June 29, 2018 at 6:34 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard
President Trump “said he wanted to further lower the corporate tax rate, from 21% to 20%, as part of a second round of tax cuts later this year,” the Washington Post reports.
“Trump, in an interview with Fox News to mark the six-month anniversary of the $1.5 trillion tax-cut law Republicans passed last year, said other parts of the new tax plan would be tailored to the middle class.”
Said Trump: “One of the things we’re thinking about is bringing the 21 percent down to 20 and for the most part, the rest of it will go right to the middle class. It’s a great stimulus.”
Source
https://politicalwire.com/2018/06/29/trump-will-propose-second-round-of-tax-cuts/
This blog will focus on political images I have found all around the Internet, though I will intersperse some commentary and quotes that I find interesting.
Friday, June 29, 2018
North Korea Has Increased Nuclear Production
“U.S. intelligence agencies believe that North Korea has increased its production of fuel for nuclear weapons at multiple secret sites in recent months — and that Kim Jong Un may try to hide those facilities as he seeks more concessions in nuclear talks with the Trump administration,” NBC News reports.
“The intelligence assessment, which has not previously been reported, seems to counter the sentiments expressed by President Trump, who tweeted after his historic June 12 summit with Kim that ‘there was no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.'”
Source
Minor problem
I had some posters/images get corrputed today. It will take a few days to get more built up to post.
Trump on trade, Russia and NATO
By Josh Marshall | June 29, 2018 6:45 pm
On WTO: “We’ve been treated very badly by the WTO…it’s a very, very unfair situation. When you look at the WTO, that’s where China emerged, when they joined the WTO. We have been treated very badly. We have lost many, many cases over the years…we’ve had minority judges..we’ve had a minority position in judges. WTO has to start treating the United States fairly because they have not treated us fairly.”
“I’m not talking about pulling out. I’m saying they haven’t treated us fairly. We have not been treated fairly.”
On Crimea: “Don’t forget, President Obama gave up Crimea. That was totally given up by President Obama…No, he lost — President Obama allowed that to happen, which was very unfortunate…It was during President Obama’s term…I think it could’ve been handled much differently…which is a shame, frankly.”
On meeting with Russia: “We’re going to be talking about Ukraine, we’re going to be talking about Syria, we’re going to be talking about elections. We don’t want anybody tampering with elections. We’ll be talking about world events. We’ll be talking about peace. We may even talk about saving millions of dollars on weapons…we are building a force like nobody’s ever seen before.”
“Perhaps the world can deescalate, with China, Russia…maybe the world can somewhat deescalate. That would not be a bad thing. But I think having a relationship with China, Russia…it’s a good thing.
[Asked about potentially lifting sanctions on Russia]: “We’ll see what Russia does. We’re going to be talking to Russia about a lot of things. We’re going to be talking to them about Syria…
On NATO: “NATO is very interesting, we’ll see what happens there. Germany has to spend more money, Spain, France, it’s not fair what they’ve done to the United States.
“The United States is paying much more disproportionately to anyone else.”
On trade: “We’re not being treated fairly on trade, by almost any country. Our leaders have let it get away, missing in action. We will be treated fairly. We will be treated very fairly. But we have not been treated fairly on trade. If you look at the European Union, it’s $150 billion dollar deficit. If you look at China, it’s $375 billion. If you take any country — look at Mexico, it’s $100 billion trade deficit…You look at Canada. Canada’s treated us poorly…but it’ll all work out.”
Source
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-on-trade-russia-and-nato
President Trump on trade, Crimea and NATO, per the pool report from Air Force One.
On WTO: “We’ve been treated very badly by the WTO…it’s a very, very unfair situation. When you look at the WTO, that’s where China emerged, when they joined the WTO. We have been treated very badly. We have lost many, many cases over the years…we’ve had minority judges..we’ve had a minority position in judges. WTO has to start treating the United States fairly because they have not treated us fairly.”
“I’m not talking about pulling out. I’m saying they haven’t treated us fairly. We have not been treated fairly.”
