I mentioned this the other day but now it’s official. President Biden is announcing today that he will legalize the undocumented immigrant spouses of American citizens:
President Biden on Tuesday is announcing a large-scale immigration program that will offer legal status and a streamlined path to U.S. residency and citizenship to roughly half a million unauthorized immigrants married to American citizens.
The Department of Homeland Security policy will allow these immigrants to apply for work permits and deportation protections if they have lived in the U.S. for at least 10 years and meet other requirements, senior administration officials said during a call with reporters.
Perhaps most importantly, however, Mr. Biden’s move will unlock a path to permanent residency — colloquially known as a green card — and ultimately U.S. citizenship for many of the program’s beneficiaries. The policy, if upheld in court, would be the largest government program for undocumented immigrants since the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative, which currently shields 528,000 so-called “DREAMers” who were brought to the U.S. as children from deportation.
Mr. Biden is slated to announce the measure at a White House event on Tuesday marking the 12th anniversary of DACA, alongside another move to make it easier for employers to sponsor “DREAMers” and other undocumented immigrants for work visas.
You will note that this, like all policies, must be upheld in court so who knows if it will actually come to pass. (And people will inevitably blame Joe Biden for being the failure who couldn’t get it done.) It would be very much be preferable to have this done legislatively but I think we know that MAGA will not let that happen right now.
This is the right thing to do. If someone has been in the US for 10 years and is married to an American — and in many cases has American children — they should be allowed to stay and work here. It’s the practical and humane thing to do.
The other side, by the way, wants to deport them and if they have to deport their American spouses and kids too, well that would just be collateral damage. Trump is all prepared for it saying often on the campaign trail that they’ll be deporting “beautiful women and children.”
John Oliver on Project 2025 and a second Trump term.
I was going to clip this segment out into shorter sections but decided to keep it together because it's too important and, frankly, it should terrify you. pic.twitter.com/Kaqo07lurB
Project 2025 is hundreds of pages long and it’s difficult to get through. And that’s just for starters. There’s more in it every day. So this run-down by John Oliver is about as short and succinct and explanation possible. If you have a few minutes it’s well worth watching. You might want to have a drink handy…
Cutman Jacob “Stitch” Duran administers treatment to fighter Vladimir Klitschko. Photo via Wkimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
A high school friend was raised a good Southern Baptist. “We couldn’t cuss in the house,” he said. “Except you could say ‘damn yankee,’ because that’s just what they were.”
The Biden campaign is taking that approach with Donald Trump: A convicted criminal is just what he is.
Donald Trump is only out for himself. I'm fighting for the American people.
Ankush Khardori, a senior writer for Politico Magazine, speaks with Greg Sargent about a Politico poll “with some pretty big surprises: A larger-than-expected percentage of Americans say Donald Trump’s criminal conviction in Manhattan makes them less likely to vote for him.”
Thirty-three percent of respondents said that the conviction made them less likely to support Trump, while only 17 percent of respondents said that it made them more likely to support Trump.
“Support” is one thing. Voting is another.
Twenty-two percent of respondents said that the conviction is important to how they will vote and that it makes them less likely to support Trump. Only 6 percent of respondents took the other side of that question — reporting that the conviction is important to how they will vote and that it makes them more likely to support Trump.
A nearly identical net-negative effect showed up among independents. Twenty-one percent of independents reported that they were less likely to support Trump and that the conviction is important to their vote. Just 5 percent of them said that the conviction is important to how they will vote and that it makes them more likely to support Trump.
Trump is cut over the eye. Now, work the eye, people. Retweet, repost, re-whatever on every platform you follow. (Biden-Harris is not on all platforms.)
“The next president is likely to have two new Supreme Court nominees — two more. [Trump has] already appointed two that have been very negative in terms of the rights of individuals,” President Joe Biden told Jimmy Kimmel during a Los Angeles fundraiser over the weekend (CNN):
“The idea that if he’s reelected he’s going to appoint two more flying flags upside down,” Biden said in an apparent reference to a flag that once flew outside the home of Justice Samuel Alito. Asked by Kimmel whether he considered this the scariest part of a second Trump term, Biden responded, “It is one of the scariest parts.”
