Chris Hedges's Blog, page 215

Trump to Kim: Let’s Meet at the DMZ

OSAKA, Japan—President Donald Trump issued a Twitter invitation Saturday to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to meet for a handshake at the demilitarized zone that separates the North and South, and expressed a willingness to cross the border for what would be a history-making photo opportunity.

The invitation, while long rumored in diplomatic circles, still came across as an impulsive display of showmanship by a president bent on obtaining a legacy-defining nuclear deal. North Korea responded by calling the offer a “very interesting suggestion.”

Presidential visits to the DMZ are traditionally carefully guarded secrets for security reasons. White House officials couldn’t immediately say whether Kim had agreed to meet with Trump. The president himself claimed he wasn’t even sure Kim was in North Korea to accept the invitation.

“All I did is put out a feeler, if you’d like to meet,” Trump said later of the message to Kim. He added, somewhat implausibly: “I just thought of it this morning.”

Later, after arriving in South Korea from a conference in Japan of world leaders, Trump offered no further insight into his planned trip to the heavily fortified border. “It will be very interesting,” he said.

While in Japan, Trump said at a news conference that he was “literally visiting the DMZ,” but wasn’t sure whether Kim would meet him.

Trump said he’d “feel very comfortable” crossing the border into North Korea if Kim showed up, saying he’d “have no problem” becoming the first U.S. president to step into North Korea.

His comments followed hours after Trump asked for Kim to meet him there. “If Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!” he wrote.

It was not immediately clear what the agenda, if any, would be for the potential third Trump-Kim meeting.

“If he’s there we’ll see each other for two minutes,” Trump predicted.

Such a spectacle would present a valuable propaganda victory for Kim, who, with his family, has long been denied the recognition they sought on the international stage.

Despite Trump’s comments Saturday, he had told The Hill newspaper in Washington in an interview this past week that he would be visiting the DMZ and “might” meet with Kim. The paper reported it had withheld Trump’s comments, citing security concerns by the White House.

North Korea’s first vice foreign minister, Choe Son Hui, said the meeting, if realized, would serve as “another meaningful occasion in further deepening the personal relations between the two leaders and advancing the bilateral relations.”

South Korea’s presidential Blue House said in a tweet that Trump asked South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the Group of 20 meetings whether he’d seen Trump’s Twitter message to Kim. When Moon replied he had, Trump said “(Let’s) try doing it” and raised his thumb, the Blue House said.

A Moon aide told reporter after the presidents had dinner that they agreed a possible Trump-Kim meeting would be a “good thing.” Moon talked about Kim’s commitment to denuclearization, while Trump expressed his “amicable” views on Kim, according to the official, Yoon Do-han, who added that a meeting would help pave the way for the resumption of nuclear diplomacy.

Trump’s summit with Kim in Vietnam earlier this year collapsed without an agreement for denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. He became the first sitting U.S. president to meet with the leader of the isolated nation last year, when they signed an agreement in Singapore to bring the North toward denuclearization.

Substantive talks between the nations have largely broken down since then. The North has balked at Trump’s insistence that it give up its weapons before it sees relief from crushing international sanctions.

Still, Trump has sought to praise Kim, who oversees an authoritarian government, in hopes of keeping the prospects of a deal alive, and the two have traded flowery letters in recent weeks.

Every president since Ronald Reagan has visited the 1953 armistice line, except for George H.W. Bush, who visited when he was vice president. The show of bravado and support for South Korea, one of America’s closest military allies, has evolved over the years to include binoculars and bomber jackets.

Trump, ever the showman, appears to be looking to one-up his predecessors with a Kim meeting.

As he left the White House for Asia earlier this week, Trump was asked whether he’d meet with Kim.

“I’ll be meeting with a lot of other people … but I may be speaking to him in a different form,” Trump said.

Such trips to the demilitarized zone are usually undertaken under heavy security and the utmost secrecy. Trump tried to visit the DMZ when he was in Seoul in November 2017, but his helicopter was grounded by heavy fog.

Trump has staked his self-professed deal-making reputation on his rapprochement with the North and has even turned it into a campaign rallying cry. Trump has repeatedly alleged that if he had lost the 2016 presidential campaign, the U.S. would be “at war” with North Korea over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.

The meeting would come at a time of escalating tensions. While North Korea has not recently tested a long-range missile that could reach the U.S., last month it fired off a series of short-range missiles. Trump has brushed off the significance of the tests, even as his own national security adviser, John Bolton, has said they violated U.N. Security Council resolutions.

___

Associated Press writers Hyung-jin Kim and Kim Tong-hyung in Seoul, South Korea, and Darlene Superville and Jill Colvin in Washington contributed to this report.

Roger Ailes’ Rise and Fall Makes Good TV

Showtime’s “The Loudest Voice” is an in-depth portrait of a shallow man. Adapted from Gabriel Sherman’s 2014 book and subsequent reporting, “The Loudest Voice” posits Roger Ailes, who died in 2017, as the most important figure in American politics in the 21st century so far, the man who brought all the virulent forces of the right wing together, creating Fox News, which has given us Donald Trump.

Played by Russell Crowe, Ailes is a turgid monster, a toxic brew of vindictiveness, lust and gross, maudlin self-pity. He always seems one tick away from rage. Near the beginning, Ailes is finishing breakfast in a diner when a waitress cheerily tells him, “Happy Holidays!” He freezes her with a stare and replies with a menacing “Merry Christmas.”

Growing up in the blue-collar town of Warren, Ohio, Ailes was beaten by his father, who imprinted him with the message “don’t ever trust anyone.” Loyalty, he learned, wasn’t a quality to be earned but something to be wrenched from others through power and fear. On a sentimental journey, he takes his pre-teen son, Zac, to show him the town where his values were formed, but he finds Warren shabby and welfare-gutted.

In a public address to the townspeople, many of them unemployed, Roger reveals the cause of this blight—the liberal elites who have sent American jobs overseas. This was the genius stroke Ailes used to mold the Republican Party: the idea that the decline of the white working class was not the result of Reaganomics, which shifted wealth dramatically from the working class to the management class, but the fault of the so-called elites who, by the way, went to college and want to “take away your guns, let Muslim terrorists into your country, give Hispanic illegals your jobs, and let gay people get married.” The subliminal message, of course, is that when you hear “elite,” you are supposed to think “Democrat.”

