So Trump is meeting Putin in Helsinki as I type this. We haven’t been told what this meeting is about, and it’s behind closed doors with no one but interpreters present, so we may never know. We can be sure that Trump will emerge from the meeting and declare it a great success, no matter how many concessions he yielded or how little he got in return.
Anyway, I’m not equipped to do breaking news, so I’ll try to suppress the temptation.
There will be two featured posts this week. The first one explores a different aspect of an issue I raised in the weekly summary last week: Trump usually frames his objections to immigrants in terms of illegal immigration of unskilled people, and talks about how we need to enforce our laws, while also changing them to claim a more useful class of immigrant. But that’s not really what’s going on. Last week I linked to articles describing how he’s making life harder for legal immigrants, and blocking their paths to citizenship. This week I’ll describe how he’s discouraging skilled immigrants from coming to America. The point is to keep America white; everything else is just rhetoric.
I haven’t titled that article yet, but it should be out before 9 EDT.
The second featured post will look at Judge Kavanaugh and ask what we could expect from him as a justice on the Supreme Court. There’s been a huge amount of speculation both ways about whether he would reverse Roe v Wade, and I’ll cover that, but a lot of other important issues are at stake: the government’s ability to regulate corporations at all, including worker-safety regulations; the survival of any right (other than corporate rights) not specifically listed in the Constitution; the Court’s willingness to reverse precedent; the limits of presidential power; the increasing partisanship of the Court; and so on. I’ll try to get that out by 11.
The weekly summary will discuss Trump’s tumultuous European tour, the new Mueller indictments, Peter Strzok’s televised testimony to Congress (which already seems so long ago, but it was Thursday), Jim Jordan, the administration’s declaration of victory in the War on Poverty, and a few other things, before closing with a very satisfying story about a guy tormenting email spammers. I’ll try for noon, but it may slip to 1 or so.
The Weekly Sift 