Month: June 2018

A prudent money manager in the White House

by digby

Because he cares:

President Trump has spent more in taxpayer dollars on frequent trips to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida than special counsel Robert Mueller‘s office has spent on the Russia investigation so far.

The president has repeatedly attacked the Mueller probe for racking up millions of dollars in expenditures, doing so most recently this week after the Justice Department reported that the special counsel’s office had spent roughly $16.7 million on expenses in just over a year of investigation.

“A.P. has just reported that the Russian Hoax Investigation has now cost our government over $17 million, and going up fast. No Collusion, except by the Democrats!” Trump tweeted Friday.

But that number is dwarfed by the amount required to pay for the president’s numerous trips to the “Winter White House,” which Washington Post and Politico analyses have estimated to cost taxpayers on average between $1 million and $3 million per trip.

As of Dec. 26, Trump had spent 39 days at Mar-a-Lago in 2017. Trump took his 17th trip to the property in April, according to Town and Countrymagazine.

The figure also comes in spite of Trump’s frequent attacks aimed at his predecessor, former President Obama.

Trump, who has been criticized for his frequent outings to Trump properties, particularly golf courses, has invoked his own criticism of Obama’s golfing trips on numerous occasions. Trump surpassed the pace of Obama’s golf outings, making 56 total trips so far compared to Obama’s 37 at the same point in his presidency, according to Politifact.

A White House spokeswoman claimed last year that, despite Trump’s fondness for golf, his visits to Mar-a-Lago have been “work” excursions.

“He is not vacationing when he goes to Mar-a-Lago. The president works nonstop every day of the week, no matter where he is,” a White House spokeswoman said in February.

That’s not really the point. On the campaign trail he promised he wouldn’t play golf or even leave the White House because he would be working so hard to make America great again. Instead he leaves every week-end, watches TV incessantly, refuses to read briefing papers, plays golf and tweets.

Also, I wonder how much his inane economic policies have cost Americans? Or how many millions he and his family have made from trading favors?

Ah, whatever. Nobody cares.

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His big, beautiful laurels
by Tom Sullivan

Strawberries.

“Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” Richard Nixon told David Frost in 1977, long before Donald Trump’s lawyers made that claim to Robert Mueller. It was not true then. It is not true now. But the truth has never been an obstacle to the sitting president and his aides from claiming up is down, black is white, in is out, and wrong is right.

The New York Times revealed Saturday it had obtained a secret 20-page letter sent to special counsel Robert Mueller in which the president’s legal team asserts the president cannot obstruct justice in the Russia investigation because the constitution empowers him to “if he wished, terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon.” The full letter with annotations is here.

They claim when the president does it, it is not illegal. The president cannot obstruct justice because he is the president.

Ruth Marcus writes in the Washington Post that as much as the administration’s behavior telegraphed this posture, it is nonetheless “breathtaking to see it spelled out” in black and white.

“A President,” the legal team writes, “can also order the termination of an investigation by the Justice Department or FBI at any time and for any reason. Such an action obviously has an impact on the investigation, but that is simply an effect of the President’s lawful exercise of his constitutional power and cannot constitute obstruction of justice.”

The Trump legal team cites an obsolete obstruction statute in making their case, proving he got what he paid for (if indeed he has), just as Trump voters got the vain amateur for which they yearned. Congress broadened the obstruction statute in 2002, the Times reports. Even under the obsolete one, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, then senator from Alabama, and over 40 of his peers in Congress voted to remove Bill Clinton from office for obstructing justice in an investigation Clinton never asserted the power to end. Politico reported on the Trump legal theory in December:

Trump’s personal lawyer John Dowd argued in an interview with Axios on Monday that the “president cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under [the Constitution’s Article II] and has every right to express his view of any case.”

Where Sessions argued in Clinton’s case that the president had the responsibility to “defend the law,” Dowd argued that the president’s oversight of law enforcement makes it impossible for anyone in the office to obstruct it in the first place.

A lot of pixels will fly in response to the Times blockbuster, as well as panel after TV panel. I leave the constitutional arguments to others this morning. It might be more useful to ask, “What now?” A bit of creativity may be in order.

Never averse to pointless and futile gestures, some on the left will demand impeachment and insist Democrats run on it this fall. Given the current balance of the House and the tenor of the Senate, impeachment seems a pointless, time-consuming, and distracting sideshow, no matter what the Constitution recommends. Even if Democrats gain control of the House next January and proffer articles of impeachment to the Senate, the Senate will not vote to convict. Given what we’ve seen of Mitch McConnell’s style, he might never convene a trial. Pursuit of impeachment is likely to deliver a result worse than unsatisfying, but in fact ineffective.

While the sitting president’s mental capacity might have been one of the situations for which the 25th Amendment was designed, its dependence on sitting cabinet members for removing a president from office makes it a similarly unlikely vehicle for removing a president claiming imperial authority.

