I find Trump absolutely disgusting.

Nobody is asking you to have a beer with him or even listen to him speak. Hell, every time Obama was on TV I turned the channel. Do the same for Pelosi. But are you happy that America is doing well?

I can't watch TV anymore because my channel-turner finally broke.

Peter Morici, a professor at Maryland, was on Fox News this morning. He says now, after 500+ days under Trump, the United States ranks 1st among industrialized nations in Global Competitiveness. We are now well ahead of China again. World Economic Forum now ranks us among best places to do business.

A couple years ago we were well down the list.

https://mobile.twitter.com/foxandfriend ... 3402659846

Jailing babies, children between the ages of 1 and 5, and young adults in the trump gulags "trumps" all those job reports.

Deporting parents while keeping the children they may never see again "trumps" all those job reports.

Holding these children hostage as payback for the wall "trumps" my modest tax bonus.

Housing children in tent cities in Texas with no air conditioning is child abuse. (Just read that air conditioning has been added) !

Aren't we all just proud to be Americans?

I fought the tears back watching the news tonight.

I stopped posting the news here because I got depressed and extremely angry with the moron we call a president.

trump and his trolls are taking America to a dark place.

Steve Schmidt: Why I Quit the ‘Vile’ Republican Party

‘I won’t share a party label with people who think it’s all right to put babies in internment camps. My fidelity is to my country, not my political party. Country first.’

Steve Schmidt, the veteran GOP strategist who worked in the George W. Bush White House and ran John McCain’s campaign for president, accused Republicans of complicity with the “vile” Trump administration and its “evil” policies unless they follow him and quit the party.

Schmidt announced Tuesday night that he had formally left the party over Trump’s policy of separating families at the U.S. border with Mexico.

Speaking to The Daily Beast, he called for his old boss, President Bush, to set aside political convention and come out to publicly challenge Trump’s grip on both the country and the Republican Party, which he feels is set to collapse. “This is a metastasis, a cancer, a toxin that has destroyed the Republican Party,” he said.

He said he fears that “cowards” Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have failed in their constitutional duty to act as counterweights to the Executive Branch, opening up the possibility that an era of liberal American democracy could be coming to an end.

“The American people are fed a daily diet of nonsense-talk and lies in the form of what is effectively state media on Fox News and nobody should underestimate the threat posed by a political party where conservatism is now defined by absolute obedience to a leader with autocratic tendencies who fetishizes dictators and autocrats all over the world,” he said.

“Trump didn’t destroy the Republican Party—it’s the cowardice of the Republican leaders, their complicity in all of it, the lack of courage to stand up for what's right.

“Republican members of Congress are cowed and fearful of Trump and they have abrogated their oaths to defend the Constitution of the United States from Trump's attacks on the rule of law; on objective truth; his defilement of important institutions; his sundering of the American people; his betrayals of the Atlantic alliance; his racism; and his cruelty. The party has become profoundly corrupt, both financially in the form of men like Scott Pruitt and Jared [Kushner] and Ivanka [Trump], but also intellectually rotten and corrupt.”

Schmidt, who was campaign manager for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s re-election as governor of California, said he believes that the Republican Party has been so badly damaged by the Trump presidency that it will not be able to recover.

He fears the party’s virtual annihilation in California, where registration rolls now show fewer Republicans than unaffiliated voters and many races are fought between two Democrats, is a foreboding warning for it nationwide.

“Whether they’re for good or bad, all trends in the United States start in California,” Schmidt said. “When you look at the demographics of the Republican Party today, its embrace of white ethno-nationalism; blood-and-soil politics of the type that you traditionally see in the European far-right—the Republican Party demographically will face its demise.”

Schmidt said he mourns the “heartbreaking” transformation of the Republican Party, not because he believes that the push and pull of a center-left and center-right party is beneficial for any democracy, but he says he has always had respect for both of America’s great political parties.

“A mark of stupidity is a belief that one party is totally virtuous and correct on the issues while the other is evil and always wrong. The truth of the matter is that both of these political parties have been essential institutions not just in the country but in the history of the world,” he said. “They have both produced good leaders and bad leaders. But neither has ever produced a leader as profoundly dangerous to the notion of small ‘l’ liberalism, of democracy, of freedom as it has in Donald Trump.”

For Schmidt, the Trump administration’s policy of forced separation of families was the final straw for his own membership of the party, he said he would now support the Democrats.

“Make no mistake about it when you're ripping breastfeeding children away from their mothers and putting them in detention facilities. That's an evil policy,” he said. “To see the Republican Party break up the way it has to lose its moral compass it is tragic, it's tragic for me personally, but I won't be part of it. I won’t share a party label with people who think it’s all right to put babies in internment camps. My fidelity is to my country, not my political party. Country first.”

The failure of the Republican leadership to challenge the policy has also left him appalled. “You literally have nobody who’s willing to fight and to stand up to recognize the extraordinary moment in time, none of the elected official class. And so we have a spectacle in the United States where there are internment camps along the southern border. A policy that is morally reprehensible that speaks to the worst moral outrages in the history of the country; the separation of families at the auction blocks during slavery; the separation of children from Indian families.”

