Last Call For You Keep Me Runnin'

As Matt Flegenheimer at the NY Times points out, Democrats in 2019 are learning what Republicans figured out in 2015: there's almost zero downside for a White House run you know you're going to lose.

There is no discernible mass groundswell for an Eric Swalwell presidential campaign. 

The case against: He is a 38-year-old California congressman of little legislative distinction. He would appear to have minimal running room in a deep and accomplished Democratic field expected to grow to 20 or so — large enough to fill two baseball starting lineups, with another contender or two left to heckle from the dugout. 

The case for: Why not? 

“We don’t have time for vanity things,” Mr. Swalwell insisted in an interview this past week, the morning after he announced his candidacy on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” pledging to anchor his bid in a call for greater gun control. “We’re doing big things.” 

That remains to be seen. But at the very least, if recent history is a guide, a run is likely to yield better things, perpetuating the victory-in-defeat incentive structure endemic to modern presidential politics. 

Today’s primaries tend to produce one nominee but many winners. Beyond the long-shot candidates effectively auditioning for cabinet positions or building a profile (and donor base) for future races, there are prospective books to sell and television contracts to sign, boards to join and paid speeches to paid-speak. Any setback is temporary, any embarrassment surmountable.

“There’s just absolutely no downside and only upside,” Antonia Ferrier, a longtime Republican strategist and former senior aide to Senator Mitch McConnell, said of quixotic presidential runs. “It is an industry of self-promotion. What better way to self-promote than run for president?”

The downside, as America found out 29 months ago, is that you might actually win when you have no business running a hot dog stand, let alone a country.

Sure hope our side actually plays to win instead of playing to lose.

A Sternly Worded Letter

House Democrats are giving Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin until April 23 to turn over Trump's tax returns or...well, they'll probably write him another letter.

House Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.) on Saturday sent a two-page letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig rebuffing Mnuchin’s statement earlier this week that Treasury would miss House Democrats’ initial April 10 deadline for the returns.

Mnuchin’s concerns “lack merit,” Neal wrote.

Neal’s latest letter sets the stage for a further escalation in the conflict between Congress and the White House, as legal experts have suggested that an outright denial of their request by Mnuchin could be followed by subpoenas or a lawsuit in federal court. Mnuchin so far has only postponed responding to Democrats’ request and said he would confer with the Justice Department, but not yet rejected it.

“Please know that, if you fail to comply, your failure will be interpreted as a denial of my request,” Neal’s letter states.

Earlier this month, Neal wrote the IRS asking for six years of the president’s personal and business tax returns, which Trump has refused to release breaking decades of precedent for candidates for the White House. In his letter, Neal argues that the IRS has an “unambiguous legal obligation" to turn over the returns under section 6103 of the tax code, which states that the treasury secretary “shall furnish” a request from the congressional committees with tax oversight.

Congressional Republicans and Trump’s personal attorney, William S. Consovoy, have argued Democrats’ request risks weaponizing the IRS for partisan political gain, with Consovoy calling it a “gross abuse of power.” Mnuchin’s letter earlier this week said Neal’s request “raises serious issues concerning the constitutional scope of congressional investigative authority.”

Mnuchin revealed in congressional testimony that White House lawyers consulted with Treasury on Trump's tax returns.

“It is not the proper function of the IRS, Treasury, or Justice to question or second guess the motivations of the committee,” Neal writes in his letter. “Judicial precedent commands that none of the concerns raised can legitimately be used to deny the committee’s request.”

Let's get one thing straight right now: all the analysis about Stephen Mnuchin going to jail for violating the law is never, ever going to happen. When this nonsense plays out in ten days, we'll get to the part where Trump finds a federal judge or two to throw out an injunction on anything that might happen to Mnuchin while this goes to SCOTUS as slowly as possible.

This will be tied up in the courts until at least 2021, if not years later.

We will not see Trump's tax returns.

We're going to have to take care of Trump ourselves.

 

Number Five For Bibi, Number Two For Donny

Roger Cohen's warning for Democrats is simple: with Benjamin Netanyahu winning a fifth term this week while under criminal indictment for bribery and corruption showing Donald Trump the way, the Democrats will lose next November unless something fundamental changes in America within the next 18 months.