On Crimea: “Don’t forget, President Obama gave up Crimea. That was totally given up by President Obama…No, he lost — President Obama allowed that to happen, which was very unfortunate…It was during President Obama’s term…I think it could’ve been handled much differently…which is a shame, frankly.”
On meeting with Russia: “We’re going to be talking about Ukraine, we’re going to be talking about Syria, we’re going to be talking about elections. We don’t want anybody tampering with elections. We’ll be talking about world events. We’ll be talking about peace. We may even talk about saving millions of dollars on weapons…we are building a force like nobody’s ever seen before.”
“Perhaps the world can deescalate, with China, Russia…maybe the world can somewhat deescalate. That would not be a bad thing. But I think having a relationship with China, Russia…it’s a good thing.
[Asked about potentially lifting sanctions on Russia]: “We’ll see what Russia does. We’re going to be talking to Russia about a lot of things. We’re going to be talking to them about Syria…
On NATO: “NATO is very interesting, we’ll see what happens there. Germany has to spend more money, Spain, France, it’s not fair what they’ve done to the United States.
“The United States is paying much more disproportionately to anyone else.”
On trade: “We’re not being treated fairly on trade, by almost any country. Our leaders have let it get away, missing in action. We will be treated fairly. We will be treated very fairly. But we have not been treated fairly on trade. If you look at the European Union, it’s $150 billion dollar deficit. If you look at China, it’s $375 billion. If you take any country — look at Mexico, it’s $100 billion trade deficit…You look at Canada. Canada’s treated us poorly…but it’ll all work out.”
Source
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-on-trade-russia-and-nato
Thursday, June 28, 2018
The travel ban decision echoes some of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history
The logic SCOTUS used to uphold the travel ban would justify Japanese internment camps.
By Aziz Huq Jun 26, 2018, 3:40pm EDT
Three times in American history, the Supreme Court has been asked to speak to a law, neutral on its face, yet rooted in a popular hatred or intolerance of minorities. Three times, it has chosen to ignore the real reasons for the law.
Three times, it has instead given a free pass to laws and policies predicated on discriminatory judgments that our Constitution supposedly bars.
The first was Plessy v. Ferguson. In 1896, the Plessy Court upheld Homer Plessy’s conviction under Louisiana’s law mandating “equal but separate” railroad carriages. The central plank of the Court’s argument was simple: If Homer Plessy experienced a “badge of inferiority,” it was “not by reason of anything found in the act,” but “solely” because he chose to view the law that way.
The second was Korematsu v. United States — the Japanese internment camp case. Famously, the case upheld in 1944 an executive order by President Franklin Roosevelt, authorizing “military areas … from which any or all persons may be excluded.” The Court reviewed “evidence” that Congress had gathered about the Japanese government’s “dissemination of propaganda and … maintenance of … influence” among Japanese Americans.
It carefully framed its Korematsu opinion as focused on a policy of “exclusion,” ignoring the network of civilian assembly centers and “relocation” camps — as the internment camps were euphemistically known — that ultimately held between 110,000 and 120,000 people.
The Court expressly refused to look beyond these proffered justifications — justifications that in the fullness of time were revealed as false. Rather, it rejected the discrimination issue because it “merely confuses the issue.” Emphasizing that “we are at war” and that “time was short,” the Court deferred to the decision of “properly constituted military authorities.”
Even at the time, the problem with this logic was apparent: As Justice Robert Jackson cautioned, the Court’s embrace of the deference meant that judges would “never have any real alternative to accepting the mere declaration of the authority that issued the order that it was reasonably necessary from a military viewpoint.”
Read more
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/6/26/17507014/travel-ban-internment-camp-supreme-court-korematsu-muslim-history
Trump: Tariffs Could Replace Income Tax
By Josh Marshall | June 26, 2018 4:49 pm
Remarkable moment in the President’s discussion of tariffs today when he suggested that his tariffs may be able to fund the government in place of income taxes. He references the McKinley era when this was the case, prior to the enactment of a federal income tax. Of course federal expenditures are roughly 10 times (2.2% versus 23% or 24%) higher today as a percentage of GDP. So this is basically insane.
