151 search results for ""14th amendment""

Trump installs his immigration soulmate at DHS

by digby

Ken “the Cooch” Cucinelli (yes, that’s his real nickname…) is an immigration extremist. And he’s now in charge of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service:

Former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli’s long-rumored role as a top coordinator of the Department of Homeland Security immigration policy finally has an official title. According to an email sent to staff at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on Monday, the longtime border hawk has been named acting director of the agency, whose 19,000 employees orchestrate the country’s immigration and naturalization system.

“We must work hand in hand with our colleagues within DHS, along with our other federal partners, to address challenges to our legal immigration system and enforce existing immigration law,” Cuccinelli wrote in an email to his new colleagues. “Together we will continue to work to stem the crisis at our southwest border.”

The note also previews an escalation of Trump’s crackdown on the asylum system, with Cuccinelli vowing to “work to find long-term solutions to close asylum loopholes that encourage many to make the dangerous journey into the United States so that those who truly need humanitarian protections… receive them.”

As Virginia’s top law enforcement official and in his years serving in the Virginia state senate, Cuccinelli laid a long track of aggressive anti-immigrant policies intended to restrict access to public services, employment, and even citizenship from migrants and their families. That record, combined with his vociferous defense of President Donald Trump on cable news and in conservative media outlets, puts Cuccinelli firmly in line with an administration that has made combating undocumented immigration its top domestic policy goal.

In his new role at Homeland Security, Cuccinelli will be one of the Trump administration’s top bosses on immigration-related matters, a portfolio that has felled other senior administration officials in recent months as the president has grown dissatisfied with stubbornly high rates of illegal entry into the United States.

If his record on immigration issues is any indication, Cuccinelli will embrace that role with relish. While his support for President Donald Trump may be relatively newfound, his championing of hardline Trump-style immigration policies is more than a decade in the making.

Although Cuccinelli first drew national attention during his time as Virginia’s attorney general for his attempts to keep laws against oral sex on the books, he also became a staunch advocate on behalf of aggressive immigration policies in other states. In 2010, Cuccinelli filed an amicus brief in support of S.B. 1070, an Arizona law that allowed police officers to investigate the immigration status of any person arrested or detained by law enforcement based on a “reasonable suspicion” that they were in the country illegally. That same year, he released a legal opinion expanding a similar policy to include any suspected undocumented immigrant stopped by law enforcement for any reason.

“Virginia law enforcement officers have the authority to make the same inquiries as those contemplated by the new Arizona law,” Cuccinelli wrote in the opinion. “So long as the officers have the requisite level of suspicion to believe that a violation of the law has occurred, the officers may detain and briefly question a person they suspect has committed a federal crime.”

Cuccinelli told reporters at the time that any police officer had the authority to question potential undocumented immigrants “so long as they don’t extend the duration of a stop by any significant degree.”

Those stances on illegal immigration appear tame compared to other proposals that Cuccinelli had backed before becoming attorney general. During his eight years in the Virginia state senate, Cuccinelli was the chief patron—the body’s version of primary sponsor—of a rash of bills targeting undocumented immigrants in the commonwealth.

One proposed law would have allowed employers to fire employees who didn’t speak English in their workplace, and stipulated that any employee so fired would be “disqualified from receiving unemployment compensation benefits.” Another bill would have allowed businesses to sue competitors that they believed to be employing undocumented immigrants for economic damages, plus $500 “for each such illegal alien employed by the defendant.”

In one case, Cuccinelli championed one of Trump’s most aggressive immigration policies before Trump himself did. In a 2008 bill, Cuccinelli urged Congress to call a constitutional convention to amend the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution “to clarify specifically that a person born to a parent who is a U. S. citizen is also a citizen of the United States,” to the exclusion of the children of undocumented immigrants who are born in the United States.

Immigration advocates called Cuccinelli’s appointment as acting head of the nation’s top immigration agency “deeply troubling.”

“Whether Ken Cuccinelli’s appointment is lawful remains to be seen,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, noting that the appointment appears to sidestep the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. “Cuccinelli’s track record of anti-immigrant stances and statements is deeply troubling. In the end, we need unifying solutions and smart policy on immigration, not further polarization. Cuccinelli’s installation doesn’t bode well.”

Cucinelli doesn’t qualify for the role without Senate confirmation and even the GOP Senate balked at installing him. So they just did it anyway:

As I’ve explained at rather embarrassing length before, the FVRA, when not superseded by other statutes, gives the president a choice of three options with which to temporarily fill vacancies in senior government positions. The president may choose the “first assistant” to the vacant office, choose anyone currently holding a Senate-confirmed position in the executive branch, or choose a non-Senate-confirmed senior employee who has been serving in the same agency as the vacant office for at least 90 of the previous 365 days. Congress thereby gave the president far more flexibility than it probably meant to (and certainly more than it needed to), perhaps assuming that presidents would act responsibly—and that politics would prevent the president from taking advantage of the broad flexibility provided by the statute as a structural end-run around the Senate’s constitutional advise-and-consent role.