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Fox News Exposed as Trump's Personal Mouthpiece



by Ilana Novick

Ailes’ madness manifests itself as a desire to turn America into the Warren of his youth, beginning with his new hometown in the liberal, old-money hamlet of Garrison, N.Y., about an hour from New York City. His take-no-prisoners campaign begins with the purchase of the town paper, which his wife turns into an organ for his worldview. Within a short time, the citizens of Garrison are divided into angry factions, a foreboding of the America that Fox would later fuel. Ailes was a genius who understood before anyone else the power of television and the effectiveness of narrow casting.

Most of Crowe’s best lines are quotations from Sherman’s book. At a staff meeting in Fox’s early stages, Crowe gives the troops his game plan. “Who’s our audience?” he asks the room. “Everyone,” someone replies. “No,” he corrects her, “we don’t need everyone.” The point is to bring the ideological faithful together, and the purpose of journalism, according to Ailes, is to serve that ideology. “PR is going to be the engine,” he tells an aide. “The news people are going to work for us.”

All vestiges of fair and balanced reporting quickly evaporate. During a point-counterpoint segment with Fox’s token liberal commentator, Ailes tells his people to hold the makeup for the liberal so that “you can see him sweat.”

Crowe’s performance as Ailes is already being likened to George C. Scott’s as World War II Gen. George Patton. But Crowe is a far more nuanced actor than Scott and more capable of conveying his character’s neuroses. And Scott’s Patton seemed greater because he was surrounded by nonentities; “The Loudest Voice” always positions Ailes near a vivid character, starting with Seth McFarlane, eyes gleaming and pearly whites flashing as Ailes’ hatchet man, Brian Lewis; stage veteran Simon McBurney as a surprisingly restrained Rupert Murdoch, head of Fox parent company News Corp. and apparently the only check on Ailes; Patch Darragh, who plays Sean Hannity as an empty vessel waiting to be filled by Ailes (you can see the Trumpian sycophant beginning to take shape); and Josh McDermitt’s Glenn Beck, who looks like, Ailes says, “a fucking armadillo with a hairpiece.”

It’s the women, though, who, after Crowe’s Ailes, make the story. Annabelle Wallis is heartbreaking as Fox client booker Laurie Luhn, whose relationship to Ailes seems to bring her closer to hell with each episode. (One of their sexual encounters should come with an on-screen warning; you may not ever be able to remove the scene from your memory.)

Sienna Miller gives a better performance than was called for in the role of Beth Ailes, who begins as Ailes’ employee and mistress at CNBC, then flounders as his wife, but ultimately is rejuvenated by the power and prestige she comes to command as Mrs. Roger Ailes.

Most tantalizing is Naomi Watts as Gretchen Carlson, who has certainly had spectacular luck in casting—Nicole Kidman is playing her in an upcoming feature film. Carlson is the woman whose allegations of sexual harassment finally brought Ailes down (seven others subsequently came forward).

Watts has only a minimal part in the four episodes that have so far been released, but the artful Naomi, one of the great screen actresses of our time, keeps entering the story through side doors, each time hinting that she’s going to take over the story. Crowe and Watts are old friends who worked together once before in Australia, and you can sense the pleasure they take in their cat-and-mouse back and forth. Watch carefully the hard-edged smile she gives when he asks her to do “a little Miss America twirl” for him and her suppressed anger as she walks away.

It’s too early to assess the critical response for “The Loudest Voice,” as only four of the seven episodes have been released, and many critics have only written about the first two. But it’s distressing to see such amiable fluff as “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “The Good Place” get such high praise while so many are dismissive of such an important miniseries.

Sophie Gilbert writes in The Atlantic that “The Loudest Voice” is “more intent on probing the political and sociological impact of Fox News than the ferociously complicated psychology of the man who created it. It’s a worthy mission, but it leaves the character at the center of the series at something of a distance.” But getting you inside the psyche of Roger Ailes is exactly what “The Loudest Voice does.” And what would make Gilbert or anyone else think that there’s more to Ailes than they’re seeing?

A bizarre dis comes from Daniel Fienberg in The Hollywood Reporter, complaining that “a cottage industry has risen up of preach-to-the-choir productions determined to use wigs and augmented jowls to illustrate for liberal audiences how conservative ideology was formed.” But the subject of “The Loudest Voice” is how Fox News gathered a choir and then preached to it. Does Fienberg believe that this isn’t how conservative ideology was formed? And why does he think that “The Loudest Voice” is only “for liberal audiences”? Simply because so-called conservatives will dismiss it without watching it?

Another thing: Regarding Fienberg’s complaints about the use of prosthetics (such as “Crowe’s latex-encased O-face”), probably half the films and TV shows we watch utilize computer-enhanced imagery; why the criticism of prosthetics and makeup designed to make an actor look like a character—especially when it works? Does anyone think Robert DeNiro was more convincing as boxer Jake LaMotta because he put on 40 pounds instead of just using padding? Crowe doesn’t seem encumbered by the makeup, he seems liberated by it.

What are critics of “The Loudest Voice” seeing, what are they thinking? What sense of discomfort or intrinsic disdain keeps them from seeing what this show is and what it’s about? I defy anyone to watch three consecutive hours of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham and tell me that “The Loudest Voice” isn’t an authentic origin story.

Before Occupy, There Was People’s Park

“The Battle for People’s Park, Berkeley, 1969”

A book edited by Tom Dalzell, foreword by Todd Gitlin, afterword by Steve Wasserman

There is nostalgia for Ronald Reagan in 2019. He is widely viewed in the media and elsewhere as a sensible Republican, a mainstream conservative, a reasonable man—the polar opposite of Donald Trump, the dangerous buffoon now occupying the presidency. Many pundits pine for the “Gipper,” the genial, affable president who chatted with reporters and sipped drinks with some of his political adversaries.

That view is tragically wrong. Reagan and his odious chief of staff and later attorney general, Ed Meese, were central players in some of the most horrific suppressive acts of the rebellious 1960s in the United States. They and various local officials in Berkeley and Alameda County, California, were responsible for some of the most egregious and systematic acts of violence directed against peaceful demonstrators and protesters in recent American history.

A powerful new book, “The Battle for People’s Park, Berkeley 1969,” provides a far more realistic vision of one of the most crucial series of events of the turbulent ’60s. Among many other things in this marvelous volume, edited by longtime Berkeley writer and denizen Tom Dalzell, it reveals Reagan as the cruel and malevolent governor who unleashed horrific terror against Berkeley students and others in May 1969. It provides powerful evidence of how Reagan used his “tough” stance against the Berkeley rebellion as a steppingstone to the White House. His campaign against Berkeley students propelled him to national political prominence and fueled his reactionary agenda in California and later in the nation.

