Supreme Court Blocks Trump’s Bid to End DACA

This week has not been a good week for Donald Trump and his racist/Christofascist base. On a number of fronts - especially LGBT rights and today the so-called Dreamers - the Supreme Court has handed Trump and his Department of Justice that reminds one of 1930's Germany major loses.  Frankly, defeat could not happen to more deserving people.  In both rulings, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the so-called liberal Justices to hand Trump defeat - suggesting to me that Roberts cares more about his place in history and the legitimacy of the Court in the eyes of a majority of Americans than her cares about pleasing the ugliest elements of today's Republican Party - including the horrific occupant of the White House. The sad truth is that Trump's actions were motivated by his hatred of non-whites and his desire to pander to the white supremacist/Christofascist base of his support.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at today's ruling.  Here are excerpts:

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to dismantle the program protecting undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, a reprieve for nearly 650,000 recipients known as “dreamers.”

The 5-to-4 decision, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., stunned President Trump, who said in a tweet that it and a ruling earlier this week that federal law protects LGBTQ workers were “shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives.”

Roberts was in the majority in both cases, and Thursday’s ruling showed once again the pivotal role he now plays at the center of the court.

His low-key ruling was technical — the administration had not provided proper legal justification, he said, for ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program implemented by President Barack Obama eight years ago. It allows qualified enrollees to work, study and remain in the United States on a renewable permit.

Trump has often suggested the conservative-leaning Supreme Court would protect him against adverse rulings from lower-court judges. But Roberts has at times joined the court’s liberal members — as happened Thursday — to make clear for [Trump] the president that his administration does not make the rules.

Whether this pattern continues over the coming weeks will frame what already has proved to be one of the court’s most controversial terms in years.

Still to come: decisions on Trump’s long-running legal battle to shield his private financial records from Congress and a New York prosecutor; several cases involving the separation of church and state; and the court’s first reexamination of abortion rights since Trump’s nominees, Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh, ascended to the bench.

Politicians on the other side of the issue were elated, even if they were as stunned as Trump seemed to be.

“I cannot — the Supreme Court, who would’ve thought, would have so many good decisions in one week, who would’ve thought . . . wow,” said Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), seemingly overcome with emotion.

Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, advised the new administration to end it, saying it was illegal.

But lower courts found that directive questionable. At any rate, they said, the Department of Homeland Security did not properly weigh how ending the program would affect those who had come to rely on its protections against deportation, and the ability to work legally. Roberts agreed.

He added: “We address only whether the [Department of Homeland Security] complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action. Here the agency failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance and what if anything to do about the hardship to DACA recipients. That dual failure raises doubts about whether the agency appreciated the scope of its discretion or exercised that discretion in a reasonable manner.”

“Since 2012, DACA recipients have enrolled in degree programs, embarked on careers, started businesses, purchased homes, and even married and had children, all in reliance” on the DACA program, Roberts wrote, quoting from briefs in the case.

“The consequences of the rescission, [advocates] emphasize, would ‘radiate outward’ to DACA recipients’ families, including their 200,000 U.S.-citizen children, to the schools where DACA recipients study and teach, and to the employers who have invested time and money in training them. . . . In addition, excluding DACA recipients from the lawful labor force may, they tell us, result in the loss of $215 billion in economic activity and an associated $60 billion in federal tax revenue over the next ten years.”

Immigration advocates were euphoric over the court’s actions.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D), who led a coalition of 20 states and the District of Columbia in bringing the challenge, said in a statement that ending DACA “would have been cruel to the hundreds of thousands of Dreamers who call America home, and it would have been bad for our nation’s health.”

Nearly 800,000 people over the years have taken part in the program. More than 90 percent are employed and 45 percent are in school, according to one government study. Advocates recently told the Supreme Court that nearly 30,000 work in health care and that their work is necessary to fighting the coronavirus.

While the program does not provide a direct path to citizenship, it provides a temporary status that shields them from deportation and allows them to work. The status lasts for two years and can be renewed.

Technically, the Trump administration could restart the process and provide the justification the court’s majority said was required. But the process is long, and there is no evidence Congress would want to pass legislation that would end the program.

In fact, it is quite popular with the public. A Pew Research survey conducted this month found that 74 percent of Americans favored granting permanent legal status to immigrants who came illegally to the United States when they were children, while 24 percent opposed.

