Given the ridiculous amount of gridlock we’ve experienced in Congress during the last six years of Obama’s presidency, you’d think that folks would have an appetite for one side or the other to get enough political power to break it. Certainly, that’s Democrats’ ambition, but it’s no longer true for the Republican donor class.
Hundreds of millions of dollars that Republican groups had been poised to spend in the 2016 presidential election are now increasingly likely to move into Senate and House races, as many big donors look to distance themselves from the party’s presumptive nominee, Donald J. Trump.
It’s clear now that Big Money Republicans are ready to concede the presidency, and they’re preparing to deal with a Clinton administration with as much obstruction as possible. Never mind that the country has come to loath Congress just as much as they loath cockroaches, chiggers, and herpes.
Insofar as the Establishment, or the elites, or the financially successful have lost the good will and trust of the people, they ought to get the message that more gridlock is a recipe for sharpened guillotines and stockpiled pitchforks, but nothing can shake them from their belief that they can manage this discontent by showering money on the Republican Party and making nice with a centrist Democratic administration.
Actually, they’re not going to play nicely with Clinton. They’re going to stand aside and let her get elected and then they’re going to claim that she’s worse than Fidel Castro. That’s their plan, anyway, but their plans haven’t been working out so well, lately.
I wouldn’t place a whole lot of money on things turning out the way they hope.
That would be an improvement over all the GOP-Clinton deals in the 1990s (most done over the objections of many and sometimes most of the Democratic members of Congress). However, in one area, HRC should do better with the GOP congress than WJC and Obama did and in this area, McCain will be her head cheerleader.
If he hangs on…
I am not making a prediction, but I have a feeling that McCain might go down this year.
It’s not specific to the facts on the ground in Arizona. It’s just a sense that the way things are going, he’s not gonna be around next year.
In this context I don’t think it really matters. If it’s not McCain, it will be somebody else.
Expect he will. Plenty of old coots in the Senate that on paper look vulnerable but don’t leave until they die or retire.
…in one area, HRC should do better with the GOP congress than WJC and Obama did and in this area, McCain will be her head cheerleader.
I assume you’re implying something about an aggressive foreign policy, but please correct me if I am wrong.
Will McCain go down in his primary?
When will Democrats point out that what people are angry about is the smaller government that the Republican obstruction has engineered (exceopt for national security spending)?
It is so small that Wall Street was complaining that the US was not issuing enough new bonds to finance its debt and provide conservative investments for them to trade. And fretting about having to go to more risky bond investments.
This is the Koch Bros. scenario. Maybe by now the rest of the oligarchy “have seen the future, and it works,” as journalist Lincoln Steffens famously said of the new Soviet society.
While Washington is kept virtually paralyzed, the various Republican statehouses get with the program and safeguard the long-term existence of the gerrymandered districts that keep them in power. Voila! States rights.
Not to mention refusing to hold hearings on supreme court nominees.
Well now shit. Didn’t you hear that Sanders single payer and free education will cost umpteen trillion dollars? We can’t afford that big government, commie shit. I must travel in all the right circles, bc I heard it and do every day. Even Bill the Big Dog has been saying how stupid those ideas are. It is funny though that a few strange economists say the net national cost may be little or nothing when you factor in an increased wage base and millions of more jobs from infrastructure. Pay them no mind.
Indeed, not even Democrats know or can say that the modern conservative movement’s results are abject failures and cotrary to their promises. The New Deal’s result are much better in that regard, despite the 1970s revisionism and the theater of the destruction of Pruett-Igoe housing in St. Louis.
The thing that really gets under my collar is the notion that we can’t afford it. that is the lie that people buy into and especially when Bill Clinton says so.
And considering Hillary Clinton is now making a point of telling people Bill will be a major part of her administration…look out.
Fun times are here again.
They are pushing hard for an increase in the interest rates. Freaking crazy but when money talks…….