Enter, President Trump. We’ve already seen … creative … interpretations of the FVRA (especially as it relates to other agency statutes) with regard to the appointment of Mick Mulvaney as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Robert Wilkie as acting secretary of veterans affairs, and Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general (not to mention how Kevin McAleenan became acting secretary of homeland security). But the Cuccinelli appointment is taking advantage of an entirely different—and more problematic—loophole.

Although the director of USCIS holds an office created by statute, the same does not appear to be true of the deputy director. Instead, that position is an internal position created by executive branch regulation (and currently held by Mark Koumans, who, as the “first assistant” until now, had been serving as acting director of USCIS for the past week). Apparently, Cuccinelli has been named to the brand-new position of principal deputy director of USCIS, a role that, so far as I can tell, did not exist before today. Presumably, the new staff position of principal deputy director will supersede the deputy director as the first assistant for purposes of the FVRA. (Some statutes expressly identify which position in specific agencies is the first assistant, but no such statute does in this case.) In other words, through nothing other than internal administrative reshuffling—creating a new position and deeming it the first assistant—the Trump administration was able to bootstrap Cuccinelli into the role of acting director, even though, until today, he had never held any position in the federal government.

Needless to say, the Senate will just say “thank you sir, may I have another” and that will be that.

This is going to be very bad.

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Only mostly dead
by Tom Sullivan

Given that Uncle Sam is supporting bombing a starving population in Yemen and teargassing desperate migrants on the Mexico/U.S border, these may be small lights in the darkness, but take what you can get. Two items this morning on how the United States sees itself, or still wants to. The U-S-of-A may be only mostly dead.

The noxious civil asset forfeiture practice police agencies made a regular feature of drug enforcement thirty years ago is under challenge in the U.S. Supreme Court. “Policing for profit” at long last is on trial.

The state of Indiana confiscated Tyson Timbs’ $42,000 Land Rover after arresting him for selling $400 worth of heroin to undercover cops. The vehicle is more than four times the amount of fine assessed for the crime, and Timbs sued to get back his vehicle. A trial court agreed the “fine” in this case was excessive. An appeals court agreed.

Indiana’s state Supreme Court ruled, however, that the Constitution’s ban on excessive fines (Eighth Amendment) does not enjoin the states from imposing them. U.S. Supreme Court justices from across the ideological spectrum challenged that assertion on Wednesday when the case came before the high court.

“Weirdly enough, the court has never explicitly held that [the Eight Amendment] restricts state governments,” writes Mark Joseph Stern at Slate:

There is little doubt that the justices will use Timbs to incorporate the clause at long last. Under long-standing precedent, a right that is “fundamental” to “ordered liberty” and “deeply rooted” in history receives protection under the 14th Amendment. And in its extraordinary brief, the Institute for Justice—the libertarian firm representing Timbs—demonstrates that the right against excessive fines checks both boxes. It was enshrined in the Magna Carta and safeguarded by most state constitutions when the U.S. Constitution was ratified. When Congress wrote the 14th Amendment, lawmakers argued that it would nullify “Black Codes” in Southern states that levied crippling, arbitrary fines on newly freed slaves. There is really no plausible argument that the right against excessive fines is not “fundamental” or “deeply rooted” and thus incorporated against the states.

Questioning on Wednesday did not go well for Indiana, as NPR’s audio coverage confirms. Justices hammered Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher who struggled to justify the practice finally before the Supreme Court.

“In 2014, federal prosecutors used asset forfeiture to take more stuff than burglars,” Stern adds.

Decades of states blurring the lines between who is a criminal and who is the law, I’d argue, has contributed to the widespread lack of trust in government that has led us to the Trump era. A ruling to quash civil asset forfeiture would begin restoring that trust.

Next up: “Nearly all of the world’s 180-plus countries include the term education in their constitution,” Alia Wong explains in The Atlantic. A class-action lawsuit filed in Rhode Island seeks to include education as a right in the one major holdout nation: yours:

The 14 plaintiffs in Cook v. Raimondo, all public-school students or parents on behalf of their children, accuse the state of Rhode Island of providing an education so inferior that the state has failed to fulfill its duties under the U.S. Constitution. But given that there is no explicit guarantee of education in the Constitution, the lawyers are making a sort of bank-shot argument: that in denying citizens of Rhode Island a quality education, the state is in essence preventing people from exercising their Constitutional rights, such as forming a legal assembly (as is guaranteed by the First Amendment) or voting (as is guaranteed by the Fifteenth). That this denial falls unevenly across the population is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which promises people equal protection under the law. As of Wednesday afternoon, none of the defendants offered comment on the suit.