Mutiny perhaps? Rosa Brooks dared write in Foreign Policy 18 months ago that with civilian control of the military a deeply internalized principle, should Trump become dangerously erratic, open defiance might not be out of the question:

It’s impossible to say, of course. The prospect of American military leaders responding to a presidential order with open defiance is frightening — but so, too, is the prospect of military obedience to an insane order. After all, military officers swear to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, not the president. For the first time in my life, I can imagine plausible scenarios in which senior military officials might simply tell the president: “No, sir. We’re not doing that,” to thunderous applause from the New York Times editorial board.

The Boston Globe offered in November several other avenues more Democratic leverage might have for influencing the president’s behavior. The first of these in particular could force him step aside on his own:

Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns, for instance, would be instantly reversed if the House requested them and read them into the public record. Similarly, Congress could refuse to confirm nominees, or put other Trump priorities on hold, until he set up a proper blind trust, truly divorcing himself — and his nearest family members — from his business empire.

There may be plenty of other ways we have never explored for leveraging aside an imperial president. Just as we have never seen a president as uniquely unfit as this one. Trump long ago telegraphed that, whatever secrets they hold, publicly exposing his taxes would wound him deeply. The prospect of a new Democratic House spilling the president’s dirty laundry onto the White House lawn has more than a little appeal.

Let’s pray that in the meantime he doesn’t start ranting about strawberries.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

SIFF-ting through cinema, Pt. 3

By Dennis Hartley

The Seattle International Film Festival continues through June 10th, so I’m sharing more highlights with you this week. SIFF is showing 433 films over 25 days. Navigating such an event is no easy task, even for a dedicated buff. Yet, I trudge on (cue the world’s tiniest violin). Hopefully, some of these films will be coming soon to a theater near you…

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (France) – With its central themes regarding exploited workers and the opportunistic, predatory habits of men in power, this rarely-presented and newly restored 1936 film by the great Jean Renoir (Le Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game) plays like a prescient social justice revenge fantasy custom-tailored for our times. A struggling pulp western writer who works for a scuzzy, exploitative Harvey Weinstein-like publisher takes on his corrupt boss by forming a worker’s collective. While it is essentially a sociopolitical noir, the numerous romantic subplots, snappy pre-Code patter, busy multi-character shots and the restless camera presages His Girl Friday.

Rating: ***½

(Special revival presentation; Plays June 3 only)

A Good Day for Democracy (Sweden) – I don’t need to tell you that democracy is a messy business. But when working correctly, it’s a good kind of mess (Mussolini made the trains run on time, but at what price?). Cecilia Bjork’s purely observational peek at “Almedalen Week”, an annual event held on Sweden’s isle of Gotland that corrals politicians, lobbyists, and everyday citizens into a no holds-barred, all-access setting serves as a perfect (albeit messy) microcosm of true democracy in action.

Rating: *** (North American premiere; Plays June 7 & June 9)

Little Tito and the Aliens (Italy) – I avoid using phrases like “heartwarming family dramedy”, but in the case of Paola Randi’s, erm, heartwarming family dramedy…it can’t be helped. An eccentric Italian scientist, a widower living alone in a shipping container near Area 51 (long story), suddenly finds himself guardian to his teenage niece and young nephew after his brother dies. Blending family melodrama with a touch of magical realism, it’s a sweet and gentle tale about second chances-and following your bliss.

Rating: ***½ (North American premiere; Plays June 7, June 8, & June 10)

Rush Hour (Mexico) – Argentinian director Luciana Kaplan profiles three working class commuters from around the globe-a single Turkish mother in Istanbul, a woman who works as a hairdresser in Mexico City, and a construction foreman in Los Angeles. As disparate as their geographical locations and cultures may be, the three have one immediately apparent thing in common: a time-sucking, soul-crushing daily commute that they must soldier through to put food on the table and a roof over their head. However, as the film unfolds, it reveals commonalities that run deeper than slogging through traffic in an existential malaise; hopes, dreams, aspirations, and shared humanity.

Rating: *** (Plays June 8 and June 9)

More SIFF coverage at Den of Cinema!

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A picture worth a billion bucks

by digby

Check out the looks on both their faces. North Korea’s top spy cannot contain his smirk and Trump is a grinning dotard. Who do you think is the smarter of these two?

By the way, yesterday we had the most vivid example of the dotard’s pathological lying:

President Trump figuratively dangled a letter from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in front of reporters on Friday, as he confirmed that a June 12 summit is back on.

“That letter was a very nice letter,” Trump said at a White House news conference. “Oh, would you like to see what was in that letter. Wouldn’t you like? How much? How much? How much?”

When a journalist asked whether the president could “just give us the flavor of what the letter said,” Trump said, “It was a very interesting letter. At some point, it may be appropriate and maybe I’ll be able to give it to you, maybe.”

