June 16, 2018
The strongest sign yet that our dying democracy still has a pulse came with Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s decision yesterday to revoke Paul Manafort’s bail and send him to jail. Her decision was precipitated by Manafort’s indictment on witness tampering charges while he was out on bail awaiting trial on multiple charges, including conspiracy, money laundering, tax fraud and making false statements. Judge Jackson rebuffed all of the defense arguments against sending Manafort to jail, acerbically noting, “This is not middle school. I can’t take away his cellphone,” (Source: “Judge Orders Manafort Jailed Before Trial, Citing New Obstruction Charges,” by Sharon LaFraniere, The New York Times, 6/15/18).
Trump’s attempts to minimize Manafort’s central role in his campaign by citing a litany of Republican presidents that employed Manafort and blatantly lying about the length of Manafort’s 144 day tenure, is our strongest proof yet that Trump is actually worried. This development, along with the recurring rumors that Michael Cohen is poised to cooperate, are dramatic signs that Mueller’s probe is on the cusp of directly implicating Trump himself.
The point of noting these developments is not to encourage passivity, but to spur us to act, secure in the knowledge that at least one of the three co-equal branches of our government continues to impose consequences for the rampant lawlessness and racist extremism that is endemic to this administration.
Nowhere are those attributes more in evidence than in the ongoing torture of Latinx children and families being perpetrated by the U.S. government at our borders. By now we have seen the inside of the warehouse like detention centers where young boys who have been ripped from their parents are imprisoned. We still don’t know where the girls are. Trump’s lie that family separation is a Democratic policy policy reveals that his cruelty is only exceeded by his cowardice. The spectacle of the nation’s tops lawyer, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions misquoting scripture in defense of this heinous practice, as if we are some backwater theocracy and not a Constitutional Republic, tells us all we need to know.
Keep in mind that asylum seekers are legal immigrants. Keep in mind that even those crossing the border illegally for the first time are guilty of nothing more than a misdemeanor. The truth is that there is a straight line between the state sanctioned murder of black people by the police for minor traffic infractions and the state sanctioned torture of brown people for misdemeanor border crossing offenses. This is an abomination and none of us can sit on the sidelines. Every journalist who fails to demand answers from this administration, every member of Congress that isn’t working to outlaw this practice with no strings attached, every one of us that isn’t calling our representatives to demand that they do, is complicit. History will not be kind.
#Endfamilyseparation
#Familiesbelongtogether
But meantime Trump is appointing judges who he hopes will turn the federal judiciary into a branch of the Executive and surrender its independence. There is an other worldliness about all this.
I agree, which is why we have to resist and try to blunt his unconstitutional abuse of power in every way possible.