Read more
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-tariffs-could-replace-income-tax
Remarkable moment in the President’s discussion of tariffs today when he suggested that his tariffs may be able to fund the government in place of income taxes. He references the McKinley era when this was the case, prior to the enactment of a federal income tax. Of course federal expenditures are roughly 10 times (2.2% versus 23% or 24%) higher today as a percentage of GDP. So this is basically insane.
Read more
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-tariffs-could-replace-income-tax
Presidential Historian Explains How Republicans 'Sold Their Soul' for 'Biblical 40 Years' of Conservative Supreme Court Justices
The president faces good odds of reelection, but smart opposition can keep him from a second term.
By Chris Sosa / AlterNet June 26, 2018, 7:21 AM GMT
Historian Jon Meacham appeared on The View to promote his new book and discussed the state of American politics under President Donald Trump.
The historian revealed that he's voted for both Republicans and Democrats, but the GOP leadership have now "sold their souls" to secure a "biblical 40 years" of the conservative Supreme Court.
"Hope is what history rewards," he explained in contextualizing how history will view the dark Trump presidency as it stands.
"The president has pushed bullying to the front," Meacham said. "What we have now is a bully-in-chief."
Meacham suggested that resistance to the president needs to avoid being passive. "I know we're supposed to turn the other cheek," he said. "But there's a reason there's only one Jesus."
While Meacham agreed with co-host Meghan McCain that Trump has a strong chance of reelection, he explained that both parties made a mistake that led to his rise.
Meacham suggested that having a Bush or Clinton on "80 percent" of presidential elections since 1980 was a major factor in Trump's rise, because Americans viewed the family dynasties as antithetical to change.
Read more
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/presidential-historian-explains-how-republicans-sold-their-soul-biblical-40-years
Trump’s Fourth of July
robertreich
On this coming Fourth of July, it’s worth pondering the true meaning of American patriotism – as opposed to the malignant, distorted view of it propounded by Donald J. Trump.
For Trump, the central challenge of American patriotism is to secure our borders. “Without borders, there can be no nation,” he says.
But excluding foreigners has never been a dominant part of American patriotism. For most of its existence America has been relatively open to people from the rest of the world, especially those fleeing tyranny and violence.
America’s core struggle has been one of inclusion, not exclusion. We have strived to extend equal citizenship to Native Americans, African Americans, women, and LGBTQs.
The poems of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, and the songs of Woody Guthrie, expressed loving devotion to America while turning that love into a demand for justice.
“This land is your land, this land is my land” sang Guthrie. “Let America be America again,” pleaded Hughes: “The land that never has been yet–/And yet must be – the land where everyone is free./The land that’s mine – the poor man’s, Indian’s Negro’s, ME –.”
Trump’s patriotism centers on symbolic displays of loyalty like standing for the national anthem and waving the American flag.
But such displays haven’t been at the center of American patriotism, either. Historically, American patriotism has meant taking a fair share of the burdens of keeping the nation going.
This includes volunteering time and energy to improving the community and country. It has meant paying taxes in full rather than lobbying for lower taxes, seeking tax loopholes, or squirreling away money abroad.
It also means refraining from making political contributions that corrupt our politics, and blowing the whistle on abuses of power even at the risk of losing one’s job.
Real patriotism involves strengthening our democracy – defending the right to vote and ensuring more Americans are heard, not claiming without evidence that millions of voted fraudulently and pushing for laws that make it harder for blacks and Latinos to vote.
True patriots don’t inundate government with industry lobbyists, attack the freedom of the press, criticize judges who disagree with them, or fill the airwaves with lies. They don’t direct employers to fire employees who exercise their freedom of speech.
True patriots don’t court foreign dictators, and don’t excuse tyranny by denigrating America.