It was a referendum on him and he nailed it. Nobody can take that away from Benjamin Netanyahu. This summer, in his fifth term, he will surpass David Ben-Gurion as the longest-serving Israeli prime minister. Enough said.

His victory contains a warning for any Democrat still imagining that the 2020 election will bring an easy victory over Donald Trump. The Netanyahu playbook will be President Trump’s next year. Gather nationalist and religious voters in your camp, add in a strong economy, dose with fear, sprinkle with strongman appeal, inject a dash of racism and victory is yours — whatever indictments are looming.

It’s not that this could happen. It will happen, absent some decisive factor to upend the logic of it. Netanyahu is savvier than Trump, but they share a shrewd assessment of how to control and manipulate the politics of spectacle, as well as a fierce determination to stay out of jail. They campaign ugly.

Exactly a century ago, Ben-Gurion said, “Everyone sees the difficulty of relations between Jews and Arabs, but not everyone sees there is no solution to that question.” Netanyahu’s solution is by now clear. He is a true believer in Greater Israel and will not give up one inch of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. There will be no Palestinian state on his watch. Period.

Many Israelis, weary of the chimera of a two-state peace, thank him for that — as they thank him for a strong economy, Trump’s support and a sense of stability. Netanyahu is a formidable politician adept in using hate and fear, the strongest currency in contemporary politics.

His victory was personal but it was also structural. Israel now has a structural majority of the right. This will almost certainly enable Netanyahu to form a right-wing government, even though his Likud party appeared tied with the Blue and White party of his upstart challenger, Benny Gantz, each winning 35 seats.

The Gantz performance was remarkable. It demonstrated the deep disquiet of liberal Israel over Netanyahu the King. But in the end Gantz took more votes from the left — the Labor Party and Meretz — than from the right. As Avi Scharf, editor of the English edition of the liberal daily Haaretz, put it to me, “Israel’s founding left is totally obliterated.”

Obliteration is absolutely the fate of the American left in less than two years unless we get our shit together and find a way to stop Trump.  The two-state solution in Israel is dead.  Palestinian genocide is nearly guaranteed as tanks will roll into Gaza and the Golan Heights within months, if not weeks. America will do nothing until the survivors are forced to accept the peace of the grave at gunpoint.

And then our adventure down that road will begin in earnest unless Trump is stopped.

At roundtable in Texas, President Trump laments that US troops at the border can't get "a little rough," because "everybody would go crazy ... can’t act like they would normally act -- or like, let’s say, another military from another country would act." pic.twitter.com/q1TPW24Csa

— NBC News (@NBCNews) April 10, 2019

Very soon they will be able to "act" in the manner Trump wants them to act.  And then America's long history of genocide against the powerless will continue in an ocean of blood.

Last Call For Trump Cards, Con't

And finally we end the week with Donald Trump being caught in what should be yet another scandal large enough to force his immediate resignation, but that America is so broken and lawless now that it's just "Friday".

President Donald Trump told Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan he would grant McAleenan a pardon if he were sent to jail for having border agents block asylum seekers from entering the US in defiance of US law, senior administration officials tell CNN.

Trump reportedly made the comment during a visit to the border at Calexico, California, a week ago. It was not clear if the comment was a joke.

Two officials briefed on the exchange say the President told McAleenan, since named the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, that he "would pardon him if he ever went to jail for denying US entry to migrants," as one of the officials paraphrased.

The White House referred CNN to the Department of Homeland Security. A DHS spokesman told CNN, "At no time has the President indicated, asked, directed or pressured the Acting Secretary to do anything illegal. Nor would the Acting Secretary take actions that are not in accordance with our responsibility to enforce the law."

Donald Trump is telling people he will pardon them if they break the law in his service.

Not one goddamn person who could do anything about it cares.

Nobody cares, least of all the Senate Republicans who should be demanding that Trump step down, because the simple fact of the matter is they've figured out that they can do whatever they want and nobody in this country will lift a finger to stop them.

We should have been in the streets years ago.

We should have been organizing crippling national strikes years ago.

It never should have gotten this far.  They're getting away with it because every day we let them.

