Month: July 2019

Trump opens up a new front in the war at home. Now he’s dehumanizing the homelessness


by digby

My Salon column this morning:

If there is one thing we’ve learned over the past three years or so, it’s that if you want to know why Donald Trump is saying what sounds like a non sequitur, turn on Fox News. You will inevitably see that he’s been watching one of his favorite sycophantic pundits feeding him the liberal outrage of the day, and he thinks that’s reality.

Trump has a certain fondness for the gang at the morning show “Fox & Friends,” and Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs have long been favorites. Trump even hired former Fox executive Bill Shine into the White House, although he didn’t last long. Lately, however, he’s found a new favorite in Tucker Carlson, one of Fox News’ biggest prime-time stars.

Carlson has adopted the right-wing, white nationalist line that Steve Bannon once pushed — but he dresses very neatly, so perhaps Trump is more open to him than he was to the man he labeled “Sloppy Steve.” According to Politico, the speculation that Trump had spoken to Carlson, a recent convert to the anti-interventionist line (and had been watching retired Gen. Jack Keane as well) before he changed his mind about attacking Iran was accurate.

It became even more evident that Carlson’s star is on the rise in TrumpWorld when he turned up at the DMZ meeting between the president, Kim Jong-un, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Carlson was so close to the action that he was able to describe Kim looking unhealthy next to strapping he-man Donald Trump. Later it turned out that Carlson had been granted an interview with Trump in Tokyo which produced this very strange exchange:

Trump on urban decay: “It’s a phenomenon that started 2 years ago. It’s disgraceful … You can’t have [it] where police officers are getting sick just by walking the beat. I mean, they’re actually getting very sick … This is the liberal establishment.” pic.twitter.com/E4o9mVOqlL

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 2, 2019

No one is sure what Trump meant by asserting that the homeless “phenomena” started two years ago. Homelessness has been an issue in America for many decades and in fact the numbers are lower than they were 10 years ago, although they have increased slightly over the past two years. Nor has anyone been able to pin down what Trump has supposedly done about the situation in Washington to make it more palatable for visiting dignitaries.

Nonetheless, it is true that there has been a sharp increase in homelessness in some cities, resulting in contentious political debates about the root causes and what can be done about it. In Los Angeles County, for instance, an estimated 60,000 people are homeless, a 12% increase from the year before. The consensus, if one can call it that, is that the rising cost of housing and lack of new construction, along with ongoing mental health and drug crises have converged into a situation where many more people are living in the streets as well as cars, RVs and temporary shelters. The city and state have appropriated money to create new shelters and try to get a handle on the other problems — but that takes time and is probably an inadequate solution in any case.

On a local level, this is a major topic of conversation. There are homeless encampments in numerous public spaces, and a serious public health problem is developing. But you can be sure that whatever Trump might do to “intercede” will not help. His administration has drastically cut funding for health care programs and Housing and Urban Development projects. His “solutions” are almost always punitive measures that make things worse.

The extent of Trump’s knowledge about all this comes from Fox News — and mostly from Tucker Carlson himself. You’ll note that Carlson didn’t use the term “homeless” when he asked Trump that question. He asked him why American cities “have a major problem with filth.” Trump understood exactly what he was getting at, because he watches his show. Carlson is all over this story day after day.

Media Matters has been following the evolution of this theme on Fox News for a while, finding that over the last couple of months “the network has painted a grim picture of American cities as ‘almost Third World in their decay,’ facing ‘a complete breakdown of the basic needs of civilization,’ and filled with ‘drugged-out zombies chasing barefooted babies.'” These segments concentrate on West Coast cities like L.A. and San Francisco, characterizing their Democratic leaders as favoring their “rich friends” and pushing “socialist solutions.” Fox folks would prefer something a little bit harsher, shall we say.

Clearly, Carlson and the other Fox pundits have made an impression on Trump. When the president was asked at his Tokyo press conference whether he agreed with Vladimir Putin that Western liberal democracy is obsolete, it was obvious he had no idea what Putin was referring to. Trump is such a profoundly ignorant person he understood “Western” to mean the American West Coast, and “liberal democracy” to mean the Democratic liberals responsible for the “filth” in California’s big cities. It’s obviously on his mind.

I would guess this particular Fox News meme going to become an issue in Trump’s re-election campaign. It’s clear he thinks it could be a winner. As he told Carlson in the interview, “This is the liberal establishment. This is what I’m fighting, It’s a terrible thing that’s taking place.”