The absence of an explicit right to education in the Constitution is not some mere oversight but is instead the result of the country’s federalist system of government: Schooling in America is not the domain of the federal government, but rather the domain of states, all 50 of which mandate in their individual constitutions the provision of public education. This decentralized approach has its benefits: Local governments control their local schools, and parents in any one place can more easily involve themselves in educational policy than they could if those policies were national. But one consequence, many observers contend, is that school funding varies hugely from region to region, often with those who have the greatest need getting the least. With close to half of education spending coming from local property-tax revenue, a child’s zip code has a huge bearing on the quality of her schooling.

Court fights over this inequality have been fought for years in state courts. A favorable federal court ruling in Cook v. Raimondo, litigants hope, “can appeal not just to liberals who are more inclined toward the establishment of a national right to education, but also to conservatives who’ve long advocated for improved civics education.” Not to mention it could result in more equitable education across states and districts. It is a shrewd strategy.

Should the Supreme Court rule against policing for profit, perhaps it will be of a mood later to prohibit public education for profit (looking at you, charter school movement) and to restore civics in schools. Don’t hold your breath. Still, these two cases suggest our institutions may only be mostly dead. Don’t throw out that old bellows just yet.

Acceptable casualties
by Tom Sullivan

As expected, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay on a lower court order that North Carolina immediately redraw congressional district boundaries. The three-judge panel found them so partisan it ruled them unconstitutional gerrymanders. North Carolina Republican legislative leaders argued that such action in an election year was unwarranted. Plus, the court already has decisions pending in similar cases from Wisconsin and Maryland. Those rulings will impact the North Carolina case.

Republican lawmakers stated openly their motivations behind the current maps. “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” Representative David Lewis said during drafting. “So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.” Partisan gerrymanders are permissible because they are not against the law, Lewis argued:

“I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”

The plan worked:

In 2016, the court said, Republican congressional candidates won 53 percent of the statewide vote. But they won in 10 of the 13 congressional districts, or 77 percent of them.

Whether partisan gerrymanders are constitutional may be decided in the Wisconsin and Maryland cases. At issue is whether (as I alluded to earlier regarding Maryland) Republicans drawn into safe districts for Democratic incumbents are denied equal protection under the 14th Amendment, and vice versa. Gerrymandering districts “safe” for your party treats your own voters in opponents’ safe districts as acceptable casualties. Independent voters are pawns in both.

That three such cases have reached the Supreme Court speaks to the prevalence of the practice and the threat gerrymandering as now practiced poses to democratic norms. If former United States Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were arguing the case, he might consider an appeal to norms “quaint,” but as we have seen with the current administration, democratic norms underlie more of our constitutional system than we previuosly realized.

The New York Times provides a walk-through of the issues at stake. In it, Judge Paul V. Niemeyer of the the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit calls partisan gerrymandering “a cancer on democracy,” adding:

“The widespread nature of gerrymandering in modern politics is matched by the almost universal absence of those who will defend its negative effect on our democracy,” wrote Judge Niemeyer. “Indeed, both Democrats and Republicans have decried it when wielded by their opponents but nonetheless continue to gerrymander in their own self-interest when given the opportunity.”

Republican Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland has announced nonpartisan redistricting reform legislation as well as signing onto an amicus brief for the plaintiffs in the Maryland case.

Hogan, a Republican governor in a heavily Democratic state, is less gleeful about the practice than his North Carolina co-partisans whose motives in seeking further delay, plaintiffs there say, Republicans admit openly:

“But their true motive is as plain as day: the Republican contingent of the legislature wants to enjoy the fruits of their grossly unconstitutional actions for yet another election cycle.”

And so they shall.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

A partisan gerrymander, pure and simple
by Tom Sullivan

A federal court has once again struck down district maps drawn by North Carolina Republicans as unconstitutional gerrymanders. The ruling was precedent-setting for why the court deemed the maps unconstitutional. It was not because of racial gerrymandering:

The ruling was the first time that a federal court had blocked a congressional map because of a partisan gerrymander, and it instantly endangered Republican seats in the coming elections.

Judge James A. Wynn Jr., in a biting 191-page opinion, said that Republicans in North Carolina’s Legislature had been “motivated by invidious partisan intent” as they carried out their obligation in 2016 to divide the state into 13 congressional districts, 10 of which are held by Republicans. The result, Judge Wynn wrote, violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.

The maps not only deny a voice to Democrats in the ten Republican-majority districts, but to Republicans in the three districts Republican lawmakers reserved for Democrats.

Courts rejected previous Republican-led attempts at redrawing racially gerrymandered state legislative maps and handed over the task to a special master. Tuesday’s decision by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals repeats that formula.

The three-judge panel, by now weary of the four-corners delay state Republicans have run since issuing the maps in 2011, gave the majority lawmakers two weeks to redraw the congressional map thay had already redrawn or it would turn over the process to a special master.

(Owing to the seesawing effect of these follies, I voted in North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District in 2010, voted in the 10th Congressional District in 2012, 2014, and in the 2016 primaries, and was back in the 11th in time for the 2016 general election — all without changing address.)