I’m glad you added that last addendum. I don’t think anyone should operate under the delusion that the Republicans will cooperate one iota.
The Republicans worked with Bill Clinton to pass all sorts of misery for everyone. Why wouldn’t they work with H. Clinton? At least on the things that they both agree on.
I’ll believe it when I see it. (I would like to see it).
Certainly. The Gee Oh Pee PTB are pissed about the Donald. Some may, behind the scenes, even work to get Clinton elected (my speculation which is worthless but conceivable).
Once inaugurated, the GOP in the House will immediately being impeachment proceedings and gridlock and obstructionism will continue apace.
Same old, different day, except the GOP has much much more to work with in terms going for Clinton’s jugular than they ever did with Obama. Birth certificate waste of money & time is going look wonderful in hindsight.
uh huh
uh huh
that’s what they plan, BooMan
Political Animal Blog
May 20, 2016 8:30 AM
What the Obama Administration Has Done to Reduce Income Inequality
By Nancy LeTourneau
There are those who say that President Obama’s most important speech is the one he gave in Osawatomie, Kansas in December 2011. He went back to the town were Teddy Roosevelt said, “The fundamental rule of our national life – the rule which underlies all others – is that, on the whole, and in the long run, we shall go up or down together.” Here is how Obama described our current situation:
Today, we’re still home to the world’s most productive workers. We’re still home to the world’s most innovative companies. But for most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded. Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people. Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefited from that success. Those at the very top grew wealthier from their incomes and their investments — wealthier than ever before. But everybody else struggled with costs that were growing and paychecks that weren’t — and too many families found themselves racking up more and more debt just to keep up….
But, Osawatomie, this is not just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. Because what’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, secure their retirement.
The steps this President has taken to reduce income inequality are not often highlighted as a package, and so they are sometimes unacknowledged or dismissed. Today, Paul Krugman takes a look at a few of them, but he begins by suggesting they can be placed in two categories:
Step back for a minute and ask, what can policy do to limit inequality? The answer is, it can operate on two fronts. It can engage in redistribution, taxing high incomes and aiding families with lower incomes. It can also engage in what is sometimes called “predistribution,” strengthening the bargaining power of lower-paid workers and limiting the opportunities for a handful of people to make giant sums. In practice, governments that succeed in limiting inequality generally do both.
Thanks for the link.
Thank you
Thay mặt kính iphone 5s
One of the unanswered questions of the Congress during the past 20 years is will the Democratic Party unite on dealing with income inequality.
It certainly seems that it will take a different batch of Democrats than the incumbents who arrived in 2009.
The Democratic establishment campaign’s minimalism continues to prevent that transformation from happening and they are resisting that transformation in this cycle.
Without widening the map, Clinton faces the same Congressional strike if she wins. It is not clear that 2018 will address it because the national rot has gone on too long — essentially since 1994 in the Congress when the Gingrich revolution legitimized gridlock and other tactics designed to immobilize the Clinton administration and paint it as a failure. Triangulation, which must have seemed brilliant at the time as a political position failed to ease that but in essential ways capitulated to it. So did the Obama attempt at “bipartisanship”. The more accommodating Obama became, the harder the GOP dug in. That reached its near destructive zenith in the attempt of Congress to fail to pay debt service in 2010.
That event and the Walker victory in Wisconin were the spawning grounds of the popular mood that resulted in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
In 2016, it really is about the Congress and state legislatures. There needs to be some reporting on how the Democratic establishment intends to expand the electoral map this year. It is, at best invisible in the media and blogs.
My reading of the only reason that Obama waited until now to roll out the overtime regulations is that earlier it would be opposed by Republicans and a few Democrats in Congress.
Now, Congress is in such chaos, it will be hard to mount opposition before the election. And why would any member of Congress want to be seen taking away someone’s newly received overtime pay?
And why would any member of Congress want to be seen taking away someone’s newly received overtime pay?