A few minutes later, however, Trump said he hadn’t even opened the letter, which was delivered by Kim Yong Chol, a high-ranking North Korean official who previously directed that country’s spy agency.

“I haven’t seen the letter yet,” the president said. “I purposely didn’t open the letter. I haven’t opened it. I didn’t open it in front of the director. I said, ‘Would you want me to open it?’ He said, ‘You can read it later.’ ”

Note the picture of the man who cannot tell a lie, George Washington, looking on from behind in that picture.

What’s for dinner down here in the rabbit hole?

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“This is going to be an emotional election”

by digby

I don’t know if Steve Bannon knows something about the president’s plans but I think Trump instinctively understands it anyway. The rally in which he got his screaming racist fan base to scream “animals!” telegraphed it pretty obviously. This excerpt is from Fareed Zakaria’s op-ed in the Washington Post, drawn from his interview with Bannon:

The Republican Party’s strategy, for now, appears to be to make the midterm elections a series of local contests focusing on the tax cut and the healthy economy. Bannon views this as fundamentally misguided. “You have to nationalize the election,” he said. Bannon understands that voters are moved from the gut more than through a wonky analysis of taxes. “This is going to be an emotional [election] — you’re either with [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi or you’re with Donald Trump. . . . Trump’s second presidential race will be on Nov. 6 of this year.”

Bannon is most focused on the issue of immigration because it hits both the heart and the head. “Immigration is about not just sovereignty, it’s about jobs.” He believes that the Trump coalition can attract up to a third of Sanders supporters who see trade and immigration as having created unfair competition for jobs, particularly for working-class blacks and Hispanics. He advocates appealing directly to those voters, saying, “You’re not going to be able to take the Hispanic and black community from the STEM system in grammar school to our best engineering schools . . . to the great jobs in Silicon Valley, unless you start to limit these H-1B visas and this unfair competition . . . from East Asia and South Asia.”

Now this strikes me as entirely wrong. The reason that not enough Hispanic and black students end up in Silicon Valley has much more to do with a broken education system, particularly for poorer kids, than the modest number of skilled Asian immigrants who get work visas. The most likely result of limiting these visas is that talented immigrants will simply go elsewhere — Canada, Britain, Australia — and start successful companies there. And, in fact, there is lots of evidence this is already happening.

But Bannon is right that this is a brilliant electoral strategy. The idea of greater immigration controls has an undeniable mainstream appeal. The Democratic Party is too far to the left on many of these issues, embracing concepts such as sanctuary cities, which only reinforces its image as a party that is more concerned with race, identity and multiculturalism than the rule of law.

Where Bannon is analytic and historical, Trump is instinctive. But the president appears to see the situation similarly. I wrote last month that Trump would try to fight the midterm elections on immigration and added, “Do not be surprised if Trump also picks a few fights with black athletes.” In recent weeks, the president has labeled immigrant gang members “animals” and suggested that football players who silently protest police violence against blacks should leave the country.

Bannon thinks Trump is just getting started in nationalizing the election around immigration. He predicted the next major battle would be over the proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. “The wall is not just totemic. The wall is absolutely central to his program. . . . As we come up on Sept. 30, if [Congress’s] appropriations bill does not include spending to fully build his wall . . . I believe he will shut down the government.”

Bannon is advocating a simple divide and conquer strategy, centered on dividing the Democratic Party by race and ethnicity. It has nothing to do with economics. Bannon is on the record with what he calls his “nationalist” philosophy (actually good old fashioned authoritarianism/fascism)

Trump’s rise was, he said, transformative for America. But it was only one manifestation of a powerful global undercurrent. “That’s why,” he said, “you see a nationalist movement in Egypt, India, the Philippines, in South Korea, and now Abe in Japan. I’d say Putin and Xi in China are nationalists. Look at Le Pen in France, Orban in Hungary, and the nationalists in Poland.” Trump was, of course, the most consequential: “Look, I’ve been studying this for a while, and it’s amazing that Trump has been talking about these ideas for 25 years.”

Actually, he’s an f-ing moron with authoritarian instincts. Anyway, here’s a little more Bannon’s recipe for destruction:

Bannon’s response to the rise of modernity was to set populist, right-​wing nationalism against it. Wherever he could, he aligned himself with politicians and causes committed to tearing down its globalist edifice: archconservative Catholics such as Burke, Nigel Farage, and U.K.I.P., Marine Le Pen’s National Front, Geert Wilders and the Party for Freedom, and Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. (When he got to the White House, he also leveraged U.S. trade policy to strengthen opponents of the E.U.) This had a meaningful effect, even before Trump. “Bannon’s a political entrepreneur and a remarkable bloke,” Farage told me. “Without the supportive voice of Breitbart London, I’m not sure we would have had a Brexit.”

