Dispatches

GRIM NEW REPORT: RENT UNAFFORDABLE FOR POOR IN EVERY STATE.

There’s not a single state, metropolitan area or county in the US where a full-time worker earning the minimum wage can afford the rent for a modest two-bedroom apartment.

Affordable housing is fundamental to a safe, healthy, stable life. Yet, for a huge swath of the population, it remains completely out of reach, Laura Paddison noted at HuffPost (6/18).

A worker earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour would need to work nearly 127 hours a week – equivalent to more than three full-time jobs – to afford a modest two-bedroom rental without spending more than 30% of their salary on housing costs. To afford a modest one-bed rental, they would need to work 103 hours a week.

These figures come from the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s annual Out of Reach report, published on June 18, which for 30 years has documented the gap between renters’ earnings and rental costs across the country.

The report takes the “fair market rent” of modest one- and two-bedroom rentals (defined as the Department for Housing and Urban Development’s best estimate of what a family moving today can expect to pay) and then calculates the hourly wage a renter would need for it to be affordable (meaning he or she spends no more than 30% of their income on housing costs).

A full-time worker needs to earn $22.96 an hour, on average, for a two-bedroom rental to be affordable, according to the report. That’s $15.71 an hour more than the federal minimum wage, and $5.39 more than the national average renter’s wage of $17.57.

For a one-bed rental, a full-time worker needs to earn $18.65 an hour, an amount above both the federal minimum wage and the average renter’s wage.

“The housing crisis is very bad,” said Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “It’s worse that it’s been in a long time and it continues to get worse.”

While rent in every state is unaffordable to minimum-wage workers, the most expensive state is Hawaii, where the fair market rent on a modest two-bedroom is $1,914 a month. To afford that, a worker in the state must make $36.82 an hour – equivalent to working 3.6 full-time minimum-wage jobs.

Arkansas, where the fair market rent for a two-bedroom is $742 – is the most affordable state. Full-time workers there need to make $14.26 an hour to afford a two-bedroom rental, significantly above the state’s minimum wage of $9.25.

Drilling down to the metro area level, the report’s figures are even starker. The most expensive is San Francisco, where full-time workers need to make a staggering $60.96 an hour to afford a two-bedroom rental. The city’s minimum wage is $15.

President Donald Trump’s administration has called for sweeping cuts to affordable housing programs and has proposed rule changes which, Yentel said, “would actually increase homelessness in our country and it would increase it for some of our country’s most vulnerable people.”

The administration wants to prevent undocumented immigrants accessing federally subsidized housing, which could potentially leave up 55,000 children, who are US residents or citizens, at risk of eviction and homelessness. And in May, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson proposed a rule change that would take away protections for transgender people at homeless shelters, potentially making it much harder for them to access facilities.

Some Democratic presidential hopefuls have set bold housing policies. Sen. Cory Booker (D.-N.J.), in June launched a housing proposal that included the introduction of a tax credit to cap the amount of rent Americans pay at 30% of their salary. A similar tax credit has been proposed by Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.).

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) plans to drastically increase the number of affordable homes by putting around $500 billion over a decade toward helping states build and maintain housing for extremely low-income renters.

WORKERS’ BONUSES SLUMPED 22% SINCE GOP TAX CUTS. Republican tax cuts for the rich came with promises of big bonuses for workers. This was the cover that corporations provided the GOP for the program, and it was as genuine as any other Donald Trump promise, Walter Einenkel noted at DailyKos (6/19). Most of the bonuses were a long time coming and had already been negotiated long before the Republican tax cuts came into being. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has released its latest Employer Costs for Employee Compensation Listing, which the Economic Policy Institute analyzed. Guess what?

“An examination of overall wage and compensation growth does not provide much in the way of bragging rights for tax cutters, especially given the expectation of rising wages and compensation amidst low unemployment. Private sector compensation and W-2 wages both fell by 0.9% over the last year (March 2019 versus March 2018) and were lower in March 2019 than the average for 2017, the year before the tax bill passed. W-2 wages in March 2019, $27.44, were lower than in December 2017, $27.79, a drop of $0.35 or 1.2%.”

