I Was Too Tired on Thursday Edition
KILLING THE DREAM: On Tuesday, racist elf Jeff Sessions announced (with irrepressible glee) that the Trump administration was ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, aka “DACA,” under which 800,000 undocumented Americans who had been brought to the US by their parents, had clean criminal records, and were going to school or serving in the military were given work permits (after paying a fee) and allowed to come out of the shadows without fear of deportation. Sessions’ speech, unsurprisingly, was chock full of racist-tinged lies about these young people and about the program. The announcement was spurred by a fake deadline imposed by a group of right-wing state Attorneys General who had threatened to sue the Administration if it did not cancel DACA.
Trump had, of course, campaigned as an anti-immigrant hardliner, but he has never been clear on his stance about DACA. Before he was a candidate, he berated Republicans for opposing the Dream Act (which would have enacted the same protections by law), and up through last week he was saying that he “loved” the Dreamers and that no one should be worried. And then, too afraid to face the cameras himself, he sent Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III out to announce the end of the program -- but also that the end would not come immediately but rather in 6 months, ostensibly to give Congress the time to pass a Dream Act itself. This was supposedly necessary because Trump’s rule of law concerns about the reach of the DACA executive order. (Yeah, sure, whatever.)
Regardless, for the vast majority of Dreamers, the 6-month delay is basically meaningless, as Greg Sergent explains:
[T]hose whose DACA status is set to expire during the next six months can renew their status, which lasts two years. But . . . those whose status expires after the six-month cutoff cannot renew it. (DACA status lasts two years from the date of implementation, and recipients have been renewing their status after expiration. Because people have been signing up on varying dates over time, their two-year statuses have been expiring in rolling intervals over time, too.) The group whose status expires in the next six months can renew one more time for two more years. But those whose status expires after the six-month deadline cannot. When their status expires, their work permits and protections from deportation are gone.
And about 75% of DACA beneficiaries fall into that second category. “In other words, what the Trump administration is doing isn’t punting on DACA for six months. It’s slowly winding down DACA, in anticipation of ending it entirely. It’s saying that Congress should act, but acting as if it won’t.”
Trump’s announcement decision faced widespread backlash. Voters overwhelmingly oppose deporting these young people. Lindsey Graham and other Republicans signaled a desire to pass something legislatively to protect these young people, for whom America is the only country they’ve ever known. After just a few hours of cable news outrage, Trump (unsurprisingly) immediately backtracked, tweeting that if Congress fails to fix the problem in six months, Trump will “revisit” the issue -- not only undercutting the only leverage he had on Congress, but also misleading Americans about the fact that the government is no longer accepting DACA applications. He then insisted that Dreamers have “nothing to worry about.” This is insane -- and dangerously misleading. “These statements put DREAMers in danger of losing their protections (or applying under false premises) because of misunderstandings. And it lulls Congress into feeling a false sense of security; if there are no changes to DACA between September 5 and March 5, there’s no problem waiting to pass a bill to protect DACA recipients until March 4.”
In the meantime, 15 states have sued the administration over its repeal announcement. While I think the legal arguments are a bit shaky, Dan Hemel puts together the strongest legal case as to why Trump’s announcement violates the Administrative Procedure Act’s requirement that executive action be a process of “reasoned decisionmaking.”
RANT ABOUT THAT STUPID DEBT CEILING DEAL: The press is losing its collective mind over the deal Trump cut with Schumer and Pelosi earlier this week to raise the debt ceiling for three months and pass aid for Hurricane Harvey victims. (I should say, it wasn’t so much a deal as a somewhat strange total capitulation from Trump to the Dems’ first proposal.) No, this does not show that Trump is a “moderate,” or that he’s upending the 2-party system. Jesus Christ people. Nor is this some giant win for the Democrats. Or rather, it’s a win only if we think that every time the GOP leadership is thwarted, it’s automatically a win for us. But that’s a dumb way to think. What we got was another three months to put leverage on the GOP and the White House to pass our priorities (ie, the Dream Act, among other things) when the debt ceiling comes up again. But the GOP also knows that Dems will never actually use the debt ceiling as a hostage device, because (a) we railed against the Republicans for doing that under Obama and (b) it is a crazy dangerous tactic and we are not insane people (and Trump is a chaos president who knows nothing and understands less and is thus the opposite of the person we’d want to negotiate something this dangerous with). So I don’t see really how this gains us that much more leverage -- given that we are unlikely to (and should not) be willing to use it. The only real upside (besides the fact that the debt ceiling did not actually run out and that Harvey aid was funded) is that Paul Ryan is getting the shit kicked out of him on the right, and that’s hilarious. Otherwise, let’s not get excited about Trump being some independent deal maker. He is and will always be a racist, know-nothing buffoon slipping steadily into senility whose only constant attribute is his vast, unfathomable narcissism. /rant
NO END TO THE IDIOCY -- PERSONNEL UPDATE: Here’s a roundup of recent news about how Trump’s hires are faring. He promised to “hire top people . . . people with heart . . . people who are truly, truly capable.” And boy does he deliver!