Because “they” don’t deserve that overtime pay. They’re lazy, they’re inefficient, they’re undocumented, they’re “not like us”, not “real hard-working Americans”. Name your favorite dog whistle.
Every man should set his own demand in the labor market by virtue of his personal excellence, doncha know?
Don’t forget “teenagers who need to be taught a work ethic and given an opportunity to enter the job market.” That’s another popular dodge. “Look how high unemployment is for people under 21!” the conservative movement cries while they shed crocodile tears.
Not only does this fail to deal with the job market as it is (only 24% of those making minimum wage in the U.S. 2014 were teenagers), it also supposes that teenagers should be pushed into the job market. In my view, if we had a healthier economy, society, and governmental education funding, the teen years would be reserved more frequently for education and extracurricular activities.
not going to stop the Speaker from trying apparently based on some of his comments the last couple days
Never saw much push back from congressional Dems when George and Chu originally took the overtime away back in 2004 by executive order. Kerry did run on repeal, but then it was forgotten.
looks like they almost successfully stopped it from the minority
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/08/over-a28.html
LOL Thank you for that link. Sooooo typical:
The Democratic politicians and trade unions have responded with public denunciations of the attack on overtime, but such protests are entirely rhetorical. The trade union bureaucrats refuse to lead any struggle of the working class to defend its own interests against the attacks by big business. Instead, they are using the overtime pay issue as yet another reason for politically subordinating workers to the corporate-controlled Democratic Party.
Democrats in the Senate voted to block the new rules in May by passing an amendment to a law to ban any reduction in overtime pay, but the measure was voted down in the Republican-controlled House, as the Democrats knew it would be. Even if it passed the House, the Democrats knew Bush could still have vetoed it. Their effort had little value except to allow them to posture as defenders of working people, and provide the occasion for a bit of campaign demagogy from Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. No one seriously expects a Kerry administration–or a new, Democratic-controlled Congress–to take any action on the issue.
The AFL-CIO has responded to the attacks on overtime pay and the 40-hour week by encouraging people to write letters to Bush and their congressmen. Union functionaries have handed out thousands of leaflets in this vein. This effort begs the question, however. If it took massive strikes in the 1930s to win the limited reforms of the New Deal, how can one take seriously the AFL-CIO’s strategy of defending these gains by writing emails to George W. Bush?
so you say they didn’t do anything to stop it and when it turns out they did try. You then say it was meaningless because they knew it would never pass the House even though it nearly did and if it did pass the House Bush would never have signed it.
So that’s proof they don’t care about the issue even though they did everything in their power at the time to reverse it?
I have no idea what you expected them to do when they used all the power they had and it didn’t work
Labor has no effective leadership in the US….”If it took massive strikes in the 1930s to win the limited reforms of the New Deal, how can one take seriously the AFL-CIO’s strategy of defending these gains by writing emails to George W. Bush?“
I believe it was 6 million workers who saw paychecks plummet, but they could not organize a parade…
so now it’s not Democrats that are the problem but labor?
BTW they did organize ultimately winning the White House and getting the policy reversed, which is the point at the end of the day right?
Sorry, should have been 8 million workers.
Maybe the Perez youngster suggested the rules change. He is new in the job. I never heard it mentioned after Kerry’s loss. You have link?
what are you talking about, it’s big news that the President signed the overtime rules change
Don’t get me wrong. I am very happy it has happened. But who would claim that labor issues have received the same degree of attention and priority that financial issues have for the last 8 yrs.
maybe you should go look at what the President’s administration has done for labor over the last eight years not just the big news that made the papers
He has done far more than most people know.
How is the Employee Free Choice Act coming along?
So this is how you respond to President Obama’s Labor Department actually doing the thing you wanted done. I mean, good Lord…
Opportunities to share this are made appropriate on a regular basis:
While we’re on the subject, what do you think of the actions of the NLRB Board since President Obama has been able to seat a quorum of appointees?