As set out in the Constitution, Congress is supposed to temper the power of the White House. “Could American democracy roll back? Could you have an autocratic leader? Can you have a president who asserts that his power is unchecked—and it is unchecked? The system of government in the United States as designed by the Founders always anticipated that one day there would be a President Donald Trump. What it didn’t anticipate was the abdication of duty by the co-equal branch of government to check the Donald Trump and that would be the United States Congress,” he said, singling out Ryan and McConnell’s utter failure to challenge Trump.

“They’re the heads of a co-equal branch of government. They have powerful offices and positions and they could have checked him. They could have set guardrails and boundaries. They could have stood up for what's right. Both of them are cowards.”

In the absence of constitutional checks, Schmidt says Americans reluctantly must cast their eyes toward Europe in the 1930s.

“What are the hallmarks here? He uses mass rallies to incite fervor and followers who are now more like cult members than voters,” he said. “Every problem has an easy group to blame—minorities, chiefly—he creates a sense of mass victimization, he alleges conspiracy by unseen forces, and he asserts that only he can stop it and protect the victims—and stop the villains, the minorities. The last step of this is an assertion: ‘I'll just need more powers to do it.’ And that's how a constitutional republic dies.”

In the absence of leadership on Capitol Hill, Schmidt says it may be necessary to hear from leaders of the past.

“Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama are good men,” he said. “The question the former presidents have to ask: Is there a moment in time that they are compelled to speak, and compelled to speak together? These men are addressed by that title ‘Mr. President,’ which is the highest that can be bestowed in American life. And I do think an hour is approaching where we have a crisis of leadership. With the fragility and the importance of our democratic institutions at stake, it would be nice to hear from them.”

“We have in America—right now, at this hour—to understand that you have a lawless president, a vile president, a corrupt president, a mean, cruel president, who is seeking to remake the world order.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-sch ... p?ref=home

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Trump’s Family Separation Order Does Nothing for Families He Already Broke Up

Kids are thousands of miles away from parents with no reliable way to find each other—and they may never after adults are deported.

EL PASO, Texas—Immigrant families won’t be separated anymore, thanks to a new order from President Trump, but that doesn’t mean families will be reunited.

Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday ending the practice of taking children away from parents who enter the U.S. illegally. Already, though, more than 2,000 children have been separated, according to the government, and advocates and attorneys for them fear they will never see their parents again.

Despite Trump’s order, there is no clear, publicly articulated plan to reunite families who are already detained. Parents are held in facilities near the border like McAllen, Texas while their children are sent to foster-care homes as far as New York, Illinois and Michigan. While the adults wait to be deported, their advocates must navigate multiple federal agencies to locate their children.

“The executive order that President Trump signed is no solution,” said Michelle Brané, director of the Women's Refugee Commission Migrant Rights and Justice program, in a statement. “First, there are more than 2,000 children already separated from their parents. This EO does nothing to address that nightmare.”

The Department of Health and Human Services will not make a special effort to reunite the children already separated from their families, according to a CBS report.

On Tuesday, an ICE spokesperson told The Daily Beast if a parent asks to be deported with a separated child, the agency will accommodate the request “to the extent practicable.”

A child immigrant advocate in the Midwest looking after a 6-year-old Guatemalan girl described “cold-calling” ICE officials in El Paso and Washington, D.C. to reunited girl with her mother so they can be deported together.

The girl’s mother is in ICE custody in El Paso after being turned away at the Paso del Norte port of entry where she sought asylum. The Daily Beast is providing the advocate with anonymity to protect the identity of the mother and child from feared retribution for speaking out.

In her case, the advocate says an Office of Refugee Resettlement agent was helpful in coordinating with ICE, but that isn’t always the case.

“There’s some actors that are more willing to cooperate than others,” the advocate said.

The advocate estimated many of the separated children will be in the U.S. six months from now.

“I would say these children will still be here,” the advocate added.

Even if a foreign government agrees to allow a immigrant back into the country, there is no guarantee that U.S. court cases for the parent or the child will be resolved at the same time, allowing them to return together. (Adults are being tried in criminal court, while children are tried separately in immigration courts.)

DHS conceded that parents have been deported without their children.

“When parents are removed without their children, ICE, ORR, and the consulates work together to coordinate the return of a child and transfer of custody to the parent or foreign government upon arrival in country, in accordance with repatriation agreements between the U.S. and other countries,” the spokesperson said Tuesday.

Chris Carlin, head of the federal public defender’s office in Alpine, Texas, told The Daily Beast that he fears some of his clients will never be reunited with their children.

“I think that’s a real possibility,” he said.

Many of the deported parents return to homelessness and poverty, Carlin said, and may not be reachable by the U.S. government who is still holding their child days, weeks or months later.

