Trump Is Trapped, Trying to Protect Himself at All Costs

Throughout his questionable real estate career which has involved ignoring the law and associations with mobsters and the Russian Mafia, three things have defined Donald Trump: (i) putting self interest/ego ahead of all else, (ii) con artist behavior, and (iii) using threats and bullying to fend off much deserved adverse consequences.  Since taking office and desecrating the White House, these three themes have continued and Trump's white supremacist and Christofascist base have happily allowed themselves to be played for fools, blinded by their thrill of seeing Trump's open racism on display and/or attacks on favored Christofascist targets.   Now, with Democrats set to take control of the House of Representatives come January, 2019, Trump may be on the verge of finally being held accountable.  Trump's reaction?  Lies, threats and efforts to subvert the law.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

On November 7, President Trump woke up to a world in which Democrats had smashed through a gerrymandered map to win three dozen House seats, depriving him of both his legislative majority and his effective immunity from congressional oversight and accountability. He responded in the most Trumpian way: with an atavistic display of brute dominance. He insisted the election had been a triumph (“I thought it was a very close to complete victory”), belittled Republicans who had lost for declining his “embrace,” pulled the press pass from CNN reporter Jim Acosta, and warned Democrats not to investigate anything in his administration or he would refuse to work with them and have Senate Republicans investigate them back.

And he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose sole offense, in Trump’s eyes, was recusing himself from the Russia investigation. Trump maintains the attorney general’s job is to protect [Trump's] the president’s political interests, even if [Trump] the president or his allies have committed serious crimes.

Trump finally acted on this vision, skipping the normal chain of command and declaring Matthew Whitaker the acting attorney general. As recently as three years ago, Whitaker worked for a scam company that catered to customers with invention ideas and “provided almost no service in return,” according to the Federal Trade Commission. Whitaker’s role was to testify to the company’s integrity . . . . and serve as legal muscle, firing off threatening letters to customers who complained they had been bilked.

Aside from his now highly relevant experience working for con men, Whitaker’s primary qualification to serve as the nation’s highest law-enforcement official is a fanatical adherence to the right-wing legal agenda. As an unsuccessful far-right Senate candidate in Iowa, Whitaker declared he would be “very concerned” about any judge with a “secular worldview” and should instead follow a “biblical view of justice.”

Whitaker’s hostility to the Mueller investigation is surely what recommended him to [Trump] the president. He claimed Trump’s campaign had not colluded with Russia . . . . . at a time when such a defense could not possibly be known. He even denied that Russia interfered in the election at all, a conclusion directly at odds with what U.S. intelligence agencies have found. . . . Trump had appointed Whitaker as Sessions’s chief of staff, a position that reportedly allowed him to serve as the president’s eyes and ears within the building.

Whitaker will have ample opportunity to undermine or quash Mueller’s investigation, but his authority over Mueller is not the only weapon at Whitaker’s disposal. Nor is the Mueller investigation the only threat to the president. Trump is a crook who is drawn to other crooks, and the potential criminal exposure across his administration is vast. We barely have a handle on the criminality that has already occurred — it has only been in the last few weeks that we learned, via the Times, that Trump committed systematic tax fraud over many decades. A lawsuit credibly accusing Trump of having run a variety of “fraudulent schemes” came out October 29 — nearly two years after his election.

[I]t is difficult to estimate how much misconduct has escaped detection. Weeks before the election, congressional Republicans privately circulated a lengthy list of Trump scandals that would be investigated if Democrats won Congress. The list ranges from Trump’s tax returns (which Republicans had voted to keep hidden) to his acceptance of undisclosed payments from foreign and domestic interests while in office to more routine incompetence and sleaze, like lavish expenses by Cabinet members and the hurricane response in Puerto Rico.

In public, Republicans are warning that investigating any of these matters will backfire on Democrats. . . . . Yes, sometimes aggressive congressional oversight can backfire, like when Republicans fanatically pursued conspiracy theories like Benghazi and “IRS targeting” during the Obama years. . . . . Even if Congress somehow overreaches in its pursuit of Trump — a prospect that is almost logistically impossible, given the staggering list of misconduct already in plain sight — it would still probably help the Democrats’s 2020 presidential candidate run against the mess in Washington.

From the very beginning, when Donald Trump and his father ignored demands from the Nixon Justice Department that they stop discriminating against African-Americans, through his repeated tax fraud and financial scams, legal impunity has formed the through-line of his career. Holding him accountable serves not only Democrats’ self-interest but the rule of law. That process begins now.

Conway's Husband: Trump Appointment of the Acting Attorney General Is Unconstitutional

Trump sycophant  and illegally appointed acting AG Matthew Whitaker (who seemingly is trying for the Mussolini look).

