The Commentariat -- July 5, 2019

Afternoon Update:

Morgan Chalfont of the Hill: "President Trump told reporters on Friday that he is considering an executive order to ensure a citizenship question is included on the U.S. census. Trump told reporters on the White House lawn that he has four or five options and is 'thinking of' the executive order. He also said his administration could begin printing the 2020 census and later include the question as part of an addendum." ...

... Mrs. McCrabbie: In another Trumpian open-mouth-insert-foot moment, according to Peter Baker of the NYT in a live report on MSNBC, Trump said he wanted the citizenship question on the Census in order to apportion Congressional representation. That's a new argument in the case, though not one that we haven't heard from Republicans in the past. U.S. population always has been measured by number of residents, not number of citizens, for the purpose of apportioning Congressional seats. If seats were allotted by number of citizens, rather than number of residents, urban areas would lose big -- and that's something Republicans want. Since judges have considered Trump's statements & tweets in making their decisions (including in a Census case last week), Trump's admission that he wants to change the basis for Congressional representation should matter. I'll look for some print reporting on this. Update: There's this:

Trump says citizenship has to be asked on the census to determine congressional districts. Actually, districts are drawn up based on total population, not the number of citizens, a practice upheld by the Supreme Court as recently as 2016. -- Peter Baker of the New York Times, in a tweet ...

... Update 2: Caitlin Oprysko of Politico: "In a court filing Friday, lawyers for the Justice Department confirmed that both DOJ and the Commerce Department were still weighing 'whether the Supreme Court's decision would allow for a new decision to include the citizenship question.' The filing reiterated what the lawyers told U.S. District Court Judge George Hazel Wednesday, after the president contradicted the government's earlier assertion that it would drop efforts to include the question on next year's survey." ...

     ... Ari Berman of Mother Jones: "In response, Maryland federal district court judge George Hazel said he was weighing whether to reopen a case looking at whether the administration added the question to intentionally discriminate against Hispanics, based on smoking-gun evidence, uncovered after the death of the GOP's longtime gerrymandering mastermind, Thomas Hofeller, showing that he had pushed for the question in order to draw new political districts that he said would be 'advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.'... Notably, the president has never mentioned a desire to enforce the Voting Rights Act -- the administration's principal, and now rejected, rationale for adding the question -- in his numerous tweets and public comments about the issue. In fact, on Friday morning, Trump told reporters that the 'number one' reason the question was needed was 'for Congress for districting,' which suggested that Republicans, if allowed to collect citizenship data, would use it to exclude non-citizens from counting toward voting district populations, as Hofeller had advised -- a step which would again boost representation for white Republicans."

Trump's "Somewhat Soviet" Speech. Tom Nichols of the New York Daily News: "Let's get an obvious point about President Trump's Independence Day speech out of the way right at the top. It was a bad speech.... Perhaps this was unavoidable, since it was never meant to salute America, but rather to provide the military display Trump has wanted for two years. Like any enforced celebration, it was flat and labored.... It would have been a challenging speech to deliver even for a better speaker, and Trump, who hates reading from prepared remarks, plodded through it with a strangely detached presence and a certain amount of mushy enunciation, including a weird blip* where he referred to the glorious military capture of some airports in colonial America.... Not only did it attempt to militarize our most sacred national holiday, but Trump tried to bathe himself in borrowed legitimacy from a military that was forced to march, sing and fly for him.... Mining the glories of past military battles while flanked by defense chiefs is the kind of thing Soviet leaders used to do while droning from their reviewing stand in Moscow." ...

     ... * Someone Left the Teleprompter out in the Rain. BBC News: "Explaining away the slip-up on Friday, Mr Trump also said it was hard to read the teleprompter in the rain.... 'I knew the speech very well so I was able to do it without a teleprompter but the teleprompter did go out and it was actually hard to look at anyway because there was rain all over it but despite the rain it was just a fantastic evening.'... Twitter users had some fun with the garble, using the hashtag #RevolutionaryWarAirports." Mrs. McC: This is an awfully strange excuse, inasmuch as Trump used to regularly criticize both President Obama & Hillary Clinton for using teleprompters.