Lawmakers are certain to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

At Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen examined the ruling, noting:

The result is not a big surprise given what North Carolina did here. After its earlier redistricting was declared a racial gerrymander, it came up with a new plan using only political data that it described as a partisan gerrymander on its own terms. It did this as a defense against a future racial gerrymandering claim. As the court explained at page 16, NC “Representative Lewis said that he “propose[d] that [the Committee] draw the maps to give a partisan advantage
to 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats because [he] d[id] not believe it[ would be] possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and 2 Democrats.” If there’s any case that could be a partisan gerrymander, it’s this one.

The Supreme Court is already considering two partisan gerrymandering cases, one from Wisconsin and one from Maryland. No doubt NC will appeal this case to the Supreme Court, which is likely to hold it in light of the decision in those cases (it would be too late, absent extraordinary briefing, to set the case for argument this term). It likely will be sent back to this court to reconsider in light of what the Court does.

Hasen’s colleague Nicholas Stephanopoulos adds that the court rejected the defendants’ arguments against using empirical evidence of partisan discrimination to reject their maps:

The court, though, observed that “plaintiffs do not seek to constitutionalize any of the empirical analyses they have put forward,” adding that “these analyses provide evidence that the 2016 Plan violates a number of well-established constitutional standards.” The court further criticized the defendants for their “cynical” view that analysis should be discarded if it has “its genesis in academic research.” “It makes no practical or legal sense for courts to close their eyes to new scientific or statistical methods.” “The Constitution does not require the federal courts to act like Galileo’s Inquisition and enjoin consideration of new academic theories.”

Not that Republican lawmakers have any history of doing that.

As satisfying as it is to see Lewis and his oleaginous associates slapped down again, it is frustrating that Democrats only recourse these days is the courts. With Donald Trump in the White House, that last line of defense will not hold much longer if Democrats do not regain control of the Senate this fall.

As I continue to remind readers, progressives’ fixation on Washington is misplaced. The real action, the gerrymandering action, takes place at the state legislative level where Republicans dominate.

Regaining control of those legislatures has been complicated by the sort of gerrymandering North Carolina Republicans have perfected. Undoing that control will take multiple cycles and commitment to that local work.

It is possible the court’s decision in this case will have a ripple effect that will impede further shenanigans in other Republican-dominated states. But the only longer-term solution is an electoral one.

Gaining U.S. Senate seats this fall may be the only near-term leverage Democrats have for preventing Republicans from enhancing the courts the way they have used mapping Viagra to keep their state and federal majorities artificially firm.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Back to the 50s. The 1850s.
by digby

So Roy Moore is known for his looney political philosophy and propensity to molest young girls. But his view of the constitution may be even loonier than we knew. He appeared on an obscure conspiracy theory radio show in 2011 and said some … unusual tings. Keep in mind that this guy was kicked off the Alabama Supreme Court twice for refusing to enforce the rule of law. In this respect he’s not Donald Trump. He actually knows what the constitution says:

CNN’s KFile obtained audio from Moore’s two appearances on the show. In the same June episode, Moore invoked Adolf Hitler in a discussion about Obama’s birth certificate. In a May 2011 episode, Moore told the two radio hosts, who have repeatedly rejected the official explanation for the 9/11 attacks, that he would be open to hearings looking into “what really happened” on that day.

In Moore’s June appearance, one of the hosts says he would like to see an amendment that would void all the amendments after the Tenth.

“That would eliminate many problems,” Moore replied. “You know people don’t understand how some of these amendments have completely tried to wreck the form of government that our forefathers intended.”

Moore cited the 17th Amendment, which calls for the direct election of senators by voters rather than state legislatures, as one he particularly found troublesome.

The host agreed with Moore, before turning his attention to the 14th Amendment, which was passed during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War and guaranteed citizenship and equal rights and protection to former slaves and has been used in landmark Supreme Court cases such as Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefell v. Hodges.

“People also don’t understand, and being from the South I bet you get it, the 14th Amendment was only approved at the point of the gun,” the host said.

“Yeah, it had very serious problems with its approval by the states,” Moore replied. “The danger in the 14th Amendment, which was to restrict, it has been a restriction on the states using the first Ten Amendments by and through the 14th Amendment. To restrict the states from doing something that the federal government was restricted from doing and allowing the federal government to do something which the first Ten Amendments prevented them from doing. If you understand the incorporation doctrine used by the courts and what it meant. You’d understand what I’m talking about.”

Moore explained further that the first ten amendments restricted the federal government in certain areas.

“For example, the right to keep and bear arms, the First Amendment, freedom of press liberty. Those various freedoms and restrictions have been imposed on the states through the 14th Amendment. And yet the federal government is violating just about every one of them saying that — they don’t they don’t — are not restrained by them.”