I wish I knew how to upload a fainting couch for you–that someone dare to disparage our Dear Leaders.
Here’s a link to what Labor used to do and still does in France….https://www.google.com/search?q=french+labor+strikes&rlz=1C1CHNV_enUS359&espv=2&am
p;biw=1600&bih=785&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjU5byXu-vMAhUFNj4KHWVQA-
gQ_AUIBygC
Developed countries with a higher minimum wage than the United States’ $7.25 an hour include Denmark at $21, Australia at $15.81, Germany at $11 and France at $12.35.
Yes, the Reagan Revolution really fucked things up for Unions, the conservative movement has become ever more insanely aggressive in its attacks on workers, and the voters have not handed progressives/liberals power for a long enough period of time for them to address the need over time to raise the Federal minimum wage to a healthy level.
Do the recent wage actions by California and New York mean anything to you at all?
You might find this interesting. Some links, too.
…http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/modernizing_labor_laws_for_twenty_first_century_work_independe
nt_worker
I live in California, near the main epicenter of the launching of the gig economy, Silicon Valley. I’m intimately aware of the abuses and vulnerabilities that can be heaped upon workers and, ultimately, all of us from this horrific employment model. The abstract for this Hamilton Project paper is offensive. I don’t even want to dig into the full proposal now; it would infuriate me.
So, let’s recognize the Administration which has done the most to empower workers in the last half century, and empower our next President and Congress, and Governors and State Legislators, to follow his lead.
Actually, by the way you talk I don’t think you are “intimately aware of the abuses and vulnerabilities that can be heaped upon workers” or you wouldn’t be so praising the Obama administration so much in this area.
And which administration would that be? It sure as hell isn’t the current one.
Name the Presidents in the last century whose Labor Department and NLRB have take concrete actions which help workers more than our President.
I’m asking you to dump the personal attacks and come to the table with some facts. Name the Presidents, and share their Administrative accomplishments, and explain why those are superior to Obama’s.
In fact, here’s a related request: what are the best accomplishments of President Obama’s Labor Department and NLRB? Do you know their actions?
I’d agree that FDR and his Congresses took advantage of the political room provided by the Great Depression to pass truly groundbreaking legislation and rulings. But it would be valuable to account for FDR’s imperfections as well. For example, most of the protections and power his laws and rulings provided were only made available to white men.
If you’re an honest historical narrator, after FDR you’ll come up wanting for any President whose Labor Department and NLRB were more outstanding than President Obama’s.
Compare and contrast. LOL
Hundreds Rally For Overtime
http://www.ibew.org/articles/03daily/0307/030701_OTRally.htm
We are such weak tea.
Thanks for reinforcing the appropriateness of the video here. The negativity here and elsewhere is unrelenting and completely absented of humor, self-awareness and historical context.
I’m well aware that Labor has more power in some European nations. Worker power is being compressed right now because of the ability for the European Union to compel member nations to execute austerity monetary policy; even French workers have experienced takeaways in recent years.
Bad negativity!!!
But it’s fine that US workers fall further and further behind if no one points it out.
Wonder what our national economic picture would be if 30yrs of back taxes from wage increases that workers never received were added to our Treasury.
Would we have had the explosion of debt that led to 2007? Debt that still overhangs our Main Street economy.
I agree!
So when a set of political leaders does something to address the issue, let’s just get through a single comments thread taking pleasure in the act and offering praise to those who took the actions we want.
Instead, the President and Labor Department get literally no praise or recognition from you. In fact, you can read in your responses criticisms so heavily implicit that they essentially feel implicit. Can you see how this, multiplied by millions, gives our leaders little political room to do what you want?
