StupidiNews!

• House Democrats will sue the Trump regime over Donald Trump's emergency border declaration, adding to multiple lawsuits filed by states and NGOs protesting Trump's abuse of power.
• The Mormon Church says it will no longer consider LGBTQ members in a same-sex marriage to be heretics to be excommunicated, reversing a November 2015 decree.
• Donald Trump reportedly will be nominating former GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain to the Federal Reserve, Cain will join conservative pundit Stephen Moore on the board.
• Elon Musk's Boring Co. tunnel-digging enterprise is in talks to operate in Israel, PM Benjamin Netanyahu believes Israel would be a good fit for his proposed Hyperloop transportation technology.
• Coming to your Android-powered Smart TV: Google ads on your streaming services as customers found out this week who are part of a new "pilot program" for on-screen ads.

Last Call For Meat The Press, Con't

The Trump regime is absolutely coming to destroy the free press, and various media control and regulation schemes will be field tested in the (meth) labs of Democracy first, at the GOP state level in places like Georgia.

Six Republican state representatives in Georgia have moved to create an "ethics board" for journalists that would require news organizations to provide copies of pictures and audio and video recordings of interviews to subjects who request them or risk civil penalty. 

The cost of meeting those requests would be paid by the news organizations.

The proposed legislation, House Bill 734, titled the "Ethics in Journalism Act," was sponsored Tuesday by Rep. Andy Welch, who represents the city of McDonough. 

The bill would create a board of media professionals and academics that would produce"a canon of ethics" and "develop a voluntary accreditation process in journalism ethics," which would also allow for the investigation and sanctioning of journalists. 

The proposed board appears to have little power to punish journalists other than to remove its own accreditation or impose a penalty if the interview request provision is not met. 

Welch also announced that he was retiring from Georgia's legislature at the end of its session on Tuesday, but that the bill would remain available for consideration during the state's 2020 legislative session, according to The Atlanta Journal Constitution.

And of course, the state could then pass laws that would only allow the state to deal with "properly accredited" journalists, who of course would then have to turn over copies of all interview material to subjects on demand.

It would be the end of investigative journalism and a free press, which is of course very much the point of the "ethics board".  If your immediate response is "no newspaper or TV station would touch a state legislator, cop, or politician with this law in place" then congrats, you see where this is going.

And believe me, Trump is taking notes. This will be sold as "fixing fake news" and news outlets will be expected to play or perish.

We get a little closer to fascism.

Crank More-Pork, Or The Other Other White Meat

The Trump regime engages in pork barrel politics at its finest by planning to cut FDA pork inspectors in half and replacing them with meat processor employees.

The Trump administration plans to shift much of the power and responsibility for food safety inspections in hog plants to the pork industry as early as May, cutting the number of federal inspectors by about 40 percent and replacing them with plant employees.

Under the proposed new inspection system, the responsibility for identifying diseased and contaminated pork would be shared with plant employees, whose training would be at the discretion of plant owners. There would be no limits on slaughter-line speeds.

The new pork inspection system would accelerate the federal government’s move toward delegating inspections to the livestock industry. During the Obama administration, poultry plant owners were given more power over safety inspections, although that administration canceled plans to increase line speeds. The Trump administration in September allowed some poultry plants to increase line speeds.

The Trump administration also is working to shift inspection of beef to plant owners. Agriculture Department officials are scheduled next month to discuss the proposed changes with the meat industry.

These proposals, part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to reduce regulations, come as the federal government is under fire for delegating some of its aircraft safety oversight responsibilities to Boeing, which developed the 737 Max jets involved in two fatal crashes over the past six months. Federal Aviation Administration certification of the two aircraft involved in the crashes took place under President Trump, but the major shift toward delegating key aspects of aviation oversight began during the George W. Bush administration.

So give it a few years and beef, pork, and chicken will be inspected by the meat companies, and not the government, and who knows if they'll care or if contamination and recalls will even be reported?  I guess if several thousand people all turn up dead maybe.

