Trump Is Pushing Hard Against American Values On Every Level— And He Must Be Fought On Every Level

There Are No Distractions— It's All The Toxic MAGA GOP Agenda

In his quest for the presidency, coporate centrist Gavin Newsom has decided to make a sharp turn right. Good; the more people who recognize him for what he is, the better. Interestingly, other centrist Democrats, particularly Chris Murphy, have made the opposite calculation— a turn— albeit not sharp— left. Aside from his clownish podcast, Newsom is dismissing Trump’s unconstitutional ICE maneuvers as just “the distraction of the day.” Hopefully, this kind of clueless perspective will eliminate the over-gelled California governor from serious contention.

Yesterday Dana Bash interviewed Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), straight off his trip to meet with the Maryland resident Trump had deported to this infamous El Salvador concentration camp. “The Trump administration has admitted in court,” Van Hollen told her, “that he was wrongfully abducted and taken to El Salvador, and yet they refuse to follow the court order, the U.S. Supreme Court order, to facilitate his return… [Trump] and his administration are defying a court order to give Abrego Garcia his due process rights. They are trying to litigate on social media what they should be doing in the courts. They need to put up or shut up in the courts… Now, let's be clear. We have a lawless president who is ignoring the order of the Supreme Court of the United States to facilitate his return. That's what's going on right now.”

Bash pointed out that Newsom said: “It's the distraction of the day, the art of distraction. And how is it so that we are looking like we're defending someone who's out of sight, out of mind in El Salvador?” Van Hollen: “I don't think it's ever wrong to fight for the constitutional rights of one person, because, if we give up on one person's rights, we threaten everybody's rights. And I think a lot of voters, both Republican and Democrat, are tired of elected politicians who just put their finger to the wind. And I would say that anyone who's not prepared to stand up and fight for the Constitution doesn't deserve to lead.” Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) was Kristen Welker’s guest on Meet the Press (as was Van Hollen). A dependable tool for the regime, Kennedy slipped up a little. He said he respects Van Hollen “but in my judgment, he is utterly and gloriously wrong. I mean, most of this gauzy rhetoric is just rage bait. Unless you’re next-level obtuse, you know that Garcia is never coming back to the United States ever. And that's not because of President Trump. That's because of President Bukele. He said up front in the Oval Office that he was not going to return Garcia. No federal judge, even J. Wilkinson, has authority over a sovereign country. Besides that, it should not go unnoticed that Bukele is much closer to President Xi in China than he is to President Trump. Xi is spending billions of dollars to build infrastructure in El Salvador. And I wouldn't be surprised if they've discussed this case. The final point I would make, whether you agree with it or not, is Bukele hates MS-13. And Garcia, allegedly, is a member of MS-13. The other point I would make is that Chris says Garcia's had no due process. He's been in front of 17 judges, some of 'em twice, probably $5 million worth of legal fees and he hadn't had to pay a dime. Final point I'd make, look, this was a screw-up in my opinion. The administration won't admit it. But, this was a screw-up. Garcia was not supposed to be sent to El Salvador. He was sent to El Salvador. The Democrats say, ‘Look, you know, we told you Trump is a threat to democracy. This is going to happen every other Thursday afternoon.’ But, I don't see any pattern here. I mean, you know, some day pigs may fly. But, I doubt it… [I]t was a screw-up. And I understand why the administration has bowed up and won't admit it's a mistake. Because if they do, they'll have their throats torn out. But, it was a screw-up. I don't see any pattern here. I've been listening to my Democratic friends say for, I don't know, since God was a child, that Trump is a threat to democracy. I don't see any pattern here. I see a screw-up.”

Trump may consider the next bit even less friendly Welker said “[Trump] said he would like to send what he calls, and I'm quoting him, ‘homegrown criminals,’ meaning U.S. citizens, to foreign prisons like the one in El Salvador. Senator, do you think the law allows the president of the United States to send U.S. citizens to a foreign prison?”