Initially, Bannon thought restoration lay in a rising political generation still some years off: figures such as Frauke Petry, of Germany’s right-​wing Alternative für Deutschland, and Marion Maréchal‑Le Pen, niece of Marine, whose politics he approvingly described as “practically French medieval,” adding: “She’s the future of France.” It took some time for him to realize that in Trump (whose familiarity with French metaphysics, we can be certain, is no more than glancing) he had found a leader who could rapidly advance the nationalist cause, — one who fit into the “unbroken chain” of populists in U.S. history that stretched from Hamilton to Clay to Polk to Teddy Roosevelt and now to Trump…

When he took over Trump’s campaign last August, Bannon ran a nationalist, divisive operation in which issues of race, immigration, culture, and identity were put front and center. This wasn’t by accident or lacking in purpose. By exhuming the nationalist thinkers of an earlier age, Bannon was trying to build an intellectual basis for Trumpism, or what might more accurately be described as an American nationalist-​­Traditionalism. Whatever the label, Trump proved to be an able messenger.

For all his paranoid alarm, Bannon believes that the rise of nationalist movements across the world, from Europe to Japan to the United States, heralds a return to tradition. “You have to control three things,” he explained, “borders, currency, and military and national identity. People are finally coming to realize that, and politicians will have to follow.” Trump, for one, certainly looks to be pursuing that agenda.

There is no need for an intellectual basis for Trumpism. It’s all about crude racism and will to power, period, which is why Bannon’s psuedo-intellectual blather meant nothing in the end and he was canned himself.

Trump pursues his own agenda: authoritarian kleptocratic corruption, which is also a strong feature of most of these “nationalist” regimes. It includes Bannon’s divide and conquer strategy, but isn’t limited to it. He’s favoring interests, regions, industries, countries and people who flatter and/or worship him (it doesn’t matter which.) That is the full extent of his motives. But as Bannon saw, these motives track very nicely with the global “nationalist” movement.

L’etat c’est moi o’ the day: If the president covers up his crimes it’s not illegal

by digby

He’s said he can’t have a conflict of interest and corruption laws do not apply to him. He’s said that he cannot endanger national security by spilling classified documents to adversaries.

Now he’s taking it to absolute limit:

President Trump’s lawyers have for months quietly waged a campaign to keep the special counsel from trying to force him to answer questions in the investigation into whether he obstructed justice, asserting that he cannot be compelled to testify and arguing in a confidential letter that he could not possibly have committed obstruction because he has unfettered authority over all federal investigations.

In a brash assertion of presidential power, the 20-page letter — sent to the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and obtained by The New York Times — contends that the president cannot illegally obstruct any aspect of the investigation into Russia’s election meddling because the Constitution empowers him to, “if he wished, terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon.”

Mr. Trump’s lawyers fear that if he answers questions, either voluntarily or in front of a grand jury, he risks exposing himself to accusations of lying to investigators, a potential crime or impeachable offense.

Mr. Trump’s broad interpretation of executive authority is novel and is likely to be tested if a court battle ensues over whether he could be ordered to answer questions. It is unclear how that fight, should the case reach that point, would play out. A spokesman for Mr. Mueller declined to comment.

“We don’t know what the law is on the intersection between the obstruction statutes and the president exercising his constitutional power to supervise an investigation in the Justice Department,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who oversaw the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush administration. “It’s an open question.”

Let’s be clear. That’s only because no president has ever said that he has the unfettered power to obstruct any investigation against him.

Hand-delivered to the special counsel’s office in January and written by two of the president’s lawyers at the time, John M. Dowd and Jay A. Sekulow, the letter offers a rare glimpse into one side of the high-stakes negotiations over a presidential interview.

Though it is written as a defense of the president, the letter recalls the tangled drama of early 2017 as the new administration dealt with the Russia investigation. It also serves as a reminder that in weighing an obstruction case, Mr. Mueller is reviewing actions and conversations involving senior White House officials, including the president, the vice president and the White House counsel.

The letter also lays out a series of claims that foreshadow a potential subpoena fight that could unfold in the months leading into November’s midterm elections.

“We are reminded of our duty to protect the president and his office,” the lawyers wrote, making their case that Mr. Mueller has the information he needs from tens of thousands of pages of documents they provided and testimony by other witnesses, obviating the necessity for a presidential interview.

Mr. Mueller has told the president’s lawyers that he needs to talk to their client to determine whether he had criminal intent to obstruct the investigation into his associates’ possible links to Russia’s election interference. If Mr. Trump refuses to be questioned, Mr. Mueller will have to weigh their arguments while deciding whether to press ahead with a historic grand jury subpoena.