Enjoy your coming summer cookouts, America.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

The NY Times is now running, not walking back its "Mueller Finds No Trump Collusion" story by actually doing some goddamn reporting and asking Mueller's team what Mueller did find, and the resulting story make it very clear that the report is bad enough for Trump that America will never see it.

Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.

At stake in the dispute — the first evidence of tension between Mr. Barr and the special counsel’s office — is who shapes the public’s initial understanding of one of the most consequential government investigations in American history. Some members of Mr. Mueller’s team are concerned that, because Mr. Barr created the first narrative of the special counsel’s findings, Americans’ views will have hardened before the investigation’s conclusions become public.

Mr. Barr has said he will move quickly to release the nearly 400-page report but needs time to scrub out confidential information. The special counsel’s investigators had already written multiple summaries of the report, and some team members believe that Mr. Barr should have included more of their material in the four-page letter he wrote on March 24 laying out their main conclusions, according to government officials familiar with the investigation. Mr. Barr only briefly cited the special counsel’s work in his letter.

However, the special counsel’s office never asked Mr. Barr to release the summaries soon after he received the report, a person familiar with the investigation said. And the Justice Department quickly determined that the summaries contain sensitive information, like classified material, secret grand-jury testimony and information related to current federal investigations that must remain confidential, according to two government officials.

We basically suspected if not outright knew this material, but it took out journalistic institutions a couple of weeks apparently to get around to following up with Barr.  Now they're all but accusing him of covering up for Trump, and the fight, as Politico's Darren Samuelsohn describes it, will be the "redaction wars."

House Democrats want to see everything related to the special counsel’s nearly two-year-old investigation into Russia meddling in the 2016 presidential election. But their open-book demands stand at odds with the Justice Department’s desire to black out sensitive areas throughout Mueller’s 400-page submission.

The high-stakes chess match will play out on both political and legal grounds, and so far neither side has yet to show any signs of compromise.

As a result, the battle could spill into the courts, setting up a protracted legal confrontation that inevitably causes waves in the thick of the 2020 White House race. For President Donald Trump, the possibility of freshly unveiled Mueller bombshells dropping while he runs for reelection could be devastating. But Democrats are in a tough position: pursuing their legal challenge at all costs could feed the Trump-approved narrative that they’re overzealous, but giving up risks angering their own Trump-hating base.

“It seems to be shaping up as a classic collision of interests by two coordinate branches of government, each with their own respective legitimate interests that may be in conflict with one another,” said David Laufman, who ran the Justice Department’s counterintelligence unit from 2014 to 2018 and had a key role overseeing the early stages of the FBI’s Russia investigation before Mueller’s appointment.

I fully expect Barr to delay  the report for "national security reasons related to ongoing cases" as long as he can get away with it.  But if you ask me, my gut tells me that this story is chin music right past Barr's head.

Maybe a full leak is next unless Barr plays fair.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• In a 313-312 vote, the UK Parliament has voted to force Prime Minister Theresa May to seek an extension of the Brexit process if there is no deal by April 12.
• Indicted NC GOP chair Robin Hayes will hand over day-to-day party operations but will not step down as he heals from "recent health setbacks".
• Ethiopia's Transport Ministry will release its initial report Thursday on the March 10 crash of a Boeing 737 MAX jet that killed 157 passengers and crew.
• House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal is formally requesting six year of Donald Trump's tax returns from the IRS, Trump will refuse but the Treasury Department gets the decision.
• An Ohio teen is facing more than 70 counts of "swatting" police departments across the country, triggering armed response teams with fake emergency calls.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

The mass deportation era that I've been predicting since Trump's election is almost upon us, and Trump is shifting preparations into high gear with plans to appoint a White House "immigration czar"...our old friend, Kris Kobach.

President Donald Trump is reportedly considering adding a “border czar” to his administration, and the individual said to be at the top of the list of potential candidates is Kris Kobach—a Republican who helped author one of the harshest anti-immigration laws in recent history.

“In this administration, it does not surprise me at all. He exemplifies the view of this administration, which is contrary to American history because immigration is very much the story of success in this country,” Joyce White Vance, a former federal prosecutor, told Newsweek on Tuesday.