Sudan got rid of their dictator this week after 30 years.

But hey, the P'Zone is back at Pizza Hut, so America's fine.

Immigration Nation, Con't

The Trump regime is turning to Bill Barr on not only on burying the Mueller report, but Trump's plan to end all immigration in the US as well by all but removing judges from the immigration process and giving summary judgment power on asylum cases to the White House.

Attorney General William Barr is making his first major moves on immigration policy since his confirmation, setting up big changes for the courts that decide whether immigrants will stay in the U.S. or be deported. 

The Justice Department is on the verge of issuing rule changes that would make it easier for a handful of appellate immigration judges to declare their rulings binding on the entire immigration system, The Chronicle has learned. The changes could also expand the use of single-judge, cursory decisions at the appellate level — all at the same time as a hiring spree that could reshape the court. 

The Trump administration bills the moves as efficiency measures to help fix a delay-plagued immigration court system, at a time it is being inundated by asylum seekers at the southern border. Asylum cases can take years to complete, even those that are relatively straightforward. 

But advocates for immigrants and attorneys who work in the system fear the efficiency tools could be used to dramatically reshape immigration law to fit President Trump’s political goals.

Trump has repeatedly railed against the immigration court system and suggested doing away with it entirely. 

“Congress has to ... get rid of the whole asylum system because it doesn’t work,” Trump said this month. “And frankly, we should get rid of judges. You can’t have a court case every time somebody steps their foot on our ground.”

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions frequently cited the immigration-case backlog as dire and made reducing it a central focus of his tenure, though it grew by more than 100,000 cases in that time to its current total of more than 800,000. Recently ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen complained that migrants with weak asylum cases were clogging the system, slowing immigration judges from handling legitimate claims. 

Last week, the Justice Department revived a proposed regulation originally initiated during the George W. Bush administration to allow the 21-judge appeals court system that hears immigration cases more latitude to issue cursory opinions without explanation.  

It would also allow the court to set precedents with only a small minority of appeals judges participating, which could sharply accelerate the administration’s ability to make changes to immigration law that wouldn’t require congressional action. 

The proposed regulation has been sent to the White House for review before being made final, according to a government database. The Justice Department declined to comment other than to confirm that it hopes to finalize the rule this year.

The coming mass deportation regime won't end with pending asylum cases either.  ICE will be coming for immigrants already here.

And soon.

StupidiNews!

• Four Republican senators have come out against Donald Trump's nomination of Herman Cain to the Federal Reserve, meaning his confirmation is all but dead and Cain is expected to withdraw.
• Texas is refusing a House Oversight Committee letter to hand over information on the state's attempts to purge millions from voter rolls in 2016, saying it reserves to right to deny a public information request.
• House Democrats plan to introduce a $2 trillion infrastructure bill, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer saying they will meet with the White House.
• Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has been ousted from power and arrested by the country's army as a military coup deposed him on Thursday, a transitional council will rule for the next two years.
• Disney's new streaming service, Disney+, will launch November 12 for $6.99 a month with movies and new shows set in the Star Wars and Marvel universes as well as Fox's entire Simpsons library.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

The more we learn about the Trump regime's mass deportation scheme, the more it becomes clear that Trump is using the autocrat playbook, trying to deliberately create a situation so chaotic and broken that he believes the country will turn to him in order to save America.  

The first step was his emergency declaration, followed by the disaster situation on the border right now with DHS, ICE and the Border Patrol in total disarray and tens of thousands trying to cross the southern border.

Now we see that the Trump regime wanted to create chaos inside the US, with a plan to deliberately release ICE detainees onto the streets of "sanctuary cities" in order to weaken Democratic opposition in urban areas.

White House officials have tried to pressure U.S. immigration authorities to release detainees onto the streets of “sanctuary cities” to retaliate against President Trump’s political adversaries, according to Department of Homeland Security officials and email messages reviewed by The Washington Post.

Trump administration officials have proposed transporting detained immigrants to sanctuary cities at least twice in the past six months — once in November, as a migrant caravan approached the U.S. southern border, and again in February, amid a standoff with Democrats over funding for Trump’s border wall.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s district in San Francisco was among those the White House wanted to target, according to DHS officials. The administration also considered releasing detainees in other Democratic strongholds.