Trump is so sick that he may try to restart the process.  Hopefully, Americans will throw him out of office in November and end his reign of hate, bigotry and misogyny.

Can the Supreme Court Save Itself?

With a rogue malignant narcissist in the White House and a Congress where Republicans no longer care about facts an, indeed the rule of law, the last institution left to protect the nation and constitutional norms is is the U.S. Supreme Court.  With the appointment of two ideologues to the Court by Trump, the question now is one of whether the Court will become yet another of the Republican partisan political agenda and, in the process lose the respect of the majority of Americans.  Courts are expected to follow the rules and not support the whims and demands of a would be autocrat and rely to a large extent on public acceptance of their rulings as their source of legitimacy.  As a column in the New York Times argues, the Court finds itself on a precipice that will determine if it becomes viewed as merely a partisan body that no longer follows the long established rules of operation. Rules, which if followed would require rulings against both the Trump administration and Trump personally in his effort to hide his tax returns (which must contain some bombshells given the desperation with which he seeks to hide them from view).  Here are column highlights:

I’m often asked these days whether there is anything the Supreme Court can do to extract itself from the partisan trap into which the rancid confirmation process and the court’s own behavior have driven it. It’s a hard question because, of course, individual justices have deeply held views that happen for the most part to map onto the views of the presidents who named them to their seats.

That wasn’t always the case — think Chief Justice Earl Warren, named by President Dwight Eisenhower, or Justice Harry Blackmun, appointed by President Richard Nixon. But it’s the case now, and it’s unrealistic to suppose that either the five conservative Republican-appointed justices or the four moderates named by Democrats would — or even should — put their basic beliefs about the Constitution or the interpretation of statutes on the shelf in an effort to persuade the public that the court is not just another political institution.

But the recently argued case involving young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers and the pending effort by President Trump to quash subpoenas seeking his tax information from his personal accountants suggest that there is something the court can do. These are extraordinary cases, to be sure, but they easily — even obviously — lend themselves to resolution by ordinary rules.

And that would be the point: business as usual, no matter who’s in the White House. Although President Trump and his attorney general, William Barr, have excoriated lower-court judges as agents of “the resistance,” in fact it’s the judges who have been following the rules and the administration that behaves as if the rules apply only to everyone else.

The case involving the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, is a prime example. . . . The case is not about DACA’s legality or presidential discretion. It’s about rules: whether in rescinding DACA, the president adhered to the core principles of administrative law. Judges in four federal judicial districts found that he did not.

The Administrative Procedure Act doesn’t tell the government what to do. It simply requires that actions of federal agencies be supported by reasoned decision-making. When challenged, agencies have to provide explanations that are plausible and consistent rather than “arbitrary and capricious.”

It was on this basis that the administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census crashed and burned in June. The judges who blocked the plan, including Chief Justice John Roberts in his majority opinion, did not, as Attorney General Barr implied in a speech last week to the Federalist Society, “inquire into the subjective motivation behind governmental action. . . . The judges simply put the administration’s stated reason (to aid the Justice Department’s enforcement of the Voting Rights Act) side by side with the facts (the request had not originated with the voting rights enforcers) and decided that the distance between the two was too great to meet the test of reasoned decision-making.

[Trump] The president would almost certainly have gotten away with rescinding the DACA program if he and his lawyers had simply said, “We don’t like DACA, it’s inconsistent with our approach to immigration policy in the following ways, and we’re getting rid of it.” But the lawyers couldn’t say that because President Trump had promised “the Dreamers” at the start of his administration that they would have his continued support. So the explanation the lawyers offered was that they had to terminate the program because they had discovered that it was illegal.

Rejecting this conclusion as “conclusory” and “virtually unexplained,” Judge John Bates of the Federal District Court in Washington took an unusual step. Rather than issuing an immediate injunction to block the rescission, he gave the administration 90 days “to better explain its view that DACA is unlawful.” Instead, the administration came back with what amounted to a new explanation of a different kind: that DACA was sending the wrong message by seeming to endorse and invite illegal entry into the country.

Responding in a second opinion, Judge Bates said that to accept what he called the “messaging rationale” would violate a basic principle of administrative law, which requires judges to disregard after-the-fact explanations “for why the agency could have taken the action.” Quoting a precedent from the federal appeals court in Washington, Judge Bates said that an agency’s subsequent explanation “must be more than a barren exercise of supplying reasons to support a preordained result.”

