Attention to the Unseen

Garrett Epps writes: Last year’s Supreme Court term ended with a vivid display of willed gullibility by Chief Justice John Roberts. In Hawaii v. Trump, the “travel ban” case, Roberts announced he would pay no attention to that Islamophobia behind the curtain and instead treat the ban as a “facially neutral policy denying certain foreign nationals the privilege of admission.” This year’s term ended with the same man stating in Department of Commerce v. New York, the census case, that…

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Kate Cronin-Furman writes: The debate over whether “concentration camps” is the right term for migrant detention centers on the southern border has drawn long-overdue attention to the American government’s dehumanizing treatment of defenseless children. A pediatrician who visited in June said the centers could be compared to “torture facilities.” Having studied mass atrocities for over a decade, I agree. At least seven migrant children have died in United States custody since last year. The details reported by lawyers who visited…

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The New York Times reports: The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that federal courts are powerless to hear challenges to partisan gerrymandering, the practice in which the party that controls the state legislature draws voting maps to help elect its candidates. The vote was 5 to 4, with the court’s more conservative members in the majority. In a momentous decision, the court closed the door on such claims. The drafters of the Constitution, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote…

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Noah Feldman writes: Chief Justice John Roberts split the baby — again. In a dramatic and complicated opinion in a much watched census case, he first held that the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census was constitutionally and statutorily permissible and was supported by sufficient evidence. He was joined by the U.S. Supreme Court’s other conservatives. Then Roberts switched course. In a separate part of his opinion, in which he was joined by only…

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Newsweek reports: The Trump administration went to court this week to argue that migrant children detained at the United States-Mexico border do not require basic hygiene products like soap and toothbrushes in order to be in held in “safe and sanitary” conditions. Trump’s team also argued that requiring minors to sleep on cold concrete floors in crowded cells with low temperatures similarly fulfilled that requirement. Arguing in a 9th district San Francisco court about the conditions that they must hold…

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The Washington Post reports: A federal district judge in Maryland on Wednesday ruled that new evidence in the case of a census citizenship question merits more consideration, opening the possibility that the question could come before the Supreme Court again even after it rules as expected this month. Civil rights groups who had sued the government over its addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 Census had asked U.S. District Court Judge George J. Hazel to reconsider his ruling…

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The New York Times reports: Federal authorities are investigating whether Deutsche Bank complied with laws meant to stop money laundering and other crimes, the latest government examination of potential misconduct at one of the world’s largest and most troubled banks, according to seven people familiar with the inquiry. The investigation includes a review of Deutsche Bank’s handling of so-called suspicious activity reports that its employees prepared about possibly problematic transactions, including some linked to President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser,…

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The New York Times reports: Paul J. Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman who is serving a federal prison sentence, had been expected to be transferred to the notorious Rikers Island jail complex this month to await trial on a separate state case. But last week, Manhattan prosecutors were surprised to receive a letter from the second-highest law enforcement official in the country inquiring about Mr. Manafort’s case. The letter, from Jeffrey A. Rosen, Attorney General William P. Barr’s new…

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Following Donald Trump’s reiteration that he would gladly receive electoral assistance from any source, Jack Shafer notes: Had Trump answered the hypothetical about taking campaign information from the Russians in 2020 in any other way than he did, it would have been read as a confession that he and his son did something wrong in 2016, and Trump almost never admits to having been wrong—or to anyone in his family being at fault. Confirming that Trump’s statement now amounts to…

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The Daily Beast reports: Reacting to President Trump saying he would accept foreign intel on a political opponent if offered, and that he doesn’t feel it’s necessary to contact the FBI, Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano on Thursday said he worries the president is “prepared to commit a felony.” Napolitano was asked by Fox News anchor Shep Smith if there was any “gray area” or “wiggle room” when it comes to campaigns legally receiving “dirt from a…

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The New York Times reports: An independent government agency recommended on Thursday that President Trump fire Kellyanne Conway, his White House counselor, for repeated violations of an ethics law barring partisan politics from the federal workplace. In a letter accompanying a report to Mr. Trump, the agency called Ms. Conway a “repeat offender” of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in campaign politics at work, saying that her flagrant defiance of the law justified her dismissal from…

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Jennifer Daskal writes: Shockingly – if anything shocks anymore – President Donald Trump told ABC news Wednesday that he need not tell the FBI if the Russians once again reached out with an offer of “dirt” on his opponents in the race for president. When Trump was told that Christopher Wary, the FBI director the president himself appointed, said last month that this kind of attempted foreign election interference was something that should be reported to federal law enforcement, Trump’s…

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The New York Times reports: Not long before Attorney General William P. Barr released the special counsel’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, he strategized with Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, about one of his next moves: investigating the investigators. Over a dinner of steak, potatoes and carrots in a wood-paneled conference room off Mr. Barr’s Justice Department office, the two discussed their shared suspicions that the officials who initially investigated the…

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Quinta Jurecic writes: After two years of silence, the special counsel Robert Mueller recently made his first public remarks — to complain, it seemed, that no one had read his report. “We chose those words carefully,” Mr. Mueller said, “and the work speaks for itself.” But at a dense 440-plus pages, if the report speaks for itself, it takes a great deal of time and focus to listen to what it has to say. Mr. Mueller tells a complicated story…

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