HHS has put the children of Carlin’s clients in foster homes as far away as New York and Illinois, and he said this makes the obstacle of reconnecting children to their parents potentially insurmountable.

“In the cases that I’m personally familiar with, I don’t see any evidence of any plan to reunify the parent and the child after the conclusion of the adult’s criminal case,” Carlin said. “I don’t see any evidence of that at all.”

Parents in detention are unlikely to have all the requisite identification documents DHS and HHS demand to prove that a parent and child are in fact related, according to Carlos M. Garcia, an immigration attorney in Austin.

Garcia said none of the people he met with had received any paperwork on how to find their children. However, The Daily Beast obtained an ICE document that is handed out to immigrants once they’re detained. It contains several phone numbers for parents to try to find their children. One number notes that the lines are monitored by DHS, possibly scaring away undocumented members of immigrants’ families.

“Who knows when they’ll be reunified, if they are reunified,” Garcia said.

A former ICE director told NBC News parents and children may be separated for years, if not permanently. “You could be creating thousands of immigrant orphans in the U.S. that one day could become eligible for citizenship when they are adopted," said John Sandweg, who served as ICE’s acting director in the Obama administration from 2013-2014.

The children of parents who have been deported may sometimes be able to gain the legal right to stay in the U.S. if they can make a valid asylum claim, qualify for special immigrant juvenile status, or qualify for a visa for crime victims, according to Ashley Feasley, the director of policy at Migration and Refugee Services in U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops. Her organization works with children who have been separated from their parents.

“How do we ensure that we can connect a mom that’s been deported to make sure she is fully informed of her child’s rights and responsibilities under the immigration system, and do so in the timely manner that we’ll need to as prescribed by our immigration laws?” Feasley said. “That’s a big concern of mine.”

Children who have been separated from their parents usually get a brief legal orientation, but most don’t have lawyers so they have to face an immigration judge alone. If their parents are deported or in detention, they may have no idea what kind of legal decisions their children face.

“These kids are traumatized,” the Midwest advocate said. “The families are heartbroken.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-cant- ... k?ref=home

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American money flowing back into America

By Suzanne O'Halloran

Published June 26, 2018

FOX Business

Despite President Trump's tit-for-tat trade barbs, America’s CEOs are not wasting anytime in taking advantage of his tax reform plan. Over $300 billion was repatriated to the U.S. in the first quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) -- the most on record.

“U.S. firms that used to build their factories overseas in order to avoid U.S. taxes, they stopped in their tracks because of the tax bill, they are bringing all the money home,” said Kevin Hassett, chair of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, during an interview on FOX Business’ Varney & Co. in June.

The BEA notes the main driver of the repatriation surge is that companies are no longer taxed on foreign earnings when returning the funds to the U.S. “We fixed that really, really stupid thing” said Hassett. By comparison just $38 billion was repatriated during the same period a year ago.

While the BEA keeps the names and sums of corporations repatriating confidential, the latest data appear to show CEOs are likely sticking to their pledge to bring more money earned overseas back to the U.S. promised shortly after the tax plan was signed by President Trump in late December 2017.

While it is not crystal clear how the lion’s share of funds returning to the U.S. will be used, pro-growth economists hope it will be used for hiring, boosting wages and other moves that will benefit the American worker and eventually trickle down to the broader economy. This is why many economists are boosting their GDP forecasts to between 3% and 4%.
More From FOXBusiness.com...

Now, the last time repatriation funds saw a notable spike was in 2005, following passage the year before of the American Jobs Creation Act, which offered a tax holiday, among other tax benefits, under President George W. Bush. Yet, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, tells FOX Business, at that time the benefit to the economy was minimal and will likely be the same this time around. “The repatriated cash will go to more stock repurchases, dividend increases, and paying for mergers and acquisitions. All of this has no significant impact on the economy” he said.

However, there are some differences between then and now. Some of America's biggest companies celebrated the tax reform plan in concert by offering one-time bonus payments to employees, along with enhanced benefits and other financial perks. As an example, Apple, the nation’s largest taxpayer, announced in January it would invest over $350 billion in the U.S. economy over the next five years due to the tax changes. The maker of iPhones and iMacs also expects to pay $38 billion in taxes, which would be the largest payment of its kind, Apple stated at the time. Inquiries by FOX Business to Apple on its repatriation status were not returned.

Another factor to consider, many Republicans, including House Ways and Means Chair Kevin Brady, are pushing to make tax cuts permanent and perhaps rolling out even deeper tax benefits i.e. tax reform 2.0. That could create even more certainty for the nation's business leaders.

Before tax reform was enacted in December 2017, U.S. companies had an estimated $2.6 trillion parked in overseas accounts, as tracked by the United States Public Interest Research Group. Opens a New Window.

CBO: Ballooning national debt could hurt U.S. economy, increase likelihood of crisis

The government could become more constrained as entitlements run up long-term costs and tax cuts reduce revenue.