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The Danger of Poeticizing Horror While Bearing Witness



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This book is a definitive account of the battle for People’s Park, a 50th anniversary gem. The volume contains scores of eyewitness statements, more than 200 photographs (many never previously published), and some highly perceptive longer pieces about those tumultuous events in 1969. A brief disclosure: A few of my personal recollections are in this volume; I spoke to Dalzell and sent him an email. I was a first-year faculty member at Berkeley in 1969 and generally supported the People’s Park struggle. Moreover, I was (and remain) an active member of the bar and participated robustly in the legal efforts to get people out of jail, released without bail, and later in other legal proceedings. I remain a UC(LA) faculty member and now only modestly practice pro bono social justice law.

This book appropriately begins with what is widely known as “Bloody Thursday.” Todd Gitlin’s opening essay provides the specific historic context. In April 1969, several hundred local people began turning a University of California parking lot wasteland south of the main Berkeley campus into a utopian park. They installed swings for children, they made gardens, they played music, they offered food to those in need, and they smoked lots of marijuana—in short, People’s Park reflected the strong counterculture of the era. The book has numerous engaging photographs and recollections of those efforts. I went there on several occasions and thought it was a useful and valuable challenge to university authority. But I also thought that the efforts in People’s Park diverted energy from opposition to the grotesque and illegal war in Vietnam.

It all came crashing down on Thursday, May 15 when Berkeley Chancellor Roger Heyns, capitulating to Reagan, cracked down on the park. Police sealed it off by bulldozing the gardens and erecting a large fence around the entire area. At a noon rally on campus, Student Body President-Elect Dan Siegel exhorted the large crowd to “take the park.” Violence soon ensued.

Students and others then marched down Telegraph Avenue. They were met with entirely unexpected police brutality. In the end, one man, James Rector, was killed and another, Alan Blanchard, was blinded. The book reveals Reagan’s comments: “You use whatever force is necessary.” And, more ominously: “The death of James Rector should again serve as a bitter lesson that violence and revolution will lead to nothing but chaos and further bloodshed.” Meese’s comment, entirely reflective of the man’s lifelong character and mentality, was even worse: “James Rector deserved to die.”

In one of my brief comments in the volume, I recalled that I was teaching at the time in the campus building not far from Telegraph Avenue, and experienced tear gas in my class. I dismissed my students. For me, by then, the issue had become police brutality far more than the occupation of the park itself. Dalzell has assembled numerous personal accounts as well as shocking photographic evidence of police malice and protester injuries. One of the most disconcerting documents in this book is the list of known victims of the May 15 shootings. This is the true legacy of Reagan.

That legacy grew more pernicious the following day. He ordered three battalions of the 49th infantry brigade of the National Guard into Berkeley. The military occupation included a group of soldiers who were billeted at People’s Park, further inflaming students and other park supporters. The photographs and personal accounts in “The Battle for People’s Park, Berkeley 1969” are striking—and utterly shocking in their implications for a military takeover (including de facto martial law) of a city in an ostensibly democratic society. Reagan, quoted in the book, blamed the Berkeley faculty and their advocacy of civil disobedience for the violence.

It got worse. In one of the most chilling chapters of the book, “Terror from Above,” May 20, 1969, is revealed as one of the darkest days in the entire history of American higher education. As the book reports, a police officer with a bullhorn announced: “Chemical agents are about to be dropped. I request that you leave the area.” What followed was an army helicopter that flew over the UC Berkeley campus dropping CS gas causing burning sensations, extensive coughing, and difficulty breathing. Wind carrying the gas wafted throughout the campus and as far away as a local elementary school.

The book chronicles many individual reactions. Reagan labeled the helicopter incident—the first bombing of an American campus—“a battlefield decision.” Victims saw it differently. One had to be taken to an emergency room with mucous membrane inflammation. Others vomited. Some had burning eyes. I was a direct victim of the gas attack and, lacking a gas mask like other opponents of the police and military, felt nauseous for a couple of days after the bombing. This grotesque helicopter attack rightfully goes down in infamy, properly documented in this extraordinary book.

“Boxed and Beaten” is another unnervingly compelling chapter in Dalzell’s masterpiece volume. This chapter documents one of the most severe incidents of massive police brutality and misconduct in Bay Area history. Known as “Operation Box,” 482 people were arrested on Berkeley’s main street, Shattuck Avenue, on May 22, 1969. This mass arrest followed a faculty-led march from the campus to downtown Berkeley. National Guardsmen drove people—mostly but not entirely protesters—into a Bank of America parking lot. Soon they were arrested and jailed, mostly without violence. The book contains accounts from several of the people on the scene, many of whom sought peacefully to leave but were arrested nevertheless.

The egregious violence occurred after they arrived at the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin 30 miles east of Berkeley. The male arrestees were subjected to horrific violence by various members of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department, an agency under the leadership of Sheriff Frank Madigan with a well-deserved reputation for police brutality at the time. The accounts in the book are devastating. They detail the vicious beatings, oral threats, and other indignities that newly arrived prisoners suffered during their long night of confinement at Santa Rita.

And they are accurate. I was one of the first lawyers to arrive at that monstrous penal facility. As I indicate in my own brief account in the book, I remained there during the late afternoon and all through the night, trying to get prisoners’ information in order to return to court to get them released as soon as possible. I witnessed many sheriff’s deputies strike people on the sides of their heads while they were lying on the ground. If prisoners even moved, deputies kicked them in their backs or legs. I had seen (and had personally experienced) comparable brutality in my civil rights days in the South; this was as bad or worse.

I was personally threatened only once: After about five hours, I asked a deputy if I could use the restroom. He refused and said he might arrest me if I asked again. I fortunately found a superior officer who directed me to a men’s room. My view is that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel, under these circumstances, also includes the counsel’s right to pee.

The best and most comprehensive account in “The Battle for People’s Park, Berkeley 1969” is Bob Scheer’s “A Night at Santa Rita,” originally published in Ramparts magazine in August 1969. It is a powerful confirmation of the viciousness of the police. Scheer, Truthdig’s editor-in-chief, describes the terror with frightening detail. This is the stuff of Nazi Germany, Algeria before the liberation, Pinochet’s Chile, Argentina of the generals, and so on ad nauseam. All this reflected the cruel and intentional interference of Reagan and his chief henchman, Meese. Not surprisingly, charges from all 482 arrests were dismissed.