Keep in mind that it was Moore’s refusal to observe the 1st Amendment’s prohibition against the establishment of religion that got him kicked off the first time. He insisted on putting the 10 Commandments in the courthouse. He’s also said that Keith Ellison should not be allowed to take a seat in congress because he is a Muslim. So his protestations to the contrary, Roy Moore doesn’t believe in the constitution. He believes in Roy Moore. And we’re supposed to believe in him too.

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Not so hard to believe
by Tom Sullivan

It’s hard to believe. Not two weeks ago, Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta announced his department would induct former President Ronald Reagan into his department’s Hall of Honor, joining Mother Jones, Eugene Debs, and Cesar Chavez.

We pause while you recover from blowing coffee out your noses.

Acosta cited Reagan’s leadership of the Screen Actors Guild beginning in 1947. There was no mention in the press release of Reagan’s destroying the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) when in 1981 he fired its 11,000 members and imposed a lifetime ban on rehiring the strikers.

AFSCME (the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) responded:

This is no small insult to working people. It’s a slap in the face to all those people whom the Hall of Honor is supposed to honor. Its mission is to honor people “whose distinctive contributions in the field of labor have elevated working conditions, wages, and overall quality of life of America’s working families.”

That applies to a very special group of people who put workers’ rights – and the struggle for dignity on the job – ahead of all else.

The Trump administration just elevated a union buster to the Labor Hall of Fame. Maybe it’s not so hard to believe.

Richard Wolff, emeritus professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, tells In These Times PATCO was just the beginning:

During the course of his presidency, Ronald Reagan became the most powerful union buster in the world. He stacked the National Labor Relations Board with officials who vehemently opposed unions, causing long-term damage to collective bargaining and workers’ rights in the United States.

After the air traffic controller debacle, corporations became emboldened and targeted unions with a new zeal, illegally firing workers for organizing with the knowledge that they could largely evade punishment under Reagan’s labor board.

Union membership in the workforce has dropped in this country since the from middle 1970s from 26.7 percent 13.1 percent. Reagan’s actions accelerated that decline and contributed to wage stagnation for the bottom 70 percent of American workers since his tenure.

Former treasury secretary Larry Summers calls in today’s Washington Post for a rebalancing of the employer-employee power dynamic that has tipped in favor of corporate leaders since Reagan.

William E. Forbath and Brishen Rogers argue for new kinds of labor laws to address the imbalance in an age of contract labor and Uber drivers.

“Democratic lawmakers know that their party was founded on the proposition that concentrated wealth seeks to convert its economic power into political power,” they write, “and that left to its own devices, it puts our democracy at risk.”

That’s not so hard to believe, either. Whoever has eyes, let them see.

Labor laws in place since the 1930s were designed to protect more formal employees than we see today, they argue. “Uber and Lyft drivers are misclassified as independent contractors [without] clear rights to bargain with the companies that actually set the rules.” Those imbalances need to be addressed:

A few simple but bold legal reforms would make a world of difference. First, Congress could pass laws to promote multi-employer bargaining, or even bargaining among all companies in an industry. If all hotel brands, all fast-food brands, all grocers or all local delivery companies bargained together, none would be placed at a competitive disadvantage as a result of unionization, which is often the main reason employers resist it so fiercely. Second, Congress could ensure that organized workers can bargain with the companies that actually profit from their work by expanding the legal definition of employment to cover more categories of workers.

We live in a period, Shaun Richman writes at In These Times, when “‘corporate persons’ have established free speech rights [and] a union—a collection of actual persons—has no similarly recognized protections.” The 14th Amendment, in essence, has yet to ensure labor and management enjoy equal treatment under law.

Unions must reverse a half-century-long strategy of avoiding the courts and mount legal and political challenges to labor laws that infringe on workers’ speech, curtail their bargaining power and deny them the right to extend solidarity to fellow workers. This is a long-term strategy, one made longer-term by the inability to appoint progressive federal judges in the near future. But if we are ever to restore key protections for labor, we need to demand a workers’ bill of rights.

He happens to have one to propose (above).

The imbalance today is entrenched. Ahead of union votes, for example, court cases “permit employers to force workers to attend ‘vote no’ presentations or be fired,” he writes:

In a 2009 study, Cornell University’s Kate Bronfenbrenner found that employers utilized these captive audience meetings in nine out of 10 union elections. Employers threatened to cut wages and benefits in 47 percent of documented cases, and to go out of business entirely in 57 percent of cases. In one in 10 instances, bosses actually hired goons to impersonate federal agents and lie about the process. Not surprisingly, unions lose 57 percent of elections when employers run these “captive audience” meetings.

Ironically, corporations have argued for—and won—the right to hold these meetings on the grounds of their First Amendment rights as “persons.” Yet union advocates possess no equivalent right to hold their own “vote yes” meetings.

Hard to believe again.