WASHINGTON — The national debt is on track to nearly double as a share of the economy over the next 30 years, according to a new report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Federal debt is currently equivalent to 78 percent of the country's annual Gross Domestic Product, with the report estimating it will rise to 100 percent of GDP by 2030 and 152 percent by 2048. The share of debt would surpass records set in the World War II era.

The annual long-term budget outlook lists rising health care costs and entitlement spending to account for aging Baby Boomers as the primary culprit. Discretionary spending, by contrast, is expected to remain steady and even shrink in coming years.

But the report also projects more debt from the Republican-passed tax cuts, especially if they're made permanent. They're expected to reduce revenue by $1.8 trillion through 2028, and more afterward if expiring provisions are made permanent.

Economists are split over how concerning long-term debt projections should be for policymakers and how best to resolve them, but the Congressional Budget Office made clear in its report that ongoing deficits have the potential to create problems down the line.

"Large and growing federal debt over the coming decades would hurt the economy and constrain future budget policy," the report reads. "The amount of debt that is projected under the extended baseline would reduce national saving and income in the long term; increase the government's interest costs, putting more pressure on the rest of the budget; limit lawmakers' ability to respond to unforeseen events; and increase the likelihood of a fiscal crisis."

Trump's thinking on the deficit has been inconsistent over time.

As a candidate, he pledged not to cut major entitlement programs, but later reversed his position on Medicaid and Social Security disability benefits, both of which he sought to reduce. In interviews, he alternately said that it was a good time to borrow to finance various domestic priorities and that he would quickly eliminate the national debt.

His administration helped broker a legislative agreement that will increase both military and domestic spending, but Trump threatened to veto the bill before signing it and has since demanded that it be scaled back.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/electi ... io-n886851

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Supreme Court Ignores Trump’s Words, Upholds ‘Muslim Ban’

The Supreme Court's conservatives understand the presidency the way that Trump does: as possessing almost unreviewable power when it comes to national security.

The travel ban is constitutional.

After over a year of litigation, the Supreme Court upheld Donald Trump’s signature security initiative, which bans travel to the United States from five majority-Muslim countries and two others, by a 5-4 decision.

Even though Trump called it a “Muslim ban” on multiple occasions, even though it is unprecedented in breadth, and even though it permanently bans 150 million people from entering the United States, mostly on the basis of religion, the Court put those facts aside because a president’s decisions on national security are subject to a very low standard of review by the Court.

Writing for the Court in Trump v. Hawaii, Chief Justice John Roberts skillfully demolished the two arguments against the ban: that it was an excess of presidential authority, and that it unconstitutionally targeted Muslims. In both cases, the reasoning was the same: in a different context, perhaps the Court would look under the hood at what Trump is really doing here. But because this is supposedly about national security, it won’t.

First, Chief Justice Roberts analyzed the relevant provision of the Immigration and Naturalization Act and concluded that it “exudes deference to the President in every clause.” The president has extremely broad authority to regulate foreign nationals traveling to the United States in the name of national security, Chief Justice Roberts said, and so even the unprecedented nature of the ban—its duration, its size, its overbreadth—is basically irrelevant.

Ultimately, he wrote, “plaintiffs’ request for a searching inquiry into the persuasiveness of the President’s justifications is inconsistent with the broad statutory text and the deference traditionally accorded the President in this sphere.”

The same reasoning was used to refute the second claim: that the travel ban unconstitutionally discriminates against Muslims.

Once again, the Court held that a very low standard of review was appropriate. Most serious freedom of religion cases require that the government show a compelling state interest to act and a narrowly tailored response to that interest. The travel ban would surely violate the second part of that test: it is wildly overbroad, the very opposite of narrowly tailored.

But, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, that standard of review doesn’t apply here.

Quoting an earlier decision, he wrote “the upshot of our cases in this context is clear: 'Any rule of constitutional law that would inhibit the flexibility [of the president] to respond to changing world conditions should be adopted only with the greatest caution,’ and our inquiry into matters of entry and national security is highly constrained.”

As a result, Chief Justice Roberts only applied what is known as rational basis review: “whether the entry policy is plausibly related to the Government’s stated objective to protect the country and improve vetting processes.”

And of course it is. The travel ban in this case was the third version of the ban. The first (apparently written by Stephen Miller, also the architect of the family separation border policy) was laughably unconstitutional, even incoherent. The second—which Trump called “watered down”—was a little better, but not much.

But by the third version, the Trump administration had had time for a thorough review by the Department of Homeland Security, a negotiation process with several of the targeted countries, and even the addition of two non-Muslim countries, North Korea and Venezuela. (Those two countries were not part of the challenge.) That all generated a lot of paperwork, all of which contained plenty of “plausible” reasons for the travel ban.

Once again, the standard dictated the outcome. Because of that “rational basis” standard, the Court took the Trump administration at its word. The administration cooked up rationales for the ban, and the Court ate them up.