Not to diminish the horror of the mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, California  - or the need for the Democrat controlled House to pass gun legislation come January, 2019 - Donald Trump is deliberately causing a Constitutional crisis as he ignores the U.S. Constitution's requirements and (i) seeks to place an unfit (in my view and that of many others) individual in the office of Attorney General and (ii) in all likelihood seeks to kill the Russiagate investigation of his own potential wrongdoing.  The move is something one would expect of Vladimir Putin, Josef Stalin or some other self-absorbed dictator.  Ironically, in today's New York Times the husband of Kelly Anne Conway - one of Trump's skanks-in-chief in my view - a noted DC attorney in his own right co-authored a column that flat out calls Trumps appointment of Trump sycophant Matthew Whitaker unconstitutional.  Trump, of course, has always viewed himself above the law as demonstrated by his years in New York City working with the mob and then the Russian Mafia.  It should come as no surprise that Trump holds constitutional requirements in contempt.  Here are column highlights:

What now seems an eternity ago, the conservative law professor Steven Calabresi published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in May arguing that Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional. . . . . He argued that Mr. Mueller was a principal officer because he is exercising significant law enforcement authority and that since he has not been confirmed by the Senate, his appointment was unconstitutional. As one of us argued at the time, he was wrong. What makes an officer a principal officer is that he or she reports only to the president. No one else in government is that person’s boss. But Mr. Mueller reports to Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general. So, Mr. Mueller is what is known as an inferior officer, not a principal one, and his appointment without Senate approval was valid.

But Professor Calabresi and Mr. Trump were right about the core principle. A principal officer must be confirmed by the Senate. And that has a very significant consequence today. It means that Mr. Trump’s installation of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general of the United States after forcing the resignation of Jeff Sessions is unconstitutional. It’s illegal. And it means that anything Mr. Whitaker does, or tries to do, in that position is invalid.

Much of the commentary about Mr. Whitaker’s appointment has focused on all sorts of technical points about the Vacancies Reform Act and Justice Department succession statutes. But the flaw in the appointment of Mr. Whitaker, who was Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff at the Justice Department, runs much deeper. It defies one of the explicit checks and balances set out in the Constitution, a provision designed to protect us all against the centralization of government power.

If you don’t believe us, then take it from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whom Mr. Trump once called his “favorite” sitting justice. Last year, the Supreme Court examined the question of whether the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board had been lawfully appointed to his job without Senate confirmation. The Supreme Court held the appointment invalid on a statutory ground.

Justice Thomas agreed with the judgment, but wrote separately to emphasize that even if the statute had allowed the appointment, the Constitution’s Appointments Clause would not have. The officer in question was a principal officer, he concluded. And the public interest protected by the Appointments Clause was a critical one: The Constitution’s drafters, Justice Thomas argued, “recognized the serious risk for abuse and corruption posed by permitting one person to fill every office in the government.” Which is why, he pointed out, the framers provided for advice and consent of the Senate.

What goes for a mere lawyer at the N.L.R.B. goes in spades for the attorney general of the United States, the head of the Justice Department and one of the most important people in the federal government.

We cannot tolerate such an evasion of the Constitution’s very explicit, textually precise design. Senate confirmation exists for a simple, and good, reason. Constitutionally, Matthew Whitaker is a nobody. His job as Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff did not require Senate confirmation. (Yes, he was confirmed as a federal prosecutor in Iowa, in 2004, but Mr. Trump can’t cut and paste that old, lapsed confirmation to today.) For the president to install Mr. Whitaker as our chief law enforcement officer is to betray the entire structure of our charter document.

Because Mr. Whitaker has not undergone the process of Senate confirmation, there has been no mechanism for scrutinizing whether he has the character and ability to evenhandedly enforce the law in a position of such grave responsibility. The public is entitled to that assurance, especially since Mr. Whitaker’s only supervisor is Mr. Trump himself, and the president is hopelessly compromised by the Mueller investigation. That is why adherence to the requirements of the Appointments Clause is so important here, and always.

[T]he Constitution is a bipartisan document, written for the ages to guard against wrongdoing by officials of any party. Mr. Whitaker’s installation makes a mockery of our Constitution and our founders’ ideals. As Justice Thomas’s opinion in the N.L.R.B. case reminds us, the Constitution’s framers “had lived under a form of government that permitted arbitrary governmental acts to go unchecked.” He added “they knew that liberty could be preserved only by ensuring that the powers of government would never be consolidated in one body.”  We must heed those words today.

Very well said and accurate.  One can only hope that Senate Republicans will remember that thir oath is to the U.S. Constitution and NOT to Der  Trumpenführer.

Alliance Defending Freedom: The Face of Anti-LGBT Hate

As noted in previous posts, the Trump/Pence Department of Justice under the very racist and very homophobic Jeff Sessions (my experiences with Sessions date all the way back to the late 1970's/early 1980s) is pushing a so-called task force to protect "religious liberty," a euphemism used to mask the agenda of the far right Christians to exempt themselves from non-discrimination laws and public accommodation laws. A piece in Rewire News (formerly Religion Dispatches)  

At the summit, DOJ attorneys assured attendees they are protecting the religious rights of everyone in the United States, all while conservative Christian politicians and advocates voiced a need for stepped-up federal protections beyond those they already enjoy. It was also a forum for Sessions to announce the next phase of Trump’s May 2017 executive order: a task force that will likely implement those very protections and, in doing so, safeguard conservative Christians’ ability to discriminate against vulnerable groups.

With the highest incidence of religious based discrimination and hate crimes being against Muslims, the summit acted as if this reality did not exist and made it clear that if one is Hindu, gay, or of some non-Christian faith, one would be treated as if invisible by the task force. A driving force behind this special rights for Christofascists agenda is Alliance Defending Freedom, a certified anti-gay hate group that for years has disseminated malicious falsehoods against the LGBT community both in America and abroad and, which if it could, would criminalize homosexuality.  A piece in The Advocate looks at the sinister specter behind the DOJ's agenda.  Here are highlights:

One hate group that compares LGBTQ people to pedophiles is laying the groundwork to usher in a new age in this country where civil rights laws are rendered moot. And unless we stand in their way, they are going to win.