Federal courts are not the only ones on the fall ballot. Only a handful of state do not elect judges in some manner. After Republicans won a 5-2 majority on North Carolina’s state Supreme Court in 2022, they quickly reversed cases decided in the last court session, “one blocking a photo ID law and one striking down partisan gerrymandered maps.” Justice Anita Earls, a former civil rights attorney, decried the move as a “process driven by partisan influence and greed for power.”
“In a single blow, the majority strips millions of voters of this state of their fundamental, constitutional rights and delivers on the threat that ‘our decisions are fleeting, and our precedent is only as enduring as the terms of the justices who sit on the bench.’ ”
Your state similar? Pay attention to those down-ballot races.
ProPublica has been busy examining conservative thumbprints on the scales of justice. In North Carolina, just by coincidence:
Last fall, out of public view, the North Carolina Supreme Court squashed disciplinary action against two Republican judges who had admitted that they had violated the state’s judicial code of conduct, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the decisions.
One of the judges had ordered, without legal justification, that a witness be jailed. The other had escalated a courtroom argument with a defendant, which led to a police officer shooting the defendant to death. The Judicial Standards Commission, the arm of the state Supreme Court that investigates judicial misconduct by judges, had recommended that the court publicly reprimand both women. The majority-Republican court gave no public explanation for rejecting the recommendations — indeed, state law mandates that such decisions remain confidential.
North Carolina’s disciplinary procedures are unusually opaque, ProPublica reports (note my bolding):
Since 2011, North Carolina’s Judicial Standards Commission has referred 19 cases to the Supreme Court for judicial discipline, according to the court’s annual reports. In that time, the court has issued 17 public disciplinary orders, ranging from reprimands to suspensions without pay.
Had the Supreme Court followed the commission’s recommendations in the cases of the two Republican judges, it would have meant publicly reprimanding them ahead of elections for both in 2024. Judge Lori Hamilton, a longtime Republican, had campaigned with the slogan, “the ideal conservative.” Judge Caroline Burnette had previously been a Democrat — but she switched her registration before her case got to the Supreme Court, according to public records.
See ProPublica for the details of those cases. But ICYMI:
Months after the Supreme Court decided in the fall of 2023 to let Hamilton and Burnette off without public consequences, it issued its most recent disciplinary order. In March 2024, the court concurred with the commission’s recommendation for punishment of Angela Foster, a Black Democratic judge who had pressured a court official to reduce a bond for her son and had taken over a courtroom reserved for other court officials, thereby delaying over 100 cases. The Supreme Court suspended her without pay for 120 days.
By the way, Earls has been a target:
In March 2023, Earls, the Supreme Court’s lone Black justice and a Democrat, received a letter from the commission informing her that she was under investigation. The letter stated that Earls had been accused of disclosing “confidential information concerning matters being currently deliberated in conference by the Supreme Court.” If the commission found evidence of a serious violation, it could send the case to the Supreme Court, which would make a final determination and could go as far as to expel her.
At the center of the anonymous complaint was the allegation that Earls had told lawmakers and state bar members at two different meetings about proposed rule changes that would give more power to the Republican justices. The complaint, which was made after WRAL News published an article describing the meetings, also alleged that she’d provided confidential information to a reporter.
In her response to the letter, which later was filed in court, her lawyer argued that it had been standard practice for justices to discuss the court’s rule changes with affected parties and that no information had been leaked. Earls’ lawyer also wrote that if the matter proceeded to a hearing, Earls planned to make the investigation public and subpoena “current and former Justices” about their “actions.” In May, the commission dismissed the complaint, providing Earls with verbal and written warnings “to be mindful of your public comments,” according to court documents.