Labor groups might start by challenging the excessive restrictions on signal picketing (efforts to embarrass unfair employers without an explicit call for a boycott). Noxious hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Westboro Baptist Church have seen their pickets vigorously defended by the courts. Unions should argue that to restrict signal picketing is to violate workers’ First and 14th Amendment rights.

Anyone who lived through the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown, bailouts, and non-prosecutions of Wall Street bankers knows it, feels it down deep in their guts that business interests have tipped the law, the economy, and the power in this country in their favor. If we as a nation are unable to roll back corporate personhood in the courts and restore democracy that way, unions should at least enjoy equal status as the beginning of a counterbalance.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

The “F” Word

by digby

Back in the fall of 2015 I wrote in Salon about Trump and his “tendencies” as he began to emerge as the frontrunner:

Over the past week or so, something unusual has happened in American politics: political figures, mainstream scholars and commentators are describing a leading contender for president of the United States as a fascist. Sure, people on barstools around the country have done this forever but it’s unprecedented to see such a thing on national television and in the pages of major newspapers.

For instance, take a look at this piece by MJ Lee at CNN:

[I]t it was after Trump started calling for stronger surveillance of Muslim-Americans in the aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks that a handful of conservatives ventured to call Trump’s rhetoric something much more dangerous: fascism.
[…]
“Trump is a fascist. And that’s not a term I use loosely or often. But he’s earned it,” tweeted Max Boot, a conservative fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who is advising Marco Rubio. 

“Forced federal registration of US citizens, based on religious identity, is fascism. Period. Nothing else to call it,” Jeb Bush national security adviser John Noonan wrote on Twitter.

Conservative Iowa radio host Steve Deace, who has endorsed Ted Cruz, also used the “F” word last week: “If Obama proposed the same religion registry as Trump every conservative in the country would call it what it is — creeping fascism.”

Yes, this is a hard fought primary campaign with insults flying in every direction. But ask yourself when was the last time you heard Republicans using the “F” word against someone running in their own party? I can’t remember it happening in decades. It’s possible that some members of the GOP establishment called Barry Goldwater a fascist in 1964 (Democrats did, for sure) but that was half a century ago. In recent years this just has not been considered politically correct on left or right.

The CNN story goes on to interview various scholars who all say that to one degree or another Trump is, indeed, fascistic if not what we used to call “a total fascist.” Historian Rick Perlstein was the first to venture there when he wrote this piece some months back,

It’s hard to understand why this has been so difficult to see. On the day he announced his campaign, Trump openly said he believed that undocumented workers are not just criminals (that’s a common refrain among the anti-immigrant right which fatuously chants “they broke the law by coming here”) but violent rapists, killers and gang members. He said he wants to deport millions of people, including American citizens. In fact, he wants to restrict American citizenship to people whose parents are citizens, and thus are guaranteed citizenship by the 14th amendment.

For months Trump has been saying that we cannot allow Syrian refugees into the country and promising to send the ones who are already here back. He has indicated a willingness to require American Muslims to register with the government and thinks they should be put under surveillance.

He condemns every other country on earth as an enemy, whether economic, military or both, and promises to beat them to “make America great again.” Despite the fact that the U.S. is the world’s only superpower, he says he will make it so strong that “nobody will ever mess with us again” so that it was “highly, highly, highly, unlikely” that he would have to use nuclear weapons.

And he said quite clearly that he believes,

“we’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule… And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago…”

Does that add up to fascism? Yeah, pretty much. In his book, “Rush, Newspeak and Fascism” David Neiwert explained that the dictionary definition of the word often leaves out the most important characteristics of the philosophy, which are “its claims to represent the “true character” of the respective national identities among which it arises; and its mythic core of national rebirth — not to mention its corporatist component, its anti-liberalism, its glorification of violence and its contempt for weakness.” If that’s not Donald Trump I don’t know what is.

But if that doesn’t convince you, surely this quote from Monday in Ohio will:

“This morning they asked me a question. ‘Would you approve waterboarding” Would I approve waterboarding? Yeah. And let me ask you a question? I said, on the other side, they chop off our young people’s heads and they put ’em on a stick. On the other side they build these iron cages and they’ll put 20 people in them and they drop ’em in the ocean for 15 minutes and pull ’em up 15 minutes later. Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I’d approve it, you bet your ass — in a heartbeat. 

And I would approve more than that. Don’t kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work.They’ll say, ‘oh it has no value’, well I know people, very, very important people and they want to be politically correct and I see some people taking on television, ‘well I don’t know if it works’ and they tell me later on, ‘it works, it works, believe me, it works’.

And you know what? If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway for what they’re doing to us.”

Now it’s true that Trump isn’t the first important political figure to publicly endorse waterboarding. Former Vice President Dick Cheney recently said he’d do it again “in a heartbeat” and falsely claimed that “it works.” But even he kept up the fiction that it was rarely employed and only then for interrogation purposes. I don’t know that any top political figure has openly endorsed torture to exact revenge.