NO GAYS ALLOWED was plastered onto a storefront in Tennessee after the United States Supreme Court ruled that the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop would have his case reheard by Colorado officials over his refusal to make cakes for same-sex weddings. The court did not rule that businesses can ban LGBTQ people. But, the reaction in Tennessee to this ruling gave us a glimpse into the future we are headed toward. It is a future where LGBTQ people are refused services at stores, turned away from jobs, and denied care at hospitals. Things that, all too often happen today but may soon be court sanctioned and brought to you by America’s most successful anti-LGBTQ hate group: the Alliance Defending Freedom.

ADF’s version of religious freedom is not the idea that one may believe or worship as one pleases. For them, it means a cakeshop owner can turn away a gay couple, as Phillips did, that a doctor can decline to treat someone if they deem someone morally offensive, and even a teacher can refuse to call a transgender student by their name.

ADF’s been designated as an anti-LGBTQ hate-group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. They’ve advocated for the criminalization of LGBTQ people in the United States and abroad.

It’s founder, Alan Sears, while president of ADF, published a book that falsely claimed being gay was “intrinsically linked” to pedophilia. Sears’s book was on ADF’s legal fellows reading list as recently as 2015.

The group also appears to have close ties to the Trump administration, and their clients frequently speak at government events about ADF-style religious freedom. In January, Sara Hellwege, an ADF client, praised ADF as she spoke at the Department of Health and Human Services’ announcement that it would attempt to allow doctors’ morality to determine which patients will be treated. On July 30, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the creation of a so-called Religious Liberty Task Force, he mentioned Jack Phillips three times in his speech before Phillips spoke at the event. Former ADF staffers now working for Sessions are believed to have helped in the creation of this task force.

It seems even more likely that ADF will rack up anti-LGBTQ victories with the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. If Trump’s pick, Brett Kavanaugh, replaces Kennedy, he will be the fifth hard-right justice on the court.

The group has become so emboldened from their legal victories that on July 17, ADF declared it will charge forward with a “proactive defense of freedom” and challenge the constitutionality of non-discrimination laws as soon as they are signed into law.

We know what ADF is doing, their playbook is simply: Push lots of small cases, make ties with federal leaders, and claim they don’t support discrimination — it’s just a minor byproduct of religious freedom. Where we fail is that instead of taking on ADF directly, the LGBTQ movement tackles each case, government edict, and ADF victory separately, never tying it all together to ADF’s overall strategy, sometimes not even mentioning ADF’s involvement at all.

Without this bigger picture the simple truth gets lost: a hate-group is trying to find any argument it can to justify discrimination against LGBTQ people. Period.

The Justice Department’s Troubling Ties to Alliance Defending Freedom

Jeff Sessions announcing his new anti-gay task force.

While the "Alliance Defending Freedom" ("ADF") describes itself as a "Christian" law firm, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups across America, has certified ADF as a hate group.  The principal target of ADF's efforts is the LGBT community whose civil rights it seeks to rescind in order that Christofascist can discriminate at will and be exempt from public accommodation laws.  Given the significant overlap between ADF's evangelical base and white supremacists, the LGBT community is not ADF's lone target.  A prior blog post earlier this week noted how  Attorney General Jeff Sessions - a man with a long history of homophobia and racism - announced at "task force" within the Department of Justice which would enforce exemptions from non-discrimination laws. A piece in Media Matters looks at the insidious relationship between the Trump/Pence DOJ and ADF.  Trump may be breaking promises to much of his base, but he is pandering overtime to the Christofascists thanks in no small part I suspect to Mike Pence, an extreme far right wing religious zealot in his own right.  Here are article highlights:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the creation of a Department of Justice (DOJ) task force to enforce “religious liberty” rules that make it easier to discriminate against the LGBTQ community and others under the guise of “religious freedom." Such discrimination is a major part of the mission of anti-LGBTQ legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), and the announcement was followed by a panel that included a major ADF client and was moderated by an ADF staff alumna. Coupled with ADF's involvement in the announcement, the new task force demonstrates the influence of the group's extreme anti-LGBTQ views on the administration.

On July 30, Sessions launched a new “Religious Liberty Task Force” that would enforce discriminatory religious exemptions guidance that the DOJ released in October 2017. (Sessions had worked with ADF on the guidance before its release.) Religious exemptions policies, such as those the DOJ released, allow people and businesses to be exempt from nondiscrimination laws and policies by citing a burden on their religious beliefs. People have frequently used the exemptions to discriminate against the LGBTQ community and others.

ADF was one of the first to break the news of the July 30 “Religious Liberty Summit” in which the task force was announced, noting that the event would feature a panel including the group’s client Jack Phillips, a Christian baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple and who took his case to the Supreme Court in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commision. ADF’s news release, however, did not mention that the panel’s moderator, DOJ media affairs specialist Kerri Kupec, worked at ADF for four yearsbefore joining DOJ in January. 