The Institute previously reported steep declines in compensation between December 2017 and December 2018, but had warned that they might be a fluke. Its researchers now do not believe those things to be a fluke, as the numbers remain at the same low level over a year later.

“This goes along with the basic numbers, where an overwhelming amount of wealth afforded corporations by the tax cuts went right back into shareholder and C-suite pockets. Everything about the tax cuts, from their unpopularity, to the Republican hypocrisy enlarging the national deficit, to continued promises of pay-offs for regular folks some time in the future, stinks.”

FOR FIRST TIME, RENEWABLES BEAT COAL IN US ELECTRICAL GENERATION. In a remarkable sign of the shifting fortunes of dirty energy and clean energy, more renewable power was generated in April than coal power — something that’s never happened before in the US, Joe Romm noted at ThinkProgress (6/26).

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) announced that, in April, “US monthly electricity generation from renewable sources exceeded coal-fired generation for the first time.”

While coal provided 20% of US power in April, renewables — which include utility-scale hydropower, wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass — provided 23% of total generation.

Coal power generation cycles seasonally because temperatures moderate over much of the country in the spring and fall, reducing the power generation needed for air conditioning and heating. During those seasons, coal generation drops, and some plants are shut down for maintenance.

This seasonal drop in coal power is on top of the steady decline of coal, which has been increasingly unable to compete economically with cheap natural gas and ever-cheaper renewables.

In fact, the EIA reports that US wind power hit a record monthly high in April. And solar will almost certainly hit a record monthly high sometime this summer.

The country continues adding both solar and wind generation at a very strong pace. So, when will annual renewable electricity generation surpass annual coal generation? The EIA projects out to only 2020 in its latest “Short-Term Energy Outlook” (STEO).

In the US, 855,000 people working in renewables is just under the 1.1 million employed by the fossil fuel industry, according to the sixth annual jobs report by the International Renewable Energy Agency, which found at least 11 million people around the world held jobs across the renewables sector, from manufacturing and trading to installation.

POSTAL SERVICE WANTS TO CUT WORKER BENEFITS, DELIVERIES. The US Postal Service wants to make significant cuts to employee benefits and cut deliviries to five days a week as part of a plan to balance the agency’s books, according to a draft business plan HuffPost obtained (6/18).

The proposal would save an estimated $18 billion on employee compensation over a decade by shaving paid leave, raising workers’ share of pension contributions, and shifting new employees into less secure 401(k)-style retirement plans.

The proposals obtained by HuffPost were marked as preliminary and subject to change, and would require congressional approval. The postmaster general, Megan Brennan, is expected to present a business plan to the House Oversight Committee this summer.

President Trump in March proposed changes to the Postal Service and its employees’ benefits, which the White House estimated would save $98 billion over the next decade.

In addition to a renewed push for offering postal employees lower pay and benefits, Trump pushed changes proposed by a task force he created last year, which would raise prices for mail and packages not deemed “essential,” reduce delivery frequency, outsource some mail processing and license access to individuals’ mailboxes.

The Postal Service said in a statement that its board of governors was developing a 10-year plan to put the agency “on a sustainable path forward.”

“Our plan is currently being finalized and reviewed through third-party analysis, and may change as part of this process,” the agency said. “In the coming months, the Postal Service will engage with stakeholders to build support for the plan, which essentially focuses on the key public policy questions of what universal services the organization should provide, and how to pay for those services.”

In addition to the benefit cuts, the agency also proposes requiring retired employees to enroll in Medicare. The move, which is dubbed “Medicare integration” and has previously been included in legislation that didn’t pass, would save an estimated $49 billion over 10 years, according to the document.

The agency is also hoping Congress will allow it to make “frequency delivery changes” ― an apparent reference to dropping to five-day delivery, a controversial idea Brennan floated at a congressional hearing this spring. The major postal unions, as well as many members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, have been vocal opponents of delivery cuts.

Much of the agency’s red ink is due to a 2006 law that forced the agency to set aside more than $5 billion annually to prefund health benefits for retirees up to 2056, a requirement unique to the Postal Service. Private sector companies generally fund retiree health care on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Democrats and postal union representatives have long said the pre-funding policy is a deliberate effort to sabotage the Postal Service, arguing the red ink would inevitably become a pretext for worker benefit cuts.