“Kobach is anti-immigration in the most mean-spirited way possible. And that’s clearly the policy that this administration has chosen to adopt towards immigrants,” Vance added.

According to an Associated Press report on April 1, the White House is looking for someone to spearhead the president’s immigration initiatives amid a surge in migrants crossing the southern border. On the shortlist of possible appointees is Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, and Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia.

While both men are immigration hardliners, Kobach once lent a hand in the creation of Alabama HB 56. The 2011 law is seen as one of the strictest anti-immigration policies in the nation and was once heralded by state lawmakers as an initiative for people to “deport themselves.”

Remember Alabama's "Papers, Please" law?  Kobach helped write it.

The law, officially titled the Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, was aimed at curbing illegal immigration. Its net effect was to make the state inhospitable to undocumented immigrants by essentially creating new immigration-related crimes.

Under HB 56, renting a house or giving a job to an “illegal” became a crime. It required state police officers to investigate or detain people based on a “suspicion” that they may be undocumented. Educators were also told to collect information regarding the immigration status of the students and their parents.

“That, of course, tamped down on school participation and school attendance,” Vance said. “If you’re a 7- or 8-year-old kid missing a year of school while that litigation went on, that’s a huge game-changer for the rest of your life. But that was what it was intended to do.”

Vance was serving as a U.S. attorney during HB 56’s passage and successfully challenged key provisions of the law in court in United States v. Alabama. The Obama administration essentially argued that the state could not create its own immigration law that is contrary to federal policy as it would be a violation of the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.

The law has continued to unravel as many of its most substantial provisions have been blocked in court.

Kobach would be a disaster.  So would Cuccinelli.  Kobach in fact really, really wants to round up the undocumented (and their families) and put them in deportation camps.  Sorry, "asylum seeker processing areas".

But the guy you really have to watch out for is Stephen Miller.

The White House is exploring all executive authorities in existing law that will allow an aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration and legal immigration fraud, senior adviser to the president Stephen Miller told The Daily Caller in an exclusive telephone interview.

“There’s going to be an aggressive effort to utilize every existing authority in statute,” Miller announced, explaining that several authorities exist in immigration laws passed by Congress throughout history, including the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.

Miller noted that the White House is “systematically reviewing all authorities that are already on the books, both in terms of cracking down on illegal immigration and […] the abuse of our legal immigration system.” The targeted abuse actions include illegal immigrants who overstay temporary visas, “combatting or addressing legal benefit seeking in the legal immigration system.”

Noting that there are approximately 1 million illegal aliens in the United States with final removal orders that still remain at large — in some cases for several years — Miller gave one example of the type of executive action the administration can take. The presidential adviser noted that existing law has a statute that allows for a “significant financial penalty” for every single day that an alien resides in the country after being ordered removed.
“This law has been on the books for a very long time and has not been utilized. That’s the example of the kind of legal authority that already exists that is the kind of thing we can deploy to restore integrity to the immigration system.”

If you thought concentration camps for undocumented was fun, wait until we have beggar's prison camps for the families who are US citizens who can't afford to pay Miller's fines for their undocumented fathers, mothers, sons and daughters.

I'm telling you guys that this is coming.  Trump's big re-election campaign is going to be "Deport them all" and should America grant him a second term, the round-ups are going to come.  Hell, they'll start before that.

The End Of The Never Trumpers

The NY Times has finally realized that the "principled conservative opposition" that materialized to scold Trump was always a ruse, and there's no better example of that then the doomed "Never Trump" movement inside the GOP that disintegrated as soon as he got his Supreme Court picks.  They were always Trump, just not as willing to take to his extreme measures in order to win.  Nowadays there is only Trump.

As Mr. Trump has prepared to embark on a difficult fight for re-election, a small but ferocious operation within his campaign has helped install loyal allies atop the most significant state parties and urged them to speak up loudly to discourage conservative criticism of Mr. Trump. The campaign has dispatched aides to state party conclaves, Republican executive committee meetings and fund-raising dinners, all with the aim of ensuring the delegates at next year’s convention in Charlotte, N.C., are utterly committed to Mr. Trump.