When, as happened with the ACA, 40% of the public opposes an action from the right or out of fear of change, and 20% opposes from the left BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE HURTING OUT HERE WHY DON’T YOU DO MORE YOU CORRUPT POLITICIANS, then the media accurately reports that 60% of Americans oppose the ACA, which threatens the Act itself. Dissatisfaction and improper reporting from many on both the right and left of the legislative and judicial history, along with the health care and financial outcomes of the ACA, can lead to enough losses in 2016 that we could lose the entire ACA in 2017, including the things which are pure progressive wins like the Medicaid eligibility expansion.
Don’t I remember discussing this with you before Obama (or Perez) ever thought of doing this? I think so.
The 2009 Congress was shameful in how quickly it killed card check–not even a VOTE. And the unions did squat. (Unless 2010 was their revenge?) So yeah, Dems only look at labor when an election is close. There is a damn pattern there.
I’m interested in hearing your history of Congressional consideration of EFCA in 2009-10. (BTW, the Act was much more than card check.)
Let’s hear it. Why was Congress unsuccessful in passing EFCA? Which people were responsible for its death?
Bleh. I am not your research pony. Anyone can Google.
What do you know about LAANE out there in California?
(http://prospect.org/article/if-labor-dies-whats-next)
I’m not asking you to do my research on EFCA. I’m asking you to do your research.
Your disinclination to do this tells me is that you assume Obama, Reid, Pelosi, DWS and the DNC killed EFCA. That would be wrong, which is a problem for you and, multiplied by millions, our Movement.
The Los Angeles City Council and County Board of Supervisors is worlds better than it was before LAANE and other community organizations in the region began doing their work more effectively, and that has manifested itself in real wins for workers and other progressive interests. So far so good.
In your linked piece, which is very good, BTW, Meyerson lays a fair amount of blame for the shrinking of the Labor movement in the U.S. on liberals and progressives outside the Labor movement. That, and the nature of and need for solidarity, are worth thinking about.
Er, no I watched it die without a vote. I kinda follow those things…
“Union Decline–A Whoduit: We Done It” is a most excellent section of that article…
“Can a new Democratic coalition all but devoid of a union presence and subject to the growing influence of corporate America and the financial elite do the same? Can it restore equitable growth? That would be squaring a circle. Already, some Democratic mayors, among them Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel and Newark’s Cory Booker, are building coalitions that array their city’s corporate elites and minority communities against their cities’ unions. The irony here is that their cities’ unions are largely responsible for expanding the middle class within those minority communities. Nonetheless, this municipal version of the Democrats’ top-bottom coalition could prove to be the model for the Democratic Party of the future. By ceding control over taxes, trade, and worker rights to the party’s corporate funders, however, this model omits a plausible vision of how to reconstruct broadly shared prosperity. Absent worker power, you can’t get there from here.”
mino, the Republicans refused to allow an up-or-down vote on EFCA; they would not grant cloture on the Bill. The “why” is extremely important here.
I note that you avoid mentioning the part of Meyerson’s piece where he talks about portions of the liberal movement walking away from solidarity with Labor. If they had not done that, portions of the Democratic Party would not have followed suit.
Wished to comment on the present state of affairs. The new top/bottom alliance the Dem party is looking at for presidential victories, at least.
Republicans did not filibuster. Except a virtual one, I guess. Harry never brought it to the floor, protecting his Conservadems, I suspect, who had delayed and delayed the bill til July, when Kennedy was no longer available. And since the election was over, there was no point to be had by allowing Republicans to grandstand.
Well, yes, there was a virtual filibuster. There’s plenty of that these days.
As badly as I and my movement wanted EFCA, I knew that we didn’t have cloture votes from a half-dozen Democratic Senators, the worst Senators in the Dem Caucus. And with McConnell and his leadership having their entire caucus in line to deny cloture, it would have been a poor use of Senate time for Reid to hold a failed cloture vote.
As we saw, most of the sack-of-shit Dem Senators were out of office at the end of their terms, so I don’t see that Reid’s failure to hold a vote was in an attempt to protect said Senators. Everyone who cared about the Bill knew who the culprits were, and they didn’t receive the Labor support they would have in their re-election bids if they had supported EFCA.