In June, Earls, the only person of color on the court, gave an interview to Law360 in which she criticized Chief Justice Paul Newby and other conservative justices for refusing to address the lack of diversity in the state’s court system. She revealed that Newby had effectively killed its Commission on Fairness and Equity by not reappointing its members and that he had ended implicit bias trainings for judges, which Earls had helped set up. Much of the interview was framed around a Law360 analysis and an outside study that found that the vast majority of state appellate court judges, and the attorneys arguing before them, were white and male. In reference to the findings, Earls said that “our court system, like any other court system, is made up of human beings and I believe the research that shows that we all have implicit biases.” She said that her five Republican colleagues “very much see themselves as a conservative bloc” and that “their allegiance is to their ideology, not to the institution.”
In August, Earls received another letter from the commission alerting her that it had “reopened” the former investigation. The letter warned: “Publicly alleging that another judge makes decisions based on a motivation not allowed under” the code, such as racial or political biases, without “definitive proof runs contrary to a judge’s duty to promote public confidence in the impartiality of the judiciary.”
Rather than letting the investigation proceed in secret again, Earls sued the commission in federal court, seeking an injunction to stop “an on-going campaign” by the commission to “stifle the First Amendment free-speech rights of Justice Earls and expose her to punishment.”
Two weeks after the lawsuit was filed, Democratic state lawmakers held a press conference to call the investigation into Earls “a political hit job” — and one state representative accused Newby of pushing it, though he said he could not reveal his sources. Four sources knowledgeable about Newby’s or the commission’s actions told ProPublica that the chief justice encouraged the investigation. The sources requested anonymity because the inner workings of the commission are confidential and because they feared retaliation.
I live in one of David Pepper’s “Laboratories of Autocracy” in which a GOP-legislative offense wreaks havoc in the capitol while minority Democrats are perpetually on defense. I spent 2016 telling progressives President Hillary can’t solve my legislature problem; President Bernie can’t either. WE have to solve that problem. Here.
That doesn’t just apply to red legislatures but to red courts in your state too.
First of all, what 23 year old buys a house? Maybe he’s got an inheritance? I would guess that very few 23 year olds are in this position. That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of 33 year olds in that position but I have a sneaking suspicion this post isn’t on the up and up.
Be that as it may, Surowecki is correct. Joe Biden doesn’t control interest rates and god knows, neither does Donald Trump. So this is stupid.
But then there’s JD Vance’s grotesque answer to the problem. Deporting 20 million people (20 MILLION!!!!) is the most fascistic policy proposal we’ve seen since 1930s Germany. They were “deporting” the alleged cause of all their problems too.
The sheer amount of pain, suffering and destruction involved in such a horrific policy is impossible to gauge but it’s going to be a nightmare. And as for the public picking up the tab for undocumented immigrants just wait until they see what inflation looks like without 20 million workers who are keeping this country running. Not to mention the vast cost incurred in rounding up such a vast number of people. It’s absurd.
This is Nazi talk, nothing less. It’s not just “Christian nationaism” or “authoritarian.” It’s full-blown Nazi rhetoric.
This should be on tik-tok. (It may be for all I know but I do hope so…) There are a lot of young women who need to see it as well as plenty of decent young men who might be skeeved out by grandpa Trump macking on young women like this. It’s very creepy and he’s still doing it. This video (referenced briefly in that series above) is recent:
You know what is creepy? Adjudicated Rapist Donald Trump sexually harassing a young woman at Turning Point pic.twitter.com/skEE0F6kQG
— Barbara Sobel (BarbaraJ.Sobel on Threads) (@Momof4Cats4) June 15, 2024
With the way the Trump campaign and Rupert Murdoch are pushing doctored videos of Biden every day, I think it’s only fair to spread real videos of Donald Trump’s grotesque behavior. People may have accepted it to some degree but they certainly don’t want to be reminded of it. They should be. They have to be.
This tactic is used by many rich people but very few have used it as liberally as Donald Trump:
The IRS plans to end a major tax loophole for wealthy taxpayers that could raise more than $50 billion in revenue over the next decade, the U.S. Treasury Department says.
The proposed rule and guidance announced Monday includes plans to essentially stop “partnership basis shifting” — a process by which a business or person can move assets among a series of related parties to avoid paying taxes.