To Joe Gruters, who was co-chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaign in Florida and now leads the state party, the local G.O.P. is effectively a regional arm of the president’s re-election effort.

“I’ve had probably 10 conversations with the Trump team about the delegate selection process in Florida,” Mr. Gruters said, adding of a potential Republican primary battle, “The base of the party loves our president, and if anybody runs against him, they are going to get absolutely smashed.”

State and local Republican organizations typically operate below the radar of national politics, but they can be vital to the success of a presidential candidate. Party chairmen and their deputies are tasked with everything from raising money to deploying volunteers to knock on doors, and in many states they help choose delegates for the nominating convention.

For Mr. Trump, who prevailed in 2016 as an outsider with little connection to his party’s electoral apparatus, the ability to control the levers of Republican politics at the state level could make the difference in a close election or a contested primary. It also leaves other Republicans with precious little room to oppose Mr. Trump on his policy preferences or administrative whims — on matters from health care to the Mexican border — for fear of retribution from within the party.

Mr. Trump’s aides have focused most intently on heading off any dissent at the Charlotte convention: To that end, two of Mr. Trump’s top campaign aides, Bill Stepien and Justin Clark, have worked quietly but methodically in a series of states where control of the local party was up for grabs. They have boosted Mr. Trump’s allies even in deep-blue states like Massachusetts, and worked to make peace between competing pro-Trump factions in more competitive states such as Colorado.

The devotion to Mr. Trump was on clear display Saturday outside Denver, where the state party gathered to elect a new chairman. Though Mr. Trump’s unpopularity helped drive Colorado Republicans to deep losses last fall, there was no sign of unrest: Mr. Trump’s name was emblazoned on lapel pins and a flag toted by one candidate for the chairmanship, and his slogan — “Make America Great Again” — was printed on the red hat from which the candidates drew lots to determine their speaking order.

Mr. Trump himself stayed out of the race, and campaign aides sent the White House a short memo last month urging the president not to pick sides between allies after Representative Ken Buck, a deeply conservative candidate, lobbied administration officials for support.

But when Mr. Buck claimed victory in the race for chairman, he described his mission in terms of unflinching loyalty to the president.

“The key is that we make sure that the voters of Colorado understand the great job the president has done,” Mr. Buck said. “That is what my job is.”

You're either with Trump, or you're an "enemy of the people".  And folks are lining up to be on the side with the orange fascist at the helm.  If somebody's actually expecting John Kasich or Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney to show up and "save" the GOP from Trump, it'll never happen.

The Republican Party is the Trump Party and it always has been.

We have to save ourselves.

Clearance Sale At The White House

Bothe the NY Times and Washington Post are reporting that a White House whistleblower came  forth to House Democrats last month in order to report that more than two dozen denials of security clearances were overturned by top Trump regime officials and that the two of the people initially denied security clearances for national security reasons are Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.  The NY Times story:

A whistle-blower working inside the White House has told a House committee that senior Trump administration officials granted security clearances to at least 25 individuals whose applications had been denied by career employees for “disqualifying issues” that could put national security at risk, the committee’s Democratic staff said Monday. 

The whistle-blower, Tricia Newbold, a manager in the White House’s Personnel Security Office, told the House Committee on Oversight and Reform in a private interview last month that the 25 applicants included two current senior White House officials, in addition to contractors and other employees working for the office of the president, the staff said in a memo it released publicly. 

The memo does not identify any of the 25 people. But one of the senior White House officials appears to be Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. 

NBC News reported in January that Carl Kline, who until recently served as the head of the personnel security division and was Ms. Newbold’s boss, had overruled a decision by career security officials concerned about granting Mr. Kushner a clearance.

The New York Times reported in February that President Trump had ordered his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, to grant a clearance last year to Mr. Kushner. The president had earlier said he had no role in the clearance. 

Democrats on the oversight panel are also demanding information from the White House about the process of granting a clearance to Ivanka Trump, among others. Ms. Trump’s final clearance was granted shortly after Mr. Kushner’s. In an interview in February with ABC News, Ms. Trump insisted her father had no hand in either her clearance or her husband’s.

