House Democrats’ Shameful Abdication of Duty By Alex Shephard

newrepublic.com
House Democrats’ Shameful Abdication of Duty
By Alex Shephard
7-9 minutes

The New Republic

April 25

A day after Democrats re-took the majority in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi knew she had a mandate. “We have a constitutional responsibility for oversight,” she told reporters. “This doesn’t mean we go looking for a fight. But it means that if we see a need to go forward, we will.”

Pelosi’s comments were hardly surprising. Democrats had campaigned on holding the president accountable by exercising congressional oversight and investigating the rampant corruption in his administration. Four days after taking back the House, the ever excitable Axios published what it deemed a “hit list,” containing “at least” 85 potential targets, including Trump’s tax returns, his family business, potential obstruction of justice and campaign finance violations, and his handling of issues like immigration and the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Even more tangential concerns—Trump’s treatment of the press, his “Space Force”—were floated as potential subjects for inquiry. The prospect was so enticing it sent Mike Allen into an incoherent tizzy. The Democrats, he told his readers, are “preparing a ‘subpoena cannon’” which was, he helpfully noted, “like an arena T-shirt cannon”—but for subpoenas.

We’re now well over 100 days into the new Democratic majority. But, as Washington Monthly’s Jeff Hauser and Eleanor Eagan reported on Wednesday, “only four committees—Oversight, Judiciary, and Financial Services and Intelligence (the last two jointly)—have authorized so much as a single subpoena” and “most committees have at most held a handful of hearings in which lawmakers directly interrogated Trump officials.” Chairs of powerful committees are allowing Trump officials to stall and, in some cases, flat-out refuse to appear before Congress. Calling himself “the most transparent president and administration in the history of our country by far,” while continuing to not release his tax returns President Trump told reporters on Wednesday that the White House would be “fighting all subpoenas.” Earlier this week, Justice Department official John Gore and former White House Personnel Security Director Carl Kline became the latest Trump officials to decline to testify before House committees—the two refused to appear to answer questions surrounding the upcoming 2020 census and the granting of security clearances, respectively. Contempt charges are possible, but thus far House leadership has done little more than denounce Trump officials for ghosting them.

It’s a shameful abdication of duty at arguably the worst possible time. Leading House Democrats, most notably Pelosi and second-in-command Steny Hoyer, have hand-waved the question of impeachment, citing the presidential elections that are fast approaching. But basic accountability measures—subpoenas, hearings—could aid the Democratic effort to retake the White House and the Senate.

The elected Democrats’ decision to cautiously wield their newfound power, rather than race forward, stands in visceral contrast to the general population’s initial response. The first two years of Trump’s presidency were marked by a number of protests—of the administration’s travel ban, of attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, of Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, and of the GOP’s push for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Seemingly every major action the Trump administration took was met by vocal and visible resistance—sometimes coordinated, sometimes improvised.

That kind of direct action has all but stopped in the wake of the 2018 midterms. It’s possible that the party’s base feels more content now that Nancy Pelosi has regained the gavel and that House Democrats have subpoena power again—even if they’ve not done that much with it. Perhaps it is possible that, with the party’s presidential primary heating up, attention has shifted from the daily high crimes and misdemeanors of the Trump administration to Elizabeth Warren’s white papers, Bernie Sanders’s rallies, and learning how to pronounce “Buttigieg.”

But it’s also possible that House leadership has actively tamped down the pre-midterms energy. Pelosi and other powerful Democrats have cautioned against taking rash action. In their eyes, the blue team has a strong hand heading into the 2020 election, given the general aura of toxicity that has clouded Donald Trump’s presidency from the very beginning. There seems to be concern that oversight and accountability could backfire, squandering the precious advantages the party has accumulated in the lead-up to what will likely be a vicious general election.

They might (might) have a point when it comes to impeachment, a long slog that could get spun into the idea that the Democrats aren’t much interested in governing. But this sense of caution seems to have migrated outward and is now preventing Democrats from doing even some of the most elemental oversight.

One of the Democratic Party’s most effective messages heading into 2020 will be built around the corruption of the Trump administration. Given the plethora of scandals that have dominated—and at times threaten to capsize—the Trump administration, there is more than enough material out there. Investigations into, say, security clearances given to members of the president’s family or the cozy relationship between Jared Kushner and Mohammed bin Salman could be complementary to the ongoing work of Maxine Waters’s Financial Services Committee, which, Hauser and Eagan note, has recently played a role in the resignation of Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan and Bank of America’s decision to raise its starting wage to $20 an hour.

There is a danger that the lack of vigorous oversight will appear to voters as a broader aura of complacency emanating from House leadership. Mnuchin has so far faced no meaningful penalty for failing to show for a January 24 hearing about the government shutdown. Trump’s decision to fight subpoenas of former associates, like former White House Counsel Don McGahn, probably stems from his instinct, likely egged on by his own legal team, to fight everything—but it doesn’t seem to be tempered by the gun-shy House Democratic leadership.

The aura of complacency also increasingly looks like entitlement. Democrats want to protect the advantages they believe they have heading into the general election. That’s understandable, given the horrors a second-term of a Donald Trump presidency would bring. But it may also ultimately be self-defeating. In the midterms, Democrats turned out in record numbers, in part because they wanted to ensure that Trump would finally have a check on his unbridled government. A Democratic majority in Congress isn’t there to protect the party’s political capital heading into a general election—it’s there to show how Democrats will govern if elected. That means exposing corruption and holding people accountable. Four months into the new Democratic majority, however, the party has mostly opted to keep its powder dry, fearful of overplaying its hand, or deploying the political capital a midterm landslide brought them. That’s good news for the president and his administration, who have spent the past week taking an unearned, “exoneration”-themed victory lap and acting, not without reason, like no one will ever really try to hold them accountable again.