Here’s the simple history, the Republicans filibustered it in the Senate and we didn’t have 60 votes to break the filibuster.
We only had 60 Democrats for 44 days and most of those days Sen. Kennedy wasn’t available.
It is true a few Democrats weren’t in favor of it but it appears that at least 54 Senators were in favor of it all Democrats.
So who killed the EFCA? Republicans killed it.
There you go. An succinct and accurate history of EFCA in the 111th.
Play small ball as long as they are able. Trust the Fed to crush any upwards wage pressure with preemptive rate hikes. Allow state leges to overrule municipal or regional minimum wage increases.
I do NOT want HC writing the Labor Act of the 21st Century.
if you don’t have a Congress willing to help, you have to do what you can with the power you actually have
Actually, better to never open the issue with this presumptive set of electees. Total monkeywrenching utterly predictable.
You just don’t get it, do you? Do you see who the Democrats anointed choice to replace Marco Rubio is? And yet I hear all sorts of whining about Alan Grayson. The Democrats have no plan to retake the House!! Not sure what Schumer’s plan to keep the Senate past January 2019 is.
Hillary’s candidate for the Florida Senate, Murphy, a Republican until 2014. But he got donations from Goldman Sachs so he must be a Democrat now.
Well you know they are charged with fighting inflation and last month it was.4% up and wages are also up. So the dicks, er Governors are all out there talking up the need to raise rates. Never mind it is being driven by oil prices, just a detail.
The major force, I think, that fought for a better income balance was unions. With manufacturing on the decline, there may need to be a new kind of union to fight for workers. Service employees. Middle-management employees. Dunno. Anti-unionization is a major plank for the Republicans and Democrats don’t do enough to assure the strength of unions. We have to fight “right to work” (thank you Frank Luntz for that one — snark).
The example I tend to use a lot is the post office. This was the way into the middle class for lots of people of color, folks with only a HS diploma. Good pay, good benefit. Could buy a home. Your kids could get more education so they could work at a desk instead of an assembly line. But “small government” wins out.
All those who have been organizing…make some new unions!
Public sector jobs have been decimated by the Recession and by state austerity. They have NOT rebounded at all. They were middle class employment for many women and minorities.
The growth of jobs has been almost exclusively in the 1099 economy–the new precariat. The Citizen as Commodity.
Take a look at some of these charts… http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/a_record_decline_in_government_jobs_implications_for_todays_ec
onomy_an
I think we can do a better job of showing the benefits of having a union now than saying all the good things they did decades ago. Right now a lot of people, including some liberals, only see unions as taking money out of their pocket.
They need better PR
You might find this interesting. An attempt to give some protections to the new and growing class of gig-workers…
http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/modernizing_labor_laws_for_twenty_first_century_work_independe
nt_worker
Unanswered? Surely you jest. Until Sanders I scarcely heard it at all. Not listening I suppose. But hell let them shut down the government, sequester funds and threaten SSMM. It’s the Debt you know. Congress seems mostly mute to me. But we need to be bi partisan. That’s the thing. All join hands now.
“Be True to Your School” kinda captures it, no?
The nights were so cold without you
And the days were always short on light
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We could share the very first snowflowers of the year
In your arms where I belong
thay mặt kính iphone 5s
Gretchen Morgenson in an article in the NY Times noted there is at least one action Obama and the Treasury can arbitrarily take to help with inequality. She says they have the legal ability to simply end the carried interest loophole the rich hedge fund and private equity guys use to keep income taxes at cap gains rates. Pity it was not done say seven years ago or even now. Now would be good too.
Exactly. The appointees to regulatory agencies who set rules and procedures are the residual power of the executive until the SC says otherwise. Those slots tell you everything about the intentions of the executive.