The Trump-Pence administration has shown a coziness with extreme anti-LGBTQ groups and with ADF, in particular. Sessions’ DOJ issued an unusual brief on behalf of Phillips before oral arguments in Masterpiece Cakeshop, and ADF alumni and allies have been hired by various agencies and nominated for federal judgeships. As Media Matters’ recently released research book details, ADF holds dozens of extreme anti-LGBTQ positions on nearly every every aspect of life, including supporting laws that would punish sodomy by imprisonment, writing in favor of Russia’s so-called “gay propaganda” law, and advocating against efforts to protect LGBTQ youth from the harmful and discredited practice of conversion therapy. The group is in many ways the most influential group working to roll back LGBTQ equality in the country, frequently targeting basic protections for transgender students and pushing religious exemptions policies.

The “Religious Liberty Task Force” is yet another example of a cabinet-level agency devoting significant resources to make it easier to discriminate against LGBTQ people. In January, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a new division to enforce laws protecting “health care workers who express religious objections to performing abortions and certain other procedures,” including providing medical services to transgender and other LGBTQ people.

When groups like ADF have a seat at the table with the upper echelons of our federal government, discriminatory policies such as these come as no surprise.

Many secular straights and other minorities likely yawn at this news and figure that it does not affect them.  However, if one has followed the Christofascist agenda for years, gays are only the first on ADF's hit list.  These folks are so extreme that they would like to make contraception illegal once more.  If Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court, they might just have the votes needed to overrule Griswold v. Connecticut.  ADF and its supporters are nothing short of frightening. 

Sessions Announces New Anti-Gay Task Force Under Guise of "Religious Liberty"

The euphemism in today's Republican Party for rolling back LGBT rights is "protecting "religious liberty."  Of course, only one set of religious belief is protected under the Trump/Republican Party Agenda: extreme right wing Christian beliefs.  The religious beliefs and civil rights of all others falls before the Christofascists push to make their beliefs supreme and their ability to discriminate against others whether based on sexual orientation or, I suspect before their quest is over, race and skin color.  Pushing this Christofascist agenda is Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, and his ever foul Attorney General, Jeff Sessions - a man I have had the acquaintance of since the late 1970's. As CNN reports, Sessions - acting no doubt on Trump's orders so as to maintain the loyalty of his utterly immoral evangelic base - has announced a new task force to implement the Trump Justice Departments effort to grant special rights to Christofascists and exempt them from public accommodation and non-discrimination laws.  Here are article highlights (in reading the piece, be mindful that "religious groups" only encompass far right Christian groups):

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday announced the Department of Justice's creation of a "religious liberty task force" to "help the department fully implement our religious guidance."

Sessions said the goal of the task force will be protecting religious groups from persecution.

"The task force will help the department fully implement our religious liberty guidance by ensuring that all Justice Department components are upholding that guidance in the cases they bring and defend, the arguments they make in court, the policies and regulations they adopt and how we conduct our operations," Sessions said. "That includes making sure that our employees know their duties to accommodate people of faith."
 Sessions cited "a dangerous movement" aimed toward stripping away the First Amendment right to freedom of religion as a basis for forming the new task force.  "A dangerous movement, undetected by many, is now challenging and eroding our great tradition of religious freedom," Sessions said in his speech. "There can be no doubt. This is no little matter. It must be confronted and defeated."

Slate provides more context and notes that references to non-right wing Christian traditions appear to be merely disingenuous window dressing to deceive the gullible or to toss a talking point to militant Christofascists.  Here are excerpts:

Sessions mentioned the Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu religions and proclaimed that the DOJ would protect all adherents from discrimination. But in arguing that it was an “unease” over a “changing cultural climate” that motivated Trump voters and the administration’s religious-liberty policies, Sessions seemed to refer more to the complaints of the Christian right. “[Trump] said he respected people of faith and he promised to protect them in the free exercise of their faith,” Sessions said. “He declared we would say ‘Merry Christmas’ again.”

In October 2017, Sessions released a vague memo that instructed federal agencies to observe 20 “principles of religious liberty.” Activists for LGBTQ and women’s rights worried at the time that the proclamation gave broad permission for religious groups to ignore federal civil rights laws.

“Under this administration, the federal government is not just reacting—we are actively seeking, carefully, thoughtfully and lawfully, to accommodate people of faith,” he said. “Religious Americans are no longer an afterthought.”

Sadly, the rights of everyone other than Christofascists will now be an after thought and the concept of a secular civil society will be further undermined. Having followed the far Christian right for over two decades, the move is no surprise to me.  Literally no one in American society is more self-centered, selfish and uncaring to others than the "godly Christian" evangelicals.  They make a mockery of the Gospel message and, if America is lucky, will accelerate the exodus from religion by Millennials and others as Christianity as imposed by the Christofascists becomes something to be reviled and avoided. 

Trump Signs "Executive Order" Ending His Own Policy

In a moment of staged theater aimed no doubt to his intellectually and morally challenged supporters, Der Trumpenführer signed an executive order ending the current family separation policy implemented by his own regime.  Up until now, Trump has lied - yes, lie is the correct term - that the policy was the fault of Democrats even though neither the George W. Bush or Barack Obama administrations , operating under the same congressional legislation had never ripped children, some as young as infants, from their parents.  What likely pushed Trump to for the most part rescind his own policy was the growing outcry of Republicans facing reelection in less than five months and the storm of international condemnation raining down on Trump's regime that shows about as much empathy for others as Adolph Hitler's regime.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Trump's theatrical and false and fraudulent gesture to deflect responsibility from himself.  Here are story excerpts:

Trump abruptly reversed course Wednesday, signing an executive order ending family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border after a public uproar over the impact of his administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy.