The book closes with the Memorial Day March, which occurred on Friday, May 30, 1969. It was huge: Somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 people marched, representing every conceivable progressive and sectarian left group in the Bay Area. Entirely peaceful, its objective was to force the removal of the cyclone fence around People’s Park. That failed; the fence remained but the march had some mixed results. It manifested the determination of thousands of people that Berkeley would not tolerate a military occupation. At the same time, it was also officialdom’s sophisticated way to allow masses of people to let off steam while essentially changing little or nothing politically.

What, then, are readers to make of all this? Steve Wasserman offers some perceptive historical observations in his afterword. He places the battle for People’s Park in the longer history of radical protest in Berkeley. He notes the controversy of the protest against the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1960; the great civil rights sit-ins of spring 1964 at the Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco and the Auto Row demonstrations, peopled largely by Berkeley students; the historic free speech movement of fall 1964 on the Berkeley campus; the historic antiwar teach-in organized by the Vietnam Day Committee in May 1965; the efforts to block troop trains in Berkeley in 1965; and the Third World Liberation Strike at UC in February 1969 to create ethnic studies programs. This is the context for the People’s Park battle.

It is crucial to go beyond the institutional hooliganism of Madigan and even Reagan. Reagan used the affair to crack down on the University of California and on public higher education generally. He tapped a broad and deep anti-intellectualism in California to reduce public funding for the university. Ultimately, this led to substantial tuition and massive student debt. These remain major problems in the early 21st century. Reagan encouraged a politics of resentment that subsequent demagogues like Donald Trump could likewise employ in their own appeals for public support.

The implications of People’s Park go far beyond a modest strip of land on University of California property. In 1969, I didn’t think that the transformation of that barren plot into a small island of peace, tranquility, goodwill, and sisterhood and brotherhood would transform the world and do much to end the violence of the war, much less the broader patterns of imperialism and oppression throughout the world. My view hasn’t changed. But I think the park should have been defended, and more aggressively. The battle for the park in 1969, I believe, was a defeat.

“The Battle for People’s Park, Berkeley 1969” provides some of the most extraordinary source material for a crucial moment in the agitation era of the 1960s. We need to understand that era if we are to learn its lessons (especially its mistakes) and confront the challenges of the new century. Truly, the future of humanity, and of the planet itself, depends on it.

 

Supreme Court to Rule on Trump Bid to End ‘Dreamers’ Program

WASHINGTON—Adding a high-stakes immigration case to its election-year agenda, the Supreme Court said Friday it will decide whether President Donald Trump can terminate an Obama-era program shielding young migrants from deportation.

The justices’ order sets up legal arguments for late fall or early winter, with a decision likely by June 2020 as Trump campaigns for re-election. The president ordered an end to the program known as DACA in 2017, sparking protests and a congressional effort to salvage it.

That effort failed, but federal courts in California, New York, Virginia and Washington, D.C., have blocked him from ending it immediately. A federal judge in Texas has declared the program is illegal, but refused to order it halted.

The program — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — protects about 700,000 people, known as dreamers, who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children or came with families that overstayed visas.

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The Fight Over DACA Has Always Been About Race



by

The DACA protections seem certain to remain in effect at least until the high court issues its decision.

The administration had asked the court to take up and decide the appeals by the end of this month. The justices declined to do so and held on to the appeals for nearly five months with no action and no explanation. The court did nothing Friday to clear up the reasons for the long delay, although immigration experts have speculated that the court could have been waiting for other appellate rulings, legislation in Congress that would have put the program on a surer footing or additional administration action.

Since entering the White House, Trump has intermittently expressed a willingness to create a pathway to citizenship for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who’ve been protected by DACA. But he’s coupled it with demands to tighten legal immigration and to build his long wall along the Mexican border — conditions that Democrats have largely rejected.

With the 2020 presidential and congressional election seasons underway or rapidly approaching, it seems unlikely that either party would be willing to compromise on immigration, a touchstone for both parties’ base voters. Three decades of Washington gridlock over the issue underscore how fraught it has been for lawmakers, and there’s little reason to think a deal is at hand.

On the campaign trail, nearly all of the two dozen Democratic presidential candidates have pledged to work with Congress to provide a pathway to citizenship for millions of people in the country illegally — beginning with the dreamers. On the other hand, Trump sees his hardline immigration policies as a winning campaign issue that can energize his supporters.

“We are pleased the Supreme Court agreed that this issue needs resolution. We look forward to presenting our case before the court,” Justice Department spokesman Alexei Woltornist said.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a conference call with reporters that the high court’s ruling Thursday barring, for now, a citizenship question on the 2020 census “demonstrates that the court’s not going to be fooled by the Trump administration’s clearly disingenuous efforts when it comes to trying to undo and backslide on a lot of the laws and regulations that are there to protect our health and our welfare.”

The Obama administration created the DACA program in 2012 to provide work permits and protection from deportation to people who, in many cases, have no memory of any home other than the United States.

The Trump administration has said it moved to end the program under the threat of a lawsuit from Texas and other states that raised the prospect of a chaotic end to DACA.

Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions determined the program to be unlawful on the grounds that President Barack Obama did not have the authority to adopt it in the first place. Sessions cited a 2015 ruling by the federal appeals court in New Orleans that blocked a separate immigration policy implemented by Obama and the expansion of the DACA program.

Texas and other Republican-led states eventually did sue and won a partial victory in a federal court in Texas. Civil rights groups, advocates for immigrants and Democratic-led states all have sued to prevent the end of the program.

In November, a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled that the administration decision to end DACA was arbitrary and capricious.

The appeals court noted that the federal government has a long and well-established history of using its discretion not to enforce immigration law against certain categories of people.

While the federal government might be able to end DACA for policy reasons under its own discretion, it can’t do so based on Sessions’ faulty belief that the program exceeds federal authority, the court held.

___

Associated Press writers Alan Fram, Will Weissert and Don Thompson, in Sacramento, California, contributed to this report.

The Democratic Party Can’t Escape Its Own Militarism

“You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”—John Lennon, “Imagine” (1972)

The whole thing reeks of faux progressivism and policy minimalism. Consider it a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. I’m thinking, of course, about Beto O’Rourke’s recently proposed “war tax” on nonmilitary families.

O’Rourke, the former punk rocker who dares to sport T-shirts at public appearances, is billed as cutting-edge cool—a millennial hipster from once solid-red Texas. To be fair, some of the former Texas congressman-turned-presidential-hopeful’s ideas on foreign policy ain’t half bad: emergency mental health care for veterans, better benefits for vets with “bad-paper” discharges and, most importantly, an end to the war in Afghanistan. But then his ideas get a bit quirky and far less bold.