When asked whether Vladimir Putin is a killer, Trump responded “you think our country’s so innocent?” When asked about Turkish strongman Erdogan’s disdain for civil liberties, Trump said “when the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t think we’re a very good messenger.”
True patriots don’t fuel racist, religious or ethnic divisions. They aren’t homophobic or sexist. To the contrary, true patriots seek to confirm and strengthen and celebrate the “we” in “we the people of the United States.”
Trump is the first United States president to use the term “we” to refer only to his supporters. “My supporters are the smartest, strongest, most hard working and most loyal that we have seen in our countries history,” he tweeted recently. “As we get stronger, so does our country.”
A majority of today’s Americans do worry that the nation is losing its national identity. But that identity has never been centered on our support for a particular president or his policies.
Nor, more fundamentally, has our identity depended on the whiteness of our skin or the uniformity of our ethnicity.
Our national identity has been our shared ideals.
If we are losing our national identity it is because we are losing those ideals: a commitment to the rule of law, to our democratic institutions, to truth, to tolerance of our differences, to equal political rights and equal opportunity, to participating in our civic life and making necessary sacrifices for these ideals we hold in common.
We must share these ideals if we are to have a functioning society. Without them, there is no America.
Trump is doing everything he can to destroy these ideals. We must do everything we can to strengthen them.
This is the true test of our patriotism.
Source
http://robertreich.tumblr.com/post/175247763080
On this coming Fourth of July, it’s worth pondering the true meaning of American patriotism – as opposed to the malignant, distorted view of it propounded by Donald J. Trump.
For Trump, the central challenge of American patriotism is to secure our borders. “Without borders, there can be no nation,” he says.
But excluding foreigners has never been a dominant part of American patriotism. For most of its existence America has been relatively open to people from the rest of the world, especially those fleeing tyranny and violence.
America’s core struggle has been one of inclusion, not exclusion. We have strived to extend equal citizenship to Native Americans, African Americans, women, and LGBTQs.
The poems of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, and the songs of Woody Guthrie, expressed loving devotion to America while turning that love into a demand for justice.
“This land is your land, this land is my land” sang Guthrie. “Let America be America again,” pleaded Hughes: “The land that never has been yet–/And yet must be – the land where everyone is free./The land that’s mine – the poor man’s, Indian’s Negro’s, ME –.”
Trump’s patriotism centers on symbolic displays of loyalty like standing for the national anthem and waving the American flag.
But such displays haven’t been at the center of American patriotism, either. Historically, American patriotism has meant taking a fair share of the burdens of keeping the nation going.
This includes volunteering time and energy to improving the community and country. It has meant paying taxes in full rather than lobbying for lower taxes, seeking tax loopholes, or squirreling away money abroad.
It also means refraining from making political contributions that corrupt our politics, and blowing the whistle on abuses of power even at the risk of losing one’s job.
Real patriotism involves strengthening our democracy – defending the right to vote and ensuring more Americans are heard, not claiming without evidence that millions of voted fraudulently and pushing for laws that make it harder for blacks and Latinos to vote.
True patriots don’t inundate government with industry lobbyists, attack the freedom of the press, criticize judges who disagree with them, or fill the airwaves with lies. They don’t direct employers to fire employees who exercise their freedom of speech.
True patriots don’t court foreign dictators, and don’t excuse tyranny by denigrating America.
When asked whether Vladimir Putin is a killer, Trump responded “you think our country’s so innocent?” When asked about Turkish strongman Erdogan’s disdain for civil liberties, Trump said “when the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t think we’re a very good messenger.”
True patriots don’t fuel racist, religious or ethnic divisions. They aren’t homophobic or sexist. To the contrary, true patriots seek to confirm and strengthen and celebrate the “we” in “we the people of the United States.”
Trump is the first United States president to use the term “we” to refer only to his supporters. “My supporters are the smartest, strongest, most hard working and most loyal that we have seen in our countries history,” he tweeted recently. “As we get stronger, so does our country.”
A majority of today’s Americans do worry that the nation is losing its national identity. But that identity has never been centered on our support for a particular president or his policies.
