings me to the problem with conservative economic doctrine.

 

That doctrine is all about the supposed need to give the already privileged incentives to do nice things for the rest of us. We must, the right says, cut taxes on the wealthy to induce them to work hard, and cut taxes on corporations to induce them to invest in America.

 

But this doctrine keeps failing in practice. President George W. Bush’s tax cuts didn’t produce a boom; President Barack Obama’s tax hike didn’t cause a depression. Tax cuts in Kansas didn’t jump-start the state’s economy; tax hikes in California didn’t slow growth.

 

And with the Trump tax cut, the doctrine has failed again. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to get politicians to understand something when their campaign contributions depend on their not understanding it.

[Winstonm]

The Lie Sandwich:

 

I read an idea that surrounding a lie with the truth emphasizes truth over lie, a technique argued that the media should adopt with Dennison. I thought I would give it a try with the help of WaPo to see if that is the effect. Examples follow:

 

1) General facts: No member of the Mueller team worked for Hillary Clinton and only one had a connection to the Clinton Foundation.

 

2) The president's lie: “You have 17 people — half, many of them worked for Hillary Clinton, some on the foundation. The Hillary Clinton Foundation.”

 

3) Specific facts: This is false. Five members of the Mueller team contributed to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. One of those people, attorney Jeannie Rhee, represented the Clinton Foundation in a 2015 lawsuit over Clinton’s use of her private email server. Aaron Zebley, a former counterterrorism FBI agent and assistant U.S. attorney, made no contributions to Clinton but represented a Clinton aide at one point.

 

1) General Fact: Trump’s wall is not yet being built.

 

2) The president's lie: “I’m building the wall in smaller stages, and we moved the military there, we put up barbed wire, we did all sorts of things.”

 

3) Specific facts: Congress inserted specific language in its appropriations bill that none of the $1.57 billion appropriated for border protection may be used for prototypes of a concrete wall that Trump observed while in California. The money can be used only for bollard fencing and levee fencing. Trump regularly makes this false claim — at last count, more than 80 times.

[barmar]

And with the Trump tax cut, the doctrine has failed again.

Isn't the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results?

 

So now it's official, Republicans are insane.

[y66]

From Why the Perfect Red-State Democrat Lostby Alec MacGillis at NYT:

 

Taylor Sappington is exactly the kind of candidate his party should want in Ohio. But he couldn’t get union support.

 

Nov. 16, 2018

 

Taylor Sappington heard the call like so many other Democrats in the year after Nov. 8, 2016. He had seen Donald Trump coming, homing in on his little town of Nelsonville, Ohio, in the state’s impoverished Appalachian southeast. The town of 5,300 people had voted for Barack Obama twice by large margins.

 

Mr. Trump was Nelsonville’s pick in 2016, though it was more by default than acclamation. Mr. Trump won there with less than a majority, with 30 percent fewer votes than Mr. Obama had gotten four years earlier.

 

Mr. Sappington, a 27-year-old Ohio native, took this as evidence that Nelsonville was not beyond redemption, that the town where he had grown up in hard circumstances — the son of a single mother who was for a time on food stamps, living deep in the woods in a manufactured home — wasn’t really Trump country.

 

Not so long ago at all, Ohio was considered the quintessential swing state — it had, after all, voted for the winning presidential candidate in every election starting with 1964. Something happened this decade, though. The 2010 national “shellacking” of Democrats left a particularly strong mark in Ohio. The Republicans who assumed control of Columbus pulled off an aggressive gerrymandering of federal and state legislative districts. In 2012, when Barack Obama won the state for the second time, Republicans held 12 of the state’s 16 congressional seats despite winning only 52 percent of the total House vote.

 

The state’s makeup had been trending red, too. At a time when the share of white voters without college degrees — who are fast becoming the Republican base — decreased nationwide, it held strong in Ohio. The state was drawing relatively few immigrants, its education system was sliding in national rankings and, with its smaller cities and towns falling far behind thriving Columbus, it was losing many young college grads to jobs out of state.

