Stable genius had a little tantrum:
Youn don’t tell me what to do, I tell YOU what to do.
He’s totally focused on what’s important and judiciously using his power for good:
He’s just fine. Nothing to worry about.Those nuclear codes couldn’t be in better hands.
This piece in the Atlantic (gift link) by Peter M. Shane, lays out the case. If Mitch McConnell is the gravedigger of democracy, John Roberts is the man who finally killed it:
o one on the Supreme Court has gone further to enable Donald Trump’s extreme exercise of presidential power than the chief justice of the United States, John Roberts. Associate justices have also written some important opinions shaping executive power, and the Court has issued ever more important unsigned orders, but the most transformative opinions—the opinions that directly legitimize Trump’s unprecedented uses of power—are Roberts’s handiwork. This is not happenstance. Under Supreme Court practice, the most senior justice in the majority—which is always the chief justice when he so votes—determines who will write the main opinion. Roberts reserved these milestones for himself.
And what milestones they have been. Roberts upheld the first Trump administration’s “Muslim ban” on the grounds that the president’s national-security role precludes courts from taking account of the bigotry undergirding an immigration order. He remanded a lower court’s enforcement of a congressional subpoena for Trump’s financial information, writing that “without limits on its subpoena powers,” Congress could exert “imperious” control over the executive branch and “aggrandize itself at the President’s expense.” He has come close to giving the president an untrammeled right to fire any officer in the executive branch at will. And he took the lead in inventing a presidential immunity from criminal prosecution that could exempt the president from accountability for even the most corrupt exercises of his official functions.
Going beyond the precise holdings in these cases, Roberts’s superfluous rhetoric about the presidency has cast the chief executive in all-but-monarchical terms. The upshot is a view of the Constitution that, in operation, comes uncomfortably close to vindicating Trump’s: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Trump’s confidence is surely bolstered also by the Roberts Court’s unsigned per curiam opinions blocking even temporary relief from his sweeping actions. In May, the Court held that Trump orders removing two federal officials at key independent agencies could remain in place while the issue of their legality makes its way through the judiciary. In June, it allowed the administration to proceed with so-called third-country deportations—that is, deporting undocumented noncitizens summarily to countries to which they had no prior connection, but where they might well face torture. On July 8, the Court effectively allowed Trump to proceed with a massive restructuring of the federal executive branch, notwithstanding that the power over executive-branch organization belongs to Congress, not the president. On July 14, the conservative majority allowed the sabotaging of the Department of Education to proceed. Trump’s use of executive power is not a distortion of the Roberts Court’s theory of the presidency; it is the Court’s theory of the presidency, come to life.
This is spot on and it’s important for all of us to absorb it and accept it. John Roberts has always been a “unitary executive” man and is very happy to have Trump present the Court with the opportunity to make it happen. He evidently is so rigid in his philosophy that the fact the one man who is willing to make this happen is a monstrous imbecile hasn’t made him second guess it.
The lethal combination of Trump and Roberts may very well end up being our undoing.
Corbin Trent, cofounder of Justice Democrats and former communications director for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has advice I can get behind.
Trump is in panic mode. He’s throwing every last bit of spaghetti on his high chair against the wall to get his MAGA base to look away from the Epstein case. This is one of those times when Democrats who claim the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time should show us all how it’s done by not letting them.
But that’s not what’s happening. Democrats have a chance to return fire to effect but are doing too little. Only five of 215 House Democrats, Trent complains, have cosponsored a discharge petition to vote on releasing the Epstein files. They have “an opportunity to show the American people that they’re not afraid of truth, that they’re not afraid of daylight being the greatest disinfectant.” But they are failing, Trent argues.
Donald Trump’s Epstein panic is a political moment Democrats ought not squander. Or they could just snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as is their habit:
Blood is in the water. Trump’s own base is fracturing over this. This is when Democratic leadership should be going for the kill. Hakeem Jeffries should be on every show demanding full transparency. Chuck Schumer should be calling press conferences. Nancy Pelosi should stop calling it a “distraction” and start calling it what it is—a cover-up at the highest levels of power. This is how Republicans would play it if the roles were reversed. They’d be ruthless. They’d smell weakness and go in for the kill.