The Court of Supremely Bad Faith By Matt Ford

newrepublic.com
The Court of Supremely Bad Faith
By Matt Ford
7-9 minutes

Once again, Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues are poised to hand the Trump administration a decisive legal victory on dubious factual grounds. During oral arguments on Tuesday, the justices appeared to favor the administration’s dishonest defense of its attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. A win for Trump could have serious consequences for the census’ accuracy, and for the near future of American democracy.

It’s unrealistic to expect anyone to agree with all or even most of the Supreme Court’s major rulings. What Americans should be able to expect is that the decisions will at least be grounded in reality and coherent logic. As in other recent cases, the justices on Tuesday instead tried to craft an alternate set of circumstances in which their eventual decision would make sense, rather than applying the law to the facts at hand.

The case, Department of Commerce v. New York, is perhaps the most consequential dispute on the court’s docket this term. The Constitution requires the federal government to count every person in the United States every ten years in order to determine how many House members each state gets to elect. State legislatures also use the data to apportion their own legislatures. What’s more, census statistics are used by cities, counties, states, and Congress to decide where and how to allocate billions in government funds.

Though the government asked about citizenship when it conducted the census in the past, it abandoned the practice in the 1950s. Census Bureau statisticians estimated that reinstituting the question today would prompt millions of respondents to avoid participating. “That has been proven in study after study,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted on Tuesday. “One census surveyor described an incident where he walked into a home, started asking citizenship, and the person stopped and left his home, leaving the census surveyor sitting there.” A citizenship question would be to the detriment, specifically, of communities with a higher share of non-citizens—which may well be the Trump administration’s intent, given its undisguised hostility toward immigrants.

The administration can’t get its own defense straight. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, whose department oversees the Census Bureau, claimed that he added the citizenship question at the request of the Justice Department, which said it would use the data to enforce part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Ross’s emails from 2017 later showed, however, that he asked Justice Department officials to make the formal request to justify a decision he’d already made. At the same time, Census Bureau officials urged Ross not to add the question because of its potentially deleterious impact.

“The Secretary’s decision rested primarily on one assertion, that it would improve the accuracy of citizenship data provided to the Department of Justice,” Dale Ho, the ACLU’s lawyer, told the justices. “But the administrative record revealed precisely the opposite, that it would make that data less accurate and, thus, harm the Secretary’s stated purpose of Voting Rights Act enforcement.” For that reason, Judge Jesse Furman blocked Ross from adding the question earlier this year, writing that the secretary violated federal administrative laws by acting in an “arbitrary and capricious manner.”

Instead of accepting that straightforward conclusion, the conservative justices grasped for ways to circumvent it. Justice Samuel Alito questioned whether the Census Bureau’s predictions could be explained by other factors, such as language ability or education. “I don’t think you have to be much of a statistician to wonder about the legitimacy of concluding that there is going to be a 5.1 percent lower response rate because of this one factor,” he said. “But maybe there is something more there.”

Barbara Underwood, New York’s solicitor general, explained that bureau officials reached that conclusion by comparing response rates between the 2000 census’s short-form questionnaire, which didn’t ask about citizenship, and its long-form questionnaire, which did. “In each case, every one, groups notwithstanding, there was a decline from the short form to the long form,” she told the justices. “But there was a much greater decline among Hispanics and non-citizens.”

At one point, Roberts gave credence to the government’s argument that its goal was to enforce the Voting Rights Act. “Do you think it wouldn’t help voting rights enforcement?” he asked Ho at one point. “The CVAP, Citizen Voting Age Population, is the critical element in voting rights enforcement, and this is getting citizen information.” The chief justice’s concern about the Voting Rights Act’s enforcement is somewhat unusual, to say the least. In the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, he led the conservative justices in a 5-4 decision that gutted a key enforcement mechanism in the landmark civil rights law.

Other principles also bent. The late Justice Antonin Scalia used to excoriate his liberal colleagues for highlighting foreign legal precedents in domestic cases. But that taboo didn’t seem to apply in Tuesday’s case. Justice Brett Kavanaugh approvingly cited the United Nations’s guidelines for administering a national census, which encourages gathering citizenship data, during oral arguments. “Does that international practice, that U.N. recommendation, that historical practice in the United States, affect how we should look at the inclusion of a citizenship question in this case?” he asked. “The same guidance from the U.N. also says to be careful to test questions to make sure they don’t interfere with the enumeration,” Underwood replied.

None of this is surprising. Last summer, the conservative justices brushed aside the bigoted origins of Trump’s Muslim ban to uphold it as a valid exercise of executive power. In February, in perhaps the most troubling instance, the court’s conservative members not only misled the public about the facts surrounding Domineque Ray’s imminent execution, then doubled down on those falsehoods in an unrelated case last month. Those decisions give the appearance that the court’s resurgent conservative wing is focused only on the results of a case—facts and reality be damned.

Oral arguments aren’t a foolproof indicator of how the justices will actually decide a case, of course. When the ruling comes out by the end of June, it’s entirely possible that the justices will side with the coalition of Democratic-led states and legal organizations that originally brought the lawsuit. But the outcome seemed preordained to most legal observers. That’s part of the problem.

A growing number of Democrats have embraced court-packing as a solution to the conservative grip on the Supreme Court. Last month, I argued that it would be an irreversible blow to the American tradition of judicial independence. It risks turning the nation’s highest court into something resembling Britain’s House of Lords, a chamber of lifetime appointees whose membership is decided solely by the whims of each new government. Packing the courts is typically the kind of behavior that the State Department condemns when it happens in illiberal democracies and would-be dictatorships.