While much of the proposal is unlikely to go anywhere politically, it shows the thinking of the agency’s leadership as it faces pressure to reverse years of operation losses. The Postal Service is an independent government agency that tries to run like a business — its operations are entirely funded by the sale of postage and other products — but its ability to raise prices or change services is limited by law.

SECRET BORDER PATROL FACEBOOK POSTS JOKES ABOUT MIGRANT DEATHS, SEXIST MEMES. Members of a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents joked about the deaths of migrants, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting a detention facility in Texas and posted a vulgar illustration depicting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in oral sex with a detained migrant, according to screenshots of postings, ProPublica reported (7/1).

In one exchange, group members responded with indifference and wisecracks to the post of a news story about a 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant who died in May while in custody at a Border Patrol station in Weslaco, Texas. One member posted a GIF of Elmo with the quote, “Oh well.” Another responded with an image and the words “If he dies, he dies.”

Charles P. Pierce noted at Esquire.com (7/1), “There is a serious rise in right-wing extremism in almost every level of law enforcement and, increasingly, in the military as well. It’s insidious and it’s goddamn dangerous, and it’s a power center just begging for an ambitious politician without a sliver of conscience to come along and activate it.”

Another post cited by ProPublica is a photo illustration of a smiling President Trump forcing Ocasio-Cortez’s head toward his crotch. The agent who posted the image commented: “That’s right bitches. The masses have spoken and today democracy won.” ... In another thread, a group member posted a photo of father and his 23-month-old daughter lying face down in the Rio Grande. The pair drowned while trying to ford the river and cross into the US; pictures of the two have circulated widely online in recent days, generating an outcry.

The member asked if the photo could have been faked because the bodies were so “clean.” (The picture was taken by an Associated Press photographer, and there is no indication that it was staged or manipulated.) “I HAVE NEVER SEEN FLOATERS LIKE THIS,” the person wrote, adding, “could this be another edited photo. We’ve all seen the dems and liberal parties do some pretty sick things …”

Pierce concluded, “There are all kinds of evil that stirring from hibernation because they sense that their time has come. … Far too many of them exist in people who carry guns and wear badges for a living. They are the viruses in our permafrost.”

SENATE DEMS CUT LEGS OUT FROM UNDER HOUSE COLLEAGUES ON BORDER BILL. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi came in for rage from some progressives for allowing the House to pass a Senate bill designed to deal with the humanitarian crisis at the southern border and its victims, but Senate Democrats left Pelosi little room to negotiate a better bill when they agreed to let the bill out of the Senate (where it passed 84-8).

Pelosi told her House members in a private meeting that she thought she had a deal with Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer to hold out for a more liberal border funding bill, the Washington Post reported (6/28).

Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) said, she was blindsided. Nearly all Senate Democrats voted for a Republican-backed bill that kneecapped the House leader and marked the most embarrassing defeat for Pelosi in the six months since Democrats took over the chamber.

Senate Democrats blamed the House for not acting sooner. Many lawmakers favored attaching the border funding to a must-pass disaster aid bill that cleared Congress earlier in June. But members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, another group closely engaged on border issues, were wary of backing any hastily negotiated deal.

That left the border bill adrift and handed more control to Mitch McConnell, who could determine when and how the legislation was considered in the Senate. The House leadership came up with a bill that eliminated funding for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement back pay as well as for Defense Department border operations, and it further tightened the administration’s ability to shift money around, but as June wore on and the border crisis deepened, House lawmakers continued to negotiate among themselves. That was, in part, due to the two caucuses pushing fiercely for tighter strings on any border money, the Post reported.

When McConnell announced in mid-June that he would put a border bill on the Senate floor before the July recess, Senate Democrats chose to negotiate, and Sens. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), cut a $4.6 billion deal that was viewed as a victory by most Senate Democrats. The bill made sure migrants would receive humanitarian aid while allocating no new funding for migrant detention beds; had a strict prohibition on using the funding for a border wall or to bulk up immigration enforcement; and established new standards for facilities while also delivering funding for immigration judges and $30 million in grants to nonprofits caring for migrants. House Democrats passed their more liberal bill (6/25), but by then Republicans decided they had little reason to negotiate further, and moderate House Dems were pressing to accept the changes. The Senate version ended up passing the House 305-102, with 95 of 235 House Dems voting against the Senate bill.

