George Packer's Blog, page 108

The Vulnerabilities in the Ninth Circuit’s Executive-Order Decision

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals delivered an extraordinary rebuke to President Trump yesterday. The politically diverse panel (two Democratic appointees, one Republican) rejected just about every argument put forth by the Justice Department and left intact a temporary restraining order that prevented Trump’s ballyhooed executive order on immigration from going into effect while a federal court in Seattle considers a challenge brought by the states of Washington and Minnesota. Trump’s political adversaries, starved for victories, celebrated.

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Kellyanne Conway’s Battle for Trump’s Favor

Kellyanne Conway’s Battle for Trump’s Favor

Yesterday afternoon, Kellyanne Conway, President Donald Trump’s counsellor, was receiving a training that would allow her to obtain top-secret security clearances when an aide came to pull her out of the meeting.

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The Vulnerabilities in the Ninth Circuit’s Executive-Order Decision

Donald Trump’s Backers at Border Protection

Last Saturday morning, a Canadian woman named Fadwa Alaoui left her home in Brossard, across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal, and drove an hour southeast, to the border crossing at Highgate Springs, Vermont. Alaoui was travelling with her two young children and an adult cousin. They planned to spend the day shopping in Burlington. At the crossing, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers asked Alaoui, who was born in Morocco and wears a hijab, for the password to her phone, so they could examine it. They asked for her cousin’s password, too, according to the account Alaoui gave to CBC News, and proceeded to review the women’s phones for about an hour.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Vulnerabilities in the Ninth Circuit’s Executive-Order Decision

The Ninth Circuit Rejects Trumpism

On Thursday afternoon, when a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, unanimously, against President Donald Trump, it emphasized that it was well aware that courts “owed substantial deference” to the executive branch on matters of immigration and national security. That was “an uncontroversial principle that is well-grounded in our jurisprudence,” the judges noted in their decision, which concerned the President’s banning people from seven countries, and all refugees, from entering the United States. But ordinary deference had not been enough for Trump. Instead, the judges wrote, with what sounded like dismay, the government had “taken the position that the President’s decisions about immigration policy, particularly when motivated by national-security concerns, are unreviewable, even if those actions potentially contravene constitutional rights and protections.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Vulnerabilities in the Ninth Circuit’s Executive-Order Decision

Why Does Donald Trump Lash Out at Everybody, Even Judges?

One of the problems with writing about Donald Trump is that you can never be quite sure what you are dealing with. Some days, he comes across as a dangerous authoritarian intent on installing himself as America’s Vladimir Putin or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Other days, he comes across like Frank Costanza—George’s father on “Seinfeld”—a crotchety old guy from Queens railing at the world.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Britain Jumps Into a Brexit Wonderland

With all the craziness going on in Washington these days, it’s easy to ignore what’s happening in the outside world. But Trump-style populism and nationalism is a transatlantic threat, and we should keep an eye on how it is progressing in other countries.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Teen-Agers Against Trump

At noon on Tuesday, as Betsy DeVos was confirmed as the Secretary of Education, hundreds of high-school students in New York City walked out of their classes and gathered at Foley Square, in downtown Manhattan. Originally announced as a response to Trump’s ban on travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, the walkout happened to coincide with the Senate vote for DeVos.

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When Presidents Think About Defying the Courts

“We have had an executive branch that has emasculated itself by surrendering constantly to the idea that once the court says something, that’s it, it’s the law of the land,” Mike Huckabee, the conservative commentator and former governor of Arkansas, said on Fox News, on Monday, talking about the court rulings against President Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban. “When I hear that phrase, ‘It’s the law of the land ’cause the court said it,’ I think, Did you guys pass ninth-grade civics, for gosh sake?” It is unclear what was taught in ninth-grade civics classes at Hope High School in the early nineteen-seventies, when Huckabee was a student there, but it probably wasn’t that judicial opinions are a form of advice that a President can disregard.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Congressman Who’s Trying to Make the Environment Worse, Again

It takes so much energy to keep up with the untruths, half-truths, and crackpot tweets coming out of the White House these days that it can be hard to find the time to monitor the falsehoods emanating from Capitol Hill. But it’s worth checking in on Congress because, it turns out, many of its most powerful members are no less delusional than President Trump. A case in point is Representative Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Smith is the kind of Science Committee chairman who openly displays his contempt for science. He recently advised Americans to get their news “directly from the President. In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth.” (According to the Texas Tribune, Smith was “the first member of Congress to donate to Trump in last year’s presidential campaign.”)

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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A Bad Day for the Environment, with Many More to Come

The Ninth Circuit and President Trump’s Lies

If there was a single question at the center of Tuesday afternoon’s hearings on President Trump’s executive order keeping people from seven Muslim-majority nations and all refugees out of the country, it was this: Do the courts, or the American people, have any recourse when the President lies? Judge James Robart, of the U.S. District Court, in Seattle, had granted the states of Washington and Minnesota a temporary restraining order that put a hold on Trump’s ban, pending further hearings in the next two weeks. The Justice Department had gone to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to ask for an emergency stay of that order, meaning that it could continue to keep people out and revoke tens of thousands of visas before any court had a say—and even then, the Trump Administration argued, the courts were not allowed to say much. The three judges on the appeals court—Michelle Friedland, Richard Clifton, and William Canby—wanted to know what, exactly, the emergency was.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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