The plan would keep families together in federal custody while awaiting prosecution for illegal border crossings, potentially violating a 1997 court settlement limiting the duration of child detentions.

Trump had repeatedly defended his immigration crackdown, including forcibly separating migrant children from their parents after they crossed the border. But images of young children in tears, housed in metal cages, set off an international outcry.

The inaction sparked international outrage, including criticism from Pope Francis and opposition from world leaders.

Trump’s action came shortly after House Republican leaders vowed to bring broader immigration legislation up for votes Thursday to address the crisis, despite widespread skepticism that a bill could pass.

Separately, Attorney General Jeff Sessions [who is facing a move within his own church to charge him with child abuse] met with Senate Republicans privately amid GOP fears about the political fallout from the separation policy. Upon leaving that meeting, Sessions said he had been “working with the White House and others all morning” on the family separation issue.

Trump’s executive order instructs DHS to keep families in custody “to the extent permitted by law and subject to the availability of appropriations,” language that points to the government’s deficit of detention space for parents with children.

But placing children in those facilities would run afoul of the 1997 “Flores Settlement” agreement that limits the government’s ability to keep children in detention and orders them to be placed in least-restrictive setting possible.

An administration official with knowledge of the plan indicated that the Trump administration was anticipating lawsuits and preparing to litigate Flores [which places limits on child incarcerations] in court, particularly if lawmakers fail to approve a legislative fix.

Some Senate Republicans began publicly and privately pressuring the administration this week to change how the zero-tolerance policy was being enforced. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and a dozen other Senate Republicans urged Sessions in a letter to pause the family separations unilaterally.

Hatch’s staff also privately lobbied Ivanka Trump — the president’s daughter and senior adviser — and told her that they wanted to help Trump find a way out of the border crisis, according to a person familiar with those discussions. A handful of Senate Republicans, including Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), also reached out privately to various administration officials to halt the separations.

“I don’t like it,” Hatch said of the family separation crisis during an interview at the Capitol. “They can’t ignore what I’m saying because I’ve been the president’s strongest supporter, and they know that I’m the middle of everything.”

International condemnation of the Trump administration policy has also continued to build.   Pope Francis is criticizing the separation of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexican Mexico border and saying that “populism” and “creating psychosis” are not the way to resolve migration problems, according to an interview published Wednesday.  Speaking to Reuters news agency, the pope said, “It’s not easy, but populism is not the solution.”

Answering questions from Parliament, meanwhile, British Prime Minister Theresa May said Wednesday that “the pictures of children being held in what appear to be cages are deeply disturbing. This is wrong. This is not something we agree with.”

Large potential continues to exist for the abuse of immigrant children and there families. Time will tell if Trump's feigned concern has any reality in fact.  Meanwhile, it is crucial to oppose Trump's efforts to blame his own policies on Democrats or Congress.  Likewise, the ugliness of Trump and his policies must be kept in people's minds up through the 2018 midterm elections. 

Jeff Sessions Cites Bible to Justify Mistreatment of Immigrant Families

I have been familiar with Jeff Sessions since my early days fresh out of law school when we were both in Mobile, Alabama.  As noted in numerous posts, the man was reprehensible back then - he refused to prosecute KKK members who lynched a young black man in Mobile (fortunately, a later prosecutor did and won convictions) - and always came across as a hypocrisy-filled, falsely pious churchgoer.  Now, Sessions embodies the worse aspects of the so-called "conservative Christian" crowd that packs church pews on Sundays yet supports a hate spewing, serial adultery in the White House and in general behaves in a manner that is the antithesis of living the Gospel message of Christ.  Indeed, Sessions is cherry picking Bible passages to justify the horrific treatment being visited upon immigrant families along America's southwest border where children are being forceably ripped from their parents and being kept in cages in many instances. If one wants an example of why one would flee Christianity, Sessions and his supporters are a prime example.  Both NBC News and Time look at Sessions perversion of the Bible to justify human rights violations.  Not surprisingly Mike Huckabee's always lying daughter rallied to Sessions' defense. First these highlights from NBC:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday offered a full-throated defense of the Trump administration's policy of separating children from their parents at the border, saying that having kids does not give migrants immunity from prosecution — and found justification for his policies in the Bible. Sessions . . . made his latest remarks in a speech to law enforcement officers in Fort Wayne, Indiana, telling the group that the migrant families were to blame for their own break-ups and that his department's separation of families was not "unusual or unjustified." "If you cross the Southwest border unlawfully, then the Department of Homeland Security will arrest you and the Department of Justice will prosecute you. That is what the law calls for — and that is what we are going to do," Sessions said. . . . "Noncitizens who cross our borders unlawfully, between our ports of entry, with children are not an exception," . . .
 In his remarks, Sessions hit back at the "concerns raised by our church friends about separating families," calling the criticism "not fair or logical" and quoting Scripture in his defense of the administration's tough policies.

"Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution. I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order," Sessions said. "Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful."

Later Thursday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders doubled down on Sessions' comments, saying it is "very biblical to enforce the law."

"That is actually repeated a number of times throughout the Bible," she said, responding to a question about Sessions' comments about Scripture's supporting the administration's policies.Many of the children separated from their parents have ended up in enormous facilities that more closely resemble prisons, where they spend 22 hours per day during the week locked inside overcrowded buildings.