O’Rourke’s big-ticket item is his promise to form a veterans trust fund, the proceeds for which will be generated by modest taxes levied upon families without an immediate member in the U.S. military. We’re supposed to believe that this gimmick will somehow rein in the American military machine and teach all those nonmilitary-serving freeloaders a lesson or two about acceding to the deployment of other folks’ kids to our nation’s imperial conflicts. Not so long ago, I was taken with the idea of a war tax myself. I still believe Americans—especially the superrich—should be required to “pay-as-they-go” for nonessential wars of choice. It would sure beat the current alternative of throwing trillions on the national credit card without any real intention of paying these debts off.

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Liberals' Dangerous Love Affair With the U.S. Military



by Maj. Danny Sjursen

But there’s something deeply troubling about O’Rourke’s proposition: America’s military already barely resembles the country it serves, and a war tax would only distance the “other 1%,” as I’ve taken to calling members of the active-duty military, even further from the citizenry at large. Poorer, Southern, more rural and often the legacy of a former service member, these troops increasingly feel disjointed from, and even superior to, the populace they “protect.” Civil-military relations, already dangerously strained after almost 50 years without a draft and 20-odd years of perpetual war, would bend further and potentially break under the weight such a tax. On Truthdig, I have called for reinstitution of the draft as a Hail-Mary attempt to force an end to these conflicts, but O’Rourke’s proposal is something else completely.

Indeed, the entire plan reeks of symbolism over substance, pageantry over prudence—one that’s very much a piece with America’s culture of obsessive adulation for our death-dealers in uniform. Respecting the sacrifice of the military is one thing; celebrating it to alleviate our collective conscience is another. As the empire inevitably comes home, with neighborhood beat cops replaced by camo-clad “warriors” in flak jackets and armored vehicles, as Sunday football games come to resemble martial parades or recruiting drives, the last thing this country needs is another reminder of how distant its soldiers have drifted from “We the People.” Yet that’s precisely what O’Rourke’s war tax would achieve.

Perhaps more significantly, it would widen the chasm between America’s troops and its citizenry without addressing the rot at the core of our ostensible republic: imperialism, militarism, adventurism and racial chauvinism at home and abroad. This putatively progressive war tax neither demands real sacrifice nor does it stand a chance of halting a military-industrial behemoth grown to proportions that even President Dwight Eisenhower couldn’t have imagined. And here we arrive at an essential problem with today’s Democrats: They hardly care about foreign policy, and precious few of their 2020 presidential hopefuls offer anything resembling a coherent alternative.

Liberals, at least any worth their salt, should be hammering Trump on his often hawkish, always confused foreign policy. Like good old John Lennon before them, they could propose bold, transformative change. Imagine a Democratic Party that called not for slightly less war, smaller carbon footprints from the Pentagon, a modest tax “punishment” on nonmilitary families and continued intervention abroad, but actual peace. It isn’t hard to do.

Dream with me, if you will, of a world—an alternative reality, really—in which the U.S. avoids a new war with Iran. But let’s not stop there. Coaxed into action by a massive popular protest movement, Congress reasserts itself, repeals the outdated post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, then overrides the president’s inevitable veto. A bipartisan coalition of foreign policy pragmatists on Capitol Hill then reevaluates the premise of each and every one of America’s worldwide military interventions. And daring to question the prevailing militarist dogma, these leaders boldly admit that none of these many wars is necessary, productive or making the U.S. any safer.

The troops start streaming home and self-defense, restraint and prudence come to define American military policy, while tens of thousands of people live who would otherwise die. And you know what? The so-called homeland is fine; nothing much happens; the threat of terrorism remains about the same and then gradually dissipates.

Which brings me back to John Lennon, and those powerful lyrics from a more expectant time. You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I hope to God I’m not the only one.

Copyright 2019 Danny Sjursen

Tulsi Gabbard Was the Clear Winner of the Democratic Debates

This piece originally appeared on The American Conservative.

Democrats, liberals, progressives—call them what you will—don’t really do foreign policy. Sure, if cornered, they’ll spout a few choice talking points, and probably find a way to make them all about bashing President Donald Trump—ignoring the uncomfortable fact that their very own Barack Obama led and expanded America’s countless wars for eight long years.

This was ever so apparent in the first two nights of Democratic primary debates this week. Foreign policy hardly registered for these candidates with one noteworthy exception: Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard—herself an (anti-war) combat veteran and army officer.

Now primary debates are more show than substance; this has long been the case. Still, to watch the first night’s Democratic primary debates, it was possible to forget that the United States remains mired in several air and ground wars from West Africa to Central Asia. In a two-hour long debate, with 10 would-be nominees plus the moderators, the word Afghanistan was uttered just nine times—you know, once for every two years American troops have been killing and dying there. Iraq was uttered just twice—both times by Gabbard. Syria, where Americans have died and still fight, was mentioned not once. Yemen, the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, courtesy of a U.S.-supported Saudi terror campaign didn’t get mentioned a single time, either.

Night two was mostly worse! Afghanistan was uttered just three times, and there was no question specifically related to the war. Biden did say, in passing, that he doesn’t think there should be “combat troops” in Afghanistan—but notice the qualifier “combat.” That’s a cop-out that allows him to keep advisers and “support” troops in the country indefinitely. These are the games most Democrats play. And by the way, all those supposedly non-combat troops, well, they can and do get killed too.

The only bright spot in the second debate was Senator Bernie Sanders’s single mention of the word Yemen—specifically ending U.S. support for that war and shifting war powers back where they belong—with Congress. Still, most of the candidates had just about nothing to say on this or other war-related topics. Their silence was instructive.

Ironically, then, two more American soldiers were killed in another meaningless firefight in the long meaningless war in Afghanistan on the day of the first Democratic presidential primary debate. Indeed, were it not for this horrendous event—the deaths of the 3,550th and 3,551st coalition troops in an 18-year-old war—Afghanistan might not have ever made it onto Rachel Maddow’s debate questions list.

I mourn each and every service-member’s death in that unwinnable war; to say nothing of the far more numerous Afghan civilian fatalities. Still, in a macabre sort of way, I was glad the topic came up, even under such dismal circumstances. After all, Maddow’s question on the first night was one of precious few posed on the subject of foreign policy at all. Moreover, it spurred the most interesting, engaging, and enlightening exchange of either evening—between Gabbard and Ohio Representative Tim Ryan.