Ms. Newbold told the committee’s staff members that she and other career officials had denied the 25 applications for a variety of reasons, including “foreign influence, conflicts of interest, concerning personal conduct, financial problems, drug use and criminal conduct,” the memo said. 

The denials by the career employees were overturned, she said, by officials with more seniority who, by her account, did not follow the normal procedures meant to mitigate security risks and generally adhered to by other administrations.

The Washington Post story focuses more on Newbold, and gives us a major clue as to a third current WH official.

A White House whistleblower told lawmakers that more than two dozen denials for security clearances have been overturned during the Trump administration, calling Congress her “last hope” for addressing what she considers improper conduct that has left the nation’s secrets exposed. 

Tricia Newbold, a longtime White House security adviser, told the House Oversight and Reform Committee that she and her colleagues issued “dozens” of denials for security clearance applications that were later approved despite their concerns about blackmail, foreign influence or other red flags, according to panel documents released Monday. 

Newbold, an 18-year veteran of the security clearance process who has served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, said she warned her superiors that clearances “were not always adjudicated in the best interest of national security” — and was retaliated against for doing so. 

Newbold’s allegations intensify pressure on the White House over its handling of security clearances, a controversy that burst into public view last year with the revelation that dozens of staffers had temporary approvals to access sensitive government information while they awaited clearance approval. 

Among them was presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, who President Trump ultimately demanded be granted a permanent top-secret clearance, despite the concerns of intelligence officials. 

Newbold alleged that 25 individuals were given clearances or access to national security information since 2018 despite concerns about ties to foreign influence, conflicts of interests, questionable or criminal conduct, financial problems, or drug abuse.

That group includes “two current senior White House officials,” according to documents released by the House Oversight Committee. 

The panel did not identify the senior White House officials but asked the White House to immediately provide documents related to the security clearances of nine officials, including Kushner, the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump and national security adviser John Bolton. 

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), the committee chairman, said in a letter to the White House Counsel’s Office that his panel would vote on Tuesday to subpoena Carl Kline, who served as personnel security director at the White House during the first two years of the administration — the committee’s first compulsory move aimed at the White House. 

Newbold alleged that Kline, then her direct manager, overruled her clearance denials and then retaliated against her when she objected.

Yep, our third contestant appears to be John Bolton's Mustache.

And the Clearance Sale continues.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump now says that Democrats must "fix" immigration issues with the southern border using legislation or he will close the border as soon as this weekend.
• Two black Baptist churches have been torched in the last few days in St. Landry's Parish, Louisiana, police are telling black churches to be cautious as they are still looking for suspects.
• Meeting a promise of an April 2 deadline, Democrats have issued subpoenas for the unredacted version of the full Mueller report from the Department of Justice.
• Former federal prosecutor Lori Lightfoot has won Chicago's mayoral runoff election, she will be the Second City's first openly gay black woman Mayor.
• Google is teaming up with Walmart so Google Assistant can order groceries using your voice.

Last Call For Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Because the white nationalist in the White House doesn't consider white supremacist groups to be an actual threat (after all, they're allies, and why would he care if they shot up a few mosques or synagogues, they're not Trump voters anyway) the Department of Homeland Security has now completely disbanded the intelligence task force unit looking into white supremacists groups in the US.

The Department of Homeland Security has disbanded a group of intelligence analysts who focused on domestic terrorism, The Daily Beast has learned. Numerous current and former DHS officials say they find the development concerning, as the threat of homegrown terrorism—including white supremacist terrorism—is growing.

In the wake of this move, officials said the number of analytic reports produced by DHS about domestic terrorism, including the threat from white supremacists, has dropped significantly. People in and close to the department said this has generated significant concern at headquarters.

“It’s especially problematic given the growth in right-wing extremism and domestic terrorism we are seeing in the U.S. and abroad,” one former intelligence official told The Daily Beast.

The group in question was a branch of analysts in DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A). They focused on the threat from homegrown violent extremists and domestic terrorists. The analysts there shared information with state and local law enforcement to help them protect their communities from these threats.