 

Not Taylor Sappington, though. He wanted to stay. He had gotten hooked on national politics in high school, around the time he read a book on Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 campaign. And he had gotten out of Nelsonville, winning nearly a full ride to George Washington University.

 

But he felt out of place in D.C. — the wealthy students who abused expensive drugs and thought nothing of paying big cover charges at clubs, the dead-eyed people in suits rushing down the sidewalks — and he’d come back to finish at Ohio University, down the road from Nelsonville, in Athens. He took a break from school to work for Mr. Obama’s 2012 campaign in Ohio. And even before he had his diploma in hand, he’d run for, and won, a seat on the Nelsonville City Council.

 

The council seat came with only a $100 monthly stipend. So Mr. Sappington kept working as a waiter at the Texas Roadhouse in Athens. Later on, he added another gig: fixing broken smartphone screens in partnership with his younger brother, who drove an hour each way to work as a correctional officer at the prison in Chillicothe.

 

Mr. Sappington was content to stick with this combination for a while. He scratched out a living while pushing his agenda on the Council: finding the money to fix the town’s rutted roads, demolishing vacant homes, pushing for a mayoral system of government.

 

Then came 2016, which gave Mr. Trump an eight-percentage-point win in Ohio and swept in a new state representative for the district that included Nelsonville, which had been held by a Democrat for the previous eight years.

 

It was now held by a young Republican, Jay Edwards, who had been three years ahead of Mr. Sappington at Nelsonville-York High. He was a star quarterback who’d gone on to play linebacker at Ohio University, the scion of a prosperous local family.

 

Mr. Sappington was still mourning the election when, just a few weeks later, he confronted darkness of a different order. His longtime boyfriend — a gentle autodidact who had taught himself to build furniture and musical instruments when not working at Ruby Tuesday — committed suicide, at age 25.

 

At the next council meeting, Mr. Sappington spoke about the death, and the need for better mental health services in southeast Ohio. Jay Edwards was in the audience, as both Mr. Sappington and another council member recall, and stood up to leave in the middle of his remarks. (Mr. Edwards declined to comment on the record about that meeting or the race.)

 

A few months later, Mr. Sappington suffered another loss: the suicide of one of his cousins. A high school friend, a former service member, was succumbing to opiate addiction.

 

The gloom seemed relentless. Mr. Sappington decided the best way to fight it was to have something else to think about. Late last year, he made up his mind to run against Mr. Edwards, to reclaim the 94th House District in the Ohio statehouse for the Democrats.

 

He knew it would be a challenge. He was young. He would be vastly outspent. On the other hand, the district had been blue until very recently, and 2018 was promising to be a strong Democratic year. And he could, at least, count on support from unions and national progressive groups.

 

What he didn’t reckon with was that those organizations were already making a very different sort of calculus about his district, and about Ohio in general.

 

In December 2017, with the help of students at Ohio University, Mr. Sappington produced an arresting two-minute campaign video that included drone footage panning over Nelsonville, with its handsome town square lined with semi-abandoned brick buildings. “Why is that so many will grow up without parents because of this drug crisis? Why is it that our graduates struggle to find good-paying jobs?” he said in the video. “So much of this seems invisible in Columbus.”

 

The video was so powerful that the Ohio House Democratic Caucus played it at a fund-raiser in Columbus. Mr. Sappington learned of this secondhand, he said, because he wasn’t invited to the event. In general, he was having difficulty getting assistance from party leaders in Columbus, who seemed to be ranking candidates’ eligibility for support based in large part on the money they’d been able to raise. It wasn’t easy for a waiter in the poorest corner of the state to get people to write him checks, but Mr. Sappington had been prepared for that challenge.