But those points presumed that the Supreme Court wasn’t already headed that way. If the court’s conservative justices uphold the citizenship question despite all the evidence against it, Democrats could reasonably conclude that the justices are more concerned about maximizing the Republican Party’s electoral prospects than applying the law to the facts at hand. In those circumstances, packing the court wouldn’t be what transforms the court into a purely political force. It would merely finish the job.

Trump Is Building His Own Case For Impeachment The New Republic / by Matt Ford

Trump Is Building His Own Case For Impeachment
The New Republic / by Matt Ford / 1h

Every schoolkid learns about the separation of powers at some point. Maybe a jaunty Schoolhouse Rock! episode taught them how the Constitution divides those powers between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Perhaps their civics teacher explained how those branches act as checks on each other to prevent abuses of power. Now President Donald Trump is eager to write a new chapter in their textbooks.

Every president squabbles with Congress about its oversight powers at some point. But Trump’s approach is different. Rather than weigh the validity of each request for information from House Democrats, he’s refusing to abide by any of them. “We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday. “These aren’t, like, impartial people. The Democrats are trying to win 2020.” Trump isn’t just chafing against the elementary idea of checks and balances; he’s rejecting the concept itself.

At the same time, Democrats are debating whether Trump’s actions over the past two years are enough to justify his impeachment. If they decide in the affirmative, they would need to convince America that his threat to the nation’s constitutional order is so great and immediate that the 2020 election is too distant to wait for the nation’s verdict. But Trump might beat them to it.

Some of the president’s clashes with Congress aren’t that surprising. During the 2016 election, he broke with four decades of precedent by refusing to release his tax returns. That raised questions about whether he had any outstanding foreign debts, which could increase the risk of foreign leverage over him, as well as any potential conflicts of interest from his sources of income. To that end, the House Ways and Means Committee formally requested Trump’s returns from the IRS earlier this month.

There’s a federal statute from the 1920s that allows the tax committees to request any individual’s tax returns, but Trump’s personal lawyers have put forward a dubious legal argument to keep them secret. (They’ve made similar arguments to block other House committees from obtaining the returns.) It’s a cynical gambit. Even if the courts rule against Trump, the legal proceedings might still run out the clock before the 2020 election. In any event, the Treasury Department is slow-walking its decision on whether to turn them over until then.

If you’re feeling generous toward the Trump administration, you might forgive them for challenging Democrats’ novel use of an old statute. But far more mundane oversight matters are also facing stiff resistance.

Earlier this week, the White House Counsel’s Office told Carl Kline, a former White House personnel security director, not to comply with a House Oversight Committee subpoena over his role in the security clearance process for White House staffers. The White House also told lawmakers this week that it would forbid Don McGahn, the former White House counsel, and other White House aides from testifying in relation to the Mueller report. (McGahn told Mueller’s team that he foiled two separate attempts by the president to fire the special counsel.) The White House reportedly signaled it would invoke executive privilege to keep McGahn and other aides away from lawmakers—a legally questionable move given that Trump already waived that privilege so they could talk to Mueller in the first place.

The Justice Department is stonewalling House Democrats, too. After the House Intelligence Committee subpoenaed the unredacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report last week, a Justice Department spokesperson described the request as “premature and unnecessary.” Attorney General Bill Barr rejected a House Oversight subpoena for John Gore, a top official in the department’s Civil Rights Division, over the Trump administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. Barr said he would comply only if a Justice Department lawyer could be present during the deposition.

In isolation, none of these standoffs would be cause for great alarm. The system is designed for a certain level of friction between the legislative and executive branches. In a way, it’s almost more troubling if there’s no friction at all. When Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress in 2017 and 2018, they largely avoided hearings or subpoenas related to the Trump administration’s myriad scandals. The House Intelligence Committee was the exception that proved the rule: Its GOP majority worked tirelessly to undermine the Russia investigation on Trump’s behalf.

In the aggregate, however, the White House’s obstinacy suggests a deeper problem. Presidents are supposed to accept the principle that Congress can act as a meaningful check on their power. Trump does not. His resistance to scrutiny isn’t limited to Congress, of course. The president habitually complains that mainstream news outlets don’t show him the deference he thinks he deserves. “In the ‘old days’ if you were president and you had a good economy, you were basically immune from criticism,” he fumed on Twitter earlier this week. Trump’s hunger for a fawning press was already bad; his authoritarian craving for the same treatment from Congress is worse.

It’s possible that this all-or-nothing approach could eventually backfire on Trump in court. It was already hard to argue that his resistance sprung from a good-faith attempt to preserve the executive branch’s powers. If anything, his categorical public refusal to cooperate with Congress only makes explicit what was already implicit. Then again, the Supreme Court still might not care. Even when faced with clear evidence of the Trump administration’s bad faith, the court’s conservative justices have chosen to pretend that nothing is amiss.

There’s a certain irony to the timing of these all-out efforts to block congressional oversight. Democrats have spent the past two years arguing that Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and disinterest in the rule of law would endanger American democracy. The president doesn’t seem interested in disputing the Democrats’ portrayal of him beyond soundbites like “No obstruction!” If anything, he seems almost eager to prove them right.

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The hazy link between the attacks in Sri Lanka and New Zealand

VIEW ON WEB > Thursday, April 25, 2019

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Today's WorldView
Edited by Ruby Mellen
BY ADAM TAYLOR
BY ADAM TAYLOR
The hazy link between the attacks in Sri Lanka and New Zealand
(Eranga Jayawardena/AP; Vincent Yu/AP)</p>
(Eranga Jayawardena/AP; Vincent Yu/AP)

From some angles, the terrorist attacks that devastated Sri Lanka on Sunday look vastly different from the one that took place in New Zealand last month. They took place in different countries using different weapons. They targeted different religions and were motivated by different ideologies.