Mr. Mueller had raised the prospect of subpoenaing Mr. Trump to Mr. Dowd in March. Emmet T. Flood, the White House lawyer for the special counsel investigation, is preparing for that possibility, according to the president’s lead lawyer in the case, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

The attempt to dissuade Mr. Mueller from seeking a grand jury subpoena is one of two fronts on which Mr. Trump’s lawyers are fighting. In recent weeks, they have also begun a public-relations campaign to discredit the investigation and in part to pre-empt a potentially damaging special counsel report that could prompt impeachment proceedings.

Mr. Trump complained on Twitter on Saturday before this article was published that the disclosure of the letter was a damaging leak to the news media and asked whether the “expensive Witch Hunt Hoax” would ever end.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers are gambling that Mr. Mueller may not want to risk an attempt to forge new legal ground by bringing a grand jury subpoena against a sitting president into a criminal proceeding.

“Ensuring that the office remains sacred and above the fray of shifting political winds and gamesmanship is of critical importance,” they wrote.

Oh fergawsakes

They argued that the president holds a special position in the government and is busy running the country, making it difficult for him to prepare and sit for an interview. They said that because of those demands on Mr. Trump’s time, the special counsel’s office should have to clear a higher bar to get him to talk. Mr. Mueller, the president’s attorneys argued, needs to prove that the president is the only person who can give him the information he seeks and that he has exhausted all other avenues for getting it.

“The president’s prime function as the chief executive ought not be hampered by requests for interview,” they wrote. “Having him testify demeans the office of the president before the world.”

Well, unless he got an unauthorized blow job in which case the whole government must come to a halt.

They have no shame.

This is really interesting. His lawyers are so lame that they relied on outdated legal precedents:

They also contended that nothing Mr. Trump did violated obstruction-of-justice statutes, making both a technical parsing of what one such law covers and a broad constitutional argument that Congress cannot infringe on how he exercises his power to supervise the executive branch. Because of the authority the Constitution gives him, it is impossible for him to obstruct justice by shutting down a case or firing a subordinate, no matter his motivation, they said.

“Every action that the president took was taken with full constitutional authority pursuant to Article II of the United States Constitution,” they wrote of the part of the Constitution that created the executive branch. “As such, these actions cannot constitute obstruction, whether viewed separately or even as a totality.”
[…]

But Mr. Trump could not have intentionally impeded the F.B.I.’s investigation, the lawyers wrote, because he did not know Mr. Flynn was under investigation when he spoke to Mr. Comey. Mr. Flynn, they said, twice told senior White House officials in the days before he was fired in February 2017 that he was not under F.B.I. scrutiny.

“There could not possibly have been intent to obstruct an ‘investigation’ that had been neither confirmed nor denied to White House counsel,” the president’s lawyers wrote.

Moreover, F.B.I. investigations do not qualify as the sort of “proceeding” an obstruction-of-justice statute covers, they argued.

“Of course, the president of the United States is not above the law, but just as obvious and equally as true is the fact that the president should not be subjected to strained readings and forced applications of clearly irrelevant statutes,” Mr. Dowd and Mr. Sekulow wrote.

But the lawyers based those arguments on an outdated statute, without mentioning that Congress passed a broader law in 2002 that makes it a crime to obstruct proceedings that have not yet started.

Samuel W. Buell, a Duke Law School professor and white-collar criminal law specialist who was a lead prosecutor for the Justice Department’s Enron task force, said the real issue was whether Mr. Trump obstructed a potential grand jury investigation or trial — which do count as proceedings — even if the F.B.I. investigation had not yet developed into one of those. He called it inexplicable why the president’s legal team was making arguments that were focused on the wrong obstruction-of-justice statute.

This is particularly stupid:

Mr. Trump’s lawyers also try to untangle another potential piece of evidence in the obstruction investigation: his assertion, during an interview with Lester Holt of NBC two days after Mr. Comey was fired, that he was thinking while he weighed the dismissal that “this Russia thing” had no validity. Mr. Mueller’s investigators view that statement as damning, according to people familiar with the investigation.

But the lawyers say that news accounts seized on only part of his comments and that his full remarks show that the president was aware that firing Mr. Comey would lengthen the investigation and dismissed him anyway.

The complete interview, the lawyers argued, makes clear “he was willing, even expecting, to let the investigation take more time, though he thinks it is ridiculous, because he believes that the American people deserve to have a competent leader of the F.B.I.”

Right. Except for the fact that he was and remains obsessed with getting every authority to say he isn’t under investigation when he clearly is.

And then there was this little quote the day after he fired Comey:

President Trump told Russian officials in the Oval Office this month that firing the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, had relieved “great pressure” on him, according to a document summarizing the meeting.

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document, which was read to The New York Times by an American official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

Mr. Trump added, “I’m not under investigation.”

