From our Friends down under at Justinian

A light sprinkle of good news

ROGER FITCH ESQ • WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13, 2019

ROGER FITCH ESQ • WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13, 2019

The search for Trump's worst cabinet member ... Environmental plunder ... Court stacking under Mitch McConnell ... Rupert Murdoch's Fox News props-up Trump's Roman circus ... Yet, amid the debauchery there are tiny rays of hope ... Some significant decisions from a stacked SCOTUS ... And women out west take control of state legislatures ... Roger Fitch reports from Washington 

"Murdoch regarded Trump with disdain, seeing him as a real-estate huckster and a shady casino operator.… but he was a visionary about the niche audience that became Trump's base" - New Yorker

"Murdoch didn't invent Trump, but he invented the audience. Murdoch was going to make a Trump exist. Then Trump comes along, sees all these people, and says, 'I'll be the ringmaster in your circus!' " - Reed Hundt, Clinton FCC chairman

"Trump serves as a carnival barker for Fox" - Blair Levin, former FCC chief of staff

HE may be embroiled in the biggest political scandal in US history (more here and here), but President Trump still clings to power, sweating out the results of the Mueller Investigation.  

Fresh reports of Trump's egregious misconduct regularly appear and, just in time for congressional subpoenas, the Brookings Institution has a 2nd edition of its voluminous report on his obstructions of justice. Ethics watchdog CREW has a report on campaign finance malfeasance. Just Security meanwhile is tracking Mr Trump's damage to democratic norms.

The heat intensified in February, when Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, testified before US House and Senate committees.

Among Cohen's revelations: Donald Trump never expected to win nomination or election, but saw the campaign as a marketing opportunity ("infomercial") for his properties, especially his project to build Europe's tallest tower in Moscow, to be named, naturally, after himself. It's a brand name now toxic. 

Following Cohen's house testimony, the House Judiciary Committee issued sweeping document requests (sorted by category here and here).

The Democrats will shortly demand Trump's tax returns. The president is already hiring teams of lawyers to assert executive privilege in this and other matters, many likely to reach the supreme court.

One of Trump's lawyers, the onetime Mafia Commission Trial prosecutor Rudolf Giuliani, knows better than most the ins and outs of organised crime. Ironically, his trademark techniques for taking down the Mafia could now be employed against Trump and the Trump Organisation. 

The president does have one enormous advantage. The New Yorker has an in-depth reporton how Rupert Murdoch's Fox News has become integral to White House messaging, essentially maintaining the rage of Trump's dwindling base as the walls close in and Foxexecutive Bill Shine, parachuted last year into the position of White House Communications Director, is now moving on to advise Trump's re-election campaign.

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A subsidiary of the US chemical industry

After the departure of most of Trump's original crew, there's a new competition for his worst cabinet member. 

An obvious choice might be CIA director Gina Haspel, former commandant of CIA torture camps in Thailand, and possibly Guantánamo. Though the subject of a criminal torture complaint overseas, she's been praised for bringing new people - especially women - into CIA leadership positions. 

Nothing good is said, however, about the self-dealing Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross(more here) or the scandal-ridden Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta.  

There is also nothing positive about the new EPA Administrator from the coal industry, Andrew Wheeler. The Trump administration's environmental policies remain shamelessly corrupt, with toxic chemicals deregulated, and the EPA transformed into a virtual subsidiary of the chemical industry. 

Under the administration's cynical cost-benefit analysis, 11,000 extra deaths a year is a price worth paying to relieve industrial polluters from the "burden" of mercury emission regulations. More here.

The administration has even rolled back the modest and sensible regulations of oil and gas exploration that were introduced after the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst such catastrophe in US history.  

Scientific advisers are meanwhile banished from positions with the EPA and the Interior Department (report), despite a damning new history of the failure to take action on climate change.

It's all part of a pattern: the Trump administration, like its corporate sponsors, has pragmatically decided that the planet is doomed and it's too late to do anything, anyway - except loot what's left.

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McConnell: bench stacker extraordinaire

The US House may be busy bashing Trump, but nothing will happen in the senate so long as the intensely partisan Mitch McConnell remains Senate Majority Leader.  

McConnell is personally credited with packing the federal judiciary, beginning with the supreme court itself, where Republican loyalists have since signed off on Trump's "Muslim ban", and seem prepared to green-light the illicit motives underlying "national security" declarations, and such recent Trump initiatives as the rigged census questionnaire; the immigration "national emergency"; and an Army-built border wall.

If the courts rule against Mr Trump's national emergency executive order, will it make any difference? He recently openly flouted a federal court order striking down another executive order excluding aliens.

While the supreme court has unique internal dynamics, it is the lower courts that are suffering the most from McConnell's systematic stacking. Alarming appointees, chosen for conservative ideology, are being nominated and confirmed in droves; some are destined to be forever tainted as "Trump judges". 

One of the most unsuitable, Howard C Nielson, is a nominee for US District Court in Utah. Nielson once worked in the "torture memo" section of George Bush's Justice Department; his contribution was a 29-page memo implausibly (and wrongly) claiming that the 4th Geneva Convention only applied to those civilians detained on US territory, leaving US detainees in Afghanistan unprotected.  

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The supreme court is nevertheless producing significant decisions.

In Timbs v Indiana the court cited the 14th amendment to incorporate one of the last elements of the Bill of Rights not yet fully applied to state and lower governments, the 8th amendment's protection against excessive fines, more here.  

Jam v International Finance Corporation opened international organisations (here, a subsidiary of  the World Bank) to civil liability for actions previously believed immune. 

The court also ruled the death penalty could not be inflicted on someone suffering dementia.

In a notable appeals court decision, Fazaga v FBI, the state secret defence was rejected by the 9th circuit. It was a refreshing change after the abuse of the doctrine under the Bush and Obama administrations, when it was not infrequently used to cover up criminal governmental and corporate misconduct. 

In a notable civil case that also survived "state secret" claims, one of the US-hired torture accomplices at Abu Ghraib, CACI International, will face trial at last, after a decade of stonewalling. Another contractor at Abu Ghraib, Titan Corporation successor L-3, settled with Iraqi plaintiffs years ago.

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Not all the 2018 election news has been bad.  

Nevada has become the first US state where women hold a majority in both houses of the legislature, and women have taken control of Colorado's lower house. The West has historically led the way in women's participation in politics; this year Wyoming is marking 150 years of full women's suffrage, the world's first.