Nor, more fundamentally, has our identity depended on the whiteness of our skin or the uniformity of our ethnicity.
Our national identity has been our shared ideals.
If we are losing our national identity it is because we are losing those ideals: a commitment to the rule of law, to our democratic institutions, to truth, to tolerance of our differences, to equal political rights and equal opportunity, to participating in our civic life and making necessary sacrifices for these ideals we hold in common.
We must share these ideals if we are to have a functioning society. Without them, there is no America.
Trump is doing everything he can to destroy these ideals. We must do everything we can to strengthen them.
This is the true test of our patriotism.
Source
http://robertreich.tumblr.com/post/175247763080
Wednesday, June 27, 2018
Mitch McConnell Doesn’t Care If You Don’t Like Him
June 27, 2018 at 4:48 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard
Matthew Yglesias: “He’s not interested in being thought of as a high-minded guy or in being well-regarded by high-minded people. He wants to be thought of as an effective party politician, and he is an effective politician…”
“There’s a perfect alignment between the reputation he wants, the reputation he has, and the reputation he deserves in a way that’s unequalled among American politicians and that allows him to conduct himself with an even greater degree of shamelessness than Donald Trump himself since unlike the all-id Trump, McConnell isn’t out of control he’s just willing to be utterly ruthless in pursuit of his political objectives…”
Read more
https://politicalwire.com/2018/06/27/mcconnell-doesnt-care-that-you-dont-like-him/
Matthew Yglesias: “He’s not interested in being thought of as a high-minded guy or in being well-regarded by high-minded people. He wants to be thought of as an effective party politician, and he is an effective politician…”
“There’s a perfect alignment between the reputation he wants, the reputation he has, and the reputation he deserves in a way that’s unequalled among American politicians and that allows him to conduct himself with an even greater degree of shamelessness than Donald Trump himself since unlike the all-id Trump, McConnell isn’t out of control he’s just willing to be utterly ruthless in pursuit of his political objectives…”
Read more
https://politicalwire.com/2018/06/27/mcconnell-doesnt-care-that-you-dont-like-him/
Manafort Owed Russian Oligarch $10 Million
June 27, 2018 at 4:54 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard
“A search warrant application unsealed on Wednesday revealed closer links than previously known between President Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and a Russian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin,” Reuters reports.
“In an affidavit attached to the July 2017 application, an FBI agent said he had reviewed tax returns for a company controlled by Manafort and his wife that showed a $10 million loan from a Russian lender identified as Oleg Deripaska.”
Source
https://politicalwire.com/2018/06/27/manafort-owed-russian-oligarch-10-million/
“A search warrant application unsealed on Wednesday revealed closer links than previously known between President Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and a Russian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin,” Reuters reports.
“In an affidavit attached to the July 2017 application, an FBI agent said he had reviewed tax returns for a company controlled by Manafort and his wife that showed a $10 million loan from a Russian lender identified as Oleg Deripaska.”
Source
https://politicalwire.com/2018/06/27/manafort-owed-russian-oligarch-10-million/
The Gates Foundation spent $775m on a Big Data education project that was worse than useless
FROM THE BOING BOING SHOP
Kudos to the Gates Foundation, seriously: after spending $775m on the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching, a Big Data initiative to improve education for poor and disadvantaged students, they hired outside auditors to evaluate the program's effectiveness, and published that report, even though it shows that the approach did no good on balance and arguably caused real harms to teachers and students.
Cathy "Weapons of Math Destruction" O'Neil has given the report a close reading, and she found that the problems with the approach were pretty predictable: asking principals to rate teachers produces pretty uniform and meaningless five-star results, while the "value add" algorithms that are supposed to figure out how much of a student's performance is attributable to a teacher are basically random number generators.
The result was a hugely stressful (and sometimes career-destroying) exercise in which teachers and students were human guinea pigs in an experiment that could have been evaluated more cheaply and quickly in smaller laboratory tests before it was unleashed on whole populations.