Tell Vlad the coast is clear …

Emperor Trump is being told by all of his sycophants that he is above the law. He believes it. And so that is how he is governing. It’s not just in this matter. It’s in everything even signaling that the jobs numbers are good in violation of one of the government and capital markets’ most sacred trusts. You know he must have told his kids and his buddies, right?

Republicans are all fine with this because they have always yearned to be subjects.

Update: Marcy Wheeler:

This “letter” is one of the most ridiculous pieces of legal sophistry I have ever seen in my life. It, without an iota of shame or self reflection, brazenly place Trump as not just a King, but a God like entity that far outstrips the importance of the rule of law or separation of powers the Founders intended.

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Winners and losers

by digby

Yes, he’s picking them. Because he’s a very stable genius who knows everything:

President Trump is increasingly intervening in the economy, making decisions about corporate winners and losers in ways that Republicans for decades have insisted should be left to free markets — not the government.

The shift amounts to a major change in the GOP’s approach to the management of the economy, and it promises to shape the success of everything from American agriculture and manufacturing to the companies that produce the nation’s electricity.

On Friday, citing national security, Trump ordered the Energy Department to compel power-grid operators to buy from ailing coal and nuclear plants that otherwise would be forced to shut down because of competition from cheaper sources.

The order came one day after the president imposed historic metals tariffs on some of the country’s strongest allies and trading partners. Now the Commerce Department is further picking winners and losers as it weighs thousands of requests from companies for waivers from the import taxes.

“It replaces the invisible hand with the government hand,” said Mary Lovely, a Syracuse University economist. “You’re replacing the market with government fiat.”

The president has chastised individual companies, second-guessed the U.S. Postal Service’s business arrangement with Amazon and put pressure on Boeing and Lockheed Martin over the cost of their products.

2:36
Fact-checking the Trump administration’s claims on ‘saving’ coal
The Trump administration has made a lot of claims about gains in the coal industry, but virtually none of them are true. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

Trump’s order to Energy Secretary Rick Perry to stop the shutdown of coal and nuclear plants is the latest example of government intervention. The method will probably resemble a 41-page memo discussed this week by the National Security Council and at a Cabinet deputies-level meeting.

According to the memo, the Energy Department should invoke emergency authority under Cold War legislation — the Defense Production Act of 1950 and the Federal Power Act — to require regional electricity grids to purchase electric power from a list of plants chosen by the department. The memo said the criteria would be reliability, a quality that is the subject of hot debate.

The activist group Earthjustice issued a statement titled “Trump Administration Resorts to Soviet-style Takeover of Private Energy Markets To Keep Dirty, Uneconomic Coal Plants Running.” Staff attorney Kim Smaczniak said “no law gives the administration the power to set energy prices.”

The companies running regional electricity grids operate under a competitive bidding process that has won praise from environmental groups, utilities and regulators.

Those regulators, the independent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, rejected a similar Energy Department rescue for coal and nuclear plants in January.

But utility industry executives now worry that Trump is insisting on forcing through a plan akin to the rejected one because of political rather than economic concerns.

It’s not even really political. It’s personal. Trump is the president of Real America, a country that consists of people who voted for him and support him blindly today. Anyone else is out of luck. He said he was going to bring back “clean beautiful coal” which he believes they literally wash to make it non-polluting. (I’m not kidding.) I’m not sure what his enablers in the White House are thinking but they seem to believe this makes sense on some abstract political level. Or maybe they’re all very stable geniuses too…

The other side of this is that Trump’s worldview is all about payback and dominance.He decided decades ago that foreigners are screwing him (he IS America) and now he’s going to show them all who’s boss. And anyone who tries to tell him differently is also trying to screw him, so they need to be hit and hit hard too.

That’s it. That’s all this is about. He has no economic philosophy. It’s just him, emperor of the world.

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The Knights of Trumplandia

by digby

What won’t they do for Emperor Trump?

Rep. Trey Gowdy has been a pitbull investigator for Republicans for years. Now, he’s in President Donald Trump’s doghouse for daring to challenge the president’s unsupported claim that Democrats and their sympathizers in the FBI embedded a spy in his 2016 campaign.

Trump allies have been pummeling Gowdy in recent days, branding him a gullible or clueless backer of the intelligence community. Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, labeled him “uninformed.” Another Trump-tied attorney, Victoria Toensing, said Gowdy “doesn’t know diddly-squat” about the particulars of federal investigations. And Fox News host Lou Dobbs tagged him a “RINO” — a term for a fake Republican.

It’s the latest twist in Gowdy’s enigmatic tenure in Congress. Once a conservative hero for his headline-grabbing inquisitions of the Obama administration — over the “Fast and Furious” gun-running program and alleged IRS targeting of conservatives, as well as his highly charged Benghazi probe — Gowdy has also bedeviled partisans by sometimes refusing to toe a pro-Trump line. At times, Trump himself has seemed perplexed; in the span of two years, the president once hailed Gowdy as a brilliant lawmaker before bashing him as a failure and then embracing him once again.