~~~~~~~~~~

Tyrant in the Rain.Michael Shear of the New York Times: "In a made-for-television Independence Day production starring America's military weaponry, President Trump on Thursday used the Lincoln Memorial as the backdrop for a homage to the country's armed forces and a call for unity that has been largely absent during his divisive presidency. Flanked by Bradley armored vehicles and M1A2 tanks in front of the statue of Abraham Lincoln, Mr. Trump paid tribute to the five branches of the military as a chorus sang each service hymn and he cued the arrival of fighter jets and other military aircraft roaring by in the skies overhead.... [Trump] avoided any of his usual attacks on the news media, Democrats or his intelligence agencies." Also, it rained. ...

... David Smith of the Guardian: "The US president's unique interpretation of the declaration of independence was on full display on Thursday when he staged a militaristic, jingoistic and untraditional jamboree at the Lincoln memorial in Washington to celebrate the Fourth of July.... In a speech that lasted 47 minutes, Trump laboured over a heroic version of American military history..., summoned military leaders to the podium, paid tribute to gold star families and at one point referenced his proposed space force. The president sailed close to one of his campaign lines when he claimed, 'our nation is stronger than it ever was before', but otherwise swerved past party politics for once.... But in a city that projects power through monuments, statues and its own Capitol, critics said it was the moment Trump went full Roman emperor, turning a traditionally nonpartisan day of events into a vanity project. Some observers have been tempted to see the military pomp not as a show of strength, but of weakness -- a harbinger of imperial decline." ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: I saw less than 30 seconds of Trump's speech, but I could tell his was on script because he was using that sing-songy cadence he employs to signal he's reading somebody else's words off a teleprompter.

Kate Lyons of the Guardian: "Donald Trump made an awkward blunder during his speech on Independence Day, praising the army, which he said 'took over the airports' from the British during the revolutionary war in the late 1700s.... [A]ir travel did not occur in the US until early in the 1900s.... However this was not the only historical confusion in this section of Trump's speech. As astute listeners picked out, the battle of Fort McHenry occurred during the war of 1812, and not the American revolutionary war which took place several decades earlier." --s ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: I looked at Trump's remarks in context, & I think the stuff about the airports & Fort McHenry was supposed to convey events that occurred after the American Revolution, although the speechwriter does throw in airports & "manning the air" before s/he gets to Fort McHenry's defense of Baltimore Harbor in 1812, which doesn't make a lot of sense. The whole speech was garbled, jumping from one historical event to another with no clear connections. Trump, of course, was oblivious to it all.

Quid Pro Quo. Devin Dwyer & Stephanie Ebbs of ABC News: "President Donald Trump's Fourth of July celebration will feature $750,000 of donated fireworks from an Ohio retailer who has lobbied the White House against expanded tariffs on Chinese imports. And last week, the same day the donation was announced, the company -- Phantom Fireworks of Youngstown, Ohio -- got what it wanted: Trump decided to hold off on his threatened $300 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods, which include fireworks." --s (Also linked yesterday.) ...

     ... Steve M.: "It looks like bribery because it is bribery. Remember, the Constitution doesn't limit the reasons for impeachment to 'high Crimes and Misdemeanors' -- the full phrase is 'Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.'... If I were Tom Steyer, I would stop running ads full of people simply demanding impeachment. I'd commission ads that succinctly summarize every obstruction allegation in the Mueller report -- maybe one ad for each allegation."

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs of the New York Times gives an online quiz of the questions which applicants for U.S. citizenship most often get wrong. Mrs. McC: I got them all right, but if I had not lived here all my life & gone to school here, I certainly would have missed some, as a few are not things that would have registered even if I'd read a couple of U.S. history books. (Also linked yesterday.)