In sum, the Court said:

The Proclamation is expressly premised on legitimate purposes: preventing entry of nationals who cannot be adequately vetted and inducing other nations to improve their practices. The text says nothing about religion. Plaintiffs and the dissent nonetheless emphasize that five of the seven nations currently included in the Proclamation have Muslim-majority populations. Yet that fact alone does not support an inference of religious hostility, given that the policy covers just 8% of the world’s Muslim population and is limited to countries that were previously designated by Congress or prior administrations as posing national security risks.

What about all of those times Trump made outrageous, false, and defamatory statements about Muslims, and offered them as the real reason for the ban?

Chief Justice Roberts quoted the same odious statements we’ve heard a hundred times: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” “Islam hates us.” And so on. But, once again, if all you’re looking for is a rationale “plausibly related” to a legitimate government interest, none of that matters.

In short, the Court isn’t going to go looking for the truth here, because national security is a presidential prerogative. If the government offers a plausible explanation, that is enough.

That was not enough, of course, for the Court’s four liberals, who joined in a dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent refuted the main claim of the Chief Justice’s opinion: that the context of national security means that courts’ roles are limited. On the contrary, she held, full judicial review is required precisely when security is proffered as a justification for targeting a disliked religious group:

The United States of America is a Nation built upon the promise of religious liberty. Our Founders honored that core promise by embedding the principle of religious neutrality in the First Amendment. The Court’s decision today fails to safeguard that fundamental principle. It leaves undisturbed a policy first advertised openly and unequivocally as a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” because the policy now masquerades behind a façade of national-security concerns.

To many observers, Trump v. Hawaii looks a lot like one of the most infamous cases in Supreme Court history, Korematsu v. United States. Decided in 1944, that case, too, was about the conflict between national security and civil rights, as the government forcibly relocated 120,000 Japanese Americans to concentration camps during World War II.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Court’s opinion took this opportunity to utterly refute Korematsu, which had never been technically overturned.

First, the Court said, “Korematsu has nothing to do with this case. The forcible relocation of U. S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority. But it is wholly inapt to liken that morally repugnant order to a facially neutral policy denying certain foreign nationals the privilege of admission.”

But, the Court continued, “the dissent’s reference to Korematsu, however, affords this Court the opportunity to make express what is already obvious: Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and—to be clear—‘has no place in law under the Constitution.’”

That’s all well and good, but as Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in her vigorous dissent:

This formal repudiation of a shameful precedent is laudable and long overdue. But it does not make the majority’s decision here acceptable or right. By blindly accepting the Government’s misguided invitation to sanction a discriminatory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security, the Court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu and merely replaces one “gravely wrong” decision with another.

Speaking, no doubt, for horrified moderates and liberals throughout the country, she concluded: “Our Constitution demands, and our country deserves, a Judiciary willing to hold the coordinate branches to account when they defy our most sacred legal commitments. Because the Court’s decision today has failed in that respect, with profound regret, I dissent.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/supreme-c ... n?ref=home

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Mitch McConnell trolls with photo of Gorsuch after travel ban ruling

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) marked the Supreme Court ruling upholding President Trump’s travel ban by sharing a photo of him with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.

McConnell’s campaign shared the image just minutes after the Supreme Court handed down its 5-4 ruling finding that the ban was constitutional. Gorsuch sided with the majority of justices upholding the ban.

McConnell blocked the nomination of former President Obama’s Supreme Court pick Merrick Garland in 2016, paving the way for Trump to nominate Gorsuch.

The court's ruling is a major victory for the Trump administration. Trump first issued the travel ban through a presidential proclamation last year, but the order has been repeatedly challenged in court.

“The president lawfully exercised that discretion based on his findings — following a worldwide, multi-agency review — that entry of the covered aliens would be detrimental to the national interest,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in delivering the opinion of the court.

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3941 ... ban-ruling

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“Motivated by Anti-Muslim Animus”: Must-Reads From Justice Sotomayor’s Dissent on Trump’s Travel Ban

“With profound regret, I dissent.”

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Tuesday to uphold President Donald Trump’s ban on allowing travel from six countries in a major decision that inspired outrage from the court’s liberal justices. In a separate written dissent joined only by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Sonia Sotomayor used Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about Muslims to underscore the “stark parallels” between the majority opinion and one of the high court’s most shameful moments: Korematsu v. United States, the decision that upheld Japanese internment during World War II.

“A reasonable observer would conclude that the Proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus,” Sotomayor wrote. “The majority holds otherwise by ignoring the facts, misconstruing our legal precedent, and turning a blind eye to the pain and suffering the Proclamation inflicts upon countless families and individuals, many of whom are United States citizens.”