In Sri Lanka, coordinated bombings killed Christians at churches and tourists at hotels; the Islamic State later claimed credit for the attacks, which killed more than 350 people. Just a month earlier, on March 15, Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian, shot and killed 50 Muslims attending Friday prayers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Still, some see connections between these events — Sri Lankan officials suggested the bombings on Easter Sunday may have been in retaliation to last month’s attack in Christchurch. Ruwan Wijewardene, Sri Lanka’s state minister of defense, told reporters Tuesday that the attacks in his country were “motivated” by the attack in New Zealand.

It’s not the only attack Tarrant may have inspired: On Thursday, Turkey detained a suspected member of the Islamic State who it believes planned to attack Australians and New Zealanders.

It is unclear if Wijewardene found specific evidence of the Sri Lankan attackers’ motivations. Such an extensive plot would have been difficult to organize — it involved eight bombings in three cities — and the Islamic State’s announcement Tuesday that it was responsible made no mention of the massacre in New Zealand.

Determining the motivations behind extremist acts can be challenging, experts say, and extremists are generally vague about their reasoning. “Terrorist organizations are often opportunistic in the way that they claim justification or rationalization for their attacks,” Nicholas Rasmussen, a former senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, told my colleagues this week.

Even if the New Zealand shootings did not directly motivate the bombings in Sri Lanka, the events are similar in that they both targeted a religious minority in houses of worship. They did so not because of local concerns, but because of delusions about a global clash of civilizations.

The nature of the relationship between the attackers in Sri Lanka and the Islamic State is not yet known. The militant group has had a hand in planning complex and devastating attacks around the world, but also regularly claims attacks it is said to have “inspired.”

Even so, the fact that a group of Sri Lankan Muslims chose to claim allegiance to the Islamic State and target the country’s Christian community and popular tourist areas suggests a global audience in mind. As Amarnath Amarasingam, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told Today’s WorldView on Sunday, a locally minded group probably would have targeted Sri Lanka’s Buddhist majority.

In New Zealand, Tarrant was thinking internationally, too. On a Twitter account created just days before the shootings, he published a 74-page manifesto that offered a lurid vision of his racist worldview. During the attack, he used a mounted camera to live-stream his violence to an online audience. Despite attempts to restrict access to the manifesto and the footage online, the information quickly spread.

Tarrant offered his own version of a pledge of allegiance, claiming he had contacted a reborn Knights Templar group — a militant order with a fearsome reputation in battles against Muslim adversaries in the medieval Crusades — and received the blessing of Norwegian extremist Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in attacks on Oslo and a nearby island in 2011. This idea may have been aspirational: Breivik’s lawyer has cast doubt on the idea his client could have had contact with the outside world.

There is no indication Tarrant had the backing of an international group, and he would not have needed it anyway. Still, both he and the more-organized terrorists in Sri Lanka chose to attack the same soft target — and the vulnerability of the their victims resonated around the world.

Experts worry about simplifying the response to the attacks along religious lines, looking at it simply as a battle between Christians and Muslims. This lens ignores the myriad differences in terrorism across regions. “What explains violence in Sri Lanka probably doesn’t explain violence in Paris,” Shaun Casey, director of Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, told The Washington Post this week.

Neither the Islamic State nor far-right attackers such as Tarrant can be said to speak for an entire religion, and they don’t claim to.

The Islamic State might consider the Muslims who died in Tarrant’s rampage as “takfir,” a complicated term that indicates excommunication, or a nonbeliever, for living in a Western, Christian-majority country. Though some far-right terrorists have claimed to be motivated by Christianity, Tarrant’s manifesto stated his Christian identity was “complicated.” Instead, his extremist beliefs appear to be tied to racial identity.

But terrorist attacks are not primarily aimed at rallying your peers. They are aimed at terrorizing your enemies, and it’s not surprising that they work. Globally, Muslims and Christians are the victims of violence and persecution, and emphasizing the supposed conflict between the world’s two largest religions often is politically expedient.

“I think Islam hates us,” President Trump said before his election. He also suggested all foreign Muslims should be banned from the country (watered-down versions of this ban have been the subject of repeated court cases). After the shootings in Christchurch, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan played videos of the attack at campaign rallies and pledged to make the perpetrator “pay for it.”

For religious communities on either side, the net result is a vicious cycle. Hilmy Ahamed, vice president of the Muslim Council of Sri Lanka, said the Christchurch attack had some positive effects for Islamic communities. “The New Zealand attack opened the eyes of the world to the crisis the Muslims are facing,” he told CNN.

But Muslims in Sri Lanka are scared. “The Christians have always been brotherly with us, but some other people may want to take revenge, or take advantage, especially in rural areas where people are not protected. So we fear,” Shafi Mula, the manager of a mosque in Colombo, told The Post’s Pamela Constable. “We fear.”

END END END END END END OF

• Meanwhile in Vladivostok, Russia, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The meeting marks Kim’s latest trip abroad to meet another world leader, but it comes amid a lack of progress in both denuclearization talks with the United States and plans for inter-Korean cooperation with South Korea.

"I hope Putin makes clear that Russia is ready to support a deal, but first you need a deal,” Alexander Vershbow, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center on Strategy and Security in Washington, told The Washington Post, referring to hopes for a U.S.-North Korea denuclearization deal.

