From Roger Fitch and our friends down under at Justinian....

Companies are hereby ordered ...

ROGER FITCH ESQ • THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2019

Trump as the Mad King ... Dystopian plans ... SCOTUS agenda ... "Religious" claims ... Gun control ... Voting rights ...Republicans on a roll ... Latest news from Guantánamo ... Roger Fitch reports from the turmoil of Washington 

"Who can deny but the president general will be a king to all intents and purposes, and one of the most dangerous kind too; a king elected to command a standing army... The President-general, who is to be our king after this government is established, is vested with powers exceeding those of the most despotic monarch we know of in modern times" - Benjamin Workman ("Philadelphiensus"), an Anti-Federalist.

"Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA" – Trump tweet.

The situation is grave: a president who erratically rants before paid Statisten at Nuremberg-style rallies, a man known for open malevolence (e.g, towards immigrants), personal vindictiveness (more here) and non-stop lying. Beyond that, a president of depthless immaturity and almost clinical grandiose delusions.

In a new burst of royalism, America's very own King Canute has "ordered" US companies to stop dealing with China, claiming justification under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, more here - yet another abuse of the executive's emergency powers.  

In July and August, Donald Trump said Denmark should sell Greenland to the US (more here), claimed Jewish Democrats were “disloyal" - to Israel (more here) and suggested certain (dusky or Muslim) female Democrats, members of congress, yes, even those born in America, "go back to where they came from."

Mainstream media edged closer to finding Trump mentally unbalanced, while a new book by a top human rights lawyer counted the ways he resembles Adolf Hitler. 

Leaving aside Trump's innate transgressive behaviour (e.g, promising pardons to subordinates who break the law), it's the president's personal corruption that interests citizen groups such as CREW, who have documented 2000 plus+ conflicts of interest.

Sometimes the Trump administration's dystopian plans fail: the EPA's proposed roll-back of car pollution standards seems doomed, with Big Auto declining to join in Big Carbon's schemes. Other corporately-curated sabotages of climate science are thriving, however, and the EPA's still on course to destroy the Endangered Species Act.

At the NLRB, the politically-appointed board has put its thumb on the scale for employers, enforcing compulsory individual arbitration agreements that were concocted and imposed after collective actions by employees, e.g. the class litigation so despised  by the supreme court's majority. 

At the Bureau of Land Management, Trump has appointed someone who doesn't believe in public land to oversee 247.3 million acres of public lands and nearly 700 million acres of subsurface mineral estate.

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SCOTUS: the right place for gun nuts 

A number of important matters are headed for the supreme court in its October term. At the top of the docket, vital to the Trump administration's campaign to reverse civil rights gains, are conflicting lower court rulings on sexual discrimination in employment. There will be further contentious decisions on appeal (see one opinion here) which consider "religious" claims of immunity from anti-discrimination laws, based on "faith", "moral" or "free speech" grounds.

Gun regulation laws are also on the menu. Timid efforts at gun control have been discussed by politicians, but the biggest obstacle is the extreme wing of the supreme court, the ideological cohort who imposed a libertarian, ahistorical gloss on the 2^nd amendment in the Heller case – one of the most controversial decisions in supreme court history. 

Unwisely, or not, a group of Democrat senators has joined a brief in the latest case, implying the supreme court's decision was likely to be partisan.

The supreme court also will hear the notorious (Mexican) border shooting case and will take up non-unanimous criminal verdicts. It's still the law in Oregon, and until 2018, it was the law in Louisiana. A case in the latter state, testing the prior-2018 decisions, has been accepted for the new term, and will likely interest the intractable "originalists" Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas. 

Stuffing the supreme court with party people is beginning to pay off for Republicans in other ways, with the partisan majority now poised to interfere in lower court decisions at an early stage in order to advance Mr Trump's agenda. Steve Vladeck comments on the border wall expenditure case, where America's president flagrantly spent money after congress refused to appropriate it.

*   *   *

The fight against voter purging

The supreme court has taken a hands-off approach towards voter rights, expressed most forcefully by its refusal to address partisan gerrymandering in the recent Rucho v Common Cause; it's an indifference likely to last as long as it benefits Republicans, and perfectly consistent with the chief justice's long-held hostility to constitutional voting rights.

"Gerrymandering" actually predates the US bill of rights, but "purging" - the practice of unilaterally knocking suspect citizens off voter rolls - is a modern device that Republican-controlled states use to disenfranchise suspect voters: 17 million of them between 2016 and 2018.

If purging doesn't eliminate prospective Democrats, Republican states have other schemes, e.g. fiddling voting machines, or closing voting sites, where uncongenial minorities attempt to vote. 

If Democrats succeed in voting in Mississippi, the state's byzantine election laws may still prevent a victorious Democrat taking office. In defending a new lawsuit, the state cites the CJ's Rucho opinion.

Citizen initiatives allow some states to set up AEC-type electoral commissions, but Republican-controlled legislatures e.g, in Michigan, are fighting back, determined to maintain gerrymanders that give them majority control. 

Republicans are also organising to base congressional districts entirely on citizenship, a clear breach of the constitution's language. If all else fails, there are plans for a constitutional redraft.

Until such time as Republicans succeed in amending the constitution, there's the electoral college and, interestingly, "faithless electors" (those who vote their conscience instead of the party slate) have just been vindicated by the 10^th circuit, more here and here. 

*   *   *

At Guantánamo, a new "9/11" judge has been considering issues such as:

•  the CIA's "turning" a defence team interpreter; 
• the over-classification of evidence essential to the defence; 
• whether torture can be put on the docket;
• if so, whether the Bush administration's torture meets the standard of "outrageous government conduct" justifying dismissal of the charges or other serious sanction against the government; and 
• the date of the trial.

Meanwhile, a lawyer for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri has been unexpectedly passed over for promotion by the Pentagon, possibly for too-vigorous representation of his client.  

The Nashiri case - probably the most lawless of all the commissions - is receiving attention in a new film about the CIA torture program; Nashiri was one of the program's first victims and received the personal attention of the former Thai torture camp commandant - now CIA director - Gina Haspel. 

And finally: it's a bit late in the day, but an Obama-bolstered DC circuit panel has brought back full habeas for Guantánamo internees, more here.