White House officials first broached the plan in a Nov. 16 email, asking officials at several agencies whether members of the caravan could be arrested at the border and then bused “to small- and mid-sized sanctuary cities,” places where local authorities have refused to hand over illegal immigrants for deportation.

The White House told U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that the plan was intended to alleviate a shortage of jail space but also served to send a message to Democrats. The attempt at political retribution raised alarm within ICE, with a top official responding that it was rife with budgetary and liability concerns, and noting that “there are PR risks as well.”

After the White House pressed again in February, ICE’s legal department rejected the idea as inappropriate and rebuffed the administration.

A White House official and a spokesman for DHS sent nearly identical statements to The Post on Thursday, indicating that the proposal is no longer under consideration.

“This was just a suggestion that was floated and rejected, which ended any further discussion,” the White House statement said.

Sure, it was just a proposal.  And now all the officials that rebuffed that proposal are gone, having been summarily fired by Trump in the last week, with the agencies in question now run by "acting" heads loyal to Trump and Trump alone. 

I'm sure it's a total coincidence.

The First Rule Of Trump Club

The first rule of keeping your creepy and dangerous Trump cult secret in DC is to talk to Politico about how cool Trump club is, I guess.

The club, an informal gathering that provides solidarity and networking opportunities in a hostile Washington, is open to what it calls “the Team” — Trump administration appointees as well as alumni of the campaign, transition and inaugural committee. Members wear a lapel pin fashioned after the butt end of a .45 caliber bullet casing and attend semi-regular gatherings that often feature remarks by better-known Trump-world figures such as Brad Parscale, Corey Lewandowski and Scaramucci.

Its operations, described here for the first time, offer insight into how the anonymous foot soldiers of Trump’s Washington have organized their social lives: discreetly, with an eye toward exclusivity and the aspirational lifestyle that has always marked the Trump brand.

Not quite a secret society, the club nonetheless goes to some lengths to fly under the radar: Public hints of its existence are scarce, and the locations of its events are withheld from attendees until they RSVP, all the better to evade the notice of pesky activists and nosy reporters. “In this political climate, there’s a lot of people who would not have pure intentions of coming to network,” explained a former campaign staffer familiar with the club. “They may be trying to infiltrate.”

This is totally normal behavior for people old enough to have drivers' licenses.

While it is common for veterans of presidential campaigns and administrations to form alumni groups, the 45 Club has taken on an outsized role as a refuge for junior operatives and appointees who have few connections in the capital. Barack Obama’s young staffers were the toast of Washington, and George W. Bush rode into town with a clubby, multi-generational political network that was heavy on the GOP establishment. But, in a reflection of his outsider campaign, Trump’s hires often came from outside the traditional feeding grounds of Republican politics. And in a city that has largely shunned them — dating app profiles here often declare an unwillingness to meet Trump’s supporters, let alone his aides — Trump’s young aides have formed an insular social scene.

“When you’ve kept the Washington Illuminati at a distance, I think you’re more likely to form groups of your own,” explained one club member.

Of course, because this is the Trump administration, there has been infighting: The 45 Club has been the subject of internecine sniping over charges that it is run by hangers-on bent on exploiting their tenuous connections to the president.

“They’re trying to create an exclusive club because they’ve been banned from every other exclusive club in D.C.,” sniped one former campaign staffer.

“Ironically enough, the two guys who started it were never on the campaign, never in the administration,” lamented Kevin Chmielewski, a member of the campaign’s advance team who went on to serve at the Environmental Protection Agency. “We were all kind of pissed about it, because it’s like, ‘Who are you to do that?’”

I can understand that when everyone in DC hates you because Trump is human filth, and that outside their little White House fiefdom, Trump people are rightfully shunned, that you would want your little clubhouse so you can commiserate in how awful the world is for white guys.

But these guys are all nursing a grudge against the country just like their boss, and I'll be damned if these guys don't have visions of being Trump's army to take over DC.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

So it turns out that Russian hackers hit voter registration systems in all 50 states during the 2016 campaign and not just the 21 states previously disclosed.  Surprise!