Trump Administration Thinks of Another Way to Harass Undocumented Immigrants. Elizabeth Dias of the New York Times: "Citing the Immigration and Nationality Act, ICE officials said the agency has the right to impose civil fines, up to $799 a day, on undocumented immigrants who have been ordered removed, or who have failed to leave the country. Officials said the agency began issuing such notices in December, though it was not clear on Thursday how many had been sent.... President Trump ... signed an executive order shortly after his inauguration that called on the Department of Homeland Security to collect all fines and penalties from anyone who had entered the country illegally...." Edith Espinal, who has been living in a church in Ohio, received a bill for $497,777 last week. Hilda Ramirez Mendez, living in a church in Texas, received notice she would be fined $303,620.would be fined $303,620.

Your Constitutional Crisis of the Day: Trump Considers Blowing off Supreme Court. Jonathan Swan & Mike Allen of Axios: "President Trump is considering an executive order to try to move forward with a citizenship question on the 2020 census.... But there is considerable skepticism within the administration that an executive order would succeed.... Trump's insistence on pushing ahead with the question, potentially without doing the legwork the Supreme Court called for, reflects his expansive view of executive power. A source familiar with some of the administration's internal deliberations said: 'I think that there's a good argument to be made that even though the president may lose in litigation at the end of the day, going through that process ultimately makes it clear that it's the chief justice, and not the Executive Branch, that bears responsibility for that unfortunate outcome.'" (Also linked yesterday.) ...

... Rick Hasen publishes a chunk of the Washington Post's story on DOJ lawyers' attempts to come up with a new pretext for adding the citizenship question to the Census. Here's a piece of that piece: "Before Trump's tweets plunged their week into chaos, Justice officials thought the president understood how few legal options remained, according to people familiar with he matter. They had earlier told the White House that the case was a dead-end and that pursuing it would be a waste of time. Those people said that Attorney General William P. Barr had talked to Trump and had tried to explain his limited options after the Supreme Court's ruling." Mrs. McC: Like "explaining" to a cranky toddler why he can't have a cookie.

Emily Holden of the Guardian: "Donald Trump plans to go on the offensive against criticism of his industry-friendly rollbacks of environment protections in a speech on Monday, according to three sources familiar with the plans. Trump will tout America's clean air and water, although his administration has advanced many efforts that experts say have undercut the country's environmental record.... He is not expected to make any major announcements of new policy initiatives. Yet in an off-the-record conference call on Wednesday, the White House reached out to key supporting groups requesting they spread the message that the US under Trump continues to be an environmental leader." --s (Also linked yesterday.)

Kathy Gannon of the AP: "Taliban and U.S. negotiators are scrambling to finalize a draft agreement that will outline the withdrawal of American and NATO troops from Afghanistan and a verifiable Taliban guarantee to fight terrorism ahead of an all-Afghan peace conference Sunday. Officials familiar with the talks, but not authorized to speak about them, say negotiations went late into the night on Wednesday and throughout Thursday -- the sixth day of direct talks between the insurgents and U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad. They were to resume again on Friday."

Presidential Race 2020

Jonathan Martin & Katie Glueck of the New York Times report on Joe Biden & Kamala Harris campaigning in Iowa on Independence Day.

Julia Manchester of the Hill: "Democratic presidential hopefuls will be criss-crossing Iowa and New Hampshire on Thursday, using a series of appearances at Independence Day events to try to inject momentum for their campaigns in a highly volatile race." (Also linked yesterday.)

Julia Kollewe of the Guardian: "Nearly half of all global pay is scooped up by just 10% of workers, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), while the lowest-paid 50% receive just 6.4%. The lowest 20% -- around 650 million workers -- get less than 1% of total pay, a figure that has barely moved in 13 years, the ILO analysis found. It used labour income figures from 2004 to 2017, the latest available data. A worker in the top 10% receives $7,445 a month (£5,866), while a worker in the bottom 10% gets just $22." --s (Also linked yesterday.)

