Liberals had a very bad week at the Supreme Court last week. There's no denying it. Almost all of the final decisions of the year went against them, and that was before the news of Justice Anthony Kennedy's impending retirement hit Washington like a bombshell. Fears that President Donald Trump will pick an ultra-conservative to replace him mean that bedrock decisions such as Roe v. Wade are now hanging in the balance. Democrats are vowing to fight hard against the next justice's confirmation, but this is quite likely a fight they are going to lose.

Mitch McConnell's naked hypocrisy is on full display in the middle of this fight. McConnell once swore fealty to the notion that the voters should weigh in on such an important manner (when Obama was in the Oval Office), but now he's singing a different tune, swearing he will act so hastily that the voters will not be able to weigh in on the matter. And since he abolished the filibuster for Supreme Court justices, the Republicans could indeed confirm someone before November -- or, at the very least, before January (even if the Democrats pull off a miracle and take back control of the Senate, the new Congress won't be seated until after the first of the year, leaving the lame duck Senate two final months to act).

Continue Reading »

There will be no new column today, sorry. I'm taking the day off and will instead devote my writing time to answering some recent comments, on which I have admittedly fallen woefully behind, of late.

Also, there will be no new column next Thursday, as I have to drive a friend to a medical appointment far from home. However, next Wednesday is Independence Day, so hopefully I'll be able to post a new column for the Fourth, in part to make up for the lack of Thursday columns.

If I had written today, it would have basically been a message to those of a religious bent to pray for the continued health of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and to likewise pray that at least one Republican senator (Susan Collins? Lisa Murkowski? With John McCain being incapable of traveling to Washington to cast a vote, it would only take one defection...) gets worried enough about the future of Roe v. Wade to block confirmation through both the midterms and the lame-duck period. Those of the Catholic persuasion might want to direct their prayers to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. Sigh.

So anyway, since we're getting all religious, I'll end by saying mea culpa for there being no new column today, and mea culpa maxima for not attending to the comments before now.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

I realize there is bigger news from the Supreme Court today, but since I wrote about them yesterday I'm not going to address Anthony Kennedy's retirement yet. Instead, I'd like to focus today on the latest round of primary election results, specifically from New York, Maryland, and Colorado. Because some big news was made within the Democratic Party last night.

New York's 14th congressional district generated the biggest news, as a 28-year-old newcomer beat a longtime Democratic Party bigwig in a stunning primary upset. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was outspent by incumbent Joe Crowley something like 17-to-1, but she still beat him by a comfortable margin. The district is majority-minority, so perhaps it was merely a matter of time before a person of color replaced an older white male, but nobody really expected it to happen this time around, least of all Crowley. He was fourth in line in the House Democratic leadership, and was even being talked about as a possible replacement for Nancy Pelosi, should she fail to get enough support to become speaker again.

Continue Reading »

Gerald R. Ford once famously pointed out that the practical definition of what constituted grounds for impeaching a president (since it is only vaguely defined in the Constitution itself) consisted of whatever a majority of the House of Representatives decided were valid grounds for impeachment (Ford, on the House floor, before he became Nixon's vice president: "The only honest answer is that an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history"). Likewise, it almost appears self-evident that defining what is constitutional and what is not can be similarly reduced to whatever a majority of the Supreme Court decides is constitutional, at the present time. Dred Scott was constitutional -- right up until it wasn't -- because a Supreme Court had determined it was. It took a shift of opinion on the highest court to reverse this. Again, this should all be pretty obvious to even the most causal observer of American history. Which is why, in fact, the conservative movement has focused so intently on the judicial branch for the past three decades and more. This began at the height of the anti-abortion movement during Ronald Reagan's time in office, and it continues today on the right side of the spectrum. But for some unfathomable reason, liberals have never matched this level of political fervor about judicial appointments. But now the stakes are higher than ever.

Continue Reading »

President Trump probably thought that a decisive move from him would end all the fuss over his "zero tolerance" policy on immigration. He signed an executive order, therefore the problem would thus go away. But this isn't how things work in the real world, where the fallout is going to continue for the foreseeable future. There will be two major arenas where this is going to play out: in the courtroom, and on the political stage.

Continue Reading »

For a change, we're not going to have much to say in this introduction. The reason is that the talking points section is taken up by a lengthy rant this week, because it seemed timely to offer one up. It is a rare week of the Trump presidency where there is really only one overriding issue in the political world to comment on, but this was indeed that kind of week.

