THIS SHOULD BE A REALLY BIG DEAL: Last week, Trump terrified the entire world by declaring, with respect to North Korea, “We are sending an armada.” He recounted to the Wall Street Journal that he had told the Chinese president, “Look, we have ships headed there.” These statements was a day after Defense Secretary Mattis said the USS Carl Vinson was “on her way up there” to the Korean peninsula. Multiple statements throughout the last week by Spicer, Mattis, and other officials confirmed that the Vinson was traveling toward North Korea, to serve as “a huge deterrence.” This was a lie. All of these statements were lies. The USS Carl Vinson was never headed anywhere close to North Korea -- and we only discovered that after the Navy posted a photo of the aircraft carrier sailing around Indonesia and into the Indian Ocean on Saturday (from Singapore). That’s the opposite direction from North Korea. Surprise of all surprises, Spicer on Wednesday insisted that no one had been misled and that Trump had been telling the truth the whole time, because the ship will eventually head toward the Korean peninsula: “We have an armada going toward the peninsula. That's a fact.” As CNN put it, “Spicer's argument goes like this: Trump said there was an armada headed toward the Korean peninsula. There is. So, in the broadest sense of the word ‘sending,’ Trump was 100 percent right.” This White House announcements last week—these repeated lies—caused real panic in South Korea (and elsewhere), as it seemed of presage a sudden escalation of tensions between the U.S. and North Korea. “In South Korea, though, fears of a full-blown war erupted. The government rushed to reassure the public that the Carl Vinson was coming only to deter North Korean provocations.” The Wall Street Journal quoted a South Korean presidential candidate saying, “What [President Donald Trump] said was very important for the national security of South Korea. If that was a lie, then during Trump’s term, South Korea will not trust whatever Trump says.” Amy Davidson, take it away: “The White House and the Pentagon were either deliberately deceiving the American people and setting up our partners, and potential partners, for a shared mortification, or they just don’t know what they are doing. Or both. This was a group effort in humiliation.”
PS. Are these maybe the stupidest sentences ever uttered by an American politician? Here’s VP Pence talking about his decision to strut around outside the DMZ last week in his super-cool leather jacket: “I thought it was important that we went outside. I thought it was important that people on the other side of the DMZ see our resolve in my face.”
P.S.S. Also, what is up with this other completely bizarre story about official Pentagon statements? What is going on?
SCOTUS READY TO FURTHER ENMESH CHURCH AND STATE: On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a highly-anticipated case about the rights of churches to receive public funds. The case is about a Missouri state program to defray the costs of repaving playgrounds with rubber recycled from tires. Plaintiff Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbia, which runs a “preschool-and-daycare ministry” applied for the state grant to repave its playground, but was denied; Missouri’s constitution states that “no money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect or denomination of religion.” The church alleged that the state’s denial of public funds constituted religious discrimination in violation of its Equal Protection and Free Exercise rights. On Wednesday, a “clear majority” of the Justices (including, of course, Gorsuch) appeared to agree. But this is horseshit. Churches have been arguing in courts for years—often successfully!—that the Free Exercise clause forbids the application of general purpose laws, like anti-discrimination laws, from applying to them. Indeed, the Supreme Court unanimously held just five years ago that the Free Exercise clause barred church employees from suing their employers for wrongful firing under the Civil Rights Act or the Americans with Disabilities Act. In that case, a teacher who “taught mainly secular subjects, including math, science, and gym, although she did teach a religion class four days a week and led a chapel service twice a year,” was fired after she got sick. The Court ruled that she was a “minister” and thus could not sue under the ADA for discrimination on the basis of disability. The Court held that anti-discrimination laws simply do not apply to “ministers,” or else the state would “infringe[] the Free Exercise Clause.” The Court held that this teacher was a “minister” unable to seek the protection of anti-discrimination laws mostly because that’s what the church called her. (Note that in the present case, Trinity Lutheran calls its preschool a “ministry.”) If the Court rules in Trinity Lutheran the way it is expected to, the rule will (apparently) be that states must fund church-related activities while they may not enforce anti-discrimination laws against churches. Churches get to take the state’s money even as it claims special exemption from the state’s rules that apply to all other organizations. I simply do not understand why we insist on giving such enormous solicitude to religious organizations. (That last link is to a story about fundamentalist Christians in Idaho whose refusal to use modern medicine keeps resulting in their children dying of things like pneumonia, and the local officials just shrug their shoulders and declare it’s their “religious freedom” to kill their kids. It definitely did not send me into a screaming rage.) It seems to me that the Framers specifically wanted to keep government away from churches; instead, we are increasingly creating a set of rules where they get all the advantages of government favor with none of the burdens of citizenship. Also, as Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern points out, this case could be the first step in forcing states to fund discriminatory churches: “[A] ruling in favor of the church could limit the government’s ability to deny taxpayer money to discriminatory religious groups. Some states bar public funding for organizations that discriminate against women and LGBTQ people, for instance; a ruling in favor of Trinity Lutheran could curb this discretion.”