- Washington Post: “The Environmental Protection Agency has taken the unusual step of putting a political operative in charge of vetting the hundreds of millions of dollars in grants the EPA distributes annually, assigning final funding decisions to a former Trump campaign aide with little environmental policy experience. In this role, John Konkus reviews every award the agency gives out, along with every grant solicitation before it is issued. According to both career and political employees, Konkus has told staff that he is on the lookout for “the double C-word” — climate change — and repeatedly has instructed grant officers to eliminate references to the subject in solicitations.”
- Eric S. Dreiband, nominee to head the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, has shown a “head-spinning turnarounds on civil rights,” the Boston Glob reports, going from civil rights enforcer at the EEOC to fighting against those regulations as a corporate hired gun. At the EEOC under Bush, Dreiband sued Abercrombie for discrimination, forcing the company to pay $40 million for discriminating against minorities and women job applicants. A few years later, now in the private sector, he represented Abercrombie, defending the company’s policy of refusing to hire a Muslim woman with a headscarf for the front of the store. Vanita Gupta, the head of the Civil Rights Division under Obama, “called him one of the ‘go-to lawyers for corporate America in their efforts in defending themselves against civil rights claims.’”
- CIA director Mike Pompeo appears to be pulling the agency back from its prior efforts to diversify its workforce, Foreign Policy reports. “During his first eight months at the CIA, Pompeo has expressed little interest in attending diversity-related events, including those designed to honor the work of those at the agency, and also to recruit from minority communities at universities and other locations. One source familiar with the matter noted that Pompeo stated he should be called upon to attend a diversity event only as a last resort and preferred other senior leaders to go in his place.” There is particular concern about withdrawing from efforts to boost LGBT enrollment and to encourage and protect Muslim agents. “According to four sources familiar with the matter, Pompeo, who attends weekly Bible studies held in government buildings, referenced God and Christianity repeatedly in his first all-hands speech and in a recent trip report while traveling overseas. According to a profile by the Washington Post’s Greg Miller, Pompeo is working on starting a chaplaincy for the CIA campus like the military has.”
- Trump has now announced nominations for 42 of the 93 United States Attorney positions in the country. All but ONE of his nominees are men, and the vast majority are white.
- After the Trump Foundation illegally donated money to her state attorney general race, now Pam Bondi is joining the Trump Administration. So fun!
THIS SHIT MAKES ME SO EFFING FURIOUS: On Thursday, the credit reporting company Equifax announced that hundreds of thousands millions of people’s private information was compromised in a security breach dated in July 29. Now Bloomberg reports that, in the days immediately following the company’s discovery of the break, three top executives -- including the CFO -- sold $1.3 million worth of company stock, all before the public had any idea what had happened. “Regulatory filings show that three days later, Chief Financial Officer John Gamble sold shares worth $946,374 and Joseph Loughran, president of U.S. information solutions, exercised options to dispose of stock worth $584,099. Rodolfo Ploder, president of workforce solutions, sold $250,458 of stock on Aug. 2. None of the filings lists the transactions as being part of 10b5-1 pre-scheduled trading plans.” Bloomberg does not say whether this is a crime. It has to be a crime, right? This MUST be the definition of criminal behavior by corporate CEOs, right? PLEASE SAY I’M RIGHT AND THAT THESE PEOPLE WILL END UP IN PRISON. Of course, since they’re rich and (presumably) white and corporate, they’ll probably be totally fine and suffer zero consequences and leave Equifax with enormous multi-million-dollar payouts. Because that’s the world we live in now.
P.S. I wrote this part originally on Wednesday or Thursday. Since then I’ve seen basically no stories about this, or even really about the Equifax breach. What is going on? Are we all just so exhausted by these repeated breaches that at this point, we’ve learned to expect little better?
GOOD NEWS: “In a stark repudiation of the Trump administration, lawmakers on Thursday passed a spending bill that overturned the president’s steep proposed cuts to foreign aid and diplomacy. Folded into the bill are management amendments that straitjacket some of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s efforts to redesign the State Department. The Senate Appropriations Committee approved $51 billion for the State Department, foreign operations, and related programs in its 2018 appropriations bill — almost $11 billion above President Trump’s request.”
Endorsements:
- You really MUST read this New Yorker article about the unbelievably horrific way this standout Muslim NYPD officer was treated -- by the NYPD. It is shocking.
- This piece on the New York wealthy. Key excerpt:
- When we evaluate people’s moral worth on the basis of where and how they live and work, we reinforce the idea that what matters is what people do, not what they have. With every such judgment, we reproduce a system in which being astronomically wealthy is acceptable as long as wealthy people are morally good. . . . Instead, we should talk not about the moral worth of individuals but about the moral worth of particular social arrangements. Is the society we want one in which it is acceptable for some people to have tens of millions or billions of dollars as long as they are hardworking, generous, not materialistic and down to earth? Or should there be some other moral rubric, that would strive for a society in which such high levels of inequality were morally unacceptable, regardless of how nice or moderate its beneficiaries are?
- Trump’s inability to talk about anything like a normal human is really, really astounding. Also, check out Milania in this video. She seems also to not have, you know, that whole human thing down yet.
- More evidence: How is this not one of the weirdest photos of all time?? It’s like the whole family has this vague sense of how humans behave but can never get it quite right. WHAT IS GOING ON??
- Off Topic: This hilarious thread on MJ’s “Remember the Time” video (yes, the video is 25 years old).
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