Trump's Supreme Court nominee

In an alternative universe where Democrats have a spine or at least a Senate majority, they might be able to do what the Republicans did in 2016 and block a nominee, especially since they can't stop any of Trump's appalling cabinet of conservative extremists.  Very, very low odds of that happening in actual reality, so let's take a look at who might get tapped next week.  President Twitler apparently has his selection narrowed down to three white male federal appeals court justices, all of them W. Bush appointees and all millionaires.

L to R: William Pryor, Neil Gorsuch, Thomas Hardiman

Those reportedly on Trump’s short list to fill a vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia are all federal appellate judges: Judge Neil Gorsuch of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Thomas Hardiman, based in Pittsburgh, and 11th U.S. Circuit Court Judge William Pryor, who works in Birmingham, Alabama.

Financial profiles of each appear there.  The favorite seems to be Gorsuch.  Edith Roberts at SCOTUSblog adds some linkage.

At Bloomberg, Greg Stohr reports that “the president is a week away from nominating someone who would become a core member of the court’s conservative wing,” and that each of “four appellate judges in contention for the slot, including front-runners Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman, would fit neatly into the ideological mold of the man they would succeed, the late Justice Antonin Scalia.” In The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that Gorsuch is “no fan of class actions,” having “criticized what he viewed as baseless litigation by shareholder classes,” and that he is “not big on agency deference either.” At PrawfsBlawg, Richard Re discusses recent remarks by Gorsuch in which the judge stressed the importance of the federal judicial oath, asserting that whoever “the nominee turns out to be, I hope that the resulting confirmation hearings spend some time exploring what it means to do ‘equal right to the poor and to the rich.’”

The son of Reagan's EPA director Anne Gorsuch Burford receives the early and favorable media vetting.  This excerpt from Ariane de Vogue of CNN digs deeper into his judicial philosophy.

Gorsuch, 49, has been on the radar of some judicial conservatives for some time. He has long been a favorite of legal thinkers at the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation.

Conservatives welcome his opinions on religious liberty. For instance, he has sided with closely held corporations who argued that the so called contraceptive mandate violated their religious beliefs. In another opinion, he challenged the notion that courts should defer to administrative agencies when they interpret the law. It may seem like a dry legal issue but it is central to many conservatives, including Justice Clarence Thomas.

"Judge Gorsuch has been a stern critic of a fixture of the Supreme Court's administrative law jurisprudence -- the idea that, where a federal agency is enforcing an ambiguous statute, courts should defer to how the agency understands the statute even if the courts read it differently," said Stephen I. Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court contributor and professor of law at the University of Texas School of Law.

"If he were to form part of a majority to scale back that principle, it would be a major sea change in the relationship between the executive branch and the courts, and one that would likely impose significant new constraints on the scope of federal regulatory authority on all topics -- from immigration and criminal law enforcement to environmental protection, consumer product safety, and drug regulation," Vladeck said.

"His position on this is more extreme than Justice Scalia," said Dan Goldberg of the progressive Alliance for Justice. "It would be hard to overstate the damage it would cause this nation and the American people."

Pryor is super-freak right; his hearings for the post he currently holds were contentious.

Pryor, 54, was subject to a years-long fight when Bush appointed him to the 11th Circuit, not least because of statements that Roe v. Wade is "the worst abomination in the history of constitutional law," and that it has "led to the slaughter of millions of innocent unborn children." He also purposely rescheduled a family trip to Disney World to avoid attending during "Gay Day", and as attorney general of Alabama wrote an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold laws banning gay sex.

Despite that extensive social conservative pedigree, some conservatives are reportedly pushing against Pryor as a pick because of a pro–transgender rights ruling he made in 2011.

With all of the left and some of the right disapproving of Pryor, Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence may be whispering to Trump that a Senate fight over this guy is one they could easily lose.  There are fuller profiles of all three at this Vox link, and more like that from Politico.  Minority Leader Schumer has promised a hard line on any nominee, but he was with the Senate delegation that met with Trump on Tuesday to discuss his choice, a group which included Charles Grassley and Diane Feinstein, the ranking members of the Judiciary committee.

I'd say the options for Democrats are limited to stalling a confirmation as long as possible.

Updates:  The odds may have moved.

Trump is now focused on another judge with a working-class background: Thomas Hardiman. As a former attorney, Hardiman has been less vocal about his personal views.

“Our role as judges is to interpret the law,” Hardiman said.

Still on the now very short list for the current vacancy is federal appeals judge Neil Gorsuch. But with Justice Anthony Kennedy likely to retire soon, Gorsuch could become a leading favorite for Mr. Trump’s second nomination.

And Trump favors employing the nuclear option to get his pick confirmed, if that's what it takes.

(Trump) would favor Senate Republicans changing voting rules to allow a simple majority of the Senate to approve his nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court if Democrats block his choice, he said in an interview airing on Thursday.

“I would. We have obstructionists,” Trump told Fox News, referring to possible use of the so-called nuclear option that would overturn Senate rules requiring 60 votes to overcome a procedural hurdle, or filibuster, for Supreme Court nominees.

There are currently 52 Republican senators in the 100-seat chamber.

[...]

Assuming all 52 Senate Republicans back Trump's nominee, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would either need to lure eight Democrats to his side or change the rules and ban the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations.

Last, in what could have been a blog post all its own, Ryan Cooper at The Week excoriates Senate Democrats for their timidity to this point in opposing Trump's cabinet picks.

