The Weekly Sift

We’re coming to the end of the Supreme Court’s term, so decisions are coming in fast. Thursday we got two particularly upsetting ones, both authored by Sam Alito. In one, people who came to the US legally under the temporary protected status program are going to lose that status and be deported, even though the countries they came from are not safe to return to. This violates the TPS law, but hey, it’s the Trump administration, it’s this Supreme Court, so who cares what the law says?

In the other, Alito twists the meaning of the word “in” to rubber-stamp a Trump policy that keeps refugees from being able to ask for asylum at our border. This also is against the law, but only if you believe the law has some abstract reality and is not whatever the Court claims it is. Those of us who lived through the Clinton impeachments remember parsing “what the meaning of is is”. It’s like that.

So anyway, the featured post will look at both of those decisions and draw the conclusion we’re not supposed to talk about: Both of these cases are really about Making America White Again. That’s the goal of Trump’s immigration policies, and that’s what six Supreme Court justices just gave their blessing to. I’ll try to get that post out by 10 EDT.

The weekly summary is left with a lot to cover: whatever the heck is going on at the Strait of Hormuz, the progressive/moderate sniping in the Democratic Party after progressives ousted two incumbent congresspeople in the New York primaries, the Tulsi Gabbard expose, the Todd Blanche nomination, Texas’ attempt to establish Christianity in its public schools, and a number of other things.

That will probably run a little late today. I’ll try to get it out by 1.

This week I’m balancing personal pleasantness against depressing news from the outside world. Personally, I’m on a very lazy vacation, looking out the window of a house on an island in Casco Bay, an hour-long ferry ride from Portland, Maine. There is not a lot to do here, and I’ve been diligently not doing it.

When I raise my gaze to the larger world, though, I see that the first trillionaire is a man who has successfully scammed the public and is responsible for third-world deaths that may eventually run into the millions. Our president just staged a gladiator fight on the White House lawn to celebrate his 80th birthday. The US openly committed a war crime this week. The House Republican majority is gearing up to pay for Trump’s wars and tax cuts and personal excesses by cutting Social Security and Medicare. And the government is shutting down its ocean sensors, because who needs to know about the effects of global warming anyway? You don’t have to deny the evidence if you never collect it to begin with.

Yesterday the US and Iran announced a partial agreement to extend the ceasefire and open the Strait of Hormuz. That, I suppose, is good news, if it holds — which it may not. But at best, it gets us back to where we were before we launched our attack, and raises the question: What was that all about?

I can’t say that staring at the water in Maine has given me any special insight into the local politics, but I did some reading this week to figure out what I think of Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate to run against Senator Susan Collins. The corporate press has been full of stories about his personal life and aspects of his past that muddy the squeaky-clean image Democrats would like to project as we run against the most corrupt administration in American history. The press has also told us virtually nothing about Platner’s message or why it appeals to Mainers.

So I poked into that and found that a lot of insightful articles have been written elsewhere if you look for them. I feel much more positive about Platner now, and I don’t think Democrats are making the same kind of deal with the Devil that Republicans have made in supporting people like Ken Paxton and Donald Trump. That’s the topic of the featured post, which should be out shortly.

The rest of the news gets covered in the weekly summary, which runs a little long this week. I hope to get it out before noon, because I have to catch a ferry back to the mainland. But before I go work on those posts, I want to offer this observation: The beauty of the world is still out there. To the extent your circumstances allow, take some time now and then to appreciate it.

This week, Senate Republicans left town for the Memorial Day recess without passing the reconciliation bill they’ve been drafting ever since Democrats refused to fund ICE without reforms. (Reconciliation is a process that circumvents a Senate filibuster, and so would allow Republicans to fund a number of programs on a pure party-line vote.) This bill touches on a number of controversial issues beyond ICE, but what derailed the process was Trump’s corrupt “anti-weaponization” fund to funnel taxpayer money to the violent criminals who invaded the Capitol on January 6.

At the same time, the House looks ready to pass a war-powers resolution calling for limits on the Iran War. Speaker Johnson had to take the bill off the floor to stop it.

Those two actions, together with some very public grousing about the cost of Trump’s gilded ballroom, suggests that (as the midterms approach and the regime makes ever-more-outrageous demands) Trump is losing his ability to dominate Congress.

Now, I hesitate to raise this idea, because we’ve lived through 10 years of speculation that Trump had finally gone too far, and his Republican support was about to crack. But it hasn’t. Is this time different?

That’s the subject of this week’s featured post, which should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will look at the rumors of a deal with Iran, Barney Frank, Tulsi Gabbard’s resignation, the progress of the Ukraine War, the Democratic “autopsy” of 2024, and a few other things. It should be out a little after noon.

With the help of the courts, Republicans have won the redistricting wars. The pro-Democratic Virginia redistricting has been thrown out, and the Supreme Court has given southern states the go-ahead to get rid of all their non-White congresspeople — which they are racing to take advantage of.

It probably won’t save Mike Johnson’s Republican majority in the fall, but it will turn a big Democratic popular-vote victory into a small Democratic House majority.

Other than that, everything that was happening last week is still happening: Trump still isn’t admitting his strategic blunder in Iran, so the price of gasoline keeps rising. The climate change catastrophe keeps creeping closer. Trump’s popularity keeps falling, but the stock market keeps rising for some reason I can’t fathom. Ukraine continues to seize the initiative from Russia, but Putin also can never admit that he made a mistake, so the killing will continue. The hantavirus scare continues.

So this seemed like a good week to do a book review: War and Power by Phillips O’Brien. It focuses on two questions: Why do analysts keep making horribly wrong predictions about how wars will turn out? (Kyiv was supposed to fall in a few days, remember.) And what does a proper understanding of war say about any possible conflict between China and the US, maybe over Taiwan?

The review should be out maybe around 10 EDT, and the weekly summary around noon.

For the last couple of days, the news has been dominated by the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner Saturday night. But I’m going to just note that event without dwelling on it, because I think we all understand it. And since the shooter failed to get off a shot at the President or any other major official, his attack shouldn’t have any lasting consequences.

More significant was the election result in Virginia, where Democrats passed a redistricting map that is expected to net them four House seats in the fall election. This makes the recent gerrymandering tally just about even, or maybe gives Democrats a small advantage. The entire redistricting battle marks a major change in Democratic strategy, which used to revolve around trying to maintain good-government norms even as Republicans changed the rules around them. So this will be the focus of the first featured post, “Where the Gerrymandering Battle Stands After Virginia”, which should be out shortly.

Something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while is the process for refugees to seek asylum in the US, which has been broken for some while. This has given Trump an opening to fix the problem by breaking the rule of law, in a two-wrongs-should-make-a-right manner. Democrats wind up in a complicated position, because the previous status quo is indefensible, but dictatorship is not the right answer.

This week an appeals court rejected Trump’s asylum-limiting executive order. Ultimately, the Supreme Court will have to decide this issue, but the appellate decision gives me a hook to raise the topic. So the second featured post will discuss asylum, starting with the Holocaust-based reasons our asylum laws exist. That should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.

Finally, the weekly summary will note the WHC dinner shooting, summarize the lack of progress in the Iran War, list a few of the other court cases the Trump regime has lost recently, and cover a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon, but it may slip.