POLL: ECONOMY ISN’T SILVER BULLET TRUMP THINKS IT IS. Sen. Kamala Harris was one among many Democratic candidates last week who leveled an attack against Donald Trump using the economy. Trump goes around bragging about “my great economy, my great economy,” Harris said, but it’s not working for Americans who don’t own stocks or who work two or three jobs just to put food on the table. 

Based on the fact that nearly every Democratic candidate echoed Harris’ sentiments on the economy, it’s clear that many Americans continue to have trouble making ends meet and are expressing that anxiety to candidates as they campaign across the country. In fact, a new AP-NORC poll shows why Democrats continue to focus on an economy that appears at first blush to demonstrate strong fundamentals.

Although nearly two-thirds of Americans say the economy is “good,” fewer than half of them approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, taxes, and trade policies, Kerry Eleveld noted at ThinkProgress (7/1).

So Democrats are onto something when they jab at Trump for repeatedly touting his “great economy.” While the unemployment rate is at historic lows and the nation’s economic expansion is setting records, a mere 15% of taxpayers believe they got a tax cut, and just 17% think Trump’s trade policies will benefit them personally. Even the number of Republicans who say Trump tariffs will help the economy has plummeted from 70% last August to 50% this June, and among all Americans that number has dropped from 40% to just 26%.

The more convinced Trump is of his own greatness, the more his disconnect from voters’ realities will continue to work against him. Just because his billionaire buddies are tickled pink doesn’t mean the rest of America is sharing in the revelry.

PRESIDENT ‘DEALS’ MAKES A DEAL. For weeks before Donald Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong-un at the Demilitarized Zone to “say hello,” a real idea had been taking shape inside the Trump administration that officials hope might create a foundation for a new round of negotiations, the New York Times reported (6/30). The concept would amount to a nuclear freeze, one that essentially enshrines the status quo, and tacitly accepts the North as a nuclear power, something administration officials have often said they would never stand for.

It falls far short of Mr. Trump’s initial vow 30 months ago to solve the North Korea nuclear problem, but it might provide him with a retort to campaign-season critics who say the North Korean dictator has been playing the American president brilliantly by giving him the visuals he craves while holding back on real concessions.

Kevin Drum commented at MotherJones.com (7/1), “Sure, this is a deal that any president for the past three decades could have gotten. And they have! And North Korea has repeatedly broken agreements for a freeze. And Trump said he’d never, ever agree to such a stupid thing because he, and he alone, knows how to stay tough and get good agreements. But c’mon, there’s a campaign coming up.

“In related news, Iran has broken the uranium limit on the 2015 nuclear deal, which Trump promised he’d replace with a tougher one. And Trump has caved in on imposing more tariffs on China because China agreed to buy more food from us, which is hardly a concession since they’ve wanted to do this all along. And NAFTA 2.0, which does hardly anything in the first place, can’t even get congressional approval.

“Quite the negotiator, our president.”

TRUMP FAILS TO PERSUADE ANYONE TO ABANDON PARIS CLIMATE ACCORD AT G20. At the G20 meeting in Osaka, Japan, in late June, Donald Trump failed in his effort to get several nations to back off their support of the Paris climate accord. If he had succeeded, this likely would have killed the final communiqué usually issued at the end of each G20 meeting. Three senior officials told Politico reporters that Trump had been pressuring Australia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and Turkey to withdraw their support for the G20’s commitment to the 2015 climate accord. It didn’t work. In fact, French President Emmanuel Macron gave notice early on that he would veto the final communiqué if it weakened the G20’s support for the accord.

As it turned out, Trump’s arm-twisting lost out, and the communiqué’s language declares similar support for the accord as it has in the past, with an “agree to disagree” carve-out for the United States in the document like those that have been included since 2017, Meteor Blades noted at DailyKos (6/29)

Two EU negotiators reportedly argued with US negotiators until 4 a.m. Saturday (6/29) without making a dent. That only came when the issue was put directly to the top leaders in Osaka, with 19 of them agreeing to stick to the old format. This was given a boost when China supported the EU’s firm stance in the matter.