Damian Carrington of the Guardian: "Planting billions of trees across the world is by far the biggest and cheapest way to tackle the climate crisis, according to scientists, who have made the first calculation of how many more trees could be planted without encroaching on crop land or urban areas.... New research estimates that a worldwide planting programme could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities, a figure the scientists describe as 'mind-blowing'.... [T]he forest restoration envisaged would take 50-100 years to have its full effect of removing 200bn tonnes of carbon." --s

Beyond the Beltway

Georgia. Pema Levy of Mother Jones: "Georgia has been requiring Puerto Rican natives seeking Georgia driver's licenses to answer a special set of questions such as identifying 'what a meat filled with plantain fritter' is called; where a specific beach is located; and 'the name of the frog [that is] native only to PR,' according to a lawsuit filed this week." --s ...

     ... Mrs. McCrabbie: Read the whole story. I guess we have to give Georgia Republicans the prize for "Most Original Form of Voter Suppression," even if the effort doesn't pass the laugh test.

Pennsylvania. Akela Lacy of The Intercept: "The state of Pennsylvania is on the cusp of approving a major piece of voter suppression legislation ahead of the 2020 election, despite a Democrat serving as governor. The bill, passed largely along party lines with nearly universal opposition from Democrats in the state legislature, is on the governor's desk. If signed into law, it would ban what's known as 'straight-ticket' voting, which allows a voter to cast a ballot for all Democrats, or all Republicans, at once.... [B]anning straight-ticket voting would mean much longer lines at the polls, as each voter needs more time behind the curtain. Studies have shown the longer lines depress Democrat turnout significantly.... In late 2015, Republicans succeeded in banning straight-ticket voting in Michigan, spurring litigation that lasted for a couple of years.... Donald Trump carried Michigan by 10,700 votes and Pennsylvania by 44,000 in 2016, meaning a swing of just a percentage point could be the difference between Trump's reelection and his defeat." --s

Way Beyond

Brazil. Reuters: "Deforestation in Brazil's portion of the Amazon rainforest rose more than 88% in June compared with the same month a year ago, the second consecutive month of rising forest destruction under the rightwing president Jair Bolsonaro.... While the final text of [a newly created] EU-Mercosur deal has not been released, an outline from the EU states the agreement includes a provision that the Paris agreement on climate change must by effectively implemented along with other commitments to fight deforestation. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, had warned last week before agreement on the deal that he would not sign off on it if Brazil leaves the Paris accord." --s (Also linked yesterday.)

China. Christy Choi of the Guardian: "China is reportedly separating Muslim children from their families, religion and language, and is engaged in a rapid, large-scale campaign to build boarding schools for them. The attempts to 'remove children from their roots' exists in parallel to Beijing's ongoing detention of an estimated 1 million Uighur adults from the western Xinjiang region in camps and sweeping crackdown on the rights of the minority group, the BBC reported." --s

News Ledes

New York Times: :Employers added 224,000 jobs in June, the Labor Department reported on Friday. Economists had expected a gain of about 170,000. The unemployment rate was 3.7 percent, up from 3.6 percent in May.Average earnings rose 6 cents an hour from May, and are up 3.1 percent over the past year.... The job market roared back to life last month, shaking off a spring slowdown and easing fears that the record-setting economic expansion could be running out of steam. The rebound from May's disappointing figure was stronger than economists had predicted, suggesting that trade tensions and cooling global growth have done little to sap the job market's fundamental strength."

CNN: "Alaska's heat wave continued through Independence Day, and in Anchorage, the temperatures shattered an all-time record. The temperature at the airport was 90 degrees Thursday, besting June 14, 1969, for the highest mark ever recorded in the city, according to the National Weather Service. Last month was the warmest June on record, with an average temperature of 60.5 degrees -- 5.3 above average, according to the National Weather Service Anchorage, whose records for this location date to 1954 (66 total Junes). June marks the 16th consecutive month in which average temperatures ranged above normal. 'All 30 days in June had above average temperatures, the service noted."