The attorney general also defended his ruling this week that fear of domestic abuse or gang violence is not an acceptable basis for granting asylum.   He claimed that he had not made new law and that he had "simply restated and implemented what Congress has passed: Asylum is generally not for those who have suffered a private act of violence."

Time has this in part on Sanders' foul defense of inhumanity which, in my view stems from one thing and one thing only: the targets of the policy have brown skin:

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Thursday that she hadn’t seen Sessions’ comments but affirmed that the Bible did back up the administration’s actions.

“I can say that it is very biblical to enforce the law. That is actually repeated a number of times throughout the Bible,” she said. “It’s a moral policy to follow and enforce the law.”

In an unusually tense series of exchanges in the White House briefing room, Sanders wrongly blamed Democrats for the policy separating children from parents and insisted the administration had made no changes in increasing the use. Until the policy was announced in April, such families were usually referred for civil deportation proceedings, not requiring separation.

Trump/Sessions Seek to End Zoning Regulations for Religious Institutions

One reason why evangelical Christians have prostituted themselves and supported Donald Trump even though Trump represents just about everything a true Christian should oppose and condemn is that in June, 2016, Trump promised evangelical "leaders - many are in actuality scamvangelists and/or hate group leaders - that if elected, he would put them above the laws that bind the rest of society. Trump/Pence regime efforts to roll back LGBT rights and legalize anti-gay discrimination have been part of the delivery on Trump's promise.  Now, we see Jeff Sessions announcing a crack down on cities that impose normal restrictions on churches and religious institutions.  Typically, zoning ordinances are aimed at avoiding the location of incompatible uses adjacent to each other, minimum lot sizes and building set back requirements, minimum parking facility requirements to avoid undue burdens on adjoining streets, and numerous other common sense restrictions.  Such restrictions that apply to all kinds of business and property uses apparently are objectionable to the "godly folks" who believe that general zoning regulations - and a host of other laws - should not apply to them.  CNN looks at this latest effort to grant special rights to religious extremists: 

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced an initiative on Wednesday aimed at boosting the Justice Department's role protecting religious institutions from cumbersome zoning rules.

"Under the laws of this country, government cannot discriminate against people based on their religion -- not in law enforcement, not in grant-making, not in hiring and not in local zoning laws," Sessions said in a statement announcing the Place to Worship Initiative. The announcement said the Justice Department would expand awareness of a 2000 law to shield religious institutions from overly restrictive zoning regulations and would provide "additional training and resources for federal prosecutors," with an inaugural community outreach event in New Jersey later this month. The planned event in New Jersey would come after the Justice Department also announced on Wednesday it was bringing a complaint under that 2000 law against the New Jersey borough Woodcliff Lake and Woodcliff Lake's zoning board of adjustment. The initiative announced on Wednesday marked another step by Sessions to steer the power of the department toward religious organizations and individuals. Last fall, Sessions announced sweeping guidance on religious liberty protections, and the Justice Department under his leadership took the side of a cake shop owner who cited religion when refusing to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the baker earlier this month.

One of my personal pet peeves is churches that are allowed to ignore "no parking" restrictions on Sundays and, as a result create unsafe driving conditions for through traffic on arterial highways. The need for such abuses is the result of zoning ordinances that do not require churches to have adequate parking spaces on their property.  

Churches sadly more often that not deliver much less in charitably services to communities in comparison to the tax drain they cause due to their (in my view) tax-exempt status.  Stated another way, churches do no pay their own way in terms of municipal services and the rest of the citizenry is forced to subsidize their often divisive dogma.  Now, they want to be able to ignore even zoning ordinance restrictions.   

Sessions Just Signed Death Warrants for LGBT Asylum Seekers

In addition to tear apart families and separating small children from their parents, the Trump/Pence regime is now limiting the bases upon which immigrants can seek asylum in America.  Domestic violence, gang violence and murder and the targeting of "certain populations" for violence no longer will be considered as proper grounds for seeking asylum.  In addition to women, the most severely impacted will be LBGT individuals who face criminalization and even death penalties in their home countries. Leading this movement is the long time racist and homophobe Jeff Sessions, perhaps the most unfit Attorney General America has suffered under in many decades, if not ever.  Cheering on these moves are (i) the white supremacists and (ii) evangelical "Christians" who comprise the core of the Trump/Pence/GOP base. LGBTQ Nation looks at the horrible consequences many LGBT individuals will likely suffer.  Here are highlights:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has issued a new order in his never ending quest to keep the U.S. as white and straight as possible. In a wide-reaching move, Sessions says that the government will no longer accept the threat of gang violence or domestic abuse as grounds for asylum in the U.S.

“The mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes — such as domestic violence or gang violence — or that certain populations are more likely to be victims of crime, cannot itself establish an asylum claim,” Sessions wrote in a 31-page memo to immigration judges.

The order is going to disproportionately affect LGBTQ asylum seekers, many of them the victims of gang violence in their home countries. In fact, Sessions all but called LGBTQ asylum seekers out in his memo by refering to “certain populations.” In essence, Sessions said, it’s not America’s problem if you’re going to be killed for being gay or trans.

The heartlessness at the center of Session’s decision is illustrated by the specific case that spurred it. Ms. A.B.–court filings use only her initials–fled El Salvador after enduring years of violence, including rape, at the hands of her husband. She went to the local police, who did nothing. Finally, she came to the U.S., seeking asylum.