Instead, Democratic leadership is nowhere to be found. Where are the coordinated attacks? Where are the daily press conferences demanding answers? Where’s the political operation that treats this like the gift it is?
If Democrats don’t pounce on this—what I would call not just a political opportunity, but a political necessity—then we lose. If this moment isn’t captured and repeated, just like Republicans would be doing if the roles were reversed, and if everyone in this country hasn’t heard Democratic leadership on every network, in every interview, demanding the release of every document, every email, every text message related to Jeffrey Epstein, then we’re missing a massive opportunity.
I agree. No one wants to vote for weenies. They rather vote strong and wrong than weak and right.
The Epstein story isn’t a left versus right scandal. It’s a top versus bottom scandal. It’s about power, about how the elite protect each other across party lines.
The American people deserve to know the full scope of the Epstein network. They deserve transparency from their government. And they deserve a Democratic Party that’s willing to fight for that transparency, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it might implicate people on both sides.
Will that work? I don’t know. But as a friend’s British mother used to say, “We’ll do domething even if it’s wrong.”
* * * * *
Have you fought dictatorship today?
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
Paul Krugman this morning considers that because “we live in a corrupted democracy in which wealth buys power,” our political discourse is driven by “crazy ideas.” One source of those crazy ideas — the sitting president’s name appears nowhere in Krugman’s comments — is Silicon Valley. Once upon a time, the public saw tech gurus as benificent. But that has changed. They have changed. Wealth that buys political power changed them. Once pro-Democrat tech scions have swung hard right as their public images sank.
Krugman references Wall Street’s post-financial collapse “Obama rage” as an analog:
Were the Masters of the Universe really that angry over Obama calling them “fat cats”? Or was their outrage performative, aimed at heading off tighter financial regulation? Yes.
The antipathy toward Obama came even as Obama’s team foamed the runway for banks in crisis. Their anger at being called out was strategic but also real, Krugman argues, suggesting “nothing makes a privileged man angrier than criticism of his privilege.”
Big Tech’s swing to the right was more gradual but more extreme. They’ve gone from looking like Time Lords to The Doctor’s alien enemies bent on galactic conquest and domination.
The Biden administration made some efforts to regulate tech. In part this reflected a perception that the big players had turned their focus from innovation to exploiting their locked in customer bases — a process memorably described by Cory Doctorow as enshittification. In part it represented growing awareness of the psychological and social harm often associated with internet use.
And like Wall Street tycoons a decade or so earlier, tech bros responded with rage. Was this rage performative, a warning to politicians who might be tempted to support regulation? Or was it genuine outrage at the idea that anyone might criticize their brilliance and benevolence? Yes.
Because their gleam is tarnished they’ve lined up behind Donald Trump. Look for ‘privilege’ in the dictionary and find his picture.
Krugman concludes:
But here’s the crucial point: Their rage wouldn’t matter if their wealth weren’t so vast and we didn’t have a political system so corrupted by money. In a more equal society with a less corrupted democracy, people expressing the views we’re hearing from the likes of Peter Thiel or Marc Andreesen would be treated as cranks. In fact, they’d probably be hiding their opinions.
Such talk nearly got venture capitalist Nick Hanauer’s 2012 TED talk on income inequality banned from the Internet. The Atlantic posted its full text. Hanauer’s sin? Pulling back the curtain to reveal that the men working the knobs and levers to create an illusion of godhood were but privileged assholes who insisted on being treated as gods.
Great wealth had gone to their head, Hanauer suggested, and convinced financial moguls that they were Übermenschen, “‘job creators’ at the center of the economic universe,” as he put it.
… and the language and metaphors we use to defend the fairness of the current social and economic arrangements is telling. For instance, it is a small step from “job creator” to “The Creator”. We did not accidentally choose this language. It is only honest to admit that calling oneself a “job creator” is both an assertion about how economics works and the a claim on status and privileges.
And nothing makes a privileged man angrier than criticism of his privilege. But the Tech Lords’ enshittification is not merely their own doing. What once was a democratic republic grew complacent, taking for granted the freedoms and flatter economic distribution that emerged after WWII. That spreading equality sparked the social and political reforms of the 1960s. Before we grew too comfortable with the new dispensation of freedoms, a conservative backlash to them emerged during the Reagan revolution and since.