Then the Trump administration’s new I&A chief, David Glawe, began reorganizing the office, which is the DHS component that has a place in the Intelligence Community. Over the course of the reorganization, the branch of I&A focused on domestic terrorism got eighty-sixed and its analysts were reassigned to new positions. The change happened last year, and has not been previously reported.

“We’ve noticed I&A has significantly reduced their production on homegrown violent extremism and domestic terrorism while those remain among the most serious terrorism threats to the homeland,” said one DHS official.

Former officials pointed to a spate of domestic terror attacks in recent years as evidence that DHS erred by shuttering this branch. From the massacre that left 11 people dead at a Pittsburgh synagogue to a shooting targeting Republican members of Congress in June 2018 to bomb threats that a deranged Trump fandirected at prominent Democrats and CNN, violent attacks informed by homegrown hatred have left Americans increasingly terrorized.

Meanwhile, the DHS has been tracking Black Lives Matter activists for years, and still hasn't done a thing about the mysterious deaths of six Ferguson, Missouri black men tied to Black Lives Matter.

If nobody's there to report it was going to happen, nobody can take note that Trump should be responsible for his own deadly rhetoric.

The Party Of Corruption, Con't

If you're wondering how the NC GOP was so corrupt that it would allow Mark Harris to nearly get away with stealing an election, it's because NC GOP party chair and former Congressman Robin Hayes is a corrupt as they come, and today the piper paid him a visit.

A federal grand jury has indicted multiple people in connection with an ongoing investigation involving donations made to the North Carolina Republican Party.

NCGOP Chairman Robin Hayes, who spent a decade in Congress representing a district that stretched from the Charlotte area to Fayetteville, surrendered himself to authorities and made a first appearance at the US Courthouse in Charlotte on Monday.

The charges center around a wealthy Durham businessman named Greg Lindberg, who has been under the microscope of federal investigators for white collar crimes related to his business empire and, later, for contributions he made to politicians in North Carolina.

Lindberg was also indicted and made a first appearance in court. Two other people who worked for Lindberg, John Gray and John Palermo, also appeared in court in connection two the indictments.

Lindberg made sizeable contributions to both political parties, campaign finance records show, including a six-figure contribution to the North Carolina Democratic Party and nearly $2 million to the North Carolina Republican Party.

A portion of Lindberg’s contribution to the NCGOP—$240,000 –was then forwarded to North Carolina Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey, who is also a Republican.

In October, NCGOP Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse confirmed to WBTV that the party sent Causey the money but said it was legal because, he said, the party steered the money to Causey after Lindberg made the contribution.

In March, WBTV reported that Causey made a secret recording of a meeting between Lindberg, an associate, Causey and Hayes.

During the meeting, multiple sources familiar with the recording told WBTV, Lindberg and Hayes reached an agreement for the NCGOP to pass $240,000 of Lindberg’s contribution to Causey’s campaign.

An attorney for Lindberg has not responded to messages from WBTV seeking comment.

Lindberg was the NCGOP's personal slush fund manager, in other words.  And it looks like he's taking Hayes with him.  Hayes's charges include wire fraud, false statements, and bribery as he was taking cash in order to then direct money with federally funded programs to benefit donors like Lindberg, and then aiding and abetting a criminal conspiracy to tie all that together in defrauding the NC Insurance Commission.

Stay tuned.  A lot of people are going down over this back home.

As The Vote Goes In Ohio

Ohio could be the next big state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact if voters get to decide on it this fall.

Ohioans could vote this fall on a measure to award the presidency to the candidate who wins the national popular vote — regardless of which candidate wins the Buckeye State.

The proposed constitutional amendment, if approved, would bypass the electoral college by apparently authorizing Ohio’s membership in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

But several more states still must approve the measure for it to potentially impact the 2020 presidential race between Republican incumbent Donald Trump and a Democratic challenger.

Since 2006, the District of Columbia and 13 states with 184 electoral votes have enacted a popular-vote measure into law. States representing 86 more electoral votes are needed to reach the majority of 270 Electoral College votes to guarantee the most-popular candidate becomes president. Ohio has 18 winner-take-all electoral votes.