• As The Post’s Jeanna Whalen reports, Kim is likely to seek Russia’s help in easing U.N. sanctions during his summit. Whelan notes that coal exports that violate these sanctions and help finance the country’s nuclear weapons program are on the rise, in part through a complicated system of ships. One known as the “White Honest,” was caught in Indonesian waters with a Sierra Leone flag last year:

"North Korea conducts its illicit trading with a fleet of ghost ships that paint false names on their hulls, steal identification numbers from other vessels and execute their trades via ship-to-ship transfers at sea, to avoid prying eyes at ports.

“In the case of the Wise Honest, a globe-trotting North Korean salesman arranged the shipment by holding meetings at Pyongyang’s embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia — and then paid an Indonesian broker through bank transfers facilitated by JPMorgan Chase, according to bank documents and other evidence gathered by the monitors.

“While the interception of the Wise Honest initially looked like a victory for enforcement, Indonesia recently defied U.N. monitors’ instructions to seize the coal, allowing it to be transferred to another vessel that promptly set sail for Malaysia, Griffiths said. He called this a ‘clear violation’ of sanctions and has asked Malaysia to investigate. Indonesian and Malaysian officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.”

• Ahead of Trump’s own state visit to Britain this June, there are some signs of trouble. The Post’s John Wagner reports:

"A day after accepting an invitation from Queen Elizabeth II for a state visit to Britain, President Trump on Wednesday promoted a baseless accusation that the United Kingdom had helped the Obama administration spy on his 2016 presidential campaign.

“Taking to Twitter, Trump cited a report, attributed to the conservative One America News Network, that cited an accusation of British spying made by Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and blogger who has spurred controversies over other false claims as well.

“‘WOW! It is now just a question of time before the truth comes out, and when it does, it will be a beauty!’ Trump wrote.

“The spying claim was roundly denied by U.S. and British intelligence officials when it surfaced two years ago.”

As Wagner notes, Britain’s main intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters, dismissed the claim again, dubbing it “nonsense” in a new statement.

• So, Trump’s next visit to London looks set to be as awkward for everyone involved as last time (even the orange diaper-wearing baby blimp is making a reappearance). But will it be any different than last time? Well, the Guardian’s Hadley Freeman sees one positive in the new date, in that Melania Trump is coming this time too:

"The truth is, the Trumps, with their visible mutual loathing, are like a satire on the anachronistic expectations about how a First Family should look and I, for one, have high hopes about Melania ending them once and for all on this trip, as she whacks Trump’s hand away outside Windsor Castle. And when that happens, we can definitively say this state visit was totally worth it.”

Amal Clooney speaks during a Security Council meeting on sexual violence at United Nations headquarters on April 23. (Seth Wenig/AP)</p>
Amal Clooney speaks during a Security Council meeting on sexual violence at United Nations headquarters on April 23. (Seth Wenig/AP)

Really?

When Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, and Nadia Murad, an Iraqi Yazidi were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last October for their work to stop the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war, there was widespread praise from all parts of the world, including the United States. But when the Trump administration was asked this month to do its part, and to pass a U.N. resolution to end sexual violence in war, things suddenly looked a bit more complicated.

Yes, the U.N. Security Council passed that resolution, but only in a watered-down version, diluted by the Trump administration. European allies are furious. They’ve grown accustomed to a U.S. administration with interests that are often diametrically opposed to theirs, including on trade, Iran and the European Union. But sexual violence in war?

The move to weaken Tuesday’s resolution followed weeks of U.S. objections to remove all references in that paper to reproductive and sexual health, which the U.S. delegation feared would be understood as support for abortions.

In practice, this could give nations accused of committing or backing such violence a pretext to justify a lack of progress in supporting victims. Also removed from the final resolution were references to expanded U.N. monitoring that would keep track of violations of the resolution. That could mean that perpetrators will have to fear less international scrutiny than originally planned.

The United States wasn’t alone in its opposition to the original resolution: Potentially encouraged by the U.S. move, China and Russia threatened to join the protest, even though both had previously supported or abstained from similar resolutions in the U.N. General Assembly. After the references to reproductive health were removed at U.S. request, both nations abstained on Tuesday, and the resolution passed 13-0.

The approved resolution still supports measures to end the use of sex as a weapon of war, some U.S. allies suggested that the country’s objections were threatening the dignity of women worldwide.

And the U.S. resistance appeared especially contradictory for an administration that has often portrayed itself as championing the rights of Yazidi women, who have faced sexual violence by the Islamic State in recent years. Human rights groups argue the move sends the wrong message, after decades in which sexual violence has become a more systematically used weapon of war. — Rick Noack

For more on Sri Lanka, a piece in the Atlantic notes how the attacks show that the Islamic State is using language to broaden its reach, and one in Foreign Policy points out the multiple warnings that could have prevented the attacks. Meanwhile, an op-ed in The Post calls for the U.N. secretary general to speak out more strongly against human rights abuses, and one in the Guardian calls attention to new legislation in Congress that could help undocumented migrants, brought to the country as children, stay in America. 

ISIS’s newest recruiting tool: regional languages
When ISIS claimed responsibility for the Easter attacks in Sri Lanka, it did so in Arabic and English—and in languages spoken in just a few regions across South Asia.
By Krishnadev Calamur | The Atlantic  •  Read more »

Sri Lanka's perfect storm of failure
There were many chances to stop the Easter Sunday attacks. The government missed them all.
By Lydia Khalil | Foreign Policy  •  Read more »

Why the U.N. chief’s silence on human rights is deeply troubling
Today’s crises are too acute, the civilian victims too numerous, for Guterres to reduce his job to mediator in chief.
By Kenneth Roth | The Washington Post  •  Read more »

I won a Pulitzer. Yet Trump wants to deport me because I'm undocumented
New legislation introduced in the House and Senate offers immigrants the chance to give back to their communities.
By Erika Espinoza | The Guardian  •  Read more »

The Los Angeles tech scene has long lingered in the shadow of Silicon Valley, but as the L.A. Times reports, that could change as the prospect of humans landing on Mars becomes more realistic. Elsewhere, Buzzfeed looks at how a reality show has, for better or worse, revived Waco, Texas, and The Post reports on how one high school is implementing a new dress code... for its mothers. 