It’s highly unlikely that he will convert any Democratic voters in the big cities by denigrating their local leaders. But that isn’t really the point. As the Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein tweeted in response to Trump’s comments in the interview:

Trump lost 87/100 largest US counties by total margin of over 15 million votes. After 2018, Dems control 149/165 House seats in the 3 most urbanized categories of districts (per @CityLab). Counties HRC won produce 2/3 of GDP. Trump is defining GOP in hostility to growing metro US https://t.co/lgaknXWcRo

— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) July 3, 2019

To his rural supporters, “If he’s having a hard time saying ‘Hey, I’m really helping you out,’ then he can instead drum up fear about ‘those bad guys in the city.’ ” https://t.co/lgaknXWcRo

— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) July 3, 2019

I doubt that Trump is crunching any numbers. He doesn’t do that. But his instincts tell him that his vaunted base hates the big blue cities — because the big blue cities hate him. And Tucker Carlson is handing him the talking points about “filth” and “third world decay” that he can use to demonize the homeless in the same way he dehumanizes immigrants. (You’ll notice that he conflates “sanctuary cities” with this issue in his answer to Carlson)

And he may have some inkling that this issue is divisive among Democrats as well. Homelessness is most urgently a problem for the people who can’t afford shelter, but it also has many local residents and businesses up in arms. He’s undoubtedly unaware of what the Republicans used to call “wedge issues,” but if he can drive a wedge between liberals, over pretty much anything, he’s had himself a good day.

Don’t be surprised if the president comes up with something truly draconian to “solve” the problem. One of Trump’s other informal advisers, Fox News’ Jesse Watters, suggested that there is only one final solution to the homeless problem: “Bulldoze the 50-block radius, and you institutionalize everybody and detoxify them, and then you let them out.”

I’d like to think that was just right-wing hyperbole. But this is a president who is presiding over the brutal incarceration of hundreds of child refugees as we speak. Is it really so hard to believe he wouldn’t propose something like that in the heat of the upcoming campaign? And isn’t it disturbingly easy to imagine that his followers would start chanting, “Lock them up”?

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Nevertheless, watch your backs
by Tom Sullivan

Image via Twitter / @eloc8

The Republican Party’s disregard for voting rights is enough to make one cynical. How cynical?

Tuesday afternoon at 4:29 p.m. EDT, Ari Berman (“Give Us the Ballot“) tweeted, “Rigged census one of biggest threats to democracy in US. Trump admin dropping push for citizenship question is enormous deal.”

Champagne corks were popping among members of the voting rights community. Government lawyers had confirmed an hour earlier that the administration had decided to print 2020 census forms without adding the controversial citizenship question the Supreme Court struck down in Department of Commerce v. New York.

My first reaction was elation. My next one was heightened alert for a knife in the back.

By 9:08 p.m. EDT, Election Law Blog’s Rick Hasen added to that sense of foreboding by tweeting, “All’s Well That Ends Well, or All’s Well That Evenwel? How the Commerce Department May Still Help States to Draw Districts with Equal Numbers of Voter Eligible Persons to Minimize Hispanic (and Democratic) Voting Strength.”

Hasen explains:

But as I understand it from people who have been following this [more] closely than I am, the Census Department is still going to create citizenship data which can then be used for redistricting. Ross ordered the Census Bureau to compile citizenship data through existing administrative records, something bureau experts had told him would be cheaper and more accurate than a question anyway.

Now maybe by the time this data is compiled, a Democratic administration could block its release. But if Trump is reelected, these data could be made available, and states could try the Evenwel gambit.

Readers may recall the administration’s true purpose in adding a citizenship question to the census, as revealed in the Hofeller documents, was to enable drawing districts based on citizen voting age population (CVAP) instead of total population. In addition to a citizenship question depressing minority response to the census, drawing CVAP districts “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites,” Hofeller wrote.

In Evenwel v Abbott (2016), plaintiffs in Texas argued that drawing legislative districts based on total population violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment by diluting the votes of the voting eligible population. A favorable ruling could have shifted power to older, whiter, more conservative areas. In a unanimous 8-0 decision affirming the constitutionality of drawing districts based on total population, Justice Ginsburg wrote:

In sum, the rule appellants urge has no mooring in the Equal Protection Clause. The Texas Senate map, we therefore conclude, complies with the requirements of the one-person, one-vote principle. Because history, precedent, and practice suffice to reveal the infirmity of appellants’ claims, we need not and do not resolve whether, as Texas now argues, States may draw districts to equalize voter-eligible population rather than total population.