It would bring the total closer. If states with pending legislation to join the compact like Florida, Georgia, NC, and another state or two join along with Ohio (like Indiana, Minnesota, Arizona or SC) that will put the total number of electoral votes in the Compact over 270, and if those are the states involved, Clinton would have won in 2016 just based on Florida, NC, Georgia, and Ohio.

How far this will get before Republicans tie it up in legal duct tape, I have no clue.  But it's got a far better shot than abolishing the electoral college, which would take a full Constitutional amendment to overcome.

StupidiNews!

• A concrete railing bridge section fell on interstate traffic in Chattanooga, Tennessee, injuring one person and closing Interstates 75 and 24 for several hours on Monday.
• The Trump regime is blocking the delivery of F-35 jets and equipment to NATO ally Turkey in retaliation for Ankara's purchase of Russian missile defense systems.
• Boeing now says it won't be able to deliver planned software fixes for grounded 737 Max passenger planes until "sometime this month" instead of next week.
• Senate Democrats blocked a GOP disaster relief bill that didn't include House-approved money for Puerto Rico, setting up yet another funding showdown for the Trump regime.
• Flight management software for multiple major airlines shut down Monday for several hours this morning, the software glitches caused hundreds of flight delays across the country.

Last Call For Another Supreme Disappointment

The US Supreme Court handed down yet another 5-4 decision today that essentially destroys 50 years of progress on stopping the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment's "cruel and unusual punishment" clause as according to Judge Neil Gorsuch and the other four conservatives, states can essentially execute people in whatever fashion they want.

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Bucklew v. Precythe, which it handed down Monday on a party-line vote, is at once the most significant Eighth Amendment decision of the last several decades and the cruelest in at least as much time.

Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion tosses out a basic assumption that animated the Court’s understanding of what constitutes a “cruel and unusual” punishment for more than half a century. In the process, he writes that the state of Missouri may effectively torture a man to death — so long as it does not gratuitously inflict pain for the sheer purpose of inflicting pain.

And, on top of all of that, Gorsuch would conscript death penalty defense attorneys — men and women who often gave up lucrative legal careers to protect the lives of their clients — into the ghoulish task of laying out the method that will be used to kill those clients.

It’s a breathtaking sign of just how much the Supreme Court’s new majority is willing to change — and how quickly they are willing to impose that change on the rest of us.

Oh, but it gets worse.

Looming beneath the surface, moreover, is an even more ominous sign for anyone who hopes that this Supreme Court will not replace decades of established law with the Federalist Society’s wildest fantasies. In several recent oral arguments, Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh appeared unexpectedly sympathetic to liberal litigants.

Bucklew was one of these cases, where Kavanaugh browbeated a lawyer defending Missouri’s plans to potentially inflict tremendous pain during an upcoming execution. “Are you saying even if the method creates gruesome and brutal pain you can still do it because there’s no alternative?” the newest member of the court asked at one point.

And yet, Kavanaugh did not simply join Gorsuch’s opinion, he wrote a separate opinion suggesting that maybe death row inmates could be executed by firing squad.

Monday’s decision in Bucklew, in other words, is not just a sweeping rewrite of one of the Bill of Rights’ core provisions. It may prove to be a very real window into the mind of Kavanaugh — and it suggests that, whatever noises Kavanaugh makes during a hearing, he will ultimately be a reliable vote for whatever outcome the Court’s conservative bloc prefers.

The ruling puts the burden of finding a more humane method of execution on the death row inmate, and unless it meets the stringent test of being easy and quick for the state to carry out, which the state gets to solely determine, then the state can reject it and use whatever method it wants to.

And please remember, all of the other conservatives signed off on this monstrous ruling, including Mr. Ball-And-Strikes Chief Justice Roberts himself.  Hell is empty and at least five of the devils are on the bench.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Ben Wittes from Lawfare takes to The Atlantic to remind us that he too is a Republican, and believes that William Barr will deliver on his promise of transparency.

Here’s a radical idea: For the next two weeks, let’s give Attorney General William Barr the benefit of the doubt.

I understand why so many people are suspicious of Barr and are lining up to denounce him—and there may well come a day, and it might come soon, when I will get in line and join them.