Read more
https://boingboing.net/2018/06/27/worse-than-useless-2.html
Kudos to the Gates Foundation, seriously: after spending $775m on the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching, a Big Data initiative to improve education for poor and disadvantaged students, they hired outside auditors to evaluate the program's effectiveness, and published that report, even though it shows that the approach did no good on balance and arguably caused real harms to teachers and students.
Cathy "Weapons of Math Destruction" O'Neil has given the report a close reading, and she found that the problems with the approach were pretty predictable: asking principals to rate teachers produces pretty uniform and meaningless five-star results, while the "value add" algorithms that are supposed to figure out how much of a student's performance is attributable to a teacher are basically random number generators.
The result was a hugely stressful (and sometimes career-destroying) exercise in which teachers and students were human guinea pigs in an experiment that could have been evaluated more cheaply and quickly in smaller laboratory tests before it was unleashed on whole populations.
Read more
https://boingboing.net/2018/06/27/worse-than-useless-2.html
Far-right voices are frothing about a looming civil war
They apparently don't remember how well it went for them last time.
CASEY MICHEL
The backlash to the Trump administration caging immigrant children has led to store owners asking White House officials to not eat in their restaurants and to protesters publicly confronting those supporting Trump’s policies. Now, voices on the far-right are increasingly unified in their only solution to the matter: civil war.
While several far-right figures have been speculating about a looming U.S. break-up for some time, recent rhetoric is a marked escalation from even a few months ago, when certain historical illiterates were only calling for an “amicable divorce.”
Now, according to increasingly shrill analysts — and even certain members of Congress — a fratricidal war is the only potential fix for the United States’ domestic tensions.
What’s with these so-called ‘patriots’ calling for the breakup of America?
Glenn Reynolds, known colloquially as “Instapundit,” led the charge with a piece in USA Today earlier this week. Pointing to White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders being denied service in Virginia and protesters identifying Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant, Reynolds claimed that the administration officials’ inability to eat at certain restaurants was a sign that civil war was well underway.
“Is America headed toward a civil war? Sanders, Nielsen incidents show it has already begun,” his headline claimed. Added Reynolds, Sanders’ incident “seems like a small thing, but it would have been largely unthinkable a generation ago.”
Of course, a generation ago — the late 1960s and early 1970s — was marked by domestic unrest that outpaces what the U.S. is currently seeing by multiple magnitudes. Protesters gunned down at Kent State University, White House officials discussing fire-bombing think tanks in Washington, explosions across New York every other day — the level of domestic strife a generation ago significantly outpaces what we’ve seen recently, even with a humanitarian crisis unfurling along the U.S.’s southern border.
Read more
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=18204927#editor/target=post;postID=1268823693609690635
The Era of Minority Rule
June 27, 2018 at 5:55 pm EDT
By Taegan Goddard
Jonathan Chait: “Democrats have won the national vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, which, with the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, will have resulted in the appointment of eight of its nine justices. And yet four of those justices will have been appointed by presidents who took office despite having fewer votes than their opponent. Republicans will have increasingly solid control of the court’s majority, with the chance to replace the sometimes-wavering Kennedy with a never-wavering conservative movement stalwart.”
“Over the last generation, the Republican Party has moved rapidly rightward, while the center of public opinion has not. It is almost impossible to find a substantive basis in public opinion for Republican government. On health care, taxes, immigration, guns, the GOP has left America behind in its race to the far right. But the Supreme Court underscores its ability to counteract the undertow of its deepening, unpopular extremism by marshaling countermajoritiarian power.”
Source
https://politicalwire.com/2018/06/27/the-era-of-minority-rule/
By Taegan Goddard
Jonathan Chait: “Democrats have won the national vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, which, with the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, will have resulted in the appointment of eight of its nine justices. And yet four of those justices will have been appointed by presidents who took office despite having fewer votes than their opponent. Republicans will have increasingly solid control of the court’s majority, with the chance to replace the sometimes-wavering Kennedy with a never-wavering conservative movement stalwart.”
