October 1, 2018
On Friday, brave activists, Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher, confronted Senator Jeff Flake and shamed him into agreeing to the compromise proposed by Democratic Senator Chris Coons for a one week delay in a floor vote to allow the FBI to investigate the sexual assault claims against Brett Kavanaugh (Source: “The #MeToo Activists Who Confronted Jeff Flake Brought Victims Back to the Center of the Kavanaugh Debate,” by Mark Joseph Stern, Slate.com, 9/28/18).
Our relief was short lived because within 48 hours, The New York Times reported that The White House and the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee had sharply limited the scope of the inquiry, by dictating precisely who the FBI was permitted to interview. The Republicans are hellbent on turning the renewed investigation into a farcical, hollowed out echo of an actual investigation. In a legitimate investigation, the FBI might interview Kavanaugh’s classmates from high school and college to determine the likelihood that he was a frequent heavy drinker. They would search out Mark Judge’s co-workers at Safeway to pin down a timeline that might corroborate Dr. Ford’s recollection, (Source: “The FBI Investigation We Deserve,” by Harry Litman, The New York Times, 10/1/18). Those avenues of inquiry have all been foreclosed, making it clear that this is yet another whitewash designed to check a box, rather than get at the truth. It is enough to make one sick with rage.
While we were closely following every twist and turn in the Kavanaugh saga, we may have missed an alarming revelation about the Trump administration’s detention of immigrant children. Over the weekend, we learned that the administration has been busy snatching immigrant children from shelters and foster homes around the country in the middle of the night, in order to ship them to a tent city in the West Texas desert. Conditions there are appreciably worse than in state regulated shelters where the children have previously been detained. For one thing, the sheer number of children being held is overwhelming (currently 1600, with plans to hold as many as 3800), making it likely that children will fall through the cracks or be preyed upon with impunity. Secondly, unlike in shelters or foster homes, there is no requirement that children receive an education or be permitted regular contact with their counsel!
The reason for the swelling numbers is not because more children are crossing the border, but because of the calculated cruelty of this administration’s child separation policy. They have compounded the problem by imposing stringent requirements on sponsors, in order to trap undocumented people. Indeed, scores of undocumented would-be sponsors have been deported since the new requirements were imposed, 70% of whom had no prior criminal records, (Source: “Migrant Children Moves Under Cover of Darkness to Texas Tent City,” by Caitlin Dickerson, The New York Times, 9/30/18). There is no sugarcoating this. These are concentration camps where the best outcome is lasting psychological damage and the worst outcome is unspeakable.
This is the context through which we should view Trump’s statement that he “fell in love” with Kim Jong Un. Trump’s goal in forging a close relationship with a brutal dictator is not to make the U.S. safer from North Korea’s rising nuclear capabilities. It is certainly not to “charm” Kim Jong Un into committing fewer human rights abuses. To the contrary, Trump is looking for a tutorial in autocracy. Trump has made no secret of the fact that he would like nothing more than the unfettered ability to punish his enemies with violence, to criminalize political opposition and to banish, imprison or exterminate non-white people. In the words of Maya Angelou, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
#VOTE
#Impeach45