Comments

[PD Pepe]

I took the quiz. Got an A, but hesitated on the question about Ben Franklin–-almost forgetting he was in the mail business and the image of his kite flying during a thunder storm was sealed in my memory. There is a question in the long form that asks the author of The Star Spangled Banner which I find irrelevant and silly. One wonders whether our maniac in chief would be able to pass this test. Raise your hands if you think he'd flunk.

Like Marie, I only listened to a few seconds of his speech––his cadence matches the slow lumbering of those tanks–-both out of touch. The image of him standing inside a rain streaked wall was metaphorically apt. –––sealed off––removed from us while he rambled about a history that never was.

The mister and I spent the evening watching once more "The Lives of Others"––a brilliant film about the Stasi and one man that was changed profoundly by it and at the end had a book dedicated to him called "Sonata for a Good Man."

Which reminds me of Robert Penn Warren's spare masterpiece "Tell Me A Story" whose concluding lines are these:

Tell me a story.

In this century, and moment of mania,

Tell me a story.

Make it a story of great distances and
starlight.

The name of the story will be Time.
But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

[Marie Burns]

@PDPepe: Yeah, I ruminated over the Ben Franklin question, too. But I think the choice was "discovered" electricity, and I was pretty sure others has "discovered" electricity long before Franklin did his key-on-a-kite thing. Then, as happened with you, the Postmaster General thing pushed its way forward from the recesses of my mind.

And, yes, it's pathetic that the POTUS* couldn't possibly pass the citizenship test, although he's learned a lot since becoming president*, like Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. "Not many people know that."

[Bobby Lee]

It's just over four hours until we learn what cockeyed reason the DoJ has come up with to require the census to have a citizenship question. Maybe: "Because the presidents wants it," More truth there than in a lot of others they could use.

[Ken Winkes]

Let's call it what it is. Just plain lazy.

The Party that used to pride itself on being the party of responsibility and hard work, the party of good ole American go-getters who toiled from dawn to dusk to advance their fortunes, their families and themselves, is now the party of spoiled grifters, content to live off the the hard work and accomplishments of previous generations, refusing to share any of the wealth their forebears accumulated for them, and shirking all responsiblity for the future.

Republicans have been able to attack unions successfully only because thousands of American workers suffered grievously to win the gains, like the 8-hour day and the 40-hour week that the many present-day workers enjoy. Those workers' sacrifices created a store of worker satisfaction sufficient to allow anti-union forces room to attack the perceived surplus that union workers enjoy.

The same situation makes the Right's constant attacks on the social safety net possible. Their selfishness and and short-sightedness have them rail against the social safety net (food stamps a typical target), but it is the establishment and existence of social safety net itself that provides the political space (people are not rioting in the streets) the Right occupies as it conducts its war on programs like Social Security, the ACA and Medicaid.

Now I see the very adminstration that is doing all it can to squander the environmental gains we've made since the 1960's is going to use that accomplishment as an excuse for its own environmental profligacy.

It goes beyond irony.

It's almost as if Daddy gave you 400 million and the capital someone else accumulated made you think you were so rich you didn't have to work hard yourself or act responsibly toward your own or your family's future.

Almost....as if....

[safari]

Seems to me that AG Bill "bag man" Barr has stuck himself in between the U.S. Constitution and a Monarchy.

His unfettered theory of "Unitary Executive Power" means that Agent Orange can "executive order" any damn thing his heart desires, like "ordering" the citizenship question to be printed on the 2020 census. But that Constitution parchment paper thing says something about respecting equal branches and that the Supreme Court rulings mean you have to respect them.

I don't see how the head of the DOJ can credibly defend the Supreme Court decision if Donny Dotard just "orders" it overruled. He'll have to follow that order, and burn down the system of check & balances alongside the remaining shreds of his tattered dignity.