An immigration judge had ruled that what she endured was “criminal,” but still ruled against her claim. Ms. A.B. filed an appeal and won. Now she faces deportation after all.LGBTQ advocacy groups were quick to condemn Session’s order. The National Center for Lesbian Rights called it “an unpricipled setback that overturns years of precedent.”

Criticizing the Trump administration’s immigration policy for cruelty is actually a badge of honor for Sessions and other hard-liners. After all, this is the administration that happily separates children from their families at the border, telling parents that the children are being taken away for a bath.

Sending LGBTQ immigrants back to their deaths is just all in another day’s work.

First They Came for the Migrants; Who Will Be Next?

“We simply follow the orders from above.”  That is the excuse/explanation given by border security workers engaged in the force separation of parents from their children, some still infants along America's borders.  The excuse is chillingly similar to that given by Nazi officials and even death camp workers after the fall of Germany in 1945. Simply because one is given an illegal or immoral order doesn't absolve one from responsibility. Decent, moral people say "no" and refuse to act. What is happening at America's borders is an indictment of every American who does nothing to stop these horrible and inhuman actions.  Silence is not an option, because silence and inaction amount to complicity. Guilt by association, if you will.  What's even more frightening is the reality that what is being done to is only the beginning of a campaign by the Trump/Pence regime to dehumanize those deemed "other" and thereby set the stage for legal repressions and others heinous acts.  The immediate targets of such immoral actions are brown skinned Spanish speakers, but the list of those Trump's white Christofascist and white supremacist base deems as "other" is lengthy. They hate gays, they hate non-Christians, to name a few potential future targets, and they see only themselves as "real Americans" worthy of full civil rights.  A column in the New York Times looks at the dying of American morality - to the extent it ever existed give the nation's ugly past - and the specter of things likely yet to come.  Be very afraid. Here are column excerpts:

The sci-fi writer William Gibson once said, “The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” In America in 2018, the same could be said of authoritarianism.

Since Donald Trump was elected, there’s been a boom in best-selling books about the fragility of liberal democracy, including Madeleine Albright’s “Fascism: A Warning,” and Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny.” Many have noted that [Trump's] the president’s rhetoric abounds in classic fascist tropes, including the demonization of minorities and attempts to paint the press as treasonous. Trump is obviously more comfortable with despots like Russia’s Vladimir Putin than democrats like Canada’s Justin Trudeau.

We still talk about American fascism as a looming threat, something that could happen if we’re not vigilant. But for undocumented immigrants, it’s already here.

There are countless horror stories about what’s happening to immigrants under Trump. Just last week, we learned that a teenager from Iowa who had lived in America since he was 3 was killed shortly after his forced return to Mexico. This month, an Ecuadorean immigrant with an American citizen wife and a pending green card application was detained at a Brooklyn military base where he’d gone to deliver a pizza; a judge has temporarily halted his deportation, but he remains locked up. Immigration officers are boarding trains and buses and demanding that passengers show them their papers. On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions decreed that most people fleeing domestic abuse or gang violence would no longer be eligible for asylum.

But what really makes Trump’s America feel like a rogue state is the administration’s policy of taking children from migrants caught crossing the border unlawfully, even if the parents immediately present themselves to the authorities to make asylum claims. “This is as bad as I’ve ever seen in 25 years of doing this work,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the A.C.L.U.’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told me. “The little kids are literally being terrorized.”

Family separations began last year — immigrant advocates aren’t sure exactly when — and have ramped up with the administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting everyone who crosses the border without authorization. Over two weeks in May, more than 650 children were snatched from their parents.

The human consequences have been horrific. Last week, The New York Times described a 5-year-old boy from Honduras who had been separated from his father and cried himself to sleep at night with a stick-figure drawing of his family under his pillow. The Washington Post reported that Marco Antonio Muñoz, a 39-year-old who is also from Honduras, killed himself in a padded cell after his 3-year-old was wrenched from his arms.

Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic congresswoman from Washington State, recently met with migrant women being held in a federal prison, many of whom, she said, were forcibly separated from children as young as 1. Some had their kids physically torn from them. Others were told that they had to go have their photograph taken; when they returned, their children were gone. . . . “Many of them were told by Border Patrol that they would never see their children again,” she told me.

Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, recently visited an immigrant processing center in McAllen, Tex. Describing how men, women, boys and girls were separated and kept in chain-linked enclosures, . . .

These kids are being used as pawns to persuade parents to give up their asylum claims and to warn others against coming to America. The administration, Merkley told me, has “decided that treating kids in this fashion would influence the adults not to seek asylum. They would hurt children to influence the parents.”

There are still mechanisms in American government that can stop this evil. Last Friday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, proposed a bill that would keep most families detained at the border together. The A.C.L.U. has filed a lawsuit on behalf of parents whose children were taken from them and is asking a federal court for a nationwide injunction to stop family separations.

But for now, what is happening is the sort of moral enormity that once seemed unthinkable in contemporary America . . . . There is no reason to believe that undocumented immigrants will be the last group of people deemed beyond the law’s protection.

Senator Merkley told me he asked people working in the detention center if they were concerned about the impact that family separation would have on the children who had been put under their authority. The answer, he said, was, “We simply follow the orders from above.”