The 1990s tech boom promised to restore to the people some of the power lost to the rich from the growing wealth gap. Instead, Big Tech got bigger mountains of assets and the big head, shifting the center of political power away from Wall Street and toward Silicon Valley. Wall Street wants all the wealth. Silicon Valley wants that and more. The Tech Lords want the world. Donald Trump just wants to be emperor. We empowered them all.
Recall, before becoming The Doctor’s arch nemesis, The Master was once himself a Time Lord.
* * * * *
Have you fought dictatorship today?
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
Unbelievable. And a bunch of Democrats voted for this. WTF????
Somebody’s going to make a lot of money:
With an overnight tripling of its annual budget and intensifying pressure to increase deportations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is racing to expand its detention space with temporary tentlike structures, despite safety warnings.
Trump administration officials have identified limited detention space as one of the major chokepoints preventing them from stepping up deportations as quickly as President Trump has promised. They hope a new $45 billion for detention through the end of his term will help them get to 100,000 beds by the end of the year, up from roughly 40,000 when Trump took office. ICE’s plan was laid out in several internal documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and described by administration officials familiar with the effort.
The infusion of cash came as part of the Republican tax-and-spending package passed by hyju this month. Congress gave ICE $74 billion to spend by 2029, more than tripling its current $8.7 billion annual budget and making it the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government.
Just imagine the overwhelming graft. It’s mind-boggling.
It’s interesting that they want to erect mostly tent facilities instead of permanent buildings. I have no doubt that the contractors will make just as much profit with much lower costs. And the sight of the tents and the cages is part of the show:
Mark Morgan, who served as acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection during the first Trump administration, criticized the Florida facility in a recent Fox News opinion article, accusing Noem of disregarding real detention infrastructure in favor of “circus tents surrounded by reptiles.”
They’re going to take the money and run.
Only dangerous criminals are being deported? Sure:
Relatives of 82-year-old Allentown resident Luis Leon are headed to a Guatemalan hospital Saturday in hopes of reuniting with the man they say disappeared without a trace into the American immigration system a month ago — and who, for a time, they thought was dead.
The last time anyone in the family saw Leon was June 20, when he went with his wife to a Philadelphia immigration office to have his lost green card replaced. There, the family says, he was handcuffed by two officers, who led him away without explanation. His wife, who speaks little English, was left behind and kept in the building for 10 hours until she was released to her granddaughter, the family says.
Repeated inquiries to immigration officials, prisons, hospitals and even a morgue yielded no information. Leon’s name was not in ICE’s online database of detainees. Finally, on Friday, a relative from Leon’s native Chile was told he had been taken first to a detention center in Minnesota and then to Guatemala. The hospital, citing privacy rules, would not verify his presence there when contacted by The Morning Call.
[…]
Leon was granted political asylum in 1987 after surviving torture at the hands of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime, according to his granddaughter, Nataly, who asked that her surname not be used because she fears U.S. government retribution against her and her relatives.
In Allentown, he lived a quiet life, raising four children and enjoying retirement after years working at a leather manufacturing plant. It all fell apart, Nataly said, when he lost the wallet holding his green card and made the fateful appointment to replace it at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office on 41st Street in Philadelphia.
The story gets worse. They got a call telling them that he had died, plunging the whole family into grief. But it wasn’t tue.
ICE refuses to answer any questions, of course. Because they don’t have to.
And then there was this, which is probably something that’s happening to other people as well:
The mystery surrounding Leon’s ordeal goes beyond ICE. Just days after his arrest, a woman claiming to be an immigration lawyer placed an unsolicited call to Leon’s wife and said she could help get Leon out on bail, but didn’t say where he was or how she learned about the case. It was this woman who called to tell his wife that Leon was dead. A week after communication from the purported lawyer ceased, the family finally received word that Leon had been in detention in Minnesota and then transferred to a hospital in Guatemala City.
I have no doubt that scam artists are all over the place taking advantage of these immigrant families. And why not? We are living in the age of the con man, led by criminals and liars. It just figures.