Pete Wilson showed what would happen but they didn’t listen

by digby

Following up on my post below, here’s something I wrote back in August of 2015 for Salon:

Donald Trump is the harbinger of GOP doom: The devastating history lesson that Republicans are completely ignoring

(Credit: AP/Charlie Neibergall/Ricardo Arduengo/John Locher)

There was a time back in the day when I used to joke with Republican friends that I would happily support a constitutional amendment that would ban all presidential candidates from California if they would agree to ban all presidential candidates from Texas. The joke, of course, was that my home state, “the land of fruits and nuts” had recently produced two conservative Republican presidents, Nixon and Reagan, while Texas’s most recent contribution had been the man responsible for “Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today.” In those days of post-Vietnam liberalism, that trade seemed like an excellent deal for the left.

It’s hard to imagine now, but from Harry Truman until Bill Clinton, California voted for a Democratic president just one time, for John F. Kennedy in 1960. With a few exceptions here and there, California also voted for GOP governors and senators more often than not. Even though the state had a longstanding reputation for social tolerance and cutting-edge cultural change, politically speaking it was a conservative state, as red as Texas is now.

There were obviously many factors that contributed to California’s evolution into the deep-blue state it is today, from demographics to the culture war. But none of those things come close to the damage that then-Governor Pete Wilson did to the longterm interest of the California Republican Party in 1994, when he scapegoated Latino immigrants as the cause of all the state’s woes.

Wilson was running for re-election, and as part of his campaign to distract from the economic failure of his first term and increase turnout among his base, he ran on a platform promising to crack down on undocumented workers, and enthusiastically supported the infamous Prop 187, which set up a statewide system designed to deny any kind of benefits to undocumented workers, including K-12 education and all forms of health care.

(He also supported a constitutional amendment to repeal birthright citizenship, currently guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.)

Here’s the famous “they keep coming” ad the Wilson campaign ran that year:

Wilson ultimately won the race, and the proposition passed with a 57 percent majority. Nativists everywhere applauded and cheered.

Unfortunately, they apparently didn’t know how to count. They failed to recognize that Latinos were the fastest growing ethnic minority in the state, and knew very well that all this “concern” about undocumented immigration stemmed from a nativist impulse that had little to do with economics and everything to do with bigotry.

The reaction was swift:

The Rev. Jon Pedigo remembers he was so angry that he instantly started planning a march from his parish in Morgan Hill to St. Joseph’s Cathedral in San Jose.

“I said, ‘I’m going to take that frickin’ cross from the church and I’m gonna walk to the downtown cathedral and demand that something be done,’” said Pedigo, now pastor of East San Jose’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. The next morning he led 250 people on the 21-mile walk.

“We filled the cathedral. We filled the park. It was amazing,” he said. “We said, ‘We will not put up with this, and we want God on our side.’”

I don’t know if God was on their side, but Latinos certainly did not put up with it. The Republicans lost the Hispanic vote in California and have almost zero chance of getting it back. The Hispanic population saw the ethnic hatred on display during that period, hatred which was enthusiastically stoked by the Republican Party of California.

The demographic trends in the state guarantee that the GOP will be in the minority in California for a very long time to come. And needless to say, if anyone thought that after 20 years a younger generation might forget why their parents rejected the Republicans and give them another look, the primal scream we are currently witnessing in the 2016 presidential primary is giving them quite a refresher course.

This story is almost a political cliche, repeated so constantly in the media that it has the taint of a moldy morality play rather than a true political lesson. Certainly it’s been an article of faith that the Republican Party simply cannot win nationally if they don’t find a way to attract some Latinos. This is what they themselves wrote in their post 2012 autopsy report:

If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay aityttention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies. In the last election, Governor Romney received just 27 percentof the Hispanic vote. Other minority communities, including Asian and Pacific Islander Americans,also view the Party as unwelcoming. President Bush got 44 percent of the Asian vote in 2004; our presidential nominee received only 26 percent in 2012.

As one conservative, Tea-Party leader, Dick Armey, told us, “You can’t call someone ugly and expect them to go to the prom with you. We’ve chased the Hispanic voter out of his natural home.”

We are not a policy committee, but among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only. We also believe that comprehensive immigration reform is consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all.

Unfortunately, their base doesn’t care about their models and their projections; they are convinced that immigrants are the source of all their troubles. And that’s a huge problem. A recent analysis by Latino Decisions shows that Republicans need to get at least 47 percent of the Latino vote in order to win in 2016. (For reference, Mitt Romney won 23 percent.)

I’m going to take a wild guess that Donald Trump and the cowardly clown car that’s chasing him have just made achieving that 47 percent figure impossible. It’s very hard to imagine that they can put this nativist genie back in the bottle. Even Jeb Bush, who is married to a Mexican American, was out on the campaign trail talking about “anchor babies” yesterday. All GOP candidates are getting drawn into the vortex, whether they want to or not. And some of them are just diving in had first:

More from @RealBenCarson on border issues: “You look at some of these caves and things out there one drone strike, boom, and they’d gone.”

