TRUMP IS WINNING ON IMMIGRATION: Over the last few weeks, it’s been easy to start feeling a little victorious about The Resistance. We’ve stopped the Muslim ban (twice); we’ve stopped the Obamacare repeal; it looks like tax cuts are going to be a heavier lift than the GOP expected; and we’ve generally exposed the hollowness of the GOP and the pathological mendacity of the occupant of the Oval Office. But, as Slate’s Jamelle Bouie reminds us, on the major policy area Trump ran on -- cracking down on immigration -- Trump is steadily notching “victories” and changing our country: “[I]t’s in this area of punitive action that the president has something close to free rein. He’s taking full advantage of it, moving through with his promised agenda of harassment, deportation, and other attacks on vulnerable communities.” We have seen Trump arrest for deportation DACA recipients who had no criminal records. We recently learned of two Texas neurologists, a married couple, who were told they had 24 hours to leave the country after living here legally, on work visas, for 10 years -- all due to paperwork errors that were at least in part the fault of the immigration agencies and not the doctors themselves. A particularly cruel and disgusting new practice has ICE arresting immigrants at their interviews for their green cards. “WBUR has confirmed that at least three of those arrested were beginning the process to become legal permanent residents. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) says the agency had orders to detain each of the five individuals for deportation.” ICE agents are also arresting immigrants at courthouses, including scooping up those going to court to seek a protective order against abusive spouses. Attorney General Sessions and DHS Secretary John Kelly justified this practice by blaming “sanctuary” cities and states that make ICE enforcement at public places like courthouses necessary. This stuff is happening all over the country, but in small bursts that make mobilization and resistance difficult, with scattered news attention and hard-to-verify details. Our immigrant communities are already dramatically changing their lives -- drafting legal papers with instructions for their citizen children in the case of their arrest; refusing to report crimes to police, for fear of being deported; keeping children out of school; declining to sign up for food stamps and other necessary benefits for their children, etc. We can’t forget that, in 70 days, Trump has been incredibly successful in immiserating the lives of hundreds of thousands of people here, and will continue to do so as long as he is in office.
RUSSIA INVESTIGATION UPDATE: This story is at once constantly unfolding and exhausting to follow. I am a little sick of writing about it, so this week’s update will be short. The major developments this week: First, Michael Flynn offered to testify to Congress about what he knows about Russian interference in the election in exchange for immunity. Right now, Congress seems to be pretty lukewarm on the offer. Second, it was confirmed that Devin Nunes’ dog and pony show about “discovering” “evidence” that “somewhat vindicated” Trump’s lie about being wiretapped was just that -- a dog and pony show of almost shocking cynicism. It turns out that three White House staffers apparently took intelligence, possibly unmasked Americans identified in that intelligence, and then gave it to Nunes, who then rushed over back to the White House to claim he had discovered shocking (!) evidence that the intelligence agencies under Obama had been improperly unmasking Trump associates. (Most absurdly: “Nunes said that most names were masked in the files he reviewed but that he could still identify Trump campaign officials from context.” So there wasn’t even an unmasking problem!) The lies wrapped in lies wrapped in BS here are staggering. “Put more bluntly: Members of the Trump White House selectively leaked classified intelligence that doesn’t actually support their boss’s claim to a credulous congressman who uncritically parroted the information in a press conference just hours later.” And substantively, it’s pretty shocking that Nunes -- who is supposed to be investigating the Trump administration -- appears to have colluded with that administration in order to deflect attention away from the investigation and provide cover to the president. Third, the Times reported today that Flynn “failed to list payments from Russia-linked entities on the first of two financial disclosure forms released Saturday by the Trump administration.” There was probably more this week but given the Rule of Three, I’m moving on.
GOP CONGRESS GUTS INTERNET PRIVACY: Trump is expected to sign a bill that passed both houses of Congress without a single Democratic vote that allows cable and phones companies to sell your private browsing and app history, without your permission or even awareness, to the highest bidder. The bill overturns Obama-implemented FCC rules that, among other things, (i) “required broadband companies to first get consent before sharing their customers' sensitive information, including browsing history and location data, with advertisers and other third-party companies”; (2) “forced broadband providers to tell customers about the data they collect and why they collect it, and to identify the kinds of third-party companies that might be given access to that information”; and (3) “required broadband companies to protect consumer information from hackers and data breaches.” Because all of those things are just terrible, right? The Electronic Frontier Foundation spells out the scary implications of the repeal of these rules, including hijacking your searches to send you to sites that paid the ISP a kickback; pre-installing software on your phone and recording every website you visit; and injecting undetectable, undeletable tracking cookies in all of your online traffic. Now major cable and phone companies are promising not to do bad things, and vowing that the repeal bill won’t change any of their practices. This is some BS. It’s not like the GOP just thought up this repeal on its own: It was obviously lobbied, and intensely, by these same companies to gut these privacy rules. The companies want these changes, they paid dearly for them, and they are certainly going to take advantage of them once Trump signs them into law.
A Note on Pence’s Marital Rules: This week the internet was abuzz with the news that Mike Pence (at least as of a few years ago) refused to dine alone with women other than his wife or to attend functions where alcohol was served without his wife. Many on the right praised the rule, or at least shrugged, baffled by the with which outrage that many people on the left (especially women) reacted to the story. (Although just pretend if Keith Ellison, Congress’s sole Muslim, had the exact same rules and also cited his religion as the reason for it. I think the right might feel a little differently.) Cosmopolitan’s Jill Filipovic had the best and most comprehensive explanation for why this practice is harmful to women and reveals a fundamental distrust of and disgust with women. You really should read the whole thing, but here are the excerpts that had me pumping my fist in the air:
- “If Pence can’t eat alone with a woman — which also implies he’s not allowed to be alone with a woman — the end result is that he’s going to work with, mentor, and promote men over women. . . . If men like Pence won’t engage with women one-on-one in informal settings, it’s the women who miss out — because it’s still men who run the show.”
- “Just as disturbing as the wake of women whose careers may have been stymied by Pence’s policies is the assumption underlying it: that women, simply by existing, are inherently sexually tempting.”
- “All of this bleeds into policy. If ‘wife or whore’ is the lens through which you see women, and with it the assumption that wives have babies while whores have illicit sex, you’re probably less likely to support the smorgasbord of policies that help real-life women — women who don’t fit into manmade boxes — live full, happy, pleasurable lives.”
Also, the always wonderful Alexandra Petri’s take on this shouldn’t be missed. (“This idea that what is negotiable is whether or not women belong in the room, not whether or not men can be expected to keep themselves from dropping to all fours and growling, is intensely frustrating.”)
A Tweetstorm on Tom Price’s Corruption: Tom Price, Trump’s HHS Secretary, seems to have had an incredibly shady history when it came to profiting off his position in Congress. Here, ProPublica reporter Charles Ornstein assembles all the myriad ways Price appeared to improperly profit from his power in Congress. (It’s just a list on Twitter, and will take 35 seconds to read. So read it!)
Good Read of the Week: Donald Trump And America’s National Nervous Breakdown.
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