In the majority opinion, the justices explicitly overruled the 1944 Korematsu decision, but Justice Sotomayor rejected their arguments, saying that their actions “merely replaces one ‘gravely wrong’ decision with another”:

In the intervening years since Korematsu, our Nation has done much to leave its sordid legacy behind … Today, the Court takes the important step of finally overruling Korematsu, denouncing it as “gravely wrong the day it was decided.”…This formal repudiation of a shameful precedent is laudable and long overdue. But it does not make the majority’s decision here acceptable or right. By blindly accepting the Government’s misguided invitation to sanction a discriminatory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security, the Court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu and merely replaces one “gravely wrong” decision with another.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts wrote the majority opinion and dispensed with the religious debate in order to focus solely on whether Trump satisfied the demands of the Immigration and Nationality Act. In response, Sotomayor argued that Trump’s executive order should have been struck down based on the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which ensures that the government “cannot favor or disfavor one religion over another.”

In reaching that conclusion, Sotomayor flatly rejected the government’s request to ignore Trump’s multiple statements about Muslims and his earliest description of the executive order as a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the US. “Given President Trump’s failure to correct the reasonable perception of his apparent hostility toward the Islamic faith, it is unsurprising that the President’s lawyers have, at every step in the lower courts, failed in their attempts to launder the Proclamation of its discriminatory taint,” Sotomayor wrote.

Sotomayor compared Trump’s many broadsides against Islam, which comprise several paragraphs of her dissent, with the Court’s recent 7-2 ruling in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, noting, “The Court recently found less pervasive official expressions of hostility and the failure to disavow them to be constitutionally significant.” In the aftermath of the Masterpiece case, some legal experts had suggested that Justice Anthony Kennedy’s ruling, which depended on hostile statements made about religion by Colorado public officials, might foreshadow his rejection of Trump’s travel ban on similar grounds. It didn’t.

Sotomayor said Trump’s order fails to even clear the standard set by “rational-basis review,” the lowest bar of judicial scrutiny, because the “administrative review” undergirding it is too unconvincing in its aims and secretive in its process to distinguish the order from its public history as a Muslim ban.

She was similarly unconvinced by the government’s contention that the travel ban did not target Islam specifically, calling the inclusion of North Korea and Venezuela on the list of prohibited regions “insubstantial, if not entirely symbolic.” The order still “overwhelmingly targets Muslim-majority nations,” she wrote, adding that the US “remains wholly unable to articulate any credible national-security interest that would go unaddressed by the current statutory scheme absent the Proclamation.” If anything, the benefits of such an order would be redundant given existing immigration vetting protocols, she argued.

As a fine point in concluding her dissent, Sotomayor borrowed an approach popularized by her late, conservative colleague, Justice Antonin Scalia. When he especially disagreed with a Court ruling, he would dispense with traditional protocol and end his dissenting opinions without the usual “I respectfully dissent” in favor of some plainer language. Sotomayor opted for the harsher option: “Our Constitution demands, and our country deserves, a Judiciary willing to hold the coordinate branches to account when they defy our most sacred legal commitments. Because the Court’s decision today has failed in that respect, with profound regret, I dissent.”

VIEW PDF FILE

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... ravel-ban/

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Trump held Harley up as an American icon. Now it’s an American icon that is moving jobs overseas.

Trump’s Harley-Davidson problem, explained.

In 2017 President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan held up Harley-Davidson as an American company that would flourish under the Republican Party’s policies on trade and taxes.

This isn’t what’s happened so far in 2018.

In January Harley announced plans to close its Kansas City plant. Days later it said it would spend nearly $700 million on stock buybacks that would benefit shareholders. And this week the company announced that because of European tariffs, a consequence of Trump’s trade war, it will shift overseas some production — and presumably jobs. The company is already opening up a new plant in Thailand.

Harley-Davidson is an American symbol. Trump and the GOP have trotted it out as a prime example of business success and held it up as a winner from their policy proposals. Now Harley has become a lesson in how the private sector often doesn’t respond in the ways politicians want.

Instead of creating jobs in the United States, Harley’s laying off workers, and it’s expanding operations abroad. And the money it gained from tax cuts? A lot of this is going to stock buybacks.

Trump raged on Twitter on Monday after Harley’s European production announcement.

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
A Harley-Davidson should never be built in another country-never! Their employees and customers are already very angry at them. If they move, watch, it will be the beginning of the end - they surrendered, they quit! The Aura will be gone and they will be taxed like never before!

7:17 AM - Jun 26, 2018
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The president seems to recognize that Harley’s moving of jobs abroad — a result of his policies — is bad for the country and bad for him. A quintessential American company’s shift of operations overseas as a direct result of an American president’s actions adds up to a bad look, and he knows it.

Trump trotted Harley executives into the White House right after he was inaugurated

In February 2017 just days after his inauguration, President Trump invited Harley-Davidson executives and union representatives to the White House. Photographers snapped pictures of Trump and Vice President Mike Pence looking at motorcycles on the White House lawn.
In remarks in the Roosevelt Room during that February 2017 meeting, Trump called Harley-Davidson a “true American icon” and “one of the greats.” He said his policies would breed success for the company and make the United States the “best country on Earth to do business” because “we’re redoing NAFTA, redoing a lot of our trade deals, and we’re negotiating properly with countries.”