[I]f the administration wants to offer policy-based reasons for terminating DACA, it has to explain its policy choice, including why the need to end the program outweighs the fact that some 700,000 DACA recipients have built their lives around their ability to remain in the United States. Judge Bates said that when an agency is terminating an existing policy, the Administrative Procedure Act requires a “more substantial justification” than usual if the “prior policy has engendered serious reliance interests.”

So that’s how the ordinary rules would work in the DACA case. It’s not particularly complicated, but the conservative justices appeared to be having a hard time with it when the case was argued last week.

When it comes to the president’s effort to shield his tax returns, the justices need to do even less than that.

Two appeals by the president, in his private capacity and represented by private lawyers, have reached the Supreme Court in the past week. One, Trump v. Vance, is a formal appeal from a ruling by the federal appeals court in New York upholding the validity of a grand jury subpoena obtained by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, and served on the president’s accountants for his personal and business tax records.

“Any presidential immunity from state criminal process does not extend to investigative steps like the grand jury subpoena at issue here,” Chief Judge Robert Katzmann wrote for the appeals court. Any further question, he added pointedly, “is purely hypothetical.”

The Trump lawyers’ Supreme Court petition, referring to Mr. Vance as “politically motivated,” “a lone county prosecutor,” instructs the court that “a sitting president should be categorically immune from state criminal process.”

Whether the Supreme Court ultimately grants review in these cases is purely discretionary. In their preliminary posture, and in the absence of conflicting opinions from other courts, the cases don’t satisfy the justices’ ordinary, if loosely defined, criteria for cases worthy of their attention. The president’s lawyers appear to recognize this, compensating with their hyperbolic language about the dire consequences to the presidency and the country if the subpoenas are enforced.

I remember similar arguments in the Paula Jones case, when President Bill Clinton’s lawyers went to the Supreme Court with the claim that a sitting president should not be subject to a lawsuit. Mr. Clinton lost that argument by a vote of 9 to 0.

What should the court do with the Trump tax cases? If the justices play by their ordinary rules, they will turn them down.

DACA supporters have criticized the administration’s position that “the law is making us do it” on the ground that the administration is seeking to evade responsibility for a decision that while perhaps popular with the president’s base, is likely to be unpopular with the country as a whole once mass deportations of DACA recipients begin.

And if the justices don’t follow the ordinary rules of administrative law, the Supreme Court will own it too — as it will own President Trump’s effort to keep his tax returns secret if the justices don’t steer clear of his cases. Can the Supreme Court save itself from itself? We’re about to find out.

GOP Leaders Scramble to Kill House Immigration Rebellion

Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy seek to kill debate on immigration reform.

Donald Trump is not the only anti-immigrant Republican.  The entire GOP Congressional leadership opposes meaningful comprehensive immigration reform despite the support for such legislation by a majority of Americans.  Given the majority support of voters, some Republicans in the House facing re-election have filed a discharge petition to force debate on an immigration reform bill.  The move sent the GOP leadership into a panic given that open debate would underscore the anti-immigrant animus of the GOP agenda.  As of yesterday, the GOP leadership was scrambling to kill the rebellion of those in their party who seemingly want to pass legislation that will address the concerns of a majority of voters, not just the white supremist and white Christian nationals of the GOP base.  The Washington Post looks at the frantic effort to stop debate.  Here are article highlights:

House Republican leaders made a full-court press Wednesday to forestall a GOP immigration rebellion that they fear could derail their legislative agenda and throw their effort to hold the majority in doubt.

The effort began in a closed-door morning meeting where Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) warned that a freewheeling immigration debate could have sharp political consequences. It continued in the evening, when the leaders of a petition effort that would sidestep were summoned to a room with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), McCarthy and three other top leaders.

Their message, according to attendees, was that efforts were underway at the highest levels, including with the White House, to get immigration legislation on the House floor before the midterm elections.