Barr’s initial letter summarizing the top-line conclusions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation allowed President Donald Trump to claim exoneration and vilify those who had called for the investigation, even as it managed not to answer any substantive questions about L’Affaire Russe. What’s more, the letter put the attorney general’s personal stamp on the exoneration of the president for obstruction of justice, an outcome that is apparently not what Mueller himself intended. It is not clear to me why Barr needed to do this, and it certainly had the effect of helping the president seize control of the narrative. So I understand why many people are suspicious.

Yet I am still inclined to give Barr the benefit of the doubt on the release of the Mueller report, if only in a kind of “trust but verify” sort of way. The reason, in short, is that Barr has promised numerous times to show his work. He has promised to do so in the short term. The equities he has insisted on protecting are, in my view, reasonable ones. And he has taken in his most recent letter an appropriate, even gutsy, stand on executive privilege with respect to the White House. He has, in short, described a reasonable process by which Congress and the public should shortly get access to Mueller’s findings. I am inclined to assume him serious about this until he fails to deliver on what he has promised. There will be plenty of time to criticize his failures if and when they materialize.

Let’s unpack this a bit.

Barr has said since his confirmation hearings that he is committed to maximum public access to Mueller’s findings consistent with the law. Since Mueller delivered his report, he has stood by this and said he means to expeditiously review a 400-page document and release as much as he can. His time frame has clarified over the past week, from soon to “weeks not months” to “mid-April, if not sooner.” Congressional Democrats are demanding the report by Tuesday. This difference is not material. If the Justice Department releases Mueller’s report in a capacious and reasonable fashion in mid-April, that is a perfectly fine outcome.

Barr has also laid out what material he believes he must redact from the document. On some of these matters, he is simply correct. For example, Barr says he means to remove grand-jury material; it is actually unlawful, criminal even, to disclose grand-jury material without the authorization of the court. In the short term, there is no way to give this material to Congress, let alone make it public; it would require substantial litigation to do so.

Moreover, Barr says he means to redact “material the intelligence community identifies as potentially compromising sensitive sources and methods.” Note that he is not saying he will redact all classified material. But it is quite irresponsible to demand that the attorney general dump in the public domain sensitive intelligence matters in a fashion that could burn collection capabilities or human sources. There is no way the attorney general is going to release a 400-page document summarizing a counterintelligence investigation without a careful review for national-security information. And going through a lengthy document with a lot of information from different sources in a review for both national-security and grand-jury material takes time—legitimately. Getting it done in a few short weeks would require having a team working on it around the clock.

Barr also says he will redact “material that could affect other ongoing matters, including those that the Special Counsel has referred to other Department offices.” This strikes me as reasonable as well. Mueller has kicked a variety of matters back to the Justice Department. Do we really want Barr to screw up those investigations by prematurely releasing the department’s analysis of them? We didn’t want Mueller to do this. I don’t want Barr to, either. This category of redaction is potentially subject to abuse, but I am not going to assume preemptively that it will be abused.

Finally, Barr says he will redact “information that would unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties.” Depending on how one reads the words unduly and peripheral, this could either be a reasonable effort to protect drive-by reputational harm to people quite removed from the core public interest in this matter or it could be a loophole big enough to drive a truck through that could protect, say, the president’s kids. So again, could this be a mechanism to black out large segments of the report? Yes. But I see no reason to assume that this is what Barr wants to do, given his more general public commitments to maximum transparency in this matter.

One important area in which Barr has said publicly that he won’t be doing any redactions is the area of executive privilege. This is actually a big deal. The White House made noises about reviewing the document for supposedly privileged material. But on this point, Barr has publicly, if somewhat backhandedly, taken a stand. In his letter on Friday, Barr wrote that “although the President would have the right to assert privilege over certain parts of the report, he has stated publicly that he intends to defer to me and, accordingly, there are no plans to submit the report to the White House for a privilege review.” 

If Wittes is right, then Barr would indeed do the honorable thing and we'd get to see virtually all of the report.

The problem is of course that William Barr decided to work for Donald Trump.

I do not believe for a second he is honorable.