HOUSE REPUBLICANS PROVE ONCE AGAIN THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO HAVE HEALTH CARE. House Republicans were given yet another opportunity to separate themselves from Donald Trump’s lawsuit to destroy the Affordable Care Act in June. Once again, they sided with Trump. The House considered amendments to top a “minibus” spending package (6/20) and in addition to funding a number of agencies, they adopted an amendment to defund the Trump administration’s efforts in federal courts to overthrow the law, Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos <>(6/24).

Freshman Rep. Laura Underwood, D-IL, offered the amendment, which passed 238-194. Just four Republicans decided that sticking with the American people—particularly the 134 million estimated to have pre-existing conditions—isn’t as important as sticking with Trump. What’s at stake in this lawsuit is health coverage for 20 million people who’ve gained it through Obamacare is at stake here, as well as the ongoing coverage for people whose illnesses could once again be excluded in health plans if the law is struck down.

This is the second time the vast majority of Republicans voted with Trump and against Americans on health care in just two months. In May, the House passed the Protecting Americans with Preexisting Conditions Act of 2019 230-183, with just four Republicans breaking ranks.

“They really couldn’t make it more clear,” McCarter wrote. “A decade later, Republicans are still fighting against the idea that everyone should have access to health coverage and they’re still lying about it. They’ve had nine years of debate to come up with a plan and they’ve failed for nine years. And they’re going to go out on the campaign trail one more time to try to convince voters that none of that has happened and they have a plan. The good news is, voters stopped believing that years ago.”

BRETT KAVANAUGH IS EXACTLY WHO WE THOUGHT HE WAS. After one term on the Supreme Court, Ian Millhiser noted at ThinkProgress (6/30), we have a record on Brett Kavanaugh. “We now know how he behaves when liberated from having to follow precedent, and when he is free to express his unvarnished views. That record tells us something important. It tells us that, in the crucible of his entitled madness [during his confirmation hearing], we saw the real Brett. ‘What goes around comes around’ is the real Brett Kavanaugh. We know this because we know how he’s behaved on the Supreme Court.”

When the court divided, Millhiser noted, “Kavanaugh almost always made friends with the far right. He did so on issues where, until recently, even many members of the Supreme Court’s right flank urged moderation. Kavanaugh did not write the most radical opinions of the term, but he joined many of them. And on the most important issues, he voted like a reliable partisan.”

Kavanaugh pointedly voted not to hear a case seeking to defund Planned Parenthood, over a vitriolic dissent by Justice Clarence Thomas. He also recoiled from Neil Gorsuch’s effort to shut down an inquiry into the Trump administration’s effort to skew the census before that inquiry even happened.

Yet, when the court took up a case, Kavanaugh’s proved to be reliably conservative, Millhiser noted. And when the more institutionalist conservative Chief Justice John Roberts and Gorsuch divide on a non-criminal matter (Gorsuch’s record on criminal cases is more nuanced than his approach to civil cases, though hardly as liberal as many commentators suggest) Kavanaugh generally aligned more closely with Gorsuch than with Roberts.

“Kavanaugh’s first abortion opinion as a member of the Supreme Court would have drastically limited courts’ ability to enforce the right to end a pregnancy, and it would have silently overruled a crucial portion of a recent abortion decision in the process. He joined an opinion holding that federal courts are powerless to stop partisan gerrymandering. And he also joined another, utterly bloodthirsty opinion casting a cloud of doubt over decades of Eighth Amendment law — conscripting death row inmates into the process of choosing how they will be executed in the process.

When a Muslim inmate sought the right to be comforted by an imam of his own faith — a right the state of Alabama afforded to Christians but not Muslims — Kavanaugh joined the court’s decision holding that the inmate could be executed without spiritual comfort. After that decision sparked a widespread backlash even among conservatives, the Supreme Court reversed course in a similar case. But Kavanaugh wrote separately to note states could comply with the Constitution by simply banning all spiritual advisers from execution chambers.