Now, after years shouldering the House GOP’s weightiest and most politically explosive investigations, he’s again drawn the ire of Trump-world. And this time, he’s virtually alone, getting little support from his House colleagues.

The retiring South Carolina Republican’s emergence as a critic of Trump’s conspiracy theory began Tuesday, when Gowdy went on Fox News to discuss his takeaway from a classified Justice Department briefing last week about the president’s claims.

Gowdy insisted that the FBI did not, in fact, plant a spy in the Trump camp for political purposes. Rather, he said, the FBI appropriately deployed an informant to glean intelligence from members on the outer edge of Trump’s campaign. The FBI had received troubling evidence that those individuals had suspect ties to Russia, and the bureau had been obligated to pursue those legitimate leads, Gowdy said. The briefing, for only a select group of nine senior lawmakers of both parties, only bolstered his position, he said.

“I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got — and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump,” Gowdy said in the interview.

The comments soon earned him punishing rebukes from Trump’s most vocal allies. Fox’s Sean Hannity said Wednesday that “Trey Gowdy doesn’t get it.” Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, father of White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, distributed a 950-word treatise Friday questioning Gowdy’s position. And Dobbs said Gowdy appeared to be auditioning for a job after he leaves Congress.

[…]

The episode isn’t the first time Gowdy has ended up frustrating Trump’s circle. House conservatives, Trump allies and even Trump himself blasted Gowdy in June 2016 for declining to issue a harsher indictment of Hillary Clinton’s role in the Benghazi attacks that left four Americans dead in 2012.

Trump, who in 2014 praised Gowdy’s ascension to lead the Benghazi probe as a “great decision,” has had a seesawing relationship with the soft-spoken South Carolinian in recent years. In July 2015, Trump tweeted a supporters’ suggestion that Gowdy become his attorney general. But he soured on him in late 2015, when Gowdy endorsed his primary rival Sen. Marco Rubio. “I hope @TGowdySC does better for Rubio than he did at the #Benghazi hearings, which were a total disaster for Republicans & America!” he tweeted at the time.

But by mid-2016, Trump was ready to embrace Gowdy again after earning his endorsement. “Thank you for your wonderful endorsement today @TGowdySC. It means a great deal to me,” Trump tweeted at the time. “We will not disappoint!”

Gowdy revealed in a CBS interview on Wednesday that he has “never met or talked to” Trump, a startling fact for a senior lawmaker who has had an outsize role in the House for years. Meanwhile, Trump approvingly quoted comments Gowdy made about Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a series of tweets Wednesday.

But that didn’t stop the onslaught of attacks on Gowdy from Trump’s most vocal allies. “He’s drinking the Kool-Aid,” Giuliani said of Gowdy in a CNN interview, before saying Gowdy “screwed up” on Benghazi.

Huckabee said Gowdy seemed to unquestioningly accept the Justice Department’s briefing on the FBI informant. “Such credulity seems strangely out of character for someone like Gowdy, a seasoned prosecutor who knows better than to believe people who continue to hide mountains of evidence,” Huckabee wrote.

This is sick. Gowdy is anything but a left wing toady and they know it. But they are demonstrating that if you defy their king they will descend like a pack of rabid wolves.

Worst Republican President Ever

by tristero

Thank you, Bret Stephens, for proposing that we entertain the burning question: who’s the worst Republican president ever?  Yes indeed, there’s something so….extremely right about putting the words “Republican” and  “worst” together in close proximity.

Here’s my choice. My major criterion for Worst Republican President Ever is needless, pointless death and suffering perpetrated by and on his watch. That makes the choice of Worst easy.

George W. Bush was the Worst Republican President Ever. Reasons include 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq (my god, the unnecessary slaughter that twisted man unleased), Katrina, and so much more.

Second place: Richard M. Nixon for getting elected on the corpses of GI’s, for Cambodia, and for perpetuating Vietnam.

Dishonorable Mention: Donald J. Trump, but with special note taken of his deranged character and power, equipping him with the alarming potential to become not merely the Worst Republican President Ever, not merely the Worst President Ever, but the Worst  Human Ever. That’s because not even the present holder of the title Worst Human Ever had either a working nuclear arsenal or a global delivery system for same at his disposal.

I’m sure you think I’m totally wrong. Great! You have your own, very different, criteria and rankings? Have at it: Who do you think was the Worst Republican President Ever?

The important thing is to keep Bret Stephens’s truly excellent meme going. “Republican.” “Worst.” Indeed.

International law? What international law?
by Tom Sullivan

ICE South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, run by for-profit Corrections Corporation of America (photo via LATINA LISTA)

Heaven forfend the sitting president and his coterie should violate international law … unless they want to. And they want to.