 

What he hadn’t been prepared for was the lack of organizational support. Progressive groups in Washington and New York were focused mostly on congressional seats — never mind that it was state legislatures that would determine congressional lines for the next decade.

 

But most confounding were the unions. One by one, they started supporting Jay Edwards. And not just the building-trades unions, which sometimes side with Republicans, but the Service Employees International Union and the public sector unions — AFSCME, the Ohio Education Association and Ohio Civil Service Employees Association. The only endorsements Mr. Sappington received were from the National Association of Social Workers and the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers.

 

He was stunned. He was about as pro-union as one could be. In his video, he had mentioned his earlier activism against the law that Ohio Republicans had pushed through in 2011, eliminating collective bargaining for public employees, which was later overturned by referendum. His mother had been active in AFSCME; his brother belonged to the Civil Service Employees Association. And Mr. Sappington himself was a low-wage service worker. Yet he was losing labor support to a Republican who had supported a state budget that effectively reduced funding for education.

 

What he learned when he asked around, and what I later confirmed, was that the unions were, in many cases, making a grimly pragmatic decision in his race and others around the state. The Democrats had fallen to such a woeful level in Ohio state government that unions felt as if they had no choice but to make friends, or at least nonenemies, with some Republicans, in hopes of staving off anti-union measures such as “right-to-work” legislation and elimination of prevailing-wage standards.

 

For years, unions in the Midwest have rightly prided themselves on delivering the Democrats far higher margins among white working-class union members than among their nonunion brethren. But Mr. Trump had strained that bond in some unions, drawing support from many members even as their leaders had remained nominally committed to Hillary Clinton. Most unions were back on board with the Democrats in Midwestern federal and statewide races this year. In state legislative races in Ohio, though, unions hedged their bets.

 

The Ohio Education Association, for instance, endorsed 13 Republicans in state House races and three in State Senate races, while staying neutral in some others.

 

“If we were just looking at this as a partisan exercise and ‘to the winner go the spoils,’ we’d have been on the outside looking in, and we can’t let that happen,” said Scott DiMauro, vice president of the Ohio Education Association. “Republicans have supermajorities in both houses, and we’ve got to work with both parties to make progress on key issues.”

 

Joe Weidner, communications director for AFSCME’s statewide Council 8, gave a similar rationale. “We don’t just push the button for the Democrat,” he said. “It’s for the people who are behind us and will support us and we’ll support them. Party is important for us; we align a lot with the Democrats. But we also have Republicans we align with.”

 

Seen from one side, this was realpolitik. Seen from another, it was self-fulfilling fatalism, consigning the unions’ Democratic allies to permanent minority status.

 

Mr. Sappington forged on without the unions. His campaign’s slogan: “Health Care. Infrastructure. Integrity.” He had the help of a dedicated band of supporters, including an Ohio University student, Jordan Kelley, who was on leave from his studies while he saved money for his final semesters working at Buffalo Wild Wings. Bit by bit, Mr. Sappington raised money, bringing in about $80,000. That was enough for radio ads, postage for thousands of handwritten postcards and stipends for campaign workers.

 

But it was far less than the $430,000 that Mr. Edwards had raised since 2016, nearly half of which was from unions. He shared much of this largess with others in his party, which meant the unions’ money was also helping Republicans who were less pro-labor than Mr. Edwards.

 

In August, Mr. Sappington got the ultimate affirmation of his candidacy: He was one of 81 candidates across the entire country endorsed by Mr. Obama. That imprimatur cast the unions’ position in an even starker light: They were now lined up behind a Republican against a Democrat endorsed by the still-popular ex-president.

 

Other organizational backing remained slow in coming. The state House Democratic Caucus sent a young campaign manager and paid half of his salary, but he was ill-suited to rural organizing and he stayed only six weeks. Mr. Sappington struggled to get Democratic candidates for statewide office to campaign alongside him in the district. One national progressive group whose help he had sought sent no money, but did send, as a gesture of moral support, a package that included nuts and dried fruit.