The last statement leaves a hole big enough for red states to drive a semi decked out in Confederate flags through if only they could get the citizenship data to redistrict using CVAP. They may yet try the Evenwel gambit with data provided to the Census Bureau by the Social Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.

Republicans stretching the law to the breaking point for partisan advantage is becoming ever more strident. Texas Republican congressman Chip Roy urged the president to simply ignore the Supreme Court ruling and add the citizenship question because he can.

This is a sitting Republican member of Congress urging the President to ignore a Supreme Court order.

I'm looking for his colleagues denouncing this.

The warning signs that the GOP wants to abandon our system of govt for one that simply gives them power are blinking red. https://t.co/QcS02tVa8H— Ian Bassin (@ianbassin) July 3, 2019

From the Executive branch on down, Republican leaders treat the law as an inconvenience applicable only to lessers.

At a strategy meeting last weekend, I told a friend I was more focused on state-level races and the U.S. Senate than the presidential contest. So long as Mitch McConnell controls the Senate, Democrats holding the presidency is no guarantee of legislative progress, nor even of McConnell allowing a Democratic president to appoint another nominee to the Supreme Court.

The last statement drew an “Oh, come on” smile, as if that could ever happen. Where were people during the last year of the Obama presidency?

Memories may be short, but habits have a frustrating way of hanging around long after they’ve become obsolete. Democrats on the Hill seem determined to keep conducting business on the basis of rules — and a system of government — their opponents have already abandoned.

Lights are blinking red? There will be tanks on display in the streets of Washington, D.C. tomorrow.

But not on parade:

“You’ve got to be pretty careful with the tanks because the roads have a tendency not to like to carry heavy tanks so we have to put them in certain areas but we have the brand new Sherman tanks and we have the brand new Abrams tanks,” Trump added.

While the US continues to operate the M1 Abrams tank the US military has not used World War II-era M4 Sherman tanks since the 1950s.

Hail to the Chief.

The Border Patrol Office of Inspector General released its report on the migrant prisons

by digby

That’s not a bunch of lying Democratic congresspeople. That’s the Inspector general:

The dangerous overcrowding and prolonged detention of children and adults at several government-run detention facilities at the border requires “immediate attention and action,” investigators inside the Department of Homeland Security said in a report Tuesday.

In the latest government report to shed light on detention facilities at the border, DHS Office of Inspector General investigators included pictures of severely overcrowded facilities in the Rio Grande sector of the border.

The so-called “management alert” follows another such alert in May, which addressed adult facilities in El Paso Del Norte Processing Center.

Per the report, detained migrants and asylum seekers were held for prolonged periods at all five of the Customs and Border Protection facilities the investigators visited.

“Border Patrol was holding about 8,000 detainees in custody at the time of our visit,” the report read, “with 3,400 held longer than the 72 hours generally permitted under the TEDS [Transport, Escort, Detention and Search] standards.”

The conditions in one such facility flagged by lawyers in a series of media interviews, in Clint, Texas, made national headlines and spurred public outcry. Several members of Congress recently toured CBP facilities on the border. Another government standard established by the so-called Flores Agreement, that children shall not be held in custody longer than 20 days, “is not being met,” Rep. Katherine Clark (D-MA) said outside an El Paso facility Tuesday.

The problems are partly systematic, the report granted, noting that the two agencies that would take custody of adults and children following CBP detention, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Health and Human Services, respectively, “are operating at or above capacity.”

The investigators confirmed lawyers’ claims that access to showers was scarce, if non-existent in some facilities.

“[C]hildren at three of the five Border Patrol facilities we visited had no access to showers, despite the TEDS standards requiring that ‘reasonable efforts’ be made to provide showers to children approaching 48 hours in detention,” they wrote, adding later that “two facilities had not provided children access to hot meals — as is required by the TEDS standards — until the week we arrived.”

They observed separately: “Most single adult detainees were wearing the clothes they arrived in days, weeks, and even up to a month prior. Further, although TEDS standards require agents to remain cognizant of detainees’ religious and other dietary restrictions,13 many single adults had been receiving only bologna sandwiches. Some detainees on this diet were becoming constipated and required medical attention.”