Buzzfeed reported Friday night:

A Salvadoran mother who applied for asylum as part of a caravan of Central Americans that traversed Mexico for the United States this spring has had her two sons removed from her custody and placed in the care of the federal government in New York.

Officials offered no explanation for removing the children, the latest in what’s becoming a growing pattern of separating immigrant parents from their children under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy for undocumented migrants caught trying to sneak into the US along the southwest border.

Except the woman had arrived at port of entry, applied for asylum, and passed the first step in the process. Immigration and Customs Enforcement gave her 10 minutes to say goodbye to her children.

The Trump Justice Department is separating children from their parents at the border under the pretext that this always happens when someone has violated the law. In this case, by crossing into U.S. territory and asking for asylum. Under the DOJ’s reading of law, they entered the country illegally, thus committing a crime. Their arrests create “unaccompanied minors” the Office of Refugee Resettlement then houses separately, often states away and without specifics on their whereabouts given to the parents. Or DHS claims it cannot ascertain the parental relationship to justify the separations.

Trump takes no responsibility for his own policy, blaming “bad laws that the Democrats gave us.” Laws the administration cites to justify the actions do not.

The administration is unapologetic. “If you don’t want your child to be separated, then don’t bring ‘em across the border illegally. It’s not our fault if somebody does that,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a May statement. He characterizes women with children fleeing danger in their home countries as “smuggling a child.”

Except under international law, signatories to the Convention and Protocols Relating to the Status of Refugees “shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened.” The U.S. is a signatory. Donald Trump might call a bad deal, but it is a binding one.

New Yorker reports:

According to the D.H.S., six hundred and fifty-eight children were separated from their parents between May 6th and May 19th. Reports have surfaced of children, some as young as toddlers, being wrested from family members, and of parents being deported before they could locate their children, who remain stranded in the U.S. “Little kids are begging and screaming not to be taken from parents, and they’re being hauled off,” Lee Gelernt, a veteran attorney for the A.C.L.U., told the Washington Post. “It’s as bad as anything I’ve seen in twenty-five-plus years of doing this work.” Research has shown that removing a young child from her primary caregivers for even a short period can cause long-term psychological harm.

It is not clear from reporting I’ve seen how many of the arriving families are claiming asylum.

Still, let’s revisit this column from The Intercept last November:

Building on a complaint filed in July, the suit argues CBP officials at numerous ports of entry, or POEs, throughout the southwest have displayed a similar set of “unlawful practices” designed to deny individuals their right under the law to apply for asylum.

“Since at least June 2016,” the motion reads, “CBP officers at POEs along the U.S.-Mexico border have been consistently turning away — through an identifiable set of tactics including, misrepresentations about U.S. asylum law and the U.S. asylum process, threats and intimidation, verbal and physical abuse, and coercion — significant numbers of individuals who express an intent to apply for asylum or a fear of returning to their home countries.”

The class action lawsuit alleges violations of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Administrative Procedures Act, the Fifth Amendment, and the Non-refoulement doctrine that under international law prohibits repatriating asylum seekers to countries where they face danger of persecution.

Diego Iniguez-Lopez is a legal services associate working serving asylum seekers:

Speaking to The Intercept, Iniguez-Lopez said the first sign of a change in attitude among immigration officials at the Texas family detention center came a week after Trump’s election, from individuals held in so-called hieleras, or ice boxes, the freezing-cold rooms where U.S. authorities house asylum-seeking families and other undocumented immigrants. “They were telling us stories of how CBP officers were singing the national anthem and taunting them,” Iniguez-Lopez said, “and telling them that they’re going to be deported back to their country and to tell their family not to come.”

Iniguez-Lopez went on to say that the practice of turning asylum-seekers away at ports of entry in his area of the country appeared to begin in early December. One of the first of those incidents, he explained, involved a mother from Central America seeking asylum with her family. The immigration officer who met with the family at the port of entry “said that under the orders of Donald Trump, there’s no more asylum for mothers with children, and the response of the mother was to say the Trump administration, they’re not even in power, they haven’t been inaugurated. So she knew more government 101 than the officer himself,” Iniguez-Lopez said.

The Obama administration began housing immigrant families at the facility pictured at the the top. Treatment by facility staff was bad enough then. The Trump administration has decided to play faster and looser with U.S. law by prosecuting asylum seekers as criminals to justify separating parents from children. This, despite the fact that prosecuting asylum seekers is a violation of international law.

Buzzfeed concludes:

Maria said that officials had asked her to surrender her children to an uncle who lives on the US East Coast.

Sobbing, she described the separation from her children as traumatic after the weeks-long bus, train and walking journey across Mexico to reach the United States.

“We made this entire journey together and in one moment they were taken away from me,” Maria said. “I don’t understand why they have to be so unjust and separate kids from parents…they’re just kids.”

To the Trump administration, Jeff Sessions included, they are nits.

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