DEM POISED TO FLIP HEAVILY GOP HOUSE SEAT: This week, 30-year-old political novice Jon Ossoff won 48% of the vote in a “jungle primary” in Georgia’s 6th congressional district, a heavily GOP district. He now moves on to a 1:1 general fight (election in June) against Karen Handel, the candidate who came in second with only 20 percent. Ossoff was never expected to do well: Tom Price won reelection to the seat in 2016 with a 23-point margin. Indeed, a Republican state legislator candidly declared that the district was gerrymandered to preserve GOP rule: “I’ll be very blunt: These lines were not drawn to get Hank Johnson’s protégé to be my representative. And you didn’t hear that,” Sen. Fran Millar said, comparing the district to a majority African-American district represented by a Democrat, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “They were not drawn for that purpose, OK? They were not drawn for that purpose.” Yet in only a few months of campaigning, he went from a literal no-name whose best (and longshot – in January, the Atlanta Journal Constitution called Ossoff’s/Democrats’ chances “dim”) hope was to come in second and make it to the general to coming within striking distance of winning the seat outright. Despite this unprecedented result, the GOP—and many in the media—cast it as a defeat for Democrats that they could not secure 50+% of the vote right away. That’s nonsense. “No Democratic congressional candidate has topped 40 percent of the vote in this district since 1996.” Ossoff has his work cut out for him to win in June, but the outstanding result is a harbinger of Democratic successes, not a portent of failure. Dems love wetting the bed, but we have energy and organizing on our side and we just need to keep fighting. Success is not going to come in one immediate swoop.
MINOR FOREIGN POLICY ROUNDUP: A few other stories from this week that were notable/outrageous/infuriating.
- Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan won a referendum granting him broad, autocratic powers, including the effective abolition of the parliament and permission for Erdogan to stay in power through 2029. Where other democratic nations reacted with alarm (or at least caution), Trump called Erodgan “to congratulate him on his recent referendum victory.” It’s really sickening—although not necessarily surprising, as Trump has routinely responded favorably to those who are nice to him or play some role in enriching him. Trump admitted flat out that, when it comes to Turkey, “I have a little conflict of interest ‘cause I have a major, major building in Istanbul. It’s a tremendously successful project.” In 2012, Ivanka Trump tweeted out her thanks to Erdogan for joining the family at the grand opening of Trump Towers in Istanbul. Everything to the Trumps is a quid pro quo. Anyway, where is the outrage in the neocon/right foreign policy circles who spent years touting Bush’s “freedom agenda”?
- This week, Trump unveiled some newly aggressive language against that most feared enemy Canada, declaring that we can’t let the Great Power to the North “do what they did to our workers and to our farmers” and insisting that “We’re going to have to get to the negotiating table with Canada very, very quickly.” Canada, of course, is the United States’ biggest market, buying about $332 billion worth of goods and services in 2016. As Austan Goolsebee noted, the United States has now threatened a trade war with all five of America’s biggest trading partners (China, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Germany).
- “Three new Ivanka Trump brand trademarks were approved in China on the same day Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner sat next to Chinese President Xi Jinping and wife Peng Liyuan earlier this month at a Mar-a-Lago state dinner.” A trademark lawyer told NPR that it typically takes between 18 months and 2 years for trademark applications to be approved in China, but Ivanka’s were filed less than a year ago, during the 2016 campaign. "When I look at this the first thing I think of is the Chinese government should be given a speeding ticket. I get whiplash looking at how fast these applications went by." This follows China granting trademarks to Trump himself only after he had been elected President—after years of trying and failing to get the marks approved.
- Responding to reports about Russia’s interference in our election, a week before he took office, Trump declared the news about Russia’s interference in the election to be “FAKE NEWS,” that there would “never” be proof of such interference, and that “my people will have a full report on hacking within 90 days.” Well, Thursday marked 90 days. “There is no team, there is no plan, and there is no clear answer from the White House on who would even be working on what.” This report is just one of many, many things Trump had promised to do within the first 90 days.
- On Thursday, Attorney General Sessions joined Trump in denigrating the American judiciary system, expressing his “amazement” that “a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific” could block Trump’s Muslim ban. That “island in the Pacific” is, of course, Hawaii, an actual state in our country where actual judges actually preside and rule on actual legal cases. This is a good time to remember that the ban as written was temporary, suspending all travel from the identified countries for only 90 days and the refugee program for 120 days while the Department of Homeland Security time to review vetting policies and implement new methods of screening travelers. That 90-day period is up on April 27, next Thursday. So of course DHS has been hard at work, during the last two months that the ban has been stayed, undertaking this review, right? Of course! That’s why we’re sure to hear, any day, about its findings. Definitely. A report will be ready any minute now.
- It appears Trump has no idea who currently runs North Korea. Also, he claims that Korea used to be “part of” China.
Good News of the Week: In an opinion by Justice Ginsburg, the Supreme Court ruled this week that when people have been exonerated of crimes and will not be retried, the state is “obliged to refund fees, court costs, and restitution exacted from the defendant upon, and as a consequence of, the conviction.” In other words, they can’t be forced to forfeit the fines and fees they had to pay for the privilege of being wrongfully prosecuted and convicted. The state “may not presume a person, adjudged guilty of no crime, nonetheless guilty enough for monetary exactions.”
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