The investigators expressed concern that the conditions threatened the health and safety of detained people and DHS agents.

“At the time of our visits, Border Patrol management told us there had already been security incidents among adult males at multiple facilities,” they wrote. “These included detainees clogging toilets with Mylar blankets and socks in order to be released from their cells during maintenance. At one facility, detainees who had been moved from their cell during cleaning refused to return to their cell. Border Patrol brought in its special operations team to demonstrate it was prepared to use force if necessary.”

One site visit was ended early, the investigators wrote, after detainees saw them: “[T]hey banged on the cell windows, shouted, pressed notes to the window with their time in custody, and gestured to evidence of their time in custody (e.g., beards).”

Responding to the report, DHS’ liaison Jim H. Crimpacker wrote that the “current situation on the Southern Border represents an acute and worsening crisis” given the large numbers of people crossing the border monthly. He said CBP had added tents to handle some new arrivals but urged congressional action “to address legal and judicial loopholes” that he said incentivize migration.

The OIG, responding in turn, wrote that “we remain concerned that DHS is not taking sufficient measures to address prolonged detention in CBP custody among single adults.”

They keep trying to say this is just partisan bellyaching without any factual basis. But this is devastating to that talking point.

Or it would be in a normal world. Fox isn’t talking about it so for about 40% of the country is didn’t happen.

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A tiny bit of good news

by digby

Huzzah:

There will not be a question asking about citizenship on the 2020 census, the Trump administration said Tuesday.

The decision comes less than a week after the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the administration from adding the question, saying it did not provide an adequate explanation for the addition.

“We can confirm that the decision has been made to print the 2020 Decennial Census questionnaire without a citizenship question, and that the printer has been instructed to begin the printing process,” Kate Bailey, a Justice Department attorney, wrote to lawyers for the plaintiffs challenging the addition of the question.

Justice Department spokeswoman Kelly Laco confirmed the move in an email to HuffPost.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, made the decision to add the citizenship question in 2018, even though Census Bureau officials advised against doing so.

“I respect the Supreme Court but strongly disagree with its ruling regarding my decision to reinstate a citizenship question on the 2020 Census,” Ross said in a statement Tuesday. “The Census Bureau has started the process of printing the decennial questionnaires without the question. My focus, and that of the Bureau and the entire Department is to conduct a complete and accurate census.”

If Ross hadn’t been such a blatant liar that even John Roberts couldn’t quite let this one pass, he would probably have prevailed.

But this is very good news. It gives a little bit of breathing room to the sane people.

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There is no division in the Democratic party on the asylum crisis

by digby

I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t want to drink out of those sinks either. Even if the toilets are clean, which I’m sure they are not, it’s gross.

Greg Sargent with another fine piece in today’s Washington Post. He points out that the emerging narrative about the horrific border crisis is characterized as “the left” vs the Trump administration when the mainstream of America is horrified by what’s happening down there. He suggests that the problem is that the party hasn’t come together on an issue that actually unites all of it:

Democrats can mount an aggressive response to these horrifying revelations that accomplishes two things: improves oversight over them while also demonstrating that tackling these problems is a partywide concern shared by most mainstream Democrats, and that a consensus set of mainstream Democratic Party solutions to them is developing.

The new revelations are coming to light, thanks to a visit that Democratic House members, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) paid to border stations on Monday.

These members reported scenes that they described as “appalling and disgusting” and indicative of a “human rights crisis.” Ocasio-Cortez and another member reported that migrants say they’ve been told to drink from toilets, while other migrants claimed to be going without showers.

Meanwhile, ProPublica reports that a Facebook group of U.S. Border Patrol agents showcased discussion of profane jokes about migrant deaths and even sexual vulgarities involving Ocasio-Cortez.

Officials at Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the overcrowded border stations — where asylum-seeking families and children are first held — adamantly deny the more lurid allegations. The agency has vowed a probe of the Facebook postings.

But concerns are mounting. Human Rights Watch just issued a reportfinding that Trump’s effort to force asylum seekers to wait in Mexico, pending processing, will put many in serious danger.

Yes, it’s true: Trump’s treatment of migrants exercising their legal right to apply for asylum is attracting the scrutiny of international human rights monitors.

Where are the Democrats?