The meeting, like many Trump events, went off the rails a bit; the president also vented frustration about an immigration deal between the US and Australia and bragged about his electoral victory in Wisconsin. But the president’s message was clear: His trade policies, including those on tariffs, would be good for Harley-Davidson.

“I think you will be very happy,” Trump declared.

And Trump isn’t the only one who has singled out Harley. In 2017 House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) went to a Harley plant in Menomonee Falls, in his home state, to tout the Republican tax bill, which Trump signed later that year.

“Tax reform can put American manufacturers and American companies like Harley-Davidson on a much better footing to compete in the global economy and keep jobs here in America,” Ryan told workers and company leaders.

The tax cut came through. The Republican-backed tax law, which slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, is bringing Harley sizable savings. The company has estimated its effective tax rate — the amount it pays — will be 23.5 percent to 25 percent this year, about 10 percentage points lower than what it would have been without the new law.

Harley took its tax cut, closed a plant, and bought back stock

But the promises Trump and Ryan made to Harley-Davidson haven’t materialized — at least not for the company’s workers.

In January Harley announced that it will close a plant in Kansas City, Missouri, leaving 800 workers without jobs. It will shift operations to another plant in York, Pennsylvania, and hire some workers there, but ultimately there will be a net loss of 350 jobs.

Days after the plant-closure announcement, which Kansas City workers say took them by surprise, Harley-Davidson announced a dividend increase and a stock-buyback plan to repurchase 15 million of its shares, valued at about $696 million.

This is a pattern that has played out multiple times since the tax cuts passed and something that Democrats warned about before the bill became law. Companies profit, shareholders reap the benefits, and workers are left out.

The Kansas City plant’s closing will cost Harley as much as $200 million through 2019, according to Bloomberg’s estimates, and could result in annual savings of $65 million to $75 million after 2020. Greg Tate, a staff representative for the United Steelworkers District 11 that represents about 30 percent of the Harley-Davidson plant’s workers, told me earlier this year he thinks Harley’s tax savings might have actually freed up cash for it to move ahead with its US restructuring plan.

“They have the capital now to move Kansas City, to shut it down,” he said. “All of that money really came from the tax cut plan, so it kind of had the opposite effect of what it was supposed to do.”

While Harley’s operations are contracting in the US, they’re expanding abroad

In May 2017 after the White House visit but before Ryan’s tax tour, Harley said it planned to build a plant in Thailand. The plant would allow Harley to avoid Thailand’s tariff of as much as 60 percent on imported motorcycles and help the company obtain tax breaks when exporting to neighboring countries, according to CNBC. Harley’s CEO, Matt Levatich, said the decision was made as part of a “Plan B” when Trump dropped out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Harley already has operations in Brazil and India, and it has a plant in Australia that it plans to close.

Executives at Harley have said that the Kansas City plant’s closure has nothing to do with the Thailand factory, but not everyone’s buying it. Union leaders have suggested that the Thailand plant’s opening and the Kansas City plant’s closing are tied together.

“Part of my job is being moved to York, but the other part is going to Bangkok,” Richard Pence, a machinist at the Kansas City plant, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in May while in Washington for a meeting between House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and members of the Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. That union represents about 70 percent of the Harley-Davidson workers being laid off.

Then this week Harley announced that some of its US jobs would definitely be transferred overseas as a result of recent tariffs.

At the end of May, the Trump administration said it would impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from the European Union, Canada, and Mexico. The European Union subsequently said it would retaliate and announced plans to put tariffs on €2.8 billion ($3.2 billion) of American goods. Those tariffs went into effect on June 22.

Harley said on Monday it will shift the production of its Europe-bound motorcycles overseas as a result of the EU’s retaliatory tariffs. In a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said the EU’s tariffs (a reaction to the Trump administration’s tariffs on steel and aluminum imports sent to the United States) will add an additional $2,200 to the price of motorcycles sold in Europe and cost it an additional $30 million to $45 million this year.

It’s not exactly clear which factories will take on the excess production for Harley. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel pointed out that Harley’s Street-model bikes are made in India for Italy, Spain, and Portugal.

Harley workers thought Trump would help them. He’s doing the opposite.

After Harley-Davidson announced the closure of its Kansas City plant, some workers hoped that President Trump would step in and pressure the company to change course. After all, that’s what he’d done with Carrier in Indiana.

In March Robert Martinez Jr., president of the International Association of Machinists, sent a letter to President Trump asking him to intervene and save Kansas City workers’ jobs.

“For decades, hard-working Machinists Union members have devoted their lives to making high-quality, American-made products for Harley,” he wrote, later adding, “America’s working men and women deserve better than being thrown out onto the street. Our nation deserves better.”

Trump never responded.

Now, it looks as if even more Harley jobs will be shifted abroad as a result of Trump’s policies. Even Republicans aren’t defending the trade war.

“This is further proof of the harm from unilateral tariffs,” AshLee Strong, a spokesperson for Speaker Ryan, said in a statement on Monday. “The best way to help American workers, consumers, and manufacturers is to open new markets for them, not to raise barriers to our own market.”