Kennedy replied “No, ma'am. Nor does it— nor should it be considered appropriate or moral. We have our own laws. We have the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. We shouldn't send prisoners to foreign countries in my judgment.”

The National Review’s Andrew McCarthy is too knee-jerk right-wing for me to normally bother to read. But yesterday he wrote something noteworthy, even if I disagree with some of it. “Vance,” he wrote, “issued one of his claptrap-laden diatribes on social media Wednesday, slamming ‘the media and the far left’ who are ‘weeping over the lack of due process’ in the Trump administration’s illegal deportations of people it alleges— probably correctly in most instances— are members of criminal gangs. Vance spotlights Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the illegal alien and Salvadoran national whom— the Trump Justice Department itself has confessed to the Supreme Court— the administration unlawfully deported to El Salvador. It is natural for Vance to dwell on Abrego Garcia. It’s topical, after all, with the administration cruising toward being held in contempt by a federal judge because it is stonewalling about its flouting of an order, endorsed by the Supreme Court, that it facilitate his return to the United States. It’s an order with which the administration could easily comply but it has decided to ignore. The best explanation is the simplest: Trump intends to illustrate that he has amassed uncheckable power. That is, having extirpated what made the Republican Party conservative and constitutionalist, and with Congress thus no obstacle (at least for the next 21 months), the president wants it known that such constitutional constraints on executive power as courts and due process are no longer operative.”

McCarthy wrote that that was the point of the heavily eye-lined twerp’s post: Due process is for whiners, and if you’re ‘weeping’ over its sudden death, you’re the problem.

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“Constitutional crisis” is a phrase often invoked and rarely accurate. But now, we actually have one: the evisceration of due process, the justice for all without which we can’t have the liberty in the republic to which we pledge allegiance. But as ever, it is erupting within our clown show. By Vance’s lights, you should feel good about voiding due process because to be opposed necessarily means you are flocking to the pom-pom squad of a man who may very well be a member of the vicious international criminal gang, MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha)— even if the Trump administration is assiduously misleading the public in claiming that two “courts” have “ruled” that he is.

(In point of fact, two immigration tribunals— which are Justice Department components, not Article III judicial courts— ruled in 2019 that Abrego Garcia should be denied bail, not that he is an MS-13 member; he has never been formally accused of, much less convicted of, some MS-13-related crime. The denial of bail was supported, in part, by an unidentified, uncorroborated informant, whom the DOJ “courts” credited. What the administration doesn’t tell you is, subsequently, a third DOJ immigration “court” allowed him to be released, without apparent objection from or appeal by the Trump-45 Justice Department. Since then, the two actual federal courts that have weighed in this month have scoffed at the weakness of the Trump DOJ’s evidence that Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 member. That doesn’t mean he’s not one, just that the feds haven’t proven it.)

…Vance took a solemn oath “to bear true faith and allegiance” to the Constitution, which includes the very inconvenient Fifth and 14th Amendment guarantees that no person— not just citizens, but no person— shall “be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.” He writes, nevertheless:

To say the administration must observe “due process” is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors.

As the Yale Law alum well knows, that is specious. The executive branch executes the laws enacted by Congress; that is the duty the president swears to “faithfully execute.” What process is due is, first and foremost, a function of congressional statute, since it is primarily the task of the legislature to balance “our resources [and] the public interest,” as well as “the status of the accused” (by which I assume Vance means the illegal-immigrant status of Abrego Garcia, though he is not an “accused” since the Trump administration never actually charged him with a crime) and the “proposed punishment” (presumably this refers to what Vance later describes as “deporting an illegal alien to their [sic] country of origin”).

… Like most Americans, I expect the Trump administration to aggressively enforce the law— not break the law and pretend that doing so is “the process that is due.” The aim should be to remove the aliens it is practicable to remove legitimately, and in so doing to reverse the incentives of illegal aliens to enter and remain in the United States. That way, new aliens don’t try to come and the ones who are here self-deport in meaningful numbers. The amount of enforcement resources Congress commits to this task is a joke, and the Trump administration (with Republicans at least for now controlling both houses of Congress) should be demanding much more. But for now, the administration should be doing what it can within the law, not flouting the law in a way that will inevitably result in court defeats on many key parts of Trump’s agenda.

