Today’s High Court decision upholding the President’s anti-Muslim travel ban should focus us on a key, important fact: the federal judiciary is now heavily stocked not just with Republican appointees but conservative ideologues. This isn’t simply a commentary on this decision. It does include major exceptions – the Court’s jurisprudence on marriage, for instance. But we simply cannot rely on the Court’s as presently constituted to make rulings which are in line with the actual constitution or our national traditions. This is in significant part because of the corrupt appointment of Justice Gorsuch. But there’s no undoing that. We are on the cusp of what will likely be an even more dramatic example of rightwing judicial activism against labor rights. On issue after issue, change and justice or simple preservation will have to rely on building robust political movements. This is a point I plan and hope to see as a guiding premise of our upcoming voting rights and democracy series.

It’s not either/or. I spoke to a friend a few days ago who said flatly, the courts are a lost cause. It’s all about politics and elections. That’s wrong. It’s not a pure either/or. Courts and litigation remain still absolutely critical. We’ve seen that even in the last year. Critically important. But on many issues, in this period of testing, saving the country will come from robust political movements, ones which will have to succeed in the face of daunting challenges to the right to vote in order to eventually redeem those rights.

Trump threatens Harley Davidson with destruction for embarrassing him.

It’s primary day for us here in New York State. One of the bad things about New York voting, partly by design, is that the state runs elections with a deliberate inefficiency. So federal primaries (House races) are on a different day than state primaries (governor). In 2016, the presidential primary was on yet a third date. In this case, it goes back to a court decision about the date of the federal primary, though a major contributing issue is indifference to making it easier to vote. We also don’t have early voting or mail in voting or really any other cool innovations from the last thirty years. But I’m not here to gripe, at least not mainly. Today in New York City a bunch of the longtime House incumbents are facing serious primary challenges: the big ones are Joe Crowley (v. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), Carolyn Maloney (v. Suraj Patel), Elliot Engel (v. Jonathan Lewis) and Yvette Clarke (v. Adem Bunkeddeko). Read More

Sarah Sanders just again complained that Democrats support “open borders and rampant crime” that she claims comes with “open borders.” These are straight up lies, so blatant and frequently repeated that I thought it was important to provide links here which can allow anyone who is willing to state and repeat the actual facts again and again and again. Read More

I was mainly offline for a few days. So when I plugged back in last night I realized that we are in the throes of another debate about the decline of “civility” in public life. This is a mealy mouthed word that has no clear meaning beyond social delicacy and the importance of not speaking up too aggressively. As a society the line we should guard is opposition to violence, physical intimidation and menace as tools of civic life. These are wrong in principle, ineffective in practice and tools which the fascistic elements in society will always be able to use more consistently and coherently than those who believe in free society and the rule of law. Read More

I am about at my wit’s end with Times‘ analysis and trend pieces. Just stop! (A subject for another day.) But this one on Trump’s deal-making and actual failure to make really any deals in 17 months as President contains a highly salient quotation, which we will need to think about a lot over the coming years. The words are from Daniel M. Price, a Bush era trade advisor. “What the president seemingly fails to understand is that in foreign policy and in trade policy — unlike in real estate transactions — the parties are all repeat players. The country you insult or seek undue advantage over today you will have to work with again tomorrow.” Read More

And there you have it. DOJ confirms that the White House knows the President’s executive order is in fact illegal on its face. What it does is set a 20 day countdown until Trump blames a court for forcing him to separate more families again.

JUST IN: Senior Justice Department official Gene Hamilton confirms the Flores settlement still controls, and that unless Congress or the court acts, the government can only detain families together for "up to 20 days."

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) June 20, 2018

In Michael Cohen’s letter resigning his position as a Deputy Finance Chair at the RNC he also took a moment to call the President’s family separation policy “heart wrenching” and said that “children should never be used as bargaining chips.”

From a column in The Houston Chronicle from a flight attendant refusing to fly more flights in which migrant children separated from their families are being transported …

I have told my story to many of my flight attendant colleagues and they have pledged to do the same.

Since sharing my story, I learned from a fellow flight attendant that he was lied to by an ICE agent who said the children on the flight were part of a soccer team. When pressed, the agent finally admitted that they were, indeed children who were being relocated to assigned camps.

This inhumane separation of migrant children from their families is against the morals and principles instilled in me, as well as my religious and spiritual teachings.

The President says he’s signing an executive order to end family separations. The actual aim seems to be to pick a fight with the courts and allow separations to continue while blaming judges. According to The New York Times, the President will sign an executive order allowing children to be detained indefinitely with their parents. The problem is that that violates a 1997 consent decree saying that you can’t detain/imprison children for more than 20 days (technically what’s currently happening isn’t detention). It straight up violates that order. So what will almost inevitably happen is that a court will step in, say you can’t do that and then Trump will announce that the judge is forcing him to keep separating families.