Continue Reading »

Well, we're almost to the end of the glorious Republican Immigration Reform Week. That was the original plan, at any rate -- Paul Ryan's House was supposed to pass an immigration reform bill containing all four pillars of Trump's stated immigration goals, and then the bill would then be sent over to the Senate, where Democrats would block it. This was supposed to give political cover for House Republicans on the midterm campaign trail, allowing them to claim "We tried to fix the problem!" all the while knowing that the entire thing was nothing short of a pointless political stunt.

Continue Reading »

Today, Donald Trump signed an executive order to end his own policy of forcing the separation of children from families seeking asylum in America, because his initial position had become so untenable (indeed, downright unbelievable) that his political allies were fleeing like rats from a sinking ship. By this afternoon, there were plenty of other metaphors flying fast and thick: Trump blinked; he waved the white flag; he surrendered; he caved; he backed down; he threw in the towel; he bent to reality. Whichever you choose, the underlying reality is the same: President Donald Trump, in a rare occurrence, was forced today to take an action that proves both he and his aides have been flat-out lying to the American public for days on end. There's just no other way to look at it, and in fact it may be unprecedented for Trump. He's been telling anyone who would listen that he alone could not do anything, and that his hands were tied -- Congress would need to act. Now he has proved himself wrong on that front. He acted, which means he could have done so at any point if he truly had cared about the issue at all. What forced him to act was the overwhelmingly negative and relentless coverage he was receiving in the media, and the flight of his allies in the Republican Party. Today, this all became too much for Trump, so he did what he could have done all along, thus putting the lie to his voluminous statements to the contrary.

Continue Reading »

I would sincerely love to be a fly on the wall at tonight's summit meeting between President Donald Trump and the House Republicans. By the time you read this, the meeting will likely either be underway or already over, so it remains to be seen how much of what goes on will leak out. Indeed, one hopes for a surreptitious recording to be made public, but one doesn't always get what one hopes for (alas!). But no matter how many of the details leak, I'd be willing to bet that the meeting will be described as "a spirited discussion" by someone in attendance. The phrase will likely become unavoidable, really.

Trump is, once again, living in his own fantasy world. The Republicans are about to explain political reality to him. This likely won't go over very well, since Trump trusts his own instincts above all, and his instincts so far are to continue to redouble his efforts rather than change course in any way. But then again he doesn't have to worry about getting re-elected in four and a half months -- while everyone else in the meeting does.

The "zero tolerance" policy that Jeff Sessions announced -- and that Trump could change at any time he chooses -- is not playing too well in Peoria, to put it mildly. The firestorm surrounding the policy of separating children (down to toddler age) from their parents is raging, and it shows no signs of abating any time soon. It's a wonder that I haven't yet heard a right-wing conspiracy about how Donald Trump is secretly a Democrat, since he really would have had to try pretty hard to come up with an issue that would be more likely to motivate Democratic voters in the midterms. Trump is making life very hard for Republican candidates right now, and the House members (who all have to get elected every two years) are about to explain this fact to him. Or try to, at any rate.

Continue Reading »

Senator Dianne Feinstein has introduced a bill in the Senate which would end Donald Trump's cruel policy of separating children from their parents at the border. You might not have heard of this bill, which is in itself a messaging failure of both Feinstein and the rest of the Democrats. Feinstein did not appear on any of the Sunday political shows (at least, that I am aware of), and neither most of the media nor her fellow Democrats who did appear yesterday seem to have been aware of Feinstein's bill. The bill is S.3036, or the "Keep Families Together Act." As of this writing, all the Democrats in the Senate have signed on as cosponsors, but not a single Republican has yet done so.

On Friday, during Trump's impromptu news conference on the front lawn of the White House (which began with a Fox News exclusive interview, naturally), Trump repeated the lie he's been telling frequently: that somehow the Democrats are responsible for his own policy. This is a policy which Attorney General Jeff Sessions used to brag about not so long ago (before all those heartbreaking photos were splashed across the media), but now rather than taking ownership of Trump's own policy, Trump is trying to lay it all at the Democrats' feet. In doing so, he threw down a gauntlet of sorts, saying if Congress did pass a bill specifically banning the child removal policy (Trump's own policy, once again, that he could overturn with one phone call to Sessions), that Trump was ready to sign it on the spot.

Feinstein, to her credit, is taking Trump up on his offer. Her standalone bill only deals with child removal, and not all the rest of the immigration debate. It merely overturns Trump's child removal policy, no more and no less. Some Democrats who did appear yesterday morning also spoke of an effort in the House to put forward a similar bill, specifically targeted at overturning this Draconian policy, so perhaps a companion bill will appear in the House in the next few days. But neither one of these bills is going to move unless people know about them. Democrats have to get the word out, and fast.

Continue Reading »