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
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
Trump threatens Harley Davidson with destruction for embarrassing him.
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.
Here’s what I take as the crux of today’s majority decision and one which I suspect may come up again in subsequent decisions given President Trump’s behavior …
For our purposes today, we assume that we may look behind the face of the Proclamation to the extent of applying rational basis review. That standard of review considers whether the entry policy is plausibly related to the Government’s stated objective to protect the country and improve vetting processes. See Railroad Retirement Bd. v. Fritz, 449 U. S. 166, 179 (1980). As a result, we may consider plaintiffs’ extrinsic evidence, but will uphold the policy so long as it can reasonably be understood to result from a justification independent of unconstitutional grounds.5
We just recorded this week’s episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast. The subject was congressional oversight – specifically, that congressional oversight is perhaps the central issue on the ballot in November. People underestimate just how important real oversight is – both in terms of substantive good government and in bringing corruption and misrule to heel. The in many ways unwritten story of the early Trump administration is just how deep and pervasive the venal corruption seems to be – and venal corruption isn’t the only kind of corruption. We know what we know because of powerful, aggressive journalism. But there’s only so much you can ferret out without subpoena power. As much as we shouldn’t be, I think people will be stunned at just what is happening and now allowed to happen because Republicans don’t do oversight. Read More
Remarkable moment in the President’s discussion of tariffs today when he suggested that his tariffs may be able to fund the government in place of income taxes. He references the McKinley era when this was the case, prior to the enactment of a federal income tax. Of course federal expenditures are roughly 10 times (2.2% versus 23% or 24%) higher today as a percentage of GDP. So this is basically insane.
Trump appears to suggest that revenue from his tariffs may be able to replace the federal income tax, referencing McKinley when federal spending was 2.2% of GDP as opposed to 23% or 24% https://t.co/4y9qDZKhwy pic.twitter.com/Z18GF1Zlzn
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 26, 2018
Let me flag your attention to something. The President has now repeatedly claimed that Harley Davidson is lying about the reason for shifting motorcycle production overseas. He is focused on the closure of a plant in Kansas and opening one in Thailand. The company seemed to be talking about something different from that. On its own this isn’t terribly surprising. President Trump accuses people of things all the time. But there’s something specific about this. This wasn’t a comment from the CEO or a press release. It was an 8-K filing. Read More
Okay, I got some further detail on how exactly subpoenaing/getting the President’s tax returns would work if the Democrats get run at least one house of Congress next year. We’ll write it up later this evening.