“The state of Texas swiftly took Kavanaugh up on this invitation.

“Kavanaugh’s two most revealing votes, however, came in two cases where Roberts crossed over to vote with the court’s liberal bloc — and Kavanuagh did not.”

The case of Department of Commerce v. New York, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross decided to add a question to the 2020 census asking whether individuals are citizens — a question that hasn’t appeared on the census’ main form since the Jim Crow era. The Census Bureau’s own experts determined that adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census was likely to lead to a 5.1% differential decrease in self-response rates among noncitizen households — thus causing immigrant communities to receive fewer federal resources and less representation in Congress.

As a leading Republican gerrymandering expert revealed in files discovered after his death, the citizenship question “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”

Yet, as Chief Justice Roberts lays out in his majority opinion in New York, the Trump administration appears to have lied to the public, lied to the lower court, and lied to the Supreme Court when it explained why it decided to add the citizenship question to the 2020 census form.

Specifically, Ross claimed that he decided to add the citizenship question because the Justice Department requested such a question in order to aid it in enforcing the Voting Rights Act. But the evidence in New York “showed that the Secretary was determined to reinstate a citizenship question from the time he entered office; instructed his staff to make it happen; waited while Commerce officials explored whether another agency would request census-based citizenship data; subsequently contacted the Attorney General himself to ask if DOJ would make the request; and adopted the Voting Rights Act rationale late in the process. In the District Court’s view, this evidence established that the Secretary had made up his mind to reinstate a citizenship question ‘well before’ receiving DOJ’s request, and did so for reasons unknown but unrelated to the VRA.”

Indeed, a Commerce Department official “initially attempted to elicit requests for citizenship data from the Department of Homeland Security and DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, neither of which is responsible for enforcing the VRA.” After these apparent efforts to convince another agency to give Commerce a pretextual reason to justify the citizenship question failed, Ross reached out to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which agreed to give Ross an (apparently fake) justification.

Trump administration officials, in other words, decided what policy they wanted — a policy, it’s worth noting, that would skew U.S. House representation to benefit Republicans — shopped around for agencies willing to give them a legitimate-sounding reason to justify that policy, and then claimed that they were implementing the policy to help with voting rights enforcement because that’s the legitimate-sounding reason they were able to find.

That was too much for a majority of the Supreme Court, which ruled that, at the very least, the Trump administration needs to offer a more plausible explanation before it can put the citizenship question on the census form. But it wasn’t anywhere near too much for Brett Kavanaugh, who joined an opinion by Justice Thomas suggesting that it doesn’t matter one bit if the government lies.

The fundamental premise of the New York opinion is that agency officials should be afforded an extraordinary level of deference by courts — even when those officials are almost certainly lying. Yet, while Kavanaugh was perfectly willing to afford such extraordinary deference when the Republican Party stands to benefit, he hummed a very different tune in a case called Kisor v. Wilkie.

Vietnam veteran James Kisor, whose bid to receive benefits for the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) he suffers was denied by the Department of Veterans Affairs, asked the Supreme Court to overrule a doctrine known as “Auer deference,” which provides that courts should defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of its own regulations. Though Roberts joined most of Justice Elena Kagan’s opinion declining to overrule Auer, Kavanaugh wrote his own brief dissent. He also joined most of a blistering dissent by Gorsuch that laid into the very idea that courts should defer to agencies’ judgments.

“If the Supreme Court does take a profoundly illiberal turn, Kavanaugh’s short record on that court suggests that he’ll enthusiastically join in. There are liberals who believe that courts should be more skeptical of agency power, and there are liberals who believe that doctrines like Auer are appropriate. But there is no theory consistent with the rule of law which says that courts must treat federal agencies with skepticism except when those agencies lie in order to benefit the Republican party.

“Department of Commerce v. New York was Brett’s chance to show that he could be “even-keeled, open-minded, independent and dedicated to the Constitution and the public good,” even when it meant going against the interests of his party. It was his chance to show that he’s not in his current job for partisan revenge, and that his outburst at his confirmation hearing really was just a self-contained flare of rage.

“But Brett did not choose open-mindedness and independence in New York. He chose what goes around comes around.”

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2019

Populist.com