The House leaders presented no firm plan for action at the meeting, and the petition effort will continue, Curbelo and others said afterward.  Reps. John Katko (N.Y.) and David A. Trott (Mich.) became the 19th and 20th Republicans to sign the petition Wednesday. If all 193 Democrats join the petition, five more Republican signatures are needed to force action, which could come as soon as next month. The immigration issue has bedeviled congressional Republicans, with members in swing districts eager to strike a compromise that would legalize “dreamers” — young undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children — while conservatives have been wary of granting anything that could be construed as “amnesty” for lawbreakers, at least not without major policy concessions. McCarthy had a blunter message, according to two members present who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private meeting and as first reported by Politico: Signing the discharge petition and paving the way for passage of a moderate immigration bill could hurt Republicans in November’s elections by depressing conservative turnout and upending leadership’s plans to focus on tax cuts and other GOP successes. Curbelo and Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.), another leader of the discharge effort, responded inside the meeting by recalling months of promises that the House would act. “This is something the American public is demanding,” Denham said in an interview, adding, “I also believe the majority is at stake if we do nothing.”

[T]hey also face pressure from their right flank to block the discharge effort.  Members of the House Freedom Caucus are threatening to hold up passage of a massive farm bill this week unless leaders schedule a vote on a conservative immigration bill co-authored by Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Tex.). 

The discharge petition would set up votes on a series of bills, including the Goodlatte-McCaul bill, which has been written to please conservatives but has languished well short of the majority necessary to pass. Two bipartisan bills are more likely to pass if brought up for a vote, but they are likely to win more support from Democrats than Republicans and could violate the informal GOP leadership rule barring the consideration of bills not supported by a majority of Republicans. Neither includes the wall or visa restrictions that Trump has demanded. Still, the 20 House Republicans who have signed the petition have made clear they are done waiting after years of hoping their party’s leaders would bring some immigration bill — any immigration bill — to the floor. Hours before signing the petition, Trott said his own patience had nearly run out and Congress needed to resolve the uncertainty created by Trump’s cancellation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.  “I didn’t hear a plan today,” he said after leaving the morning meeting. “Time’s running out. We need to do something.”

What a refreshing concept: passing legislation that the public wants, not just pandering to right wing extremists and open racists.  Let's hope the discharge effort is successful.

Stress, Hostility Rising in American High Schools in Trump Era

Since November 9, 2016, I know that I have felt more stress and anxiety as civic discourse has coarsened and LGBT citizens have become increasingly a target for mistreatment by the federal government under Trump/Pence.  I have also come to realize that some who I thought were friends may, in fact not be my friends and may even support discrimination against me and others in the LGBT community not to mention against members of racial minorities.  And I am an educated white male with a career that would allow me to reopen my own law firm if things ever came to that.  Not everyone has that safety net.   Thus, I can only imagine the the stress and increased anxiety that racial minorities must be experiencing as the occupant of the White House continues to fan hate and bigotry and the Justice Department takes actions to allow open discrimination against people like me and others.  One venue where hate and bigotry is not easily avoided is in America's high schools where the situation shows how much damage is being done to younger generations.  The Virginian Pilot reports on the findings of a new study that ought to disturb decent, moral people (which, in my view, excludes Trump supporters).  Here are highlights:

Student anxiety and hostility on public high school campuses has worsened since Donald Trump became president and is affecting student learning, according to a new UCLA report.

More than half of public high school teachers in a nationally representative school sample reported seeing more students than ever with "high levels of stress and anxiety" between last January, when Trump took office, and May. That's according to the study, "Teaching and Learning in the Age of Trump: Increasing Stress and Hostility in America's High Schools," by John Rogers, director of the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at the University of California at Los Angeles.

[N]early 80 percent said some students had expressed concern for their well-being because of the charged public conversation about issues such as immigration, health care, the environment, travel bans and LGBTQ rights, it said. Furthermore, 40 percent said concerns over key issues - such as Trump's ban on travelers from eight countries, most with Muslim majorities; restrictions on LGBTQ rights; and health care - are making it harder for students to focus on their studies and making them less likely to come to school.

"I had students stand up in the middle of class and directly address their peers with racial slurs," the report quoted Ohio social studies teacher Aaron Burger as saying. "This is not something I have seen before."