Vance claims that taking the position I’ve just outlined, the legal aggressive-enforcement position, is “giving the game away.” By that he means one who stakes out this position secretly “doesn’t want border security,” doesn’t “want us to deport the people who’ve come into our country illegally,” wants “a fake legal process,” and hopes for “ratification of Biden’s illegal migrant invasion.”

It’s not enough to say that is self-evidently untrue. I’d add, in all sincerity, that it is Vance who is giving the game away.

He says we who want the law enforced don’t have a plan for deporting 20 million people— and that’s true, for there is no such four-year plan; there’s just “do the best you can to materially reduce the illegal population, get on a trajectory for bigger reductions over time, and then manage illegal immigration like we manage other ordinary crime.” But to flip it around, Vice President Vance does not tell us what his plan is for rapidly deporting 20 million people. That’s because such a plan cannot include faithfully executing the law. And he knows it.

And if it were a diversion? The GOP stealing health care from millions of Americans? Jonathan Cohn noted over the weekend that “The likelihood of Donald Trump and his allies in Congress taking Medicaid away from millions of low-income Americans— and, in the process, rolling back a huge piece of the Affordable Care Act— has increased significantly in the last two weeks. The change has been easy to miss, because so many other stories are dominating the news— and because the main evidence is a subtle shift in Republican rhetoric… [Obamacare’s]  main goal was to make decent health insurance available to all Americans, as part of a decades-long, still unfinished campaign to make health care a basic right, as it is in every other economically advanced nation. That meant getting coverage to the uninsured, including low-income Americans who didn’t have a way to get insurance on their own— because their jobs didn’t offer coverage or made coverage available at premiums they couldn’t afford, and because individual policies (the kind you buy on your own, not through a job) were either too expensive or unavailable to them because of pre-existing conditions.”

Cohn notes that “As of today, forty of the states have expanded Medicaid, if not through legislative action then through ballot initiative. That’s the single biggest reason the U.S. uninsured rate is at record lows. But conservatives object to all of the taxing and spending Medicaid expansion requires, and say the government intervention makes health care worse, not better. They’ve tried to block expansion where they could— which is why ten Republican-led states still don’t have it— and in 2017 they made sure the GOP’s Obamacare-repeal bills included provisions to take away the extra funding… [T]he interest in ending expansion funding is still there— in no small part because the money is still there— and in recent years especially Republicans have spun their efforts more as an attempt to preserve Medicaid for what they say are the truly vulnerable groups that need it.

[T]aking away the extra matching funds will mean that the only way to preserve expanded Medicaid coverage would be for states to make up the difference— something most either couldn’t or wouldn’t do, given the expense and their resources.

…And it’s not like Johnson or his supporters are proposing an alternative way of covering all these people. Some would find their way to other forms of coverage, but the rest would end up uninsured. And while it’s tough to predict these sorts of things accurately, the number of newly uninsured would likely reach well into the millions and could easily exceed 10 million.

…At its most fundamental level, a debate over curbing or even ending Medicaid-expansion funding would be the same one that’s been dividing Democrats and Republicans for decades: Should health care be a right and, if so, should the federal government spend what it takes to make that happen?

Democrats have mostly prevailed in those debates recently, including the 2017 repeal fight. And the prospect of big Medicaid cutbacks— of any sort— has already drawn objections from House Republicans from states that have expanded Medicaid.

… [I]t’s not hard to imagine Republicans in Congress buckling and going along with a cut to Medicaid expansion, given the pressure to find budget savings and— potentially—ba push from the White House.

It could come down to wavering Republican lawmakers weighing how these cuts will look to their constituents. And that political judgment may depend on whether voters come to believe Johnson’s argument that taking away America’s most vital health safety net program is the best way to help its most vulnerable citizens.