Stephan: When you look at the Trumpian Orcs, like Barr, Pompeo, DeVos, Mnuchin, if you are like me, you ask, "How could someone in a democracy agree to serve someone like Trump, or do the kind of things happening in the U.S. today? But when I think that I think back to Hitler, and all the men and women who faithfully served him. Remember Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, Hermann Goring? The truth is there are always humans willing to do horrific things to their fellow citizens, and they always have a rationale to explain what they are doing, as this piece describes. QED.
A leading Trump Orc, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Credit: Alex Wong/Getty
Human rights advocates denounced as “dangerous” a draft report released Thursday by the U.S. State Department’s controversial Commission on Unalienable Rights that paints property rights and religious liberty as “foremost among the unalienable rights that government is established to secure” while casting doubt on other liberties, including reproductive freedom.
“Make no mistake: this report was not designed with principles of equality, justice, and rights in mind. Instead, it serves as another stepping stone in the White House’s radical, isolationist, anti-rights, anti-scientific, religious agenda,” Serra Sippel, president of the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), said in a statement.
“The Commission on Unalienable Rights is a thinly veiled religious fundamentalist panel, and the people on it should have absolutely no say about the human rights of people all over the world,” Sippel declared, calling the panel “a dangerous distraction from the fact that this administration does not believe that all people are equal and entitled to human rights.”
“This administration has shown time and time again that their concern with human rights is not […]
ANDY KROLL, Washington Bureau Chief - RollingStone
Stephan: We are watching a concerted effort by the Republican Party, Trump, and his administration, with help from Russia, to fundamentally alter the substance of American democracy. It is a multi-faceted strategy being pursued at the federal, state, and local level, and it is unlike anything ever since in this country before. They seek to maintain the superficial forms of democracy but to sabotage the substance so that the dwindling Republican Party can retain power. These are very scary times.
Illustration by Victor Juhasz for Rolling Stone
In June, President Trump sat in the Oval Office for one of his periodic interviews-turned-airing-of-grievances. When the conversation turned to the 2020 election, Trump singled out what he called the “biggest risk” to his bid for a second term. It was not the mounting death toll from COVID-19, or further economic damage inflicted by the pandemic, or anything else a reality-dwelling president might fret about.
“My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits,” Trump told the Politico reporter he’d invited. He was referring to the series of lawsuits filed by his campaign and the Republican National Committee that fight the expansion of mail-in voting and seek to limit access to the ballot box in November. “We have many lawsuits going all over,” he said. “And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think — I think it puts the election at risk.”
Going into 2020, Trump had the political winds at his back with a strong economy, roaring stock market, and historically low unemployment. Then came COVID-19. As of this writing, more […]
Ryan Goodman and Danielle Schulkin, Co-Editor-in-Chief of Just Security, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Professor of Law at New York University School of Law | Junior Fellow at Just Security. JD, New York University School of Law - Just Security
Stephan: In my opinion, William Barr is the most corrupt and worst Attorney General in the history of the United States, worse even than John Mitchell, Nixon's attorney general who went to prison, as I believe Barr should as well. Here is an essay on his role in what is going on in Portland.
William Barr, Attorney General
Attorney General Barr has been building his playbook for using federal forces against an unwilling state for decades. In an interview with the Miller Center in 2001, Barr explained his strategy for deploying federal troops to address unrest in the Virgin Islands after a major hurricane in 1989. At the time of the incident, Barr was an assistant attorney general and head of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. He boasted that during this time he found a way to deploy federal forces based on a legal justification that appears to now being played out in Portland:
Barr: We started quickly looking at the legal books. What authority do we have to go in there and start enforcing the law in St. Croix? We looked at some statutes, and we finally decided that without Presidential authority we could send down law enforcement people to defend the federal function. That is, we said, “People are interfering with the operation of our courts” and so on. I said, […]
Stephan: Just start with this: This is a report appearing in a British newspaper describing the current state of America. Makes you proud, right? No? Me neither.
John Yoo, whose infamous memo was used to justify American torturing people of other nationalities has been pulled out of whatever cesspit, and Trump now wants to use him to justify creating a national storm trooper force.
John Yoo, who wrote an infamous memo used to justify waterboarding Credit: Melissa Golden/Getty
The Trump administration has been consulting the former government lawyer who wrote the legal justification for waterboarding, on how the president might try to rule by decree.
John Yoo told Axios he has been talking to White House officials about his view that a recent supreme court ruling on immigration would allow Trump to issue executive orders that flout federal law.
In a Fox News Sunday interview, Trump declared he would try to use that interpretation to try to force through decrees on healthcare, immigration and “various other plans” over the coming month.
Constitutional scholars and human rights activists have also pointed to the deployment of paramilitary federal forces against protesters in Portland as a sign that Trump is ready to use this broad interpretation of presidential powers as a means to suppress basic constitutional rights.Advertisement
“This is how it begins,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard constitutional law professor, wrote on Twitter. “The dictatorial hunger for power is insatiable. If ever there was a time for peaceful civil disobedience, that time is upon us.”
Stephan: I consider what is going on in Portland, Oregon to be a test case being run by the Trump administration to gauge the public's reaction to the introduction of fascist Trumpian storm troopers onto American Streets. It is part of the Republican voter suppression effort, the discrediting of mail-in ballots -- even though Trump, Pence, and most of the cabinet vote by mail, and the invocation of blatant White supremacy.
The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Oregon sued the Trump administration late Friday over its deployment of federal agents to Portland, where unidentified officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Marshals Service have been detaining Black Lives Matter protesters without explanation and using indiscriminate force to crush demonstrations.
“This is police escalation on top of police escalation. These federal agents must be stopped and removed from our city.” —Kelly Simon, ACLU of Oregon
“This is a fight to save our democracy,” Kelly Simon, interim legal director with the ACLU of Oregon, said in a statement. “Under the direction of the Trump administration, federal agents are terrorizing the community, risking lives, and brutally attacking protesters demonstrating against police brutality. This is police escalation on top of police escalation.”
“These federal agents must be stopped and removed from our city,” Simon added. “We will continue to bring the full fire power of the ACLU to bear until this lawless policing ends.”
The lawsuit (pdf) against DHS and the U.S. Marshals Service—filed on behalf of legal observers and journalists who were recently assaulted by federal agents in Portland—aims to “block federal law enforcement from dispersing, arresting, threatening to arrest, or using physical force against journalists or legal […]