“Over the last generation, the Republican Party has moved rapidly rightward, while the center of public opinion has not. It is almost impossible to find a substantive basis in public opinion for Republican government. On health care, taxes, immigration, guns, the GOP has left America behind in its race to the far right. But the Supreme Court underscores its ability to counteract the undertow of its deepening, unpopular extremism by marshaling countermajoritiarian power.”
Source
https://politicalwire.com/2018/06/27/the-era-of-minority-rule/
So he said
“Trump is not essentially a conservative. Trump is an anti-liberal. They’re not the same phenomenon. But he may be the most effective uprooter of liberalism in my lifetime.”
— Newt Gingrich, in an interview with ABC News.
Mike Lee is the conservative favorite to take a seat on the Supreme Court
But the senator’s past positions — and views on Trump — might pose a problem.
By Jane Coastonjane.coaston@vox.com Jun 27, 2018, 7:00pm EDT
Conservatives reacting to Wednesday’s announcement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement already have a popular choice for his replacement: Sen. Mike Lee.
Lee, from Utah, is a firebrand conservative and original Tea Party member loved by many libertarians and conservatives, but despised among establishment Republicans who saw his hardline moves as self-defeating.
Erick EricksonLast summer, for example, he torpedoed a Republican plan to repeal Obamacare. “It seems like he’s against everything right now,” his fellow senator from Utah, Orin Hatch, said in an interview with Politico. “That’s the way it looks to me.”
?
@EWErickson
If the President went with Mike Lee, he'd eliminate the oppo research hits on a nominee, he'd get an obstacle out of the Senate, and he'd make conservatives really happy.
5:24 PM - Jun 27, 2018
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And he’s widely blamed for helping Sen. Ted Cruz shut down the government in 2013.
When Lee ran for reelection in 2014, fellow Utah Republican Jon Huntsman called him an “embarrassment to our family, to our state, to our country to have him as a U.S. senator”
Though Lee is a lawyer, he’s not a traditional pick for a Supreme Court justice, as he’s not a legal scholar or sitting judge.
Nonetheless, Lee’s on President Donald Trump’s short-list of potential Supreme Court picks, and the senator has already said he “would not say no” if asked to serve.
Longtime friend and ally, Cruz, told Fox News that Lee would be his ideal choice.
Other conservatives and libertarians echoed similar views on Wednesday, including conservative writer Erick Erickson, Fox News commentator Guy Benson, and Commentary magazine’s John Podhoretz.
Senator Ted Cruz
?
@SenTedCruz
ICYMI on @FoxNews: "I think the single best choice that President Trump could make to fill this #SCOTUS vacancy is @SenMikeLee"
4:19 PM - Jun 27, 2018
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429 people are talking about this
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Reason magazine’s Eric Boehm wrote Wednesday, “conservatives have plenty of reasons to like the prospect of a Justice Mike Lee,” and added, “libertarians would be hard pressed to find much ... to complain about Lee sitting on the Supreme Court, where he could fill Kennedy’s “swing vote” role and steer the court in an originalist direction.”
This isn’t the first time Lee has been pushed by conservatives as a possible Supreme Court choice; in 2016, after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, Lee had the support of many Republicans as a potential Trump SCOTUS nominee, including then-Sen. Jeff Sessions and the powerful Heritage Foundation, which described Lee as having a “deep devotion to the Constitution” and added, “his speeches and writings ... reflect a keen desire to restore important constitutional principles, which he acknowledges is a daunting endeavor.”
Lee’s political views are a mixed bag of traditional conservatism and pro-privacy libertarian (a la Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, with whom Lee has voted against major defense bills, breaking with the GOP). It’s unclear just how realistic his chances are of landing on the Supreme Court, given both his past disagreements with other conservatives and his history with President Trump.
But the fact that he’s in the mix shows that at least some conservatives view him as just the “strict constructionist” they’re looking for on the Supreme Court — complete with Tea Party leanings and a willingness to divide.
Read more
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/27/17511348/mike-lee-republican-scotus
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