Right now, Democrats are consumed in a searing internal debate over whether some immigration positions of some presidential candidates are pulling the party too far left. These include things such as “decriminalizing migration” by downgrading the seriousness of illegal border crossing.

Some are warning that Democrats are veering away from the strategy that enabled them to win the House by triumphing in very tough districts, including ones carried by Trump.

My view is that those positions are mostly half-baked and tangential to the serious dilemmas we face on immigration (see this Juliette Kayyem explainer on why “decriminalizing migration” is largely a distraction). But it’s reasonable to debate whether such positions put the party at risk in the general election, as Matthew Yglesias says. This is one thing primaries are for.

But the debate over the asylum crisis in particular offers an opening to unite the party around positions that simply can’t be described as extreme or politically dangerous, on an issue that is commanding intense public attention right now. Why not grab this opportunity?.

Harsh treatment of small kids is an outrage that transcends all differences among Democrats. (It should transcend all difference among Americans but it doesn’t.)  Democrats shouldn’t shy away from that. There may just be some decent Republicans left out there.

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QOTD: A GOP fundraiser

by digby

Via Huffington Post:

“He’s going to have tanks out there. It’s going to be cool. He wants to have a parade like they have in Moscow or China or North Korea.”

The White House has tasked the Republican National Committee with handing out the free VIP tickets to their  donors and friends, making it a GOP event rather than one for the general public — and successfully bastardizing the 4th of July as a salute to Donald Trump. L’etat C’est Moi, bitchuz.

With tanks and military flyovers. I’d guess he’ll save the goose-stepping soldiers for next year, right before the election.

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We all need to take a breath

by digby

As the race progresses, we’ll have a much clearer sense of whether Democratic voters and members the general public are really unfavorably disposed to the field’s left-most candidates, and whether Democrats will once again select a nominee who doesn’t take the left-most position on health care. That’s a reasonable way way to resolve concerns about electability. Encouraging candidates and voters to let fear of Republican demagoguery shape their values and ambitions is not, because the demagoguery is coming no matter what.

And that demagoguery is going to be very, very ugly. There’s no margin in trying to mitigate it. They need to just make their case about Trump and their agenda to the public — and try to be prepared for the mud-slinging and dirty tricks.  It’s going to be epic.

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Trump’s next big issue: homelessness

by digby

This Trump answer involves musings about people with mental illnesses, a suggestion he cleansed DC streets so foreign leaders wouldn't have to see unsightly homeless people, and a suggestion he might "intercede" to rid other cities of "that whole thing." https://t.co/KYOa7WylsZ— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) July 2, 2019

Washington Post:

President Trump said Monday that he wanted to address the crisis of people on the streets, telling Fox News in an interview that his administration “may intercede” to clean up cities such as Washington, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The president made the remarks in an interview he taped in Japan with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, after Carlson asked him about cities in Japan, which Carlson said are clean and free from graffiti and “junkies.” American cities, by comparison, have a problem with “filth,” Carlson noted.

“It’s a phenomena that started two years ago,” Trump said, drawing a connection between the beginning of this and the early days of his time in the White House. “It’s disgraceful.”

The numbers of homeless people in the United States has stayed relatively level in the three years between 2016 and 2018, ticking up from 550,000 to 553,000 last year. But these numbers represent a significant drop over the past decade. An average of 630,000 people experienced homelessness per year between 2007 and 2012, according to federal data. And an average of 580,000 people were homeless a year between 2012 and 2015.

The president went on at some length, painting a dark picture of life in some American cities without giving specifics for how he would address the issue.

“Police officers are getting sick just by walking the beat,” he claimed. “We cannot ruin our cities. And you have people that work in those cities. They work in office buildings and to get into the building, they have to walk through a scene that nobody would have believed possible three years ago.”

“We have to take the people,” he said. “And we have to do something.”

Trump did not mention the word homeless during the segment, so it was difficult to glean his exact meaning or how he would address the issue. He blamed liberals and “sanctuary cities.”

“When we have leaders of the world coming in to see the president of the United States and they’re riding down a highway, they can’t be looking at that,” he said. “They can’t be looking at scenes like you see in Los Angeles and San Francisco . . . So we’re looking at it very seriously. We may intercede. We may do something to get that whole thing cleaned up.”

[President Trump suggests executing drug dealers at summit on opioid crisis]

He also said he personally “ended” some issues in this regard in the District of Columbia but did not elaborate.