The full nightmare of Hitler's Germany did not happen over night.  It started slowly and targeted powerless groups.  Most Germans simply looked the other way refusing to believe where things were headed.  Other Germans - much like today's white Christofascists and white supremacists who make up the core base of the Republican Party - cheered on the horrors.  Each of must decide which group we will fall into.  I refuse to be silent and complicity in moral evils.  Meanwhile, think about this: the "godly folk" evangelicals find same sex love disgusting and sinful and worry about pre-marital sex, but support this Trump/Pence policy. They are utterly evil in my view -  just like Trump/Pence/Sessions. No amount of feigned piety in church pews absolves them from such inhumanity to others. 

State Terror in Trump’s America

America - morally bankrupt. 

The international world order is not the only thing that Donald Trump, a/k/a Trumpenführer, is destroying.  He and his foul regime are destroying America's decency and basic morality.  True, America has some ugly history - e.g., slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, the Japanese internment camps during WWII - but one would have hoped that as a nation we would have moved past such inhumanity.  Not so under the Trump/Pence regime and its evangelical Christian base which is showing itself to be no better than the majority of German Christians who supported Hitler's rise to power.  When a nation has as official policy the mistreatment of children, some as young as infants and toddlers, national moral bankruptcy is complete. Yet this is what is happening along America's southern border where children are being forceably ripped from their parents and being warehoused like animals.  Even U.S. Senators have been barred from seeing the inside of these detention centers which certainly suggests that Trump/Pence/Sessions do not want images of the horrors being disseminated. Frighteningly, Trump's base sees nothing wrong with this.  They see brown skin and, thus, the victims of the policy are not deemed even human.  Disgusting!! Andrew Sullivan has a column that laments this violation of human rights and basic decency.  Here are excerpts:

Keep a list, they tell you. Notice the little landmarks that tell you that authoritarianism is making headway.

It’s worth making a note, then, when a president goes out of his way to declare he has an “absolute right” to pardon himself, and anyone else, if he so wants, for any reason, including protecting himself and others from possible charges of conspiracy against the United States.

And it’s also worth taking a note when a near-universal norm of human decency is thrown out of the window, with a sudden change in procedure. I’m talking about the idea of a government that reserves the right to separate children from their parents forcibly — and not for interests of rescuing the child from abuse. I’m talking about the 658 children taken from their parents at the border in the two weeks since a new policy was introduced, with the aim of prosecuting everyone who enters the U.S. illegally immediately. In May alone, hundreds of children were subjected to this trauma, now counted alongside 11,000 children in government shelters across the U.S. Most are kept in huge detention centers, without their mothers or fathers, and outsiders are barred from entering. Hewitt is not a softy, he’s a hard-line Republican, reliably partisan, often ludicrously so. But even Hewitt was aghast at the sheer cruelty of this and the banality of [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions’s response to it. [T]he children are separated from their parents in order to send a message to future illegal immigrants. Come here, and we’ll take your kids away. This was not a panicked measure, taken quickly, to avert a crisis. It was months under due consideration, with plenty in the Trump administration balking at the inhumanity of it all. These children are being traumatized to send a message. They are being used as a form of deterrence for others.

When the government threatens to tear families apart in this way, it is inflicting what can only be called state terror. Masha Gessen notes how this tactic is deployed by Putin against the children of demonstrators, as a form of intimidation, and is straight out of the totalitarian playbook: “Putin and the system he has created have consistently, if not necessarily with conscious intent, restored key mechanisms of Soviet control. The spectacle of children being arrested sends a stronger message than any amount of police violence against adults could do.”

As for the facilities in which these kids are held, Sessions told Hewitt he has never been to one. Senator Merkley of Oregon tried to gain access recently to one in Brownsville, Texas. He was not allowed in, and the windows in the massive building holding the children are darkened. Why, one wonders? Senator Menendez was also barred from inspecting another holding center.

The Trump administration argues that if they are going to immediately detain all illegal immigrants, and they can’t house children in adult jails, they have no choice. Really? It seems perfectly possible to find a way to ensure that at least mothers and children are detained together, to ensure that some decency is possible in an otherwise callous process. If the resources are not there, right now, then it should be a matter of extreme urgency for the Congress to find them. Being detained in a foreign country, separated from family, unable to understand the language being spoken to them, is what can only be called profound trauma. . . . This is simply something the United States should never do.

I’m fine with tough enforcement, open to E-verify, lower future immigration levels, and even Trump’s fricking wall. But there are some core humane lines no civilized country should cross, some red lines, such as torture, or mistreatment of prisoners, or the wrenching of children from loving parents by agents of the state. This isn’t a completely isolated instance either. The ICE arrests that are happening every day just as mothers and fathers drop their kids off at school are particularly horrifying. They violate official policy, which is supposed to restrict arrests at “sensitive locations,” but the loopholes in this provision are legion. Children see their mom or dad suddenly subjected to force, shoved out of cars, handcuffed and then simply spirited away. No child should ever be subjected to this, period. The sheer trauma it will generate can last a lifetime. Yes, these are noncitizens. Yes, many have broken the law. But they are also children. Every day we numb ourselves to these core violations of decency, America dies a little. When challenged on this, of course, Trump simply lied and insisted that the Democrats came up with this “horrible law.” He has nothing to do with what his own ICE is doing, he tells us. Nothing.  The thing about this despicable man is that he doesn’t even have the courage of his own cruelty.

I am ashamed to be an American.  No doubt when we travel to Europe in September, the husband and I will have to repeatedly explain that we oppose such inhumanity and that we worked hard to stop Trump's election.