Which leads me to suggest that gridlock seems quite all right for the current Wall Street-friendly “centrist” Democratic Party. Considering all the deals that Clinton cut with the Republicans in his 8 years, I’m sure that H. Clinton is willing to settle for gridlock. That’s how Republicans and Clintonistas rule.
“It’s clear now that Big Money Republicans are ready to concede the presidency….”
After reading this my first thought was that now I understand why you so frequently boast that “I was right….”
With all due respect, I typically find your writing informative and interesting, but predicting what is going to happen in the next six months is a fool’s game.
…you’d think that folks would have an appetite for one side or the other to get enough political power to break it. Certainly, that’s Democrats’ ambition….
I keep reading here remarks reflecting a contrary line of thinking, namely, that the Democratic Party actually wants divided power as an excuse for doing nothing.
I’m assuming the remarks you refer to are in the comments, not the actual posts. If so, I agree with your comment as I’ve never seen so many supposed progressives and Democratic voters who so gleefully ascribe the most anti-Democratic motivations to those they label the elites. It’s as if they revel in their cynicism and thrive on negativity.
It’s almost as though they are here for reasons other than pushing progressive progress.
.
How’s the Employee Free Choice Act coming along?
pretty simple, a Republican filibuster killed it
you can post the same comment over and over if you’d like but it’s not going to change what happened
Well, I’d say that there are elements of the Democratic party that do feel this way to some extent. Andrew Cuomo operates this way in New York. He helped engineer a Republican takeover of the NY State Senate with the help of a number of Democrats to slow or block progressive legislation or reforms coming to NY.
If we win the Senate, there would need to be a corresponding overhaul of the rules and elimination of all the BS tricks senators can pull to stall legislation/appointees.
uh huh
uh huh
A Federal Judge Just Ordered A Dox Attack Against 100,000 Innocent People
BY IAN MILLHISER
MAY 20, 2016 9:00 AM
A federal judge with a history of anti-immigrant sentiment ordered the federal government to turn over the names, addresses and “all available contact information” of over 100,000 immigrants living within the United States. He does so in a strange order that quotes extensively from movie scripts and that alleges a conspiracy of attorneys “somewhere in the halls of the Justice Department whose identities are unknown to this Court.”
The judge is Andrew Hanen, who conservative attorneys opposed to President Obama’s immigration policies appear to have sought out specifically because of his belief that America does not treat immigrants with sufficient hostility. Texas v. United States was filed shortly after President Obama announced policy changes that would permit close to 5 million undocumented immigrants to temporarily work and remain in the country. As the name of the case suggests, the lead plaintiff is the State of Texas, yet the Texas Attorney General’s office did not file this case in Austin, the state’s capitol. Instead, they filed it over five hours away in the town of Brownsville.
At the time, only one active federal judge, Judge Hanen, sat in Brownsville, so the attorneys’ decision to file their case nearly 300 miles away meant that it was highly likely that the case would be assigned to a judge that once accused federal officials of engaging in a “dangerous course of action” because they permitted an undocumented mother to be reunited with her child without facing criminal charges. Hanen later issued a nationwide order halting the Obama administration’s new policies.
It appears to be, as several immigration advocates noted shortly after the order was handed down, an effort to intimidate immigrants who benefit from certain Obama administration programs from participating in those programs, lest their personal information be turned over to people who wish them harm. As Greisa Martinez, Advocacy Director for United We Dream, said in a statement, the judge is “asking for the personal information of young people just to whip up fear” — fear, no doubt, of what could happen if anti-immigrant state officials got their hands on this information. Or if the information became public.
He is also going after DOJ lawyers for lying by withholding the info on those 100,000 people where action on them was taken before approvals. He is requiring them all to take legal ethics training each year for five years. It also appears the case for Obama’s executive action now goes to the Supreme Court, which means no relief for those five million. Conservatives love this shit.
The next time the government doesnt coddle a right wing movement while literally beating a leftwing one into the ground will be …. maybe the second?