A joint intelligence bulletin (JIB) has been issued by the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation to state and local authorities regarding Russian hacking activities during the 2016 presidential election. While the bulletin contains no new technical information, it is the first official report to confirm that the Russian reconnaissance and hacking efforts in advance of the election went well beyond the 21 states confirmed in previous reports.

As reported by the intelligence newsletter OODA Loop, the JIB stated that, while the FBI and DHS "previously observed suspicious or malicious cyber activity against government networks in 21 states that we assessed was a Russian campaign seeking vulnerabilities and access to election infrastructure," new information obtained by the agencies "indicates that Russian government cyber actors engaged in research on—as well as direct visits to—election websites and networks in the majority of US states." While not providing specific details, the bulletin continued, "The FBI and DHS assess that Russian government cyber actors probably conducted research and reconnaissance against all US states’ election networks leading up to the 2016 Presidential elections."

DHS-FBI JIBs are unclassified documents, but they're usually marked "FOUO" (for official use only) and are shared through the DHS' state and major metropolitan Fusion Centers with state and local authorities. The details within the report are mostly well-known. "The information contained in this bulletin is consistent with what we have said publicly and what we have briefed to election officials on multiple occasions," a DHS spokesperson told Ars. "We assume the Russian government researched and in some cases targeted election infrastructure in all 50 states in an attempt to sow discord and influence the 2016 election."

In fact, DHS Assistant Secretary Jeanette Manfra told the Senate Homeland Security Committee in April of 2018 that Russia had likely at least performed reconnaissance on election infrastructure in all 50 states. The bulletin raises the confidence in that estimate, however, saying:

Russian cyber actors in the summer of 2016 conducted online research and reconnaissance to identify vulnerable databases, usernames, and passwords in webpages of a broader number of state and local websites than previously identified, bringing the number of states known to be researched by Russian actors to greater than 40. Despite gaps in our data where some states appear to be untouched by Russian activities, we have moderate confidence that Russian actors likely conducted at least reconnaissance against all US states based on the methodical nature of their research. This newly available information corroborates our previous assessment and enhances our understanding of the scale and scope of Russian operations to understand and exploit state and local election networks.

Please keep in mind the Trump regime has done everything possible to weaken US defenses against Russian hacking, including shutting down defense efforts at both the Pentagon and in the White House since taking office.

And if you don't think current Russian efforts to hack state voter registration rolls in order to help Trump purge Democrats aren't already underway right now, you've not been paying attention.

And speaking of Russian efforts to undermine the 2016 election, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange finally got tossed from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London into the waiting arms of UK police and Justice Department espionage charges.

The dramatic expulsion follows a year of ratcheting tension between Assange and his Ecuadorian hosts, culminating in Wikileaks publicizing a leak of hundreds of thousands of hacked emails mysteriously stolen from the inboxes of Ecuador’s president and first lady. It was this last move that finally set Ecuador’s government firmly against Assange, who was by then already being treated less like a political refugee than an inmate—albeit one who was free to leave at any time.

“The patience of Ecuador has reached its limit on the behavior of Mr. Assange,” said Ecuador’s president Lenín Moreno on Thursday.
Assange, who has an outstanding warrant for jumping bail in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, was taken into custody after officers were invited inside by embassy officials. It’s a relatively minor charge, but Assange’s imminent freedom is far from assured.

British police confirmed a few hours after the initial arrest that Assange was arrested for a second time on behalf of U.S. authorities on an extradition warrant. The U.K. government didn't reveal much, only saying Assange is “accused in the United States of America of computer related offences.”

CNN reported that the U.S. Justice Department will soon announce charges against Assange and the cause for the extradition request.

Federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Virginia, have been working to build a case against the Australian cypherpunk for nearly a decade, and a paperwork error last year revealed they have a sealed criminal complaint at the ready in anticipation of this moment.

That complaint was unsealed today as domestic political pressure on President Moreno from an exposed Chinese corruption deal (lot of those going around) made Assange an albatross around his neck, and weight was finally too much for him to bear.  In fact, Moreno blames WikiLeaks for the documents that Moreno's opponents magically seemed to get their hands on.