— Dennis Welch (@dennis_welch) August 19, 2015

In case it wasn’t clear, Dr Ben Carson, the man who is coming in second in many GOP presidential polls, is suggesting that the government use armed drones to kill undocumented immigrants. Pete Wilson was a bleeding heart liberal by comparison.

Wilson’s California Republicans are now a rump party of angry, white Tea Partyers and a handful professional operatives. It’s a very sad motley group compared to the political juggernaut that produced Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

There used to be an old saying “As California goes, so goes the nation” meaning that California was the modern, forward thinking laboratory of democracy which started the trends that everyone else would soon follow. If that holds true in this case of this Latino bashing, the Republicans are in for a long road back from the debacle of 2016.

Update: And in case you were worrying, Trump has put the final nail in the coffin of the California GOP. It is on the way to total annihilation in the largest state in the union. And some House seats are going to turn over here.

by digby

This article from The Atlantic should broaden the dialog a bit about Trump and undocumented immigrants. It’s not just about the delicious taco bowl they serve in Trump tower that he loves so much. It’s also about the curry and the pho and the Kung Pao chicken:

Turns out that, since 2000, unauthorized immigration from Asia has grown at rates much faster than from Mexico and Central America. That’s according to a new report by the Migration Policy Institute. So Trump will need to amend his ideas for “securing our nation’s borders.”

At 6 million, Mexicans still represent the majority of the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the country. But the percentage of those arriving has slowed since the recession. During that time, however, Asian unauthorized immigration has increased considerably. From 2000 to 2013, it increased 202 percent, according to the report.

A curious reason for this, says Marc Rosenblum, deputy director of U.S. immigration policy at MPI, and coauthor of the study, is that income in some Asian countries has risen. “That can be counterintuitive,” he says, “since you often think of immigration is something that low-income people do.”

In the 1990s, the unauthorized population in America doubled from 3.5 to 7 million. It reached its apogee in 2007 at 12.2 million. Then the recession hit.

As demand for low-skilled, low-wage workers waned, so did the number of those who came to the U.S. and traditionally filled those roles. In greater numbers than any other group, the unauthorized Mexican immigrant population has dropped after the recession.

“I think it’s safe to say that the unauthorized immigrant Mexican population is unlikely to return to the high growth rate that it did in the 80s and 90s,” says Rosenblum.

In that same time, the number of African unauthorized immigrants doubled. Similarly, the number of unauthorized immigrants from Asia tripled.

What happened in that time, Rosenblum says, is that as the economies thrived in places such as China, South Korea, and India, people there could now afford to migrate to the U.S.—both legally and illegally.

For example, in 1990, there were an estimated 28,000 unauthorized immigrants from India in the U.S. There’s now more than 284,000. Those numbers mirror the rising share of legal Indian immigrants coming to the U.S., and also America’s growing Indian-American population.

The Asian countries with the largest growth are India (306 percent), South Korea (249 percent), and China (148 percent) .

In fact, if stretched back to 1990, India’s unauthorized U.S. immigration growth far outpaces any other country’s, reaching 914 percent.

Asians now represent about a third of the foreign-born population in America—equal with the Mexican foreign-born population. They also represent 14 percent of the unauthorized population. That number, by the author’s own projections, will grow in the coming decade.

Looks like Trump is going to have to build a wall around the whole country — even in the oceans. I’m sure he can do it. He’s a master builder, dontcha know. He can build anything. It’ll be great.

Clearly, Trump’s “anti-illegal” immigrant campaign is based on bigotry against Latinos. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. But keep in mind that he routinely bashes China with equal fervor so it’s a short hop to demonizing Asian immigrants as well.

And recall that we had some hints of how this could go earlier in the primary campaign when the whole question of “anchor babies” came up.  And it was none other than that nice moderate Jebbers who went there first:

It all started when the former Florida governor visited McAllen, Texas, located near the U.S.-Mexico border on Monday and defended his use of the term “anchor baby” to describe the children born on U.S. soil to parents who came into the country illegally. The phrase is considered offensive by many Latinos. 

On Monday, Bush argued that he’s been “immersed in the immigrant experience” personally — his wife is from Mexico — and said it’s “ludicrous” for Democrats to say he was using the word in a derogatory fashion. 

Further attempting to clarify his comments, the Republican presidential contender said he was actually talking about immigrants other than those who cross the U.S.-Mexico border. 

“What I was talking about was the specific case of fraud being committed where there’s organized efforts and, frankly, it’s more related to Asian people coming into our country, having children in that organized efforts taking advantage of a noble concept which is birthright citizenship,” he said. “I support the 14th amendment.”

Trump is still focused on bashing  Mexicans and Muslims depending on the day of the week. But his Asia-bashing will likely lead in that direction as well.  Why wouldn’t it?

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