Here are key findings from the report:

• Stress and concerns with welfare have increased, particularly in schools enrolling mostly students of color.
• Polarization, incivility and reliance on unsubstantiated sources have risen, particularly in predominantly white schools.
• A growing number of schools, particularly predominantly white schools, have become hostile environments for racial and religious minorities and other vulnerable groups.
• While some school leaders avoided issues related to the political environment, others moved proactively to create a tolerant and respectful school culture. When leaders did not act, student behavior grew dramatically worse.
• As the national political environment has become more threatening, bellicose and uncivil, more young people are subject to adverse socio-emotional and academic consequences. These changes also undercut the democratic purposes of public education.
• Educators can mitigate some of these challenges, but they need more support. Ultimately, political leaders need to address the underlying causes of campus incivility and stress.

The policy issue that concerned students the most was the Trump administration's statements about immigration, including the deportation of undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children and are known as "dreamers." Jeff Seuss, a social studies teacher and coach in Nebraska, reported that some of his student athletes now live in "survival mode," never knowing if they will be deported to a country they never lived in.

79 percent of teachers reported that their students have expressed concerns for their well-being or the well-being of their families associated with recent public policy discourse on one or more hot-button issues, including immigration, travel limitations on predominantly Muslim countries, restrictions on LGBTQ rights, changes to health care, or threats to the environment.

"Many teachers described how the political environment 'unleashed' virulently racist, anti-Islamic, anti-Semitic or homophobic rhetoric in their schools and classrooms. An Indiana English teacher explained: 'Individuals who do harbor perspectives on racism and bigotry now feel empowered to offer their views more naturally in class discussions, which has led to tension, and even conflict in the classroom.'

Sadly, this is precisely what Trump voters wanted: to make those the deem to be "other" fearful and threatened.  It is a testament to just how toxic conservative "Christian values" have become.   

Dreamers, Liars and Bad Economics

As noted often on this blog, one of the defining aspects of the Trump/Pence regime is dishonesty and lies.  Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, tells a lie - even when one isn't needed - and Mike Pence (a typical evangelical Christian who acts as if the Commandment against lying and bearing false witness does not exist) either repeats it or strives to justify the lie.  In the case of the diktat to rescind the DACA program, a cowardly Trump recruited the racist and homophobic Jeff Sessions to lay out false legal and economic reasons to end the program despite the fact that racism and pandering to Trump's white supremacist base are the true motivation.  As a column in the New York Times notes, if the undocumented individuals white and from Western Europe, the rescission would never have occurred. As for the false economic justifications, the column demonstrates why this is all a lie.  Here are excerpts:

Does it matter that Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, tried to justify Donald Trump’s immigration cruelty with junk economics?  It’s definitely not the main issue. Trump’s decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy is, above all else, immoral. The 800,000 beneficiaries of DACA — the so-called Dreamers — have done nothing wrong; they came to the United States illegally, but not of their own volition, because they were children at the time.

They are, according to all available data, an exemplary segment of our population: hard-working young people, many seeking to improve themselves through higher education. They’re committed to the values of their home — because America is their home.

And it’s self-evidently driven by racial hostility. Does anyone believe this would be happening if the typical Dreamer had been born in, say, Norway rather than Mexico?

Still, Sessions chose to put economics front and center in his statement, declaring that DACA, which allows the Dreamers to work legally, has “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.” That’s just false, and the decision to lead with such a falsehood tells you a lot, not just about this decision, but about the Trump administration in general.

The day after announcing that he would rescind DACA, Trump gave a speech on tax reform in which he claimed, as he has on multiple occasions, that America is the “highest-taxed nation in the world.” As fact-checkers have pointed out every time he says this, this isn’t just false, it’s almost the opposite of the truth — the U.S. collects less in taxes, as a share of national income, than almost any other advanced economy. But Trump just keeps repeating the lie.

So having officials make false claims about the economics of DACA is, in a way, just standard operating procedure for this administration. Yet I’d argue that in this context it’s especially noteworthy, and especially vile.

The official administration line is that Trump had no choice, that he was regretfully taking harsh action because DACA was an illegal exercise in executive power — which was also supposedly the reason the statement came from Sessions rather than the president himself. Actually, the legal case for DACA is pretty strong, and putting Sessions in front was probably about Trump’s cowardice more than anything else. . . . . adding “and besides, they’re stealing our jobs” undercuts the whole pretense.

Furthermore, the claim was, as I said, junk economics. The idea that there are a fixed number of jobs, so that if a foreign-born worker takes a job he or she takes it away from a native-born worker, is completely at odds with everything we know about how the economy works. Hearing it from a conservative is especially surreal.