This piece by Michael Waldman at the Brennan Center is important. If you had any hope for the Supreme Court left this will cure you of it:
All knew that a great clash over presidential power would unfold at the Supreme Court this year. Donald Trump has smashed through laws and constitutional boundaries. What would the justices do?
They might cave and endorse this sweeping call for expanded presidential power. Or they might stand up for checks and balances. Perhaps they would try to avoid acting altogether. We had every reason to expect big debates and major rulings.
Instead, the justices found another path — a sneakier one. Repeatedly, they have let Trump amass vast new power, and they have done so without putting their names on it. They are proving willing accomplices to a constitutional coup, all without leaving a trace.
That’s what happened on Monday in a case involving the Department of Education. The Court permitted Trump to move forward with his plan to effectively shut down the federal agency created by Congress and embodied in decades of law. Two lower courts had blocked this effort. The Supreme Court overturned those decisions in an order, with not even a sentence of explanation. There was no public argument. Not a single justice would sign their name.
[…]
Here, the justices never heard arguments. Just one friend-of-the-court brief was filed. The Court gave challengers only seven days to file papers. No explanation was offered either. “Owing to their unpredictable timing, their lack of transparency, and their usual inscrutability, these rulings come both literally and figuratively in the shadows,” explained Georgetown professor Steve Vladeck, the country’s leading expert on the shadow docket.
It was all over in the blink of an eye. We don’t even know how many votes this move got. The supermajority was silent. ..
This major ruling follows a disturbing recent pattern. In the past few months, the justices have used the shadow docket to let the president fire independent agency heads, in clear violation of 90 years of precedent. They’ve allowed the administration to deport people to countries where they never lived. And they’ve given effective approval to the Pentagon’s move to bar transgender people from serving in the military. All these measures involve a passive-aggressive jurisprudence: We aren’t making a big ruling, you see, just addressing something done by other judges. Though the rulings are technically temporary, the damage is done.
Here, because the Court allowed the administration to proceed with mass firings at the Department of Education, by the time a major ruling is issued (if one is), the offices will have long been emptied and the department effectively destroyed. Education experts discussed the implications of the Court’s actions and explored the protections that state courts and constitutions might provide against at least some of the administration’s policies at a Brennan Center live event yesterday.
That’s the clever trick, isn’t it? Delay, delay, delay until the dirty deed is done.
They are not going to save us. They are a huge part of the problem.
I wish I could say that I’m surprised by this but really … isn’t this inevitable all across the government? In fact, it’s already here:
The US Department of Veterans Affairs has enthusiastically joined Donald Trump’s war on DEI – demanding that staffers report colleagues who engage in diversity initiatives, banning LGBTQ+ pride flags from VA hospitals and shuttering an office investigating why Black veterans are more likely to have their mental health disability claims rejected.
Last week, the VA secretary, Doug Collins, tweeted that “VA is now squarely focused on Veterans – not out-of-touch, woke causes such as DEI and gender dysphoria treatments.”
Collins’s pronouncement comes as he faces tough questions from US Senate and House members in the wake of a Guardian report that the agency had quietly removed language from its hospital bylaws that explicitly barred discrimination based on patients’ marital status or political views.
Seventy House members wrote to express “profound alarm” that doctors and other VA medical providers “will now be able to refuse treatment” based on veterans’ political views or whether they are unmarried, widowed or part of a same-sex couple.
Collins and his agency have pushed back with a series of puzzling statements, saying the bylaw changes were merely a “formality” and were required by a Trump anti-transgender executive order banning “gender ideology extremism” – even though the Trump order says nothing about marital status or political affiliations.
Especially novel – given the VA and the Trump administration’s adamant anti-DEI stance – was the agency’s argument that the bylaw changes did not matter because unmarried or politically active patients would still be protected by a 2013 Obama administration DEI directive.
Of course they are targeting people for their political views. That’s what the DEI anti-trans movement is really all about. Protesters, tourists, government employees are already in the cross hairs as well as, obviously, legal immigrants who have been arrested for their political views about Israel.
I mean, they’re administering loyalty oaths to FBI agents. It. Is. Happening.
My favorite:
Grrrrrr….