As Coachella raged, the L.A. tech world made plans to live on Mars
What do NASA engineers, synthetic biologists and Silicon Valley VCs do for Coachella? Throw a party to talk about colonizing space.
By Sam Dean | The Los Angeles Times  •  Read more »

“Fixer upper” is over, but Waco’s transformation is just beginning
HGTV stars Chip and Joanna Gaines helped convert a sleepy Texas town into a tourist mecca. But not everyone agrees on what Waco’s “restoration” should look like.
By Anne Helen Petersen | Buzzfeed  •  Read more »

A high school’s new dress code bans leggings, pajamas and silk bonnets — for parents
The policy has been called "classist" and "discriminatory," especially since it targets parents at a majority-minority high school where many students come from low-income households.
By Antonia Farzan | The Washington Post  •  Read more »

More than 1,000 indigenous Brazilians gathered outside Congress on Wednesday for an annual three-day campout to protest what they see as rollbacks of indigenous rights under President Jair Bolsonaro. Tents dotted the congressional building’s lawn, where indigenous leaders sang, danced and sold crafts while wearing traditional feathered headdresses with their faces painted red and black. The event began its 15th edition with a sense of animosity toward Bolsonaro, a far-right politician whose policies are called by indigenous leaders the biggest setbacks to their peoples’ rights in recent history. (Eraldo Peres/Associated Press)

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Trump’s defiance puts pressure on Congress’s ability to check the president
Since taking office, President Trump has consistently treated Congress as more of a subordinate than an equal.
By Seung Min Kim  •  Read more »

A white supremacist who murdered James Byrd Jr. was just executed for his 1998 hate crime
The crime prompted a national discussion about hate crime legislation.
By Eli Rosenberg and Lindsey Bever  •  Read more »

White House rejects Democrats’ call for Stephen Miller to testify on immigration
Miller is the mastermind behind the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
By Colby Itkowitz and Rachael Bade  •  Read more »

Fire and ice

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Should Democrats Impeach Trump? Wrong Question. By Alex Shephard

newrepublic.com
Should Democrats Impeach Trump? Wrong Question.
By Alex Shephard
5-6 minutes

April 24

Hours after the Mueller report was released, Majority Whip Steny Hoyer—the second-highest-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives—appeared to slam the door on impeachment. “Based on what we have seen to date, going forward on impeachment is not worthwhile at this point,” Hoyer told CNN’s Dana Bash, citing the just-released Mueller report. “Very frankly, there is an election in 18 months and the American people will make a judgment.”

But that door was, almost instantly, again cracked open. Hoyer quickly walked back his comments in a tweet after an uproar from prominent liberals and from his own caucus. Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Adam Schiff, chairs of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, respectively, each used the Sunday news shows to communicate that, after reviewing all the evidence, they would still consider impeachment. While the president and his all-too-familiar surrogates spent the weekend doubling down on claims of “exoneration” that have no basis in fact, they have been more than met with a chorus of calls for Democrats to hold accountable a flagrantly corrupt president who has repeatedly flouted the rule of law.

Democrats who favor leaving the door open to impeachment, and those who don’t, agree in broad terms that Trump is unsuitable for office. But the practicality and feasibility of casting him out has oddly taken center stage in a debate that should be focused on presidential malfeasance: advocates arguing that keeping impeachment on the table energizes a Democratic base eager for action, and could demoralize a Republican one forced to watch its leaders defended the swampiness of the Trump administration; detractors waving a Clinton-era bloody shirt, warning impeachment only gives the president a galvanizing issue for the 2020 election.

Whether there will ever be enough Republicans in the Senate willing to vote with Democrats to convict Trump of whatever articles of impeachment the House might draft—and such a scenario deserves heaping helpings of skepticism—and whether a failed impeachment effort would hurt Democrats at the polls, those are questions that exist wholly in the political realm. But making political considerations the driving question of impeachment would be a mistake for Democrats trying to claim the mantle of the party that believes in the rule of law.

The point of the next several months is to build a national dialogue about the Trump administration’s rampant corruption. There is no vexing, existential, binary quandary that needs an immediate answer. “To impeach, or not to impeach,” that is not the question. Impeachment, after all, is a process—a lengthy one at that—and not a magic wand. Democrats can and should build the case against Trump—and, perhaps, the impeachment case against Trump—publicly, in the form of hearings and other investigations. Through the public testimony of Robert Mueller and William Barr, and of administration officials and Trumpworld associates like former White House Counsel Don McGahn, former Communications Director and Trump confidant Hope Hicks, and, perhaps, members of Trump’s own family, a narrative of this administration’s high crimes and misdemeanors is likely to emerge.

Contrary to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s comments last month—“Impeachment is so divisive to the country ... I don’t think we should go down that path”—it is that path that will help locate a national point of consensus. Pelosi may have been right in concluding Trump is “just not worth it,” but the Constitution is.

For other Senior Democrats, however, there is a third path, and it’s probably the best one—one that takes into account the president’s wrongdoings, and likely the politics, as well. Now that the Mueller report is out in the open, House hearings can probe the president’s many scandals—not only looking at obstruction of justice and “collusion,” but also a host of other issues, from the Trump administration’s shameful handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Maria to the president’s financial dealings and cozy relationship with strongmen, industrialists, and oligarchs.