Biden administration officials said after evaluating the practice that there are no economic grounds for these transactions, with Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo calling it “really just a shell game.” The officials said the additional IRS funding provided through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act had enabled increased oversight and greater awareness of the practice.
“These tax shelters allow wealthy taxpayers to avoid paying what they owe,” IRS commissioner Danny Werfel said.
Due to previous years of underfunding, the IRS had cut back on the auditing of wealthy individuals and the shifting of assets among partnerships and companies became common.
The IRS says filings for large pass-through businesses used for the type of tax avoidance in the guidance increased 70% from 174,100 in 2010 to 297,400 in 2019. However, audit rates for these businesses fell from 3.8% to 0.1% in the same time frame.
Treasury said in a statement announcing the new guidance that there is an estimated $160 billion gap between what the top 1% of earners likely owe in taxes and what they pay.
Miles Johnson, a senior attorney adviser and partnership tax specialist at the Tax Law Center at NYU Law, said “these transactions effectively make income disappear from the tax system by creating depreciation deductions or other tax reductions that don’t reflect any true economic cost.”
I’ll look forward to hearing how this change in the tax regulations is really an assault on the everyday Real Americans in rural counties. I’m sure it will be creative.
Trump is running on an explicitly transactional platform planning to enact draconian tariffs on virtually everything because he thinks he can strong arm other countries into doing his bidding — which would crash the world economy and provoke hostility among friends and foes alike. I don’t think that’s what most of the country means when they say we should engage with the world.
Here’s what German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said about Biden over the weekend:
“I think that Joe Biden is someone who is very clear, who knows exactly what he is doing and who is one of the most experienced politicians in the world, especially when it comes to international politics. In a difficult situation like this, where a war is taking place right here in Europe, after Russia invaded Ukraine, where many, many other conflicts are raging around the world, this is an asset, a good thing, and therefore I can only say that this is a man who knows exactly what he is doing.”
Or we can have an ignorant, malevolent, pathological liar in charge. That’s the choice.
There are Democrats out there who say the Biden campaign shouldn’t run ads like this. They say nothing matters but voters’ perceptions of the economy. I don’t think that’s true. (It certainly isn’t true of the MAGA people who are all about cult worship and culture wars.) And I don’t think it’s a good idea to push disinformation even if it’s in service of assuaging people’s concerns. The truth is the best way to go.
And the truth is that some people are economically insecure. Millions of them. And Biden has done as much as any president in my lifetime to address that. Nonetheless, it perennially exists in our country and you can’t sugar coat it. Some people need help. At the same time, the economy really is in a comparatively good place with lots of jobs, inflation coming down sharply and roaring markets which should be celebrated, not downplayed. Democrats do themselves no favors by being the Debbie Downer party while Trump is out there selling himself as having the greatest economy the world has ever seen.
Meanwhile, he’s a convicted felon and there’s good reason to believe that independents aren’t happy about this conviction. That’s where the election will be won or lost. This is a good ad.
Over the weekend Donald Trump committed one of the worst verbal “glitches” of the campaign so far. After delivering his standard line about how Joe Biden should be forced to take a cognitive test and rambling on about how he had “aced” his, Trump then said:
“Doc Ronny Johnson, does everyone know Doc Ronny Johnson from Texas? He was the White House doctor and he said that I was the healthiest, he feels, president in history so I liked him very much.”
Brig. Gen. Dr. Richard Tubb, said in a letter that the doctor had been attached like “Velcro” to Trump since Inauguration Day. Tubb explained that [the] office is “one of only a very few in the White House Residence proper,” located directly across the hall from the president’s private elevator. He said that “on any given day ‘physician’s office,’ as it is known, is generally the first and last to see the President.”
They were tight and Trump surely knows (or knew) that his last name is Jackson not Johnson and yet he said it wrong twice. But then he does that doesn’t he? Recall that he also repeatedly confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi at another rally earlier this year. But doing it in the same breath that he’s slagging Biden’s cognitive abilities takes it to a whole other level of absurdity.