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) was more cutting. “The problem isn’t that Harley is unpatriotic — it’s that tariffs are stupid,” he said in a statement.

Trump on Monday and Tuesday tweeted about Harley multiple times. He complained that Harley-Davidson motorcycles should “never be built in another country” and lamented that the “Aura” around them will be gone.

The president essentially blamed the company for throwing in the towel too soon on the trade battle he is waging with Europe and apparently expects everyone to wait out. “Surprised that Harley-Davidson, of all companies, would be the first to wave the White Flag,” he wrote.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... n-thailand

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As US market weakens, Harley-Davidson recruits new riders

MILWAUKEE (AP) — Harley-Davidson, the iconic brand that sells its customers an image of freedom and adventure, found itself in an unwanted role this week: poster child for the damage of an international trade war.

Harley said it would move production of motorcycles bound for Europe overseas, blaming European Union tariffs it said would add an estimated $2,200 cost to the average bike. That prompted President Donald Trump — whose own tariffs prompted the EU moves — to accuse Harley of using tariffs as an excuse for moves already planned.

Beneath the rhetoric, Harley is a company that needs overseas growth to shore up a business that is shrinking in the United States, where retail sales fell 8.5 percent last year. International sales also fell, but by less than 4 percent.

Milwaukee-based Harley has been putting renewed emphasis on teaching people to ride as part of its effort to attract more customers. As The Associated Press reported in December, Harley has expanded the number of dealerships with a Harley “Riding Academy.”

The program launched in 2000 with about 50 locations; the company now says 250 dealerships in the U.S. offer the three- or four-day course. It says about a quarter of those launched since 2014.

The Motorcycle Industry Council says the median age of motorcycle owners increased from 32 to 47 since 1990. About 46 percent of riders are over 50; only about 10 percent are 30-34.

Samantha Kay rode on the back of her father’s motorcycle growing up, but when the 25-year-old took a class to ride for the first time she couldn’t help being anxious.

“I think motorcycles inherently do scare a lot of people,” Kay, of Milwaukee, told The AP in December, when she was one of 50,000 people nationwide to take such a riding course at a Harley-Davidson dealership in 2017.

The training is one of the ways Harley is trying to attract a new generation of riders like Kay amid big demographic shifts.

“Some of the aging Baby Boomers, which have been the guts of Harley-Davidson’s purchasers, they’re getting older and some of them are just getting out of the sport because they can’t handle the motorcycle anymore,” Clyde Fessler, who retired from Harley-Davidson in 2002 after holding several executive positions over 25 years, told the AP in December. He created what became the “Riding Academy.”

He said the idea “is getting people comfortable on a motorcycle and getting them to feel safe and confident.”

In addition to riders getting older, a slow economic recovery has made it harder for millennials to buy new motorcycles, said Jim Williams, vice president of the American Motorcyclist Association.

Among the newest models, a 2018 Softail Slim starts at $15,899 and a 2018 Sportster Forty-Eight at $11,299.

But it’s not all the millennials’ fault, said Robert Pandya, who managed public relations for Indian Motorcycles and Victory Motorcycles. Pandya recently launched “Give A Shift,” a volunteer group discussing ideas to promote motorcycling. One of their conclusions, he said, is the idea that “if mom rides, the kids will ride.”

Currently, women are about 14 percent of the riding population, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council.

“The biggest possible opportunity in motorcycling is to invite more women to ride,” Pandya said in December.

That’s not lost on Harley-Davidson. Among the ways Harley-Davidson is trying to reach younger riders is by having motorcycle role-models like Jessica Haggett, the founder of the “The Litas” all-women motorcycle club, be a voice for the company on social media. And the company is also focusing advertising efforts in male-dominated sports like the X Games and UFC events popular with younger viewers.

“I think we have to work harder to gain share of mind with young adults, for example, in that they have other activities in their lives. They’re on screens, they’re connecting socially, they’re involved in gaming, they’re involved in other things,” said Heather Malenshek, Harley-Davidson’s vice president of marketing.

She said the easily customizable Sports Glide model that launched in November and the aggressive, performance-driven Fat Bob also have younger riders in mind. In all, the company plans to release 100 new motorcycles over the next 10 years. During that time, the company also wants to gain 2 million new riders.

https://www.apnews.com/1bcceed680fb4836 ... new-riders

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Atlanta Fed Verified account @AtlantaFed
On June 27, the #GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth in Q2 2018 is 4.5%

https://www.frbatlanta.org/cqer/researc ... um=twitter

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The average quarterly growth under Obama was 1.07%

I know I know, Bush this and Bush that and drove over a cliff and blah blah blah ... look, after 8 years the last quarter of growth under Obama was One and a Half percent. 1.6 %

People laughed at Trump during campaign when he said he would get it above 3.

I hope people are starting to wake up. Unfortunately a portion of New York City elected a socialist in the democratic primary yesterday for a congressional seat so I don't guess so.