It’s a wide-angled approach, but one that endeavors to put the scope of the president’s misconduct on full display. These hearings may very well turn up impeachable offenses, but they also have the secondary effect of highlighting the Democrats’ best message heading into 2020: That they are a party bent on restoring good government, not just on ousting a bad president.

America’s Messiah Complex By Colin Dickey

newrepublic.com
America’s Messiah Complex
By Colin Dickey
10-13 minutes

April 24

For the past four decades, it seems, we’ve all been drinking the Kool-Aid when it comes to cults. In the wake of the spectacular human tragedy of Jonestown (from which the oft-quoted idiom about Kool-Aid comes), we’ve defaulted to seeing cults as homicidal and suicidal. Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple sits at the apex of this pyramid of doom, of course—but before he became a paranoid drug addict who led his followers to deprivation and mass death in Guyana, Jones was an outspoken advocate for racial integration, a fervent communist, and voracious reader who worked indefatigably for Civil Rights in his racist home state Indiana. Is it at all possible to examine those aims as well as the destruction he later wrought? How can we make sense of the utopian dream that lies just beyond the field of bodies?

AMERICAN MESSIAHS: FALSE PROPHETS FOR A DAMNED NATION by Adam MorrisLiveright, 432 pp., $28.95

Adam Morris’s American Messiahs: False Prophets for a Damned Nation attempts this difficult task, tracing a series of cults and communes through history from the founding of the American Republic to the fall of Jonestown. Morris makes plain that “the impulse to purify the group through separation from mainstream society, now regarded as the signature of a cult, could not be more fundamental to the nation’s history.” What else were the Puritans, after all, if not a fundamentalist, break-away, apocalyptic cult? The history of the United States is one of such groups, always eager to divorce themselves from the world in search of purity.

Morris’s book does for American history what Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium did for pre-modern European history: Rather than accept that the United States is ever proudly marching forward toward progress, enlightenment, and democracy, American Messiahs makes plain that we have always been a nation waiting on the cusp of the Millennium, and that time and time again we’ve turned to the prophets shouting that the End is close.

Morris doesn’t go into the wide panoply of American cults, focusing instead on six leaders: Public Universal Friend (who was born Jemima Wilkinson), Ann the Word (born Ann Lee), Thomas Lake Harris, Koresh (née Cyrus Teed), Father Divine (aka James Baker, Jr.), and, of course, Jim Jones. Each of these figures is well deserving of her or his own book (and to be certain, most of them—particularly Jones—have been the subject of several). By bringing them together, Morris succeeds in creating a lineage that spans the first 200 years of American history. From colonial New England to northern California, to Florida and back to Depression-era Harlem, American Messiahs offers a parallel history of a nation through its self-appointed deities.

Public Universal Friend, the first messiah of the young United States, was born in 1758, and was still unmarried when, at 23 years old, she came down with a fever that by all rights should have killed her. After six days of delirium, she awoke, announcing that she was no longer Jemima Wilkinson and that her body had been requisitioned by God for humanity’s salvation. The Friend now used male pronouns (though he insisted he was neither male nor female), and began delivering sermons of an impeding Apocalypse, riding through New England gathering up converts. Going by various titles, including not just the Public Universal Friend, but also “the All-Friend,” “Friend of Sinners,” and “the Comforter,” he brought neither friendship nor comfort to what he perceived as the hypocrites of New England society. “Wherever he went,” Morris writes, “the Friend had made himself disagreeable among well-to-do Quakers and old-light Congregationalists by chastising those who made their fortunes off the slave trade and selling rum to Native Americans.” Attracting a modest but respectable following, the Friend ultimately moved his flock to Utica, New York, to establish a utopian commune—where things gradually fell apart, as greed, selfishness, and inequality among the congregants exacerbated already difficult living conditions. The Friend died in 1819, but first he established a template for other prophets to follow: Call out the hypocrisy of America, gather up converts under an apocalyptic and utopian banner, start a heaven on Earth, and watch it all go straight to hell.

Each of the messiahs profiled by Morris brought with them various idiosyncrasies, but none could top Cyrus Teed, aka Koresh, whose theology led to perhaps the most gruesome post-mortem life of any god or prophet. Teed had built a successful commune (the Koreshan Unity) in southwestern Florida with his puritanical critique of mainline churches, which, he argued, “prostituted” their members through the debased institution of marriage. Through celibacy and religious purification, Teed instructed his followers, they would “translate” from their corrupt, mortal forms to a bisexual, immortal new body. (Teed’s cosmology didn’t stop there; among his many arguments, he preached that we lived on the inside of a hollow globe—directly above our heads is China, only it’s blocked by the sun.) He also told his followers that he was the living God, and that upon his death he would be the first to translate into this new, utopian form. So when Teed died in December, 1908, the Koreshans put his corpse in a bathtub and waited.

Florida’s humidity was (to put it extremely mildly) unkind to the corpse, and the congregants who shuffled by the bathtub containing Teed’s mortal coil had differing feelings about his transformation. One would later write of the “very marvelous transformations” that his body underwent:

    by no means good looking, oh no—some would call it hideous—not a trace of any of our Master’s features are recognizable but a perfect likeness of Horus the great Egyptian god…. Still it was not repulsive to the majority of us. I would like to look at it over and over again.

Other Koreshans were less awed. Teed’s own sister remarked bluntly, “That thing ought to be put in the tomb.” It was a while before the Koreshans accepted the obvious: Teed’s body was not in a chrysalis undergoing metamorphosis—it was decomposing rapidly. It took a full week before they let the coroner bury him.