Assange is facing conspiracy charges for working with convicted whistleblower Chelsea Manning.  What Assange isn't facing is charges of publishing classified material.  It seems Bill Barr isn't willing to go that far on carrying out Trump's media "enemies of the people" plan quite yet.

For now.  Let's remember that WikiLeaks helped Trump and Roger Stone leak the Russian-provided hacked Podesta DNC memos in 2016.  It's perfectly understandable that they want to toss Assange in a hole before he can bury Trump in one.

StupidiNews!

• Four million Americans in an area stretching from east of Denver to west of Minneapolis are in for a major spring blizzard today and tomorrow, several feet of snow could fall in parts of the Plains.
• With a Friday deadline on Brexit looming, European Union leaders have agreed to a six-month delay with UK negotiators as the government of PM Theresa May tries to find a solution.
• Former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig is expected to be charged in connection with his work for Paul Manafort for the Ukrainian government, stemming from the Mueller investigation.
• New Zealand's parliament has voted 119-1 to ban several types of military-style firearms in the country, the law will include a buyback provision as possession will result in prison time.
• SpaceX has scrubbed a Wednesday Falcon Heavy rocket launch due to high winds, the launch will be rescheduled for Thursday evening.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

Meanwhile, Attorney General Bill Barr is gearing up for yet another investigation into the Mueller investigation.

Attorney General William Barr has assembled a team to review controversial counterintelligence decisions made by Justice Department and FBI officials, including actions taken during the probe of the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016, according to a person familiar with the matter.

This indicates that Barr is looking into allegations that Republican lawmakers have been pursuing for more than a year -- that the investigation into President Donald Trump and possible collusion with Russia was tainted at the start by anti-Trump bias in the FBI and Justice Department.

“I am reviewing the conduct of the investigation and trying to get my arms around all the aspects of the counterintelligence investigation that was conducted during the summer of 2016,” Barr told a House panel on Tuesday.

Barr’s inquiry is separate from a long-running investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters. The FBI declined to comment. Barr said he expected the inspector general’s work to be completed by May or June.

The issue came up as Barr testified before a Democratic-controlled House Appropriations subcommittee. Most of the questioning concerned demands for Barr to give lawmakers Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s full report and the evidence behind it. But the issue is sure to get more attention when Barr appears Wednesday before the panel’s GOP-led Senate counterpart. 

Republican Lindsey Graham, who’s a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has already pledged to pursue the issue in the Judiciary Committee he leads.

The practical upshot of all this is that by July or so, Barr and Graham expect to have the Mueller report safely buried in legal limbo awaiting SCOTUS, and that the IG report and Senate investigation will both call for a special counsel, which Barr will appoint, to investigate Carter Page's FISA applications and the FBI and invariably the Clintons and Loretta Lynch, and all this circus will be drowning out the Democrats for the next year and change.

They really believe they've won now, and that they will get away with it, right into a second Trump term with no holds barred and no accountability whatsoever, depending on the twin threats of a Trump police state and armed Trump voters to keep liberals in line.

That's their plan, anyway.  How successful that will be is up to us.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Texas Republicans want to overturn Roe v Wade so badly they're willing to outright criminalize abortion procedures in the state and subject both medical professionals and women choosing to end their pregnancy to the death penalty, because nothing says "pro-life" like capital punishment. 

House Bill 896 would criminalize abortion and classify it as a homicide. Women who have abortions could be sentenced to the death penalty. 

How essentially one is okay with subjecting a woman to the death penalty for the exact… to do to her the exact same thing that one is alleging that she is doing to a child,” said State Rep. Victoria Neave, a Democrat from Dallas.

“I think it’s important to remember that if a drunk driver kills a pregnant woman, they get charged twice. If you murder a pregnant woman, you get charged twice. So I’m not specifically criminalizing women. What I’m doing is equalizing the law,” said State Rep. Tony Tinderholt, a Republican from Arlington. 

The hearing in the House Judiciary Committee wrapped up at 3 a.m. Tuesday. 

The bill now goes before the full Texas House for debate.

As soon as Roe is struck down by the Roberts Court, this will become law in several red states.  And ladies in red states?  If you conceive, you will bear the child or die.  And the best part is in a state that already has one of the highest maternal death rates in the country, higher than several "third-world" nations, criminalizing abortion is a death sentence anyway.

