Mortal Kombat: Press Secretary vs North Korea Edition - This Week In Politics 6/30/19
In the blood sport of politics, it’s been a big week. Here’s my rundown to help you stay informed, with a bit of humor to help you stay entertained:
[Please excuse any discrepancies in formatting - we’ll work those out over time. Squarespace ain’t as easy as they tell you on those podcasts, man]
Mortal Kombat: Press Secretary vs North Korea Edition
I don’t… I don’t exactly know what in the hell this is (you may apply this statement to just about everything coming out of the White House, at will). Here’s my best try at explaining the cluster**** in North Korea right now.
Pres. Trump made a third visit to the notorious ‘Hermit Kingdom’. The meeting followed his last summit held in Vietnam, which Trump billed as X but resulted in no deal, with the North Koreans abruptly pulling out. The North Koreans resumed missile launch testing in May.
Trump’s new press secretary Stephanie Grisham apparently came to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and she was ALL OUT OF BUBBLEGUM.
While bodying multiple North Korean security guards, apparently she was shouting “Go! Go!” and trying to clear a path for American press to capture the historic meeting between Trump and Kim Jong-Un. According to some on Twitter the situation devolved into an “all out brawl” involving Secret Service with blows being thrown.
This is exactly as strange as it sounds.
Supreme Court Cases
You can say we’re Fuct. It’s legal now.
HYPE - the Supreme Court (SC) ruled on several high-profile cases this week!
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Kicking things off, the SC ruled that it is legal to trademark certain naughty words, in a case involving skateboard brand FUCT. This is a huge win for them and, er, any future companies founded by teenagers, presumably. But it’s a loss for us because next time we try to describe the state of politics, some of the best words may be copyright protected.
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In a HUGE win for the left, the SC also threw out the appeal on the citizenship question that the administration had been trying to get included in the 2020 census.
There’s a TON of backstory on this one, so here’s my summary in one paragraph. Republican strategists determined that if fewer minorities answered the census, Democrats would lose some power/representation. Thus they planned to include a question asking if the census-taker was a citizen, to scare certain demographics away from answering. They lied to the SC that there was no racial motivation to the effort, then a dead GOP strategist’s laptop (yes, actually) turned in by his daughter revealed that in fact the entire reason for the citizenship question push was, in fact, to suppress racial turnout. The Administration was caught in their lie and SC Justice Roberts upheld the decision from a Federal judge that the GOP must come back with a better argument on their case, or no dice.
A juicy quote from the NYT story (Robert’s quote at the end is the judicial equivalent of a “You played yourself” meme)
In sworn testimony before Congress, Mr. Ross said he had decided to add the question “solely” in response to a Justice Department request in December 2017 for data to help it enforce the Voting Rights Act, or the V.R.A. Three federal trial judges have ruled that the evidence in the record demonstrated that Mr. Ross was not being truthful.
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“Altogether,” the chief justice wrote, “the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the secretary gave for his decision.”
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Last case: GERRYMANDERING. This was the big kahuna case of the season. And unfortunately, in a win for absolutely no one, the SC ruled that it wasn’t federal courts’ responsibility to interfere with legislative gerrymandering. This was passed by a 5-4 vote on party lines, with Republican justices passing it and Liberal justices dissenting. This is potentially the most harmful Supreme Court ruling since Citizens United, in terms of degrading the quality, fairness and safety of our democracy. It allows state legislatures to gerrymander at will, without a federal check-and-balance.
Gerrymandering is the process whereby a legislative majority can re-draw voting districts, using sophisticated AI algorithms, to tilt elections in their favor based on neighborhood demographics. The practice results in politicians selecting their voters, rather than the other way around.
There is copious research available that shows Republicans have benefited overwhelmingly more than Democrats from gerrymandering in recent history. However, it is a corrupt practice used by both parties and its existence disenfranchises all Americans regardless of party.
SC Justice Kagan’s kicked the argument up to Savage when she wrote a dissenting opinion, which argues against the ruling of the Republican majority on the Court, including this:
The majority’s idea instead seems to be that if we have lived with partisan gerrymanders so long, we will survive.
That complacency has no cause. Yes, partisan gerrymandering goes back to the Republic’s earliest days. (As does vociferous opposition to it.) But big data and modern technology—of just the kind that the mapmakers in North Carolina and Maryland used—make today’s gerrymandering altogether different from the crude linedrawing of the past. … The effect is to make gerrymanders far more effective and durable than before, insulating politicians against all but the most titanic shifts in the political tides. These are not your grandfather’s—let alone the Framers’—gerrymanders.
What was possible with paper and pen—or even with Windows 95—doesn’t hold a candle (or an LED bulb?) to what will become possible with developments like machine learning. And someplace along this road, “we the people” become sovereign no longer...
So the only way to understand the majority’s opinion is as follows: In the face of grievous harm to democratic governance and flagrant infringements on individuals’ rights—in the face of escalating partisan manipulation whose compatibility with this Nation’s values and law no one defends—the majority declines to provide any remedy. For the first time in this Nation’s history, the majority declares that it can do nothing about an acknowledged constitutional violation because it has searched high and low and cannot find a workable legal standard to apply…
…. Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections. With respect but deep sadness, I dissent.
Damn. Tell’em, Justice Kagan. Sometimes it do be like that.
Trump Lawyers Take An ‘L’ While Attempting to Deprive Detained Immigrants of Safe and Sanitary Conditions
Lawyer Arguing To Worsen Migrant Conditions
So here’s a not-fun fact - the number of immigrants that have died in under Trump’s administration has risen to 24. Lest you think, hey, look, these things are bound to happen - the number that died under the Obama administration is 0.
The Immigration Detention Centers run by the Administration (or in some cases, corrupt private contractors) are in the spotlight at the moment, and what’s being revealed is not good. Crowding, disease, and lack of food, medicine, and proper childcare are all rampant.
The administration has fought efforts to provide detained immigrants with sanitary products and care - but watch this Trump lawyer get absolutely destroyed by judges as she argues that immigrant children don’t deserve toothbrushes, soap or a safe place to sleep.
AOC and the GOP Go to War Over Oxford Dictionary
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