BY PRIYANKA ARIBINDI, BRIAN BEUTLER,
& CROOKED MEDIA

Thursday, June 21st, 2018

—Mike Cernovich on Don Jr.

EXECUTIVE (DIS) ORDER

U.S. border patrol agents will reportedly stop referring migrant parents with children who cross the border to courthouses for prosecution. This is an apparent workaround that will prevent family separation and joint-family detention, even though the Justice Department says its zero-tolerance policy is still in place.

Meanwhile, there’s still no plan in place to reunite the 2,300 children already in detention with their parents.

In the chaos Trump has created, government agencies are not coordinating with one another and Republicans in Congress are paralyzed. The result is tremendous uncertainty and even a risk that family separation will return.

Democrats can’t force Republicans to be humane and/or competent. Democrats CAN stake out clear positions on how they would clean up Trump’s mess, if given the chance.  

The Senate Democratic legislation to prohibit family separation is a good starting point. Democrats could go further, including by adopting proposals from Ali Noorani in the Washington Post to:

• Revive the family case-management program that the Obama administration instituted—a program Trump terminated, despite its overwhelming success assuring migrant compliance with law-enforcement proceedings.
• Eliminate jail and jail-like detention in favor of home detention, or bail-style release, and monitoring.
• Discourage migration not with deterrence, but with aid measures targeted to alleviate violence and poverty in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Democrats also can’t ignore the GOP’s ugly spin, which frames Trump’s approach as “following the law” and the alternative as “open borders.” Both of these frames are lies.

• In no other contexts do lawmakers equate “following the law” with “zero tolerance.” (If they did, Jeff Sessions would be in jail for lying to Congress!) In the actual world, with limited resources and common sense, it is phenomenally stupid and cruel to focus on arresting and prosecuting as many mothers crossing the border with children as possible.
  
• Republicans will lie and say anything Democrats support amounts to “open borders,” so Democrats should support ideas they believe will do the most good and make the argument. Abandoning your principles to stop these attacks is a fool’s errand.

From Dan Pfeiffer: Trump faced real-time accountability for separating families, and it’s worth looking at why, in the hope of learning lessons for the battles to come. We shouldn’t resign ourselves to the idea that Trump can only be forced to back down when he does something as vile as kidnap and torture children.

Read →

Pitch in → go.crooked.com/families

The Trump administration continues to limit access to child-detention facilities, increasing concerns about how the children inside are being treated. CNN’s Jake Tapper tweeted: “It’s not an accident that the U.S. government is making it so difficult for journalists, lawmakers, lawyers and others to bring you images and firsthand accounts from these separated parents and children. They are hiding the truth from you because they fear your reaction."

After being detained for crossing the border on their own, kids as young as 14 held in a detention facility in Virginia say they were beaten while handcuffed, held in solitary confinement for extensive periods, and strapped in chairs nude with paper bags over their heads. These incidents appear to precede the zero-tolerance policy. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam has ordered officials to investigate.

A new Supreme Court decision lays the groundwork for states to collect sales tax from online retailers. Take that, #disrupters!

The European Union approved retaliatory tariffs on more than $3.2 billion worth of U.S. exports, which will go into effect on Friday. It also filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization, and promised additional tariffs on more than $4.3 billion worth of U.S. goods if President Trump doesn’t end his trade war. Look at how respected we are!

A federal judge in New York declared the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to be unconstitutional. If the ruling is not overturned on appeal, it will tee up a confrontation over the constitutionality of the bureau before the Supreme Court.

Federal officials investigating Michael Cohen subpoenaed the parent company of the National Enquirer for records related to the $150,000 it paid to former Playboy model Karen McDougal to kill the story of her affair with Donald Trump.

The Texas-based Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) will spend the more than $17 million it raised in the wake of child separation to grow its staff and provide legal representation and counsel to every child and parent. Help them out: go.crooked.com/families

Scott Pruitt has spent $1,500 on “tactical pants”—a fraction of the $4.6 million total in government money that he’s spent on questionable security measures since becoming EPA administrator. If the pants were really tactical, the pockets would have resignation letters in them.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says he will spend $80 million ahead of the midterm elections to help Democrats take back the House. Outright support for Democrats is a significant departure for Bloomberg, who has previously donated to candidates from both parties. Cheers to this with a modestly-sized soda.

It’s technically the summer solstice and the longest day of the year. But still pretty sure November 9th, 2016 was longer.

Juul Labs, the company behind the ubiquitous e-cigarette that’s made nicotine addicts of teenagers around the country, is now valued at more than $10 billion. According to a recent survey, more than 60 percent of Juul’s young users don’t know that it contains nicotine. The hardest drug is commerce.

On Crooked Conversations: Crooked Contributor Julissa Arce talks to National Geographic photographer Cristina Mittermeier about the role art plays in battling climate change.

Listen →

Donald Trump took children hostage and tortured them. Robert DeNiro and a random congressional intern told Trump to go fuck himself. According to the New York Times, these are two sides of the same coin.

From Brian: All comparisons are imperfect, so responsible journalists make them carefully. Equivalence is the most extreme form of comparison, and yet it gets tossed around in political journalism constantly, and it’s almost always wrong. Reporters and editors could ask themselves “are we drawing this equivalence because it reflects reality?” before publishing drek like this, but the fear of alienating sources and readers with the truth makes that option inconvenient.

For more on how this dynamic has created a pro-Trump media bias, read this by Crooked contributor Tim Miller.

Read →  

We aren’t a fashion blog, but this outfit choice does not seem right to us.

Sara Netanyahu, wife of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been indicted on charges of defrauding the Israeli government. The Prime Minister’s wife reportedly spent nearly $100,000 on catering by top chefs in Jerusalem while already employing a full-time chef of her own, and went to great lengths to cover up the expenses.

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