The road to Gilead is paved with Republicans "equalizing the law".

Out In The Real World

Outside the social media bubble that Democratic activists are in, Democrats who will decide the primaries are increasingly moderate if not conservative, believe political correctness is a major issue, don't follow the news, and most of all, are far more likely to be black voters.

Perhaps the most telling poll of the Democratic primary season hasn’t been about the Democratic primary at all — but about the fallout from a 35-year-old racist photo on a yearbook page. Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia was pummeled on social media after the revelation, and virtually every Democratic presidential candidate demanded his resignation.

Yet the majority of ordinary Democrats in Virginia said Mr. Northam should remain in office, according to a Washington Post/Schar School polla week later. And black Democrats were likelier than white ones to say Mr. Northam should remain.

Today’s Democratic Party is increasingly perceived as dominated by its “woke” left wing. But the views of Democrats on social media often bear little resemblance to those of the wider Democratic electorate.

The outspoken group of Democratic-leaning voters on social media is outnumbered, roughly 2 to 1, by the more moderate, more diverse and less educated group of Democrats who typically don’t post political content online, according to data from the Hidden Tribes Project. This latter group has the numbers to decide the Democratic presidential nomination in favor of a relatively moderate establishment favorite, as it has often done in the past.

Even these results might understate the leftward lean of the most politically active, Democratic Twitter users, who often engage with political journalists and can have a powerful effect in shaping the conventional wisdom. In an informal poll of Democrats on one of our Twitter accounts on Monday, about 80 percent said they were liberal, and a similar percentage said they had a college degree. Only 20 percent said political correctness was a problem, and only 2 percent said they were black.

The relative moderation of Democrats who are not sharing their political thoughts on social media, and therefore of Democrats as a whole, makes it less surprising that Virginia Democrats tolerated Mr. Northam’s yearbook page. It makes it easier to imagine how Joe Biden might not merely survive questions about whether he touched women in ways that made them feel uncomfortable, but might even emerge essentially unscathed.

It also helps explain why recent polls show that a majority of Democrats would rather see the party become more moderate than move leftward, even as progressives clamor for a Green New Deal or Medicare for all.

Obama understood this.  Clinton did too.  Social media/beltway bubble activists are not the base, and Bernie Sanders found that out the hard way.  And if you think the nominee is going to be from the far left of the party, I've got news for you.

They won't be.   For all the yelling I do on here, I'm under no illusions that somehow I'm going to make a difference in a red state other than my own voice and my own vote.

StupidiNews!

• Acting Homeland Security Secretary Claire Grady is resigning immediately, less than 24 hours after Kirstjen Nielsen, this clears the way for Trump to name Kevin McAleenan to run DHS.
• The Dalai Lama has been released from a New Delhi hospital after a "routine" check-in for chest pains, the 83-year-old Buddhist monk is reportedly in "good" condition.
• Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be on his way to an unprecedented fifth term after Tuesday's national elections, despite facing indictment for corruption and bribery.
• Illinois lawmakers are moving forward with Democratic Gov. J.D. Pritzker's plan to scrap the state's flat tax, the bill would put the question of a 4.95% tax on the state's wealthiest 3% before voters.
• China's government is considering a total ban on using computers in cryptocurrency mining, Beijing currently dominates the global production of Bitcoin and other blockchain-based currencies.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

As I keep saying, Attorney General Bill Barr will never release the actual Mueller report.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report will be released “within a week,” Attorney General Bill Barr promised Tuesday at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing.

“Within a week, I will be in position to release the report to the public,” Barr testified.

“This process is going along very well,” Barr said, adding that the “original timetable of being able to release this by mid-April stands.”

The Attorney General said his office was working with Mueller’s team to identify information that falls under four categories Barr previously said would need to be redacted. Those include matters related to ongoing investigations, information that would damage innocent third-party individuals, secret grand jury materials, and classified intelligence.

Barr said that that information would be color-coded and that his office would provide “explanatory notes for each redaction” in the report that goes to Congress.