Reminding the audience of the recent troop deaths in the country, Maddow asked Ryan, “Why isn’t [the Afghanistan war] over? Why can’t presidents of very different parties and very different temperaments get us out of there? And how could you?” Ryan had a ready, if wholly conventional and obtuse, answer: “The lesson” of these many years of wars is clear, he opined; the United States must stay “engaged,” “completely engaged,” in fact, even if “no one likes” it and it’s “tedious.” I heard this, vomited a bit into my mouth, and thought “spare me!”

Ryan’s platitudes didn’t answer the question, for starters, and hardly engaged with American goals, interests, exit strategies, or a basic cost-benefit analysis in the war. In the space of a single sentence, Ryan proved himself just another neoliberal militarist, you know, the “reluctant” Democratic imperialist type. He made it clear he’s Hilary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Chuck Schumer rolled into one, except instead of cynically voting for the 2003 Iraq war, he was defending an off-the-rails Afghanistan war in its 18th year.

Gabbard pounced, and delivered the finest foreign policy screed of the night. And more power to her. Interrupting Ryan, she poignantly asked:

Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers who were just killed in Afghanistan? Well, we just have to be engaged? As a soldier, I will tell you that answer is unacceptable. We have to bring our troops home from Afghanistan…We have spent so much money. Money that’s coming out of every one of our pockets…We are no better off in Afghanistan today than we were when this war began. This is why it is so important to have a president — commander in chief who knows the cost of war and is ready to do the job on day one.

In a few tight sentences, Gabbard distilled decades’ worth of antiwar critique and summarized what I’ve been writing for years—only I’ve killed many trees composing more than 20,000 words on the topic. The brevity of her terse comment, coupled with her unique platform as a veteran, only added to its power. Bravo, Tulsi, bravo!

Ryan was visibly shaken and felt compelled to retort with a standard series of worn out tropes. And Gabbard was ready for each one, almost as though she’d heard them all before (and probably has). The U.S. military has to stay, Ryan pleaded, because: “if the United States isn’t engaged the Taliban will grow and they will have bigger, bolder terrorist acts.” Gabbard cut him right off. “The Taliban was there long before we came in. They’ll be there long [after] we leave,” she thundered.

But because we didn’t “squash them,” before 9/11 Ryan complained, “they started flying planes into our buildings.” This, of course, is the recycled and easily refuted safe haven myth—the notion that the Taliban would again host transnational terrorists the moment our paltry 14,500 troops head back to Milwaukee. It’s ridiculous. There’s no evidence to support this desperate claim and it fails to explain why the United States doesn’t station several thousand troops in the dozensof global locales with a more serious al-Qaeda or ISIS presence than Afghanistan does. Gabbard would have none of it. “The Taliban didn’t attack us on 9/11,” she reminded Ryan, “al-Qaeda did.” It’s an important distinction, lost on mainstream interventionist Democrats and Republicans alike.

Ryan couldn’t possibly open his mind to such complexity, nuance, and, ultimately, realism. He clearly worships at the temple of war inertia; his worldview hostage to the absurd notion that the U.S. military has little choice but to fight everywhere, anywhere, because, well, that’s what it’s always done. Which leads us to what should be an obvious conclusion: Ryan, and all who think like him, should be immediately disqualified by true progressives and libertarians alike. His time has past. Ryan and his ilk have left a scorched region and a shaken American republic for the rest of us.

Still, there was one more interesting query for the first night’s candidates. What is the greatest geopolitical threat to the United States today, asked Maddow. All 10 Democratic hopefuls took a crack at it, though almost none followed directions and kept their answers to a single word or phrase. For the most part, the answers were ridiculous, outdated, or elementary, spanning Russia, China, even Trump. But none of the debaters listed terrorism as the biggest threat—a huge sea change from answers that candidates undoubtedly would have given just four or eight years ago.

Which begs the question: why, if terrorism isn’t the priority, do far too many of these presidential aspirants seem willing to continue America’s fruitless, forever fight for the Greater Middle East? It’s a mystery, partly explained by the overwhelming power of the America’s military-industrial-congressional-media complex. Good old President Dwight D. Eisenhower is rolling in his grave, I assure you.

Gabbard, shamefully, is the only one among an absurdly large field of candidates who has put foreign policy, specifically ending the forever wars, at the top of her presidential campaign agenda. Well, unlike just about all of her opponents, she didfight in those very conflicts. The pity is that with an electorate so utterly apathetic about war, her priorities, while noble, might just doom her campaign before it even really starts. That’s instructive, if pitiful.

I, too, served in a series of unwinnable, unnecessary, unethical wars. Like her, I’ve chosen to publicly dissent in not just strategic, but in moral, language. I join her in her rejection of U.S. militarism, imperialism, and the flimsy justifications for the Afghanistan war—America’s longest war in its history.

As for the other candidates, when one of them (likely) wins, let’s hope they are prepared the question Tulsi so powerfully posed to Ryan: what will they tell the parents of the next soldier that dies in America’s hopeless Afghanistan war?

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army Major and regular contributor to The American Conservative. His work has also appeared in Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Tom Dispatch, The Huffington Post, Truthdig and The Hill. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. He co-hosts the progressive veterans’ podcast “Fortress on a Hill.” Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Trump’s Lies Destroy Immigrants’ Lives

On June 17, a day before President Donald Trump tweeted his plans to arrest about 2,000 immigrants, 150 of them in Los Angeles, I happened to be in immigration court in L.A. I was there to observe the administration’s efforts to stop Mexicans and Central Americans from seeking asylum in the United States.

The downtown courtrooms are at the center of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant drive, designed to stir up the conservative white nationalists who constitute much of the president’s electoral base. I’ve found this bureaucratic treadmill, with an infamously huge backlog of cases, a good place to observe the president’s team at the ground level.

By chance, I had picked an opportune time. Trump’s announcement, trumpeted through the internet, radio, television and the newspapers all the next day, spread terror through the country’s large communities of Central American and Mexican immigrants. Then, on June 22, the unpredictable president delayed the arrests of those scheduled for deportation. But the fear continued unabated. Trump promised to begin the arrests in two weeks unless his version of a $4.5 billion immigrant aid appropriation passes through Congress.

“Every enforcement causes trauma, especially to children,” said Victor Narro, an immigrants’ rights advocate, project director at the UCLA Labor Center and a law professor at the university. “We have traumatized an entire generation of children, and this will plague them the rest of their lives.”

Judy London, directing attorney of Public Counsel’s Immigrant Rights Project, told me what awaits the immigrants if the arrests and deportation orders are carried out. They will be taken to a room in the basement of the federal building and then to a detention center far from home. From there, they will be deported. Their families can give them a single suitcase for the journey.