 

On the night before the election, when other candidates might have done final phone-banking, Mr. Sappington had to report to Texas Roadhouse for a staff meeting on new food-safety measures. The next day, he traveled around the district to check on turnout levels. At night he headed to a vacation cabin in the woods that he had rented to watch election returns. His friends and family assembled to eat his mom’s chili and watch MSNBC.

 

Mr. Sappington sat with a laptop, monitoring the numbers trickling in from around the 94th District. Athens had turned out strongly, and he’d racked up big majorities there. But he’d been swamped in the rural areas. Mr. Edwards’s margin was the exact same as it had been against a different Democratic opponent two years ago: 58 to 42 percent.

 

The numbers were bleak for Democrats across the state. Sherrod Brown had won re-election to the Senate against a flawed opponent, by about six percentage points, but he was an anomaly. Democrats had not managed to win a single one of those gerrymandered congressional seats. They still held only four of 16, despite winning 48 percent of the congressional vote. They had lost not only the election for governor but for every other statewide office.

 

They’d picked up only four seats in the state House and lost one in the Senate, leaving Republican supermajorities in both chambers — this despite Democrats having won a near majority of total votes in those races, a sign of just how effectively gerrymandered districts were. In a way, the Democrats’ failure to make big gains had affirmed the unions’ self-protective strategy; but that failure had been partly abetted by the unions themselves.

 

There was another aspect, though, to the failure of the unions, state party leaders and progressive organizations to strongly support candidates like Taylor Sappington. He is a native of small-town Ohio, working-class not only in his roots but in his own livelihood: exactly the sort of elected official whom Democrats say they need to cultivate in areas where the party is losing ground.

 

At 9:45 p.m., Sappington slipped out of the cabin to call Jay Edwards and concede the race.

 

When he came back into the cabin, his face was drawn. He said that Mr. Edwards hadn’t immediately known who was calling, and a hard conversation was made harder.

 

“Hey, Jay,” he recalled saying. “It’s Taylor Sappington.”

 

“Taylor who?” said Mr. Edwards.

Ohio, we have a problem.

[y66]

From Judge hands CNN victory in its bid to restore Jim Acosta’s White House press pass by Paul Farhi at WaPo:

 

A federal judge on Friday ruled in favor of CNN and reporter Jim Acosta in a dispute with President Trump, ordering the White House to temporarily restore the press credentials that the Trump administration had taken away from Acosta last week.

 

In a victory for the cable network and for press access generally, Judge Timothy J. Kelly granted CNN’s motion for a temporary restraining order that will prevent the administration from keeping Acosta off White House grounds.

 

The White House revoked the reporter’s press pass last week after a heated exchange between him and President Trump and a brief altercation with a press aide at a news conference. Acosta, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, is the first reporter with a so-called hard pass to be banned.

 

CNN sued President Trump and other White House officials on Tuesday over the revocation. Kelly’s ruling was the first legal skirmish in that lawsuit. It has the immediate effect of sending Acosta back to the White House, pending further arguments and a possible trial. The litigation is in its early stages, and a trial could be months in the future.

 

CNN said Acosta would resume his post at the White House Friday afternoon.

 

Kelly, whom Trump appointed to the federal bench last year, handed down his ruling two days after the network and government lawyers argued over whether the president had the power to exclude a reporter from the White House.

 

In explaining his decision, Kelly said he agreed with the government’s argument that there was no First Amendment right to come onto the White House grounds. But, he said, once the White House opened up the grounds to reporters, the First Amendment applied.

 

His ruling, however, primarily emphasized the White House’s lack of due process in revoking Acosta’s access, a key argument made by CNN in its suit. He said the White House’s decision-making was “so shrouded in mystery that the government could not tell me . . . who made the decision.” The White House’s later written arguments for banning Acosta were belated and weren’t sufficient to satisfy due process, Kelly said.