Chairman Jose Serrano (D-NY) asked if the report would include the potential instances of obstruction of justice that Mueller investigated but had not yet been publicly reported.

“As things stand now, I don’t think that they will be redacted so they will be identifiable,” Barr replied.

It is this color-coded version that will be handed over to Congress, and, Barr said, hopefully made “available to the public.” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) is among the Democratic leaders saying nothing less than the full, unredacted report is acceptable.

Barr said the redacted version was a “first pass.”

Expect massive redactions in the report that Barr will control completely in order to minimize the damage to Donald Trump.

Attorney General Bill Barr has no plan to try to seek the public release of secret grand jury materials included in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

“My intention is not to ask for it at this stage,” Barr testified Tuesday before the House Appropriations subcommittee.

Democrats on the committee asked if Barr intended to seek a court order to make those materials public, as House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) has pressed him to do. He offered only to listen to Nadler’s case on why that would be necessary.

The attorney general also testified that he had grand jury material in mind when he made the decision to write a March 24 letter offering what he claimed were Mueller’s “principal conclusions.” He confirmed that he declined to use the multiple report summaries that Mueller’s team had reportedly already prepared. Every page of the report Barr received from the special counsel’s office was marked by the indication that it may contain secret grand jury material, he testified.

Barr said he took the restriction barring the release of grand jury material seriously, citing a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling last week affirming that there were only five exemptions that would allow a court to release grand jury materials.

Barr struck a somewhat defensive tone in explaining his letters to Congress characterizing the report. He repeatedly insisted that he tried to use “as much of the special counsel’s own language” as possible without revealing any classified grand jury information.

Rep. Charlie Crist (D-FL) asked about press reports that members of Mueller’s team were frustrated that Barr did not accurately describe their extensive, serious findings about President Trump’s obstruction of justice.

“I suspect that they probably wanted more put out,” Barr replied. “But in my view I was not interested in putting out summaries or trying to summarize because I think any summary regardless of who prepares it not only runs the risk of, you know, being under-inclusive or over-inclusive but also would trigger a lot of discussion and analysis that really should await everything coming out at once.”

The theory is that Democrats in Congress will only see the full, unredacted Mueller report if they impeach Donald Trump and subpoena the report as evidence.

One of the exceptions to grand jury secrecy is disclosure “preliminary to or in connection with a judicial proceeding.” To authorize disclosure of the Watergate grand jury information, the special prosecutor’s office argued that the House had authorized its Judiciary Committee to conduct a formal impeachment inquiry and that such an inquiry could be fairly analogized to a “grand jury” investigation and thus a judicial proceeding. Both the district court and the court of appeals agreed, and the Judiciary Committee obtained both the report and the underlying evidence.

Significantly, the appeals court decision several days ago reaffirmed that exception. All three judges agreed that an impeachment inquiry falls within the “exception for judicial proceedings” and “coheres” with other rulings about the proper scope of grand jury secrecy.

But Pelosi has declined to allow the Judiciary Committee to open even a preliminary impeachment inquiry, asserting rather bizarrely that Trump is “not worth it.” That decision may hamstring Nadler’s quest for the complete Mueller report. Nothing in the federal rules creates an explicit exception allowing congressional committees exercising general powers of government “oversight” to demand access to secret grand jury material. So, Pelosi and Nadler are confronting a dilemma of their own making: either revisit the politically fraught impeachment question or concede that the House is at the mercy of whatever judgment the attorney general makes in excising grand jury information, which may include the most salient material about possible collusion and obstruction of justice.

For his part, Barr also has delicate judgments to make. If he is so inclined, the attorney general could properly opt to exclude only the names and actual testimony of grand jury witnesses while nevertheless informing the Judiciary Committee — and the public — about the substance of the information developed during the proceedings. Unfortunately, Barr has given every indication that he intends to make needlessly sweeping redactions, especially having ruled that, in his judgment, the evidence of obstruction of justice did not rise to the level of a prosecutable crime. Trump’s selection of his new attorney general may prove to be his best line of defense — unless Pelosi revisits her stance and directs the House Judiciary Committee to include impeachment within its investigatory ambit.

Whatever the decision, expect the fight over the Mueller report to drag on for months, if not years.