If I had to guess, Trump was confusing Jackson’s name with Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, with whom he’s been reportedly on the phone a lot lately, harranguing him to somehow overturn his New York criminal conviction. (Perhaps he confused him with his former fixer Michael Cohen…)
Politico reported that Trump is obsessed with the idea of using congressional power to go after Democrats he believes have “weaponized” the justice system.
It’s a campaign he orchestrated in the days after his May 31 conviction on 34 felony counts in New York, starting with a phone call to the man he wanted to lead it: Speaker Mike Johnson. Trump was still angry when he made the call, according to those who have heard accounts of it from Johnson, dropping frequent F-bombs as he spoke with the soft-spoken and pious GOP leader.
“We have to overturn this,” Trump insisted.
That’s an interesting choice of words don’t you think? He has quite the habit of calling people up and demanding they “overturn ” results he doesn’t like. Recall the famous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger demanding that he “find” just enough votes to overturn the presidential election. Likewise he said publicly more than once that he believed the Supreme Court would overturn the results of the 2020 election, largely because the three he put on the bench owed it to him. At one point he was just posting #OVERTURN on social media.
That obviously didn’t work but it hasn’t stopped him from deploying the same demands in the wake of his conviction last month. And it appears that unlike Raffensberger, Johnson is ready and willing to do what he can to help. After all, he was an election denier before it was cool.
Back in 2020, Johnson was among those who argued that some states officials had changing voting procedures to accommodate the deadly pandemic was unconstitutional and he reportedly strong armed 125 House members to join him in a Supreme Court brief supporting a lawsuit filed in Texas to overturn the elections in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin. According to ABC, ” he told them Donald Trump was watching” and let it be known that he was in close contact with the then president.
The Supreme Court refused the case due to lack of standing but Johnson didn’t let up. He trafficked in some of kookiest election conspiracy theories including that the Dominion voting machines were rigged and were tied to the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez who had been dead for years. He’s a card-carrying election denier who will do everything he can to help Trump this November if he wants to challenge the results again (which he and the RNC are already setting up to do should he lose.)
Trump obviously knows this which is why he immediately got Johnson on the horn after the conviction, hurling F-bombs about how Johnson needs to overturn it, despite the fact that he is the Speaker of the House not a New York Appellate Court judge. Politico reported that Johnson was already on board:
The speaker didn’t really need to be convinced, one person familiar with the conversation said: Johnson, a former attorney himself, already believed the House had a role to play in addressing Trump’s predicament. The two have since spoken on the subject multiple times.
Whether he can fulfill Trump’s demands is another story. They managed to vote to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt last week but it wasn’t easy. It’s unknown if they will be able to pass any of their proposals to go after those who are prosecuting Trump and the move to pass a law allowing presidents to move state cases to federal court is still pending. While he once said that “defunding” Jack Smith’s office was unworkable, Johnson is now pursuing it but one senior appropriator told Politico that the defunding gambit is “stupid” and there is little indication that there are enough votes for any of this.
So perhaps Johnson’s just doing all this to appease his hard right flank and keep them from trying to oust him from the Speaker’s office. More likely, he’s trying to help Trump and from the way it sounds he’s more than happy to do it on principle.
After Trump demanded he overturn the conviction Johnson went on Fox and Friends and reassured everyone that his pals on the Supreme Court were going to take care of it:
“I think that the justices on the court—I know many of them personally—I think they are deeply concerned about that, as we are. So I think they’ll set this straight. This will be overturned, guys, there’s no question about it; it’s just going to take some time to do it.”
That had to be music to Trump’s ears and it no doubt made him love the speaker even more. But I hope Johnson doesn’t expect him to remember it. He’s been having a little trouble in that department lately. At this point, Trump could confuse him with Mike Pence and all that goodwill would go right out the window.
Salon
Sometimes, I surprise myself. I wrote this last night. This pops up this morning:
"I got to know Donald Trump post-presidency… and Trump had severe memory issues. As the journalist who spent the most time with him, he couldn't remember things, he couldn't even remember me."