Why these particular prophets? Morris had so many colorful, charismatic figures to choose from, but what seems to unite these six is their politics. In differing ways, each of these figures set out to critique some fundamental component of American culture: capitalism, the nuclear family, morality and sexual identity (like the Friend, Teed imagined a coming body that transcended sexual difference). The Friend’s critique of New England’s mercantile class would gradually be sharpened by his ideological descendants. Teed, for example, recognized early on that American sexual politics were bound up in economics. “The Koreshans welcomed anyone,” Morris writes, “who agreed that women’s emancipation and the overthrow of monopoly capitalism could not be achieved independently. Capitalist competition and women’s subjugation were mutually reinforcing phenomena.”

Cults fascinate and terrify because of their megalomaniac leaders and their connections with violence, to be sure. But they also arise out of legitimate critiques of capitalism and moral fallibility. “American messiahs,” Morris reminds us, “tend to arise from progressive movements within left politics because they identify capitalism and exclusionary social hierarchies as sources of evil that will inevitably damn the nation to perdition.” America, a supposedly democratic society built on inequality and injustice, has always provided hypocrisies for self-styled prophets to position themselves against. Too often, though, these genuine critiques are buried beneath the idiosyncrasies, excesses (and sometimes violence) of their leaders.

Father Divine, the charismatic Harlem preacher, has since come to be known for his outsized megalomania, his predilection for Cadillacs and other excesses, but contemporary Civil Rights leaders and sociologists long acknowledged (if at times begrudgingly) his importance to New York’s black community in the years before World War II. Divine was legendary for his free meals to anyone who wanted them (his Sunday feasts attracted thousands, lasting well into the night), and for his ability to find his followers reliable and steady employment, elevating them out of poverty. “It would be fair to say that Father Divine’s Peace Mission,” Morris explains, “has, for the most part been deleted from the history of black struggle in America for its tacky theology, its unappealing blend of communistic lifestyle and respectability politics, its disavowal of racial identity, and most of all, its iconoclastic leader: a squat, bald, dark-skinned man whose followers called him God and their Redeemer.”

And, then, of course, there’s Jim Jones. Of the figures profiled in American Messiahs, it is Jones whose story will be most well-known. Less known is his early career as a courageous campaigner for civil rights in a deeply racist Indiana, operating the state’s first integrated church and brazenly taking on the KKK—a bright and promising future that was eclipsed by the Peoples Temple’s stunning conclusion with hundreds of deaths. Jones (like Divine) has been summarily removed from the roster of civil rights activists for fairly obvious reasons: Little he did was so singular that it couldn’t be replicated by others, and the damage and harm done far outweighed their good deeds (exponentially so in the case of Jones).

But while their civil rights messages may not have been particularly novel, what set them apart was their desire to be set apart: they, like Teed and the Universal Friend, argued that the system cannot be changed from within, that only by breaking away from the fabric of capitalism could any meaningful change be possible. As Morris writes, the “American messianic impulse is based on a fundamentally irrefutable truth first observed by the Puritans: the injustices of capitalist culture cannot be reformed from within.” Dismissing cult leaders as nothing more than delusional narcissists hungering for free love and freer money misses what makes them so compelling in the first place: The blunt recognition that the system won’t save us.

As such, they are, Morris reminds us, “symptoms of the system’s health, not its disease.” For all their terrible faults and tragic ends, the figures who are the subject of American Messiahs: False Prophets of a Damned Nation weren’t wrong in their initial critiques of American inequality—an inequality that will continue to outlast these momentary attempts to change the country’s course. As long as we have a monstrous system, we will also have to contend with these monsters on the margins trying to save us from it. The problem, after all, is right there in the subtitle to Morris’s book: These particular prophets may be false, but the nation is still damned.

Cri de Cœur Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

Cri de Cœur
Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 1h
TPM Reader RS chimes in …

At the ripe old age of 68 and as one living in the southern U.S., I am the prototype Trump supporter. Problem is, I can’t stand the man; I can’t stand to see him and I can’t stand to hear him. Put simply, he makes my skin crawl! I, like many of your readers, have been disappointed by the Democrats’ seeming cowardice when it comes to standing up to Trump’s shenanigans.

At least Elizabeth Warren is willing to stand up and call a spade a criminal! The man is an ignorant, narcissistic, serial adulterer, a pathological liar, a misogynist, and a wannabee authoritarian (or should I say, “dictator”). We have gone well past the scandal of the month to the scandal “du jour!” I am simply worn out by the constant lies, obfuscation, misdirection, and destructive policies of an administration that seems hell-bent on destroying every progressive program, person, or proposal from anyone with a “D” next to their name.

I am also a Christian (a preacher, actually) who sees those with whom I should be in agreement as enemies of truth, morality and integrity. Christian principles? Pshaw! The teachings of Jesus? Fugetaboutit! The words of Bill O’Reilly from 2007 echo in my memory: “But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you’re a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have.” Is that what this is all about? Is this why Bill Barr is willing to sell his soul to the devil? Is this why subservient Republicans bow down to “Dear Leader” and allow the president to embarrass them (and himself) in service to white supremacy? I wonder. Could it be that protecting the “white, Christian, male power structure” takes precedence over all other considerations? Is that what this is all about?

I wish I had the answers. Truth is, I am prepared to do whatever it takes (legally, of course) to rid ourselves of this cretin we call “President of the United States.” In the words of J.F.K., I am ready to, “…pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Yes, I am frustrated and depressed, but I am not ready to give up on the “American Dream.” I am ready and willing to fight for the promise of America! Beating Trump in 2020 is not enough. We must work to totally obliterate everything he and his criminal enablers stand for; from the destruction of the environment to the undermining of our most cherished political traditions to the very concept of truth itself. I pray I am not alone! And I pray, in the words of the Great Emancipator, “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” To which I can only say, “AMEN!”

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