The truth is that letting the Dreamers work legally helps the U.S. economy; pushing them out or into the shadows is bad for everyone except racists.

To understand why, you need to realize that America, like other advanced economies, is facing a double-barreled demographic challenge thanks to declining fertility.

On one side, an aging population means fewer workers paying taxes to support Social Security and Medicare. Demography is the main reason long-run forecasts suggest problems for Social Security, and an important reason for concerns about Medicare. Driving out young workers who will pay into the system for many decades is a way to make these problems worse.

On the other side, declining growth in the working-age population reduces the returns to private investment, increasing the risk of prolonged slumps like the one that followed the 2008 financial crisis.

What about the claim that immigrant workers compete with less-educated native-born workers, driving their wages down and increasing income inequality? Most of the evidence suggests that this claim is wrong, but in any case it’s irrelevant here: The Dreamers are a relatively well-educated group, very different from undocumented immigrants who came as adults.

In short, letting Dreamers work is all economic upside for the rest of our nation, with no downside unless you have something against people with brown skin and Hispanic surnames. Which is, of course, what this is all really about.

The Mindless Whining and Tantrums of Sanders Supporters.

I can't cite a lousy night's sleep for my crankiness today when it comes to Bernie Sanders supporters who continue to whine and threaten to sit home if Sanders isn't the 2016 Democrat nominee.  As if staying home on their grumpy asses on election day and by default potentially putting a Republican in the White does anything other than spell a death knell for the policies Sanders supporters claim to support and value.  Is seeing the Supreme Court shifted to the right for a generation, more failed trickle down economics, increased military spending at the expense of social programs, and  even more income inequality really worth proving ones "purity" to the Sanders mantra?  I'm sorry, but I see such behavior as both irrational and an example of cutting off one's nose to spite their face.  A pro-Sanders reader sent me a link to a piece that looks at the idiocy of this mindset as laid out by a Sanders supporter who cannot see that refusing to "learn to love Hillary Clinton" threatens everything the author claims to support.  Here are excerpts:

The moment has arrived. That moment when the establishment’s sniggering apologists tell those damn idealists that it is time to get with the program and settle for the latest shabby party product or risk going home empty-handed. Hear the eternal refrain: Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.

There has been a slew of these strident come to Jesus jeremiads from the usual suspects after former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s win in the New York primary. But the latest sermon on submitting to destiny from former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau both perfectly encapsulates the mindless DNC Hillary Clinton Campaign talking points, while attempting to provide a how do you do fellow kids credibility because he was part of the 2008 primary fight against Hillary Clinton.

The substance of the screed is as tired as it is tiresome. Favreau makes a number of claims that fail basic scrutiny when he counsels supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders, or “Berniacs” as they are called by The Daily Beast. For instance:

“Maybe you don’t believe that she’s different from the caricature we’ve all helped perpetuate. But she is running a campaign with a policy platform that’s more progressive than her husband’s administration, her 2008 campaign, and—in a few cases—Barack Obama’s administration.”

The problem, of course, is not that Hillary Clinton is not taking progressive positions. The problem is that, given her record, the best analysis of her policy platform is that she is lying about those positions.

Senator Sanders not only offers a progressive platform that he has a well-demonstrated commitment to, but his theory of change is vastly different than former Secretary Clinton’s. Sanders sees change as coming from social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement he participated in, which uses people power to pressure government officials into making concessions. Clinton claims that she will use her extensive experience in politics and government to personally work the gears of the state apparatus from the inside on behalf of the causes and people she states she cares for.

In summation, for those who genuinely support a progressive platform on domestic and foreign policy, Hillary Clinton is not qualified. Her record shows her approach to domestic policies is to run to the right while throwing up progressive rhetoric to cover her escape, and her foreign policy would be a return to Bush-era belligerence and incompetence.

In other words, no Jon, we won’t learn to love her, though maybe some of us will hold our noses and vote for her in November if she is the nominee to prevent an even worse candidate from taking over the empire. Then again, maybe not.

To quote the author, do Sanders supporters really prefer allowing someone even worse to occupy the White House, nominate Supreme Court appointments and push policies diametrically opposed to what Bernie Sanders supposedly stands for?  Oh, and as for the parallel with the civil rights movement, does the author not recognize that 50 years later, the civil rights battle still is not over.  Wake up to reality!!