OK, this was not our best week. If you went to one of the keep-families-together demonstrations on Saturday, you might have gotten energized by that. But overall, the news was pretty depressing.
As I warned last week, that sense of victory we felt when Trump appeared to reverse the family-separation policy was premature. It’s still uncertain whether or not the policy will come back or what will replace it. In the meantime, about 2,000 kids are still separated from their parents, and the government is either unwilling or unable to reunite them. We’re now seeing the spectacle of kids too young to know which country they came from facing an immigration hearing.
And then there was the Supreme Court. Every year, there’s a flurry of decisions at the end of the term in June, and usually there’s a little something for everybody. You’re happy about this, sad about that, you hoped for more here, and so on. This year, the news was uniformly bad. The Muslim ban, voting rights, gerrymandering, unions, gay rights … it all came out wrong. Some of the decisions were merely disappointing, while others were horrible.
And then, guess what? We found out that it’s going to get worse. Justice Kennedy is retiring. Unless a miracle happens, Trump will replace him with a clone of Gorsuch, making Roberts the new swing vote. Since Roberts is already Chief Justice, he’ll be the most powerful American jurist in a long, long time. If you know anything about him, that’s seriously bad news.
Personally, I bounce back and forth between being depressed and being energized, so I wrote two featured posts this week. The depressing one is “Minority Rule Snowballs”. Back in 2013, I outlined what I saw as the new Republican strategy: They were going to stop trying to appeal to a majority of the American people, and instead see if they could rule from the minority. That’s been way more successful than I thought was possible, and this post will describe how. It should be out shortly.
Then there’s a post about not giving up — actually, the depressing post ends with a riff on not giving up too — that I haven’t titled yet. When I look at the aw-fuck-it temptation in my own heart, it’s uncomfortably rooted in my sense of privilege. That’s why I wasn’t prepared for a decades-long struggle against fascism: Once people like me get mobilized, what we want is supposed to happen pretty quickly. And it’s also why I imagine that giving up is an option: If the worst happens, I could easily melt into the population of “good Germans” who get along relatively well. Aw-fuck-it-we’re-going-to-lose-anyway is a much too easy way out. If the Gandhis and Kings and Mandelas had gone that way, the world would be a much worse place.
So let’s call that for 11 EDT and the weekly summary for noon or so.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
I heard that the reason for all the children was the border was letting those w/ children not be detained but given a time to “appear”; thus the families w/ children immediately became the norm. and got to be a ‘free pass’ ; an unintended consequence.
I heard that the reason for all the children was that people are trying to save their children from terrorism and crippling poverty, the monsters.