“You know, I had a situation when I first became president,” Trump said, “We had certain areas of Washington, D.C., where that was starting to happen, and I ended it very quickly. I said, ‘You can’t do that.’ ”

The Trump administration has eyed federal housing programs for deep budget cuts despite recent successes in reducing homelessness.

It’s to be expected that Trump would get on this issue, which is undoubtedly going to bubble up in the presidential campaign. His base hates the cities generally and this is some delicious red meat for them. He’ll be hitting this hard because he’s been watching Fox and they’ve been doing a lot of coverage of the homeless issue in Seattle, San Francisco and LA. That’s where this came from.

(I certainly hope all the campaigns have an intern assigned to watch Fox and provide a read-out each day of what they’re talking about. It’s almost like having a bug in Trump’s brain.)

But I predict this will be an issue in the campaign and it’s going to be divisive. In my neighborhood in the People’s Republican of Santa Monica, it’s all anyone talks about. And many of the attitudes are not exactly bleeding heart liberal. This piece by Steve Lopez in the LA Times discusses one aspect of the problem that’s certainly present where I live: drugs. (He says the west coast is more of a meth problem and the east more of an opioid problem, but I have never heard that before.)

Anyway, get ready for more of this talk. It fits perfectly with the Trump base’s hatred of urban America. Fox knows it and Trump has a highly tuned feral instinct for what gets them excited.

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Eric Holder is a man with a plan
by Tom Sullivan

With twenty or so Democrats running for president in 2020, it must be lonely being Eric Holder. The former attorney general has taken up the cause of restoring legislative balance to states gerrymandered after the 2010 census. The Republican war on voting has expanded from promoting photo IDs to gerrymandering to rigging the census. Ari Berman reports for Mother Jones that Holder founded the Nation­al Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC) to counter efforts to solidify minority Republican control in state after state.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country is absorbed with debates, polls, and candidates’ 2020 fundraising. Holder is working on what happens in 2021 when states redraw their state and congressional districts.

The effort stems from hard lessons learned during the Obama administration. Democrats lost nearly 1,000 state legislative seats during Omama’s two terms as president while it focused on health care and combating the T-party. Then in 2010, the GOP’s $30 million REDMAP effort succeeded in flipping 63 U.S House seats and gaining control of 20 additional state legislative chambers, Berman explains. With control in a series of swing states, plus the help of the Citizens United decision, Republicans could draw “four times as many state legislative and House districts as Democrats.”

Democrats fought voter disenfranchisement efforts successfully in the courts for years. But the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision gutting the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act and last week’s decision that federal courts could not block partisan gerrymandering have blunted accustomed legal tools.

With the help of Obama’s Organizing for Action, Holder is belatedly trying to make up for Democrats’ missteps. NDRC is organizing to regain control of state legislatures in Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, and North Carolina:

When New Jersey Democrats proposed giving legislative leaders more power over the drawing of district lines last year, Holder quickly denounced the plan. “I’m here for a fair process, not to gerrymander for Democrats,” he told me.

For years, Berman notes, Democrats did not worry about control of legislatures. A story I have told before illustrates that shortsightedness:

A friend tells a story about visiting the office of leading North Carolina lawmaker before Democrats lost control of the legislature in the 2010 election. She’d some to advocate for nonpartisan redistricting. He listened patiently, then leaned back in his chair and smiled, saying, “Democrats draw great districts.” Soon after, they lost the ability to for the first time in decades. The rest, as they say….

Holder’s efforts to gain attention for the issue today competition as the presidential cycle heats up, drawing both eyeballs and dollars to more high-profile and sexier campaigns. Berman again:

Mark Gersh, a Democratic redistricting expert working with Holder’s group, said the team is “trying to figure out whether Trump’s plummeting popularity and behavior might enable us to go beyond the parts we know we can win, because there’s not enough of them. We won all the low-hanging fruit last time.”

[…]

Democratic strategists working on down-ballot races say the presidential campaign is siphoning away resources. “It’s harder to recruit people [to run], it’s harder to get attention to these races, it’s harder to raise money for them,” said Amanda Litman, executive director of Run for Something, which recruits progressive candidates for local offices. “Quite a few of the donors we work really closely with have been hesitant to reengage, either because they’re tapped out from 2018 or they’re waiting for the presidential race to shake out.”