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As Immigrant Deaths Pile Up, We Need to Find Our Moral Compass



by Sonali Kolhatkar

Deportation is the final step of the process. But before that happens, immigrants get lost in the maze of the immigration court.

The courts were the subject of a scathing report released this month by The Innovation Lab and the Southern Poverty Law Center titled “The Attorney General’s Judges: How the U.S. Immigration Courts Became A Deportation Tool.” It charged, “After decades of neglect and abuse by prior attorneys general, the Trump administration is weaponizing the immigration court system against asylum seekers and immigrants of color … the attorneys general have actively sought to turn the immigration court system into a weapon of deterrence and deportation.”

There are 58 immigration courts in the United States, each with a judge appointed by the U.S. attorney general and serving at his pleasure. Overworked and faced with a huge backlog of cases, the judges run a judicial assembly line.

I joined a number of immigrants and their lawyers waiting for the nearby courtroom to open. It promised to be a busy afternoon. A lawyer told me Judge Veronica Villegas would hear 30 cases in the next four hours, a small part of the backlog of 908,552 cases pending in immigration courts around the country. Immigrants’ average waiting time for a hearing is 727 days, according to the foremost compiler of immigration statistics, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), maintained by Syracuse University.

Shortly before 1 p.m., the courtroom doors opened, and soon it was standing room only. Although I’d stood near the head of the line, I found a seat in the back row.

Immigration law is incredibly complicated, and without a lawyer, immigrants are usually doomed to deportation. That’s how 75% of the cases end.

I saw a man threatened with deportation to Mexico apply for asylum. His case would be heard in seven months, on Feb. 3, 2020. Until then, he would be out on bail if he could afford it, or if not, he would go to one of the notoriously overcrowded detention centers. A woman got a hearing on April 23, 2021. The hearing for another immigrant was scheduled for Oct. 12, 2021.

Trump and his team portray the immigrants as worthless, dangerous people who duck out of court hearings and disappear. Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan, the National Review reported, testified to a Senate committee that 90% of asylum-seekers skipped their hearings.

This is a lie. Examining the cases of families facing deportation, TRAC said those with legal representation showed up 99.9% of the time. The rate dropped to 81.6% for those without lawyers. One reason for the lower rate is that attorneys keep track of court dates for their clients. Court notices often miss the recipients without lawyers or are in English, which is no help to Spanish-only speakers.

Trump stirs up his supporters with the false charge that the immigrants are criminals. As he tweeted last October, “Many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border. Please go back, you will not be admitted into the United States unless you go through the legal process. This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!”

This is another Trump lie.

TRAC reports that “the vast majority (58 percent) of individuals in ICE custody had no criminal record. An even larger proportion—four out of five—either had no record, or had only committed a minor offense such as a traffic violation.” For those who had been convicted, their most frequent crime was entering the country without documents. The second most common was driving under the influence of alcohol.

Trump is peddling an ugly myth, one designed to ensure his re-election next year by stoking his supporters’ fear of immigrants. The images on television and in other media showed the toll: inhumane treatment of children at a Texas detention facility; the bodies of a father and his child on the banks of the Rio Grande.

This kind of rhetoric inflames feelings against immigrants who want nothing more than an escape from terror in their homelands and better lives—the same feelings that brought earlier generations to the United States.

As I have seen in the immigration courts, even worse damage is being done to those trapped in an anti-immigrant bureaucracy, where asylum is usually denied, and women and men and children are turned over to ICE police for a trip back to their dangerous hometowns and whatever fate awaits them.

White Supremacist in Charlottesville Case Gets Life Sentence

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.—An avowed white supremacist who drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters during a white nationalist rally in Virginia was sentenced to life in prison Friday on hate crime charges.

James Alex Fields Jr. of Maumee, Ohio, had pleaded guilty in March to the 2017 attack that killed one person and injured more than two dozen others. In exchange, prosecutors dropped their request for the death penalty. His attorneys asked for a sentence less than life. He will be sentenced next month on separate state charges.

Before the judge handed down his sentence, Fields, accompanied by one of his lawyers, walked to a podium in the courtroom and spoke.

“I apologize for the hurt and loss I’ve caused,” he said, later adding, “Every day I think about how things could have gone differently and how I regret my actions. I’m sorry.”

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The Other Enduring Legacy of Jim Crow in Charlottesville, Va.



by , and Erica Green / The New York Times

Fields’ comment came after more than a dozen survivors of and witnesses to the attack delivered emotional testimony about the physical and psychological wounds they had received as a result of the events that day.

The “Unite the Right” rally on Aug. 12, 2017, drew hundreds of white nationalists to Charlottesville to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

The case stirred racial tensions around the country.

Fields was charged with 29 hate crime counts and one count of “racially motivated violent interference.” He pleaded guilty to 29 of the counts.

In a sentencing memo filed in court last week, Fields’ lawyers asked U.S. District Judge Michael Urbanski to consider a sentence of “less than life.”

“No amount of punishment imposed on James can repair the damage he caused to dozens of innocent people. But this Court should find that retribution has limits,” his attorneys wrote.

Fields faces sentencing in state court on July 15. A jury has recommended life plus 419 years.

Robert Reich: Trump Is Quietly Hobbling Working People

It’s bad enough that the Trump administration has now imposed tariffs on America’s closest trading partners – because those tariffs will raise prices on everything from clothing to cars.

Even worse — and this will come as no surprise — Donald Trump and his enablers are lying about the consequences of these trade wars.

First, a bit about tariffs: Tariffs operate exactly like taxes – on you.

Trump claims that “tariffs are… being paid to the United States by China…“ That’s baloney. Average Americans end up bearing the financial burden.

When the U.S. imposes tariffs on a country, like China, that raises costs for companies doing business there. And then those companies pass on their increased costs to you in the form of higher prices, as even Trump’s own economic advisor Larry Kudlow acknowledged.

Trump’s tariffs are tantamount to one of the biggest tax hikes on Americans in recent history. The latest round of 25% tariffs on Chinese imports will cost U.S. households $106 billion a year, or $831 for the average family.

And this tax increase is regressive, taking a bigger bite out of the incomes of average working families than the rich.

I haven’t even mentioned the costs to American workers of losing their jobs because China and other nations subject to Trump’s tariffs retaliate by raising tariffs on our exports to them.

Here’s another lie they’re trying to push: Trump’s chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, claims that tariffs aren’t paid by American consumers because ”it’s relatively easy to substitute other goods” from other countries. Mulvaney also predicts a jump in U.S. production of consumer goods to fill the gap.

This, my friends, is total rubbish.

It’s not at all easy to substitute other goods at the same low prices as we can get them from Mexico or China. Companies have chosen these countries as their supplier not because the companies like the weather or food, but because it’s cheaper to make or buy stuff there than elsewhere.

There won’t be a jump in production here in the U.S. “to fill the gap,” because if it becomes too expensive to make or buy in China or Mexico, American companies will switch production to somewhere else that’s not as cheap as China or Mexico but still cheaper than making things in the United States – say, elsewhere in Latin America, or in Southeast Asia.

Once again, Trump’s economic nationalism is hurting ordinary Americans without creating a single new job.

Know the truth about tariffs – and spread it.

States Move to Take Over Fight Against Gerrymandering

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo.—The battle for political advantage in state capitols is poised to become more intense after the U.S. Supreme Court declared that federal judges have no role in settling disputes over partisan gerrymandering.

The ruling this week could empower Republicans and Democrats who hold full control of state legislatures and governor’s offices to become even more aggressive in drawing districts to their benefit after the 2020 census.

It could shift legal challenges against partisan gerrymandering to state courts and prompt more efforts to reform redistricting procedures through amendments to state constitutions.

Ultimately, it also could mean that voters upset with the party in power must seek change the old-fashioned way — by electing different lawmakers, no matter how difficult that might seem in heavily gerrymandered districts.

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Republican Plot to Entrench White Power Revealed



by

“It just means the next elections are even more important,” said Mindy Nagel, a Cincinnati Democrat whose home is split between two Republican-held congressional districts. “We need to focus on state politics big time.”

Ohio is one of several states immediately affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling, which overturned lower court decisions that North Carolina Republicans and Maryland Democrats had unconstitutionally gerrymandered congressional districts to their political advantage.

Writing for the court’s 5-4 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that although the cases provided “blatant examples of partisanship driving districting decisions,” federal courts have no authority to determine whether partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional.

The ruling is likely to lead to the dismissal of similar federal lawsuits in Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin.

Courts in Michigan and Ohio had ordered new districts to be drawn for the 2020 elections after ruling that Republican officials engaged in illegal partisan gerrymandering. A retrial on a partisan gerrymandering claim in Wisconsin had been scheduled to begin in July.

Instead, the 2020 elections will proceed under the same districts used for the past decade. An Associated Press statistical analysis of the 2016 and 2018 elections found that congressional districts in North Carolina and Ohio produced a consistent advantage for Republicans. The AP’s analysis also found a persistent Republican advantage in state House or Assembly districts in Michigan and Wisconsin.

“The fact that these districts aren’t fairly drawn makes it a tough slog for us,” Michigan Democratic Party Chairwoman Lavora Barnes said. “But we feel good that there are places in Michigan, despite the gerrymandered districts, where we can make inroads and where we can win seats that have been drawn specifically for Republicans to win.”

Michigan Democrats have said much the same thing before — with little to show for it in the state legislature.

But “if voters are sufficiently ticked off … they may often be able to overcome partisan gerrymandering through sheer electoral force,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who tracks redistricting nationwide. “It’s not realistic to expect that would happen everywhere, but it may happen in enough places to send a message.”

In Ohio, which lost two U.S. House seats after the 2010 census, the map enacted by Republican officials led to a 12-4 Republican congressional majority that has stood since the 2012 elections. Last year, Republicans received 52% of the vote statewide but won 75% of the seats.

One of the biggest beneficiaries has been Republican U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot, whose Cincinnati-based district added GOP-dominated Warren County in the remapping. While Democrats have had the upper hand politically in the Cincinnati area in recent years, the city is divided between two GOP congressmen.

Chabot commended the Supreme Court, saying by email that Ohio has already passed redistricting reform, and “it would be an unjust usurpation for the federal courts to substitute their opinions for those of the Ohio legislature and voters.”

Michigan’s Republican House Speaker, Lee Chatfield, also praised the Supreme Court, saying it “did the right thing upholding the will of the voters and leaving state policy decisions to the people of Michigan and their elected representatives.”

Voters in Ohio, Michigan, Colorado, Missouri and Utah all approved ballot measures in 2018 that were intended to reduce partisanship during the next round of redistricting in 2021. Ohio’s measure requires bipartisan support for new maps to last for 10 years. Missouri’s measure requires a nonpartisan demographer to draw state legislative districts designed to achieve “partisan fairness” and “competitiveness.” The other states adopted independent or bipartisan commissions to draft district lines.

About 18 states have passed some sort of redistricting procedures designed to keep partisanship in check. More are pursuing such measures.

Virginia’s General Assembly in February approved a constitutional amendment that would create a 16-member commission of lawmakers and citizens to draw congressional and state legislative districts after the 2020 census. The measure must be approved again next year by lawmakers for it to go on the statewide ballot.

New Hampshire’s Democratic-led Legislature passed a bill in June to create a 15-member redistricting commission that would present maps to the Legislature for approval. Republican Gov. Chris Sununu has not taken a public position yet on the bill.

Citizen ballot initiatives aren’t allowed in about half the states, including in Texas, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana — all places where lawsuits over racial gerrymandering have been filed.

Former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder, who leads the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said his group will continue to pursue racial gerrymandering claims in federal courts and partisan gerrymandering claims in state courts. The group also is looking into supporting constitutional amendments in 2020 to create independent redistricting commissions in New Hampshire, Arkansas and Oklahoma.

“Even with no federal guardrails on gerrymandering, this fight is really far from over,” Holder said.

In North Carolina, litigation challenging partisan gerrymandering in state court already is teed up for trial in mid-July.

Common Cause and the state Democratic Party — both involved in the federal case decided Thursday — also sued last November challenging the state legislative districts drawn by Republicans. That case claims the maps violate the state constitution’s provisions that protect freedom of speech, declaring that “all elections shall be free” and ensuring people are protected by laws equally.

Last year, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down congressional districts based on a state constitution that contains similar wording declaring that “elections shall be free and equal.” The Democratic-majority high court then adopted new districts, under which Democrats gained four more seats in 2018 than they had won in 2016.

In North Carolina, “we still feel like this is an excellent opportunity (for) … ultimately the state Supreme Court to rule in our favor to say partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional,” Common Cause North Carolina Executive Director Bob Phillips said. “So we haven’t lost hope.”

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Sewell reported from Cincinnati.

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Associated Press writers David Eggert in Lansing, Michigan, Gary Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Holly Ramer in Concord, New Hampshire, contributed to this report.