It is also harder to recruit Democrats to run, I’d add, in redder districts where there is little support from local Democratic committees both under-skilled and inexperienced in helping candidates win local races. If the most help prospective candidates can expect is money from out-of-district sources, their odds of winning lengthen. Their odds of running shrink as well. They need a competent local ground game behind them, something with which I am somewhat familiar. There is little money available for promoting that, either. It’s effective, but it’s not sexy.

Trump whine o’ the day

by digby

Boo hoo hoo:

President Donald Trump on Monday accused New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo of using the state’s attorney general, Letitia James to target his businesses for political purposes, claiming in an afternoon tweetstorm that the state sues “for everything” and is “always in search of a crime.”

It is very hard and expensive to live in New York. Governor Andrew Cuomo uses his Attorney General as a bludgeoning tool for his own purposes. They sue on everything, always in search of a crime. I even got sued on a Foundation which took Zero rent & expenses & gave away…

….more money than it had. Going on for years, originally brought by Crooked Hillary’s Campaign Chair, A.G. Eric Schneiderman, until forced to resign for abuse against women. They never even looked at the disgusting Clinton Foundation. Now Cuomo’s A.G. is harassing all of my….

….New York businesses in search of anything at all they can find to make me look as bad as possible. So, on top of ridiculously high taxes, my children and companies are spending a fortune on lawyers. No wonder people and businesses are fleeing New York in record numbers!

That’s right, The Trump Foundation gave away 100% plus, with Zero rent or expenses charged, and has been being sued by Cuomo and New York State for years – another part of the political Witch Hunt. Just in case anyone is interested – Clinton Foundation never even looked at!

Speaking on a conference call with reporters, Cuomo said Monday that he had not yet seen Trump’s tweets, but added “nothing that man can say can surprise me.”

“He says the most absurd things,” Cuomo said, adding that Trump’s “strength is not fact or truth.”

The governor said the only person who has increased taxes on the state is the president, through his tax bill’s elimination of state and local tax — known as SALT — deductions for higher-taxed states.

“He doesn’t understand how government works,” Cuomo said, adding that “maybe his attorney general is a tool” and noting that the New York attorney general is elected.

“His suggestion that it’s my attorney general is incorrect,” he said.

Of the state investigation, Cuomo said of Trump, “If he has nothing to hide, he has nothing to worry about.”

James tweeted soon after on Monday afternoon, saying that as “the elected AG of NY, I have a sworn duty to protect & uphold state law.”

“My office will follow the facts of any case, wherever they lead,” she continued. “Make no mistake: No one is above the law, not even the President. P.S. My name is Letitia James. (You can call me Tish.)”

Late last year Trump’s charitable foundation agreed to dissolve and give away its assets to other nonprofit organizations as a result of the New York attorney general probe, which began under Eric Schneiderman. At the time, Schneiderman’s successor as attorney general, Barbara Underwood, said the nonprofit had exhibited a “shocking pattern” of illegality.

That deal did not stop the civil lawsuit Underwood filed against the foundation last year from proceeding. The New York attorney general’s office continued to seek nearly $3 million in restitution and additional fines as part of the suit, as well as a ban on Trump’s leading a New York nonprofit for the next decade and placing one-year bans on the charity’s other board members, which include the president’s adult children.

Trump has repeatedly clashed with Schneiderman through the years and later publicly criticized Underwood and James, claiming their investigations were politically motivated. The office has led significant investigations into not only his charity, but also into Trump University, the president’s defunct real estate education venture.

Shortly after her election in November, James, a Democrat, vowed to “use every area of the law” to probe Trump, his family and associates, and his business. The office of attorney general has sweeping investigatory and prosecutorial powers to do just that.

Earlier this year, James subpoenaed Trump’s banks, seeking information about the Trump Organization and the president’s finances. Trump dismissed those efforts as “presidential harassment” and tweeted that James “openly campaigned on a GET TRUMP agenda.”

James opened that probe, a civil inquiry, after Michael Cohen, the president’s former attorney, testified to Congress in February that Trump inflated the worth of his assets in financial statements that he provided to banks to secure loan.

He thinks he’s the King — L’etat c’est moi. Therefore he should be exempt from laws everywhere. Frankly, it appears that he pretty much is on a federal level. The State of New York has other ideas. And the Trumps are obviously getting nervous about it.

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