Senate Democrats are ... the first target of liberal outrage, since they have to vote on Trump's cabinet nominees. They don't control the chamber, so it mostly doesn't matter in substantive terms how they vote — but it's still a powerful symbolic act. (Though they could have come close to picking off the wretched Mike Pompeo as CIA director, since Rand Paul voted against him.)

But not a single Democratic senator has voted against every nominee, as Paul Blest points out. Only Kirsten Gillibrand and Tom Udall have come close, voting against five of six. Six other caucus members have voted against four of six: Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Richard Blumenthal, Jeff Merkley, Ron Wyden, and Elizabeth Warren. On the other hand, fully 14 Democrats had voted for all six of Trump's nominees — and some of those in safe blue states, like Dianne Feinstein (California), Brian Schatz (Hawaii), Sheldon Whitehouse (Rhode Island), and Chuck Schumer (New York) — who is also the Minority Leader.

[...]

Republicans mounted total procedural obstruction to Democrats and President Obama, and it only worsened as his presidency passed. The goal, as then Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in 2010, was to "deny President Obama a second term." They filibustered nearly every bill, even ones that would go through 100-0, simply to gum up the calendar and eat up precious floor time. They filibustered nearly every judicial nominee (until Senate Democrats scaled back the filibuster), to keep liberals out of the courts — and last year, when Antonin Scalia died, Senate Republicans refused to even consider Obama's Supreme Court nominee for an entire year, in hopes that Trump would be able to fill the seat. That has literally never happened before.

This has been a nihilistic, will-to-power struggle for years now, and obviously so. Republicans now control the whole government due to happenstance and the idiotic Electoral College, but they're not moderating their policies to the slightest degree out of some sense of decorum. Instead, they're going to ram through their agenda as fast as possible, and try their utmost to disenfranchise enough liberals and rig the election procedures such that America becomes a permanent one-party state.

Harsher than most anything I've written.

It only takes one party to start a fight, and when you're already in one compromise is a guaranteed way to lose. Ordinary Democrats are finally seeing this truth, as shown by the gigantic marches all over the country during inauguration weekend, and later ones in Philadelphia and New York against Trump's anti-Muslim policies. Not even a week into his presidency and Trump is already facing massive unrest.

Elected Democrats are going to need to ditch their usual cringing, timid, compromising ways if they want to have a chance at a political career in the future. Even fairly milquetoast liberals are crying out for some sort of firebrand to lead a ferocious, determined resistance. If, say, Tom Udall or Kirsten Gillibrand can realize this, their national profile will quickly grow.

But those who vote for Jeff Sessions to become attorney general might face a primary challenge instead.

So let it be done.

Our alt-facts president

Enabled by his alt-facts press secretary.  Bold mine.

Sean Spicer has shed new light on the concept of "alternative facts," a widely-panned concept introduced by his colleague Kellyanne Conway to defend his seemingly inaccurate inauguration attendee numbers.

According to the White House press secretary, his usage of "alternative facts" is much ado about nothing: In fact, he says, its similar to a meteorologist who incorrectly predicts the weather.

"The press was trying to make it seem like we were ignoring the facts," Spicer told Fox News' Sean Hannity during an interview that aired Tuesday night. "The facts are, sometimes when you look at a situation, in the same way that you can look at a weather report. One weather report comes out and says it's going to be cloudy and another says it’s going to be light rain. No one lied to you, it just means you interpreted the data in a way that you felt got you to a conclusion."

Spicer claimed, "We weren’t by any means trying to mislead anyone. We asked for a set of facts, we thought that the group [which provided subway ridership figures] and the facts that we were given at that time were accurate. Like anything else, it's not alternative facts. There’s sometimes you can watch two different stations and get two different weather reports. That doesn’t mean that the station was lying to you. And the press made it look like we were ignoring the facts. " 

Weather reports aren't facts; they're forecasts.  Predictions.  Sort of like polls.  The weather, like the size of a crowd, is a fact afterwards and not before.  Spicer could have said "Trump's inauguration will be the biggest of all time" the day before the event, and some people would have nodded in agreement while others laughed him off as a braggart.  You can't run around telling people it rained yesterday when it didn't without looking like a moron or an asshole.

The trouble with analogies like this is that we'll have to deal with people who say "It rained at my house" next.  But alt-facts are the world we live in now, so make the necessary adjustments.

In our fresh new environment, ill Eagles cost Trump the popular vote.  And we can't have governmental agencies talking about climate change, or releasing data about unemployment or jobs when they contradict the president's strongly-held belief.  This is truthiness taken to its most petulant extreme.  But Democrats in the Senate already understand they're going to have to pick their battles, and if a nominee is just dense and unqualified, that's not as bad as dangerous and malignant.  Lesser of two evils, you see.

If making America Great Again means more jobs for robots that are themselves manufactured in China, then so be it.  It's up to us to figure out an alternatively factual way to understand it.

Here's one: Robots can't build border walls, so there's going to be some number of jobs -- millions! Yuuuge! -- for Americans that Mexicans won't do (or take away from them, or be shipped overseas).  See how easy this is?

Democrats winning and losing

-- First, a few more photos from the weekend, at the Capitol ...

... and here in H-Town:

And more pics at the Observer.

The rallies are powerful and enduring emotionally, but simply do not translate into electoral strength. Big turnouts for protests can be misleading, as Nate Silver reminds, and as Charles has noted, Wendy Davis and her filibuster produced a similarly large crowd of upset people over women's reproductive freedoms, and then Greg Abbott defeated her a year later with more white (but not black or brown) female votes than Davis was able to earn.  So it's fair to ask: where do the Dems go from here?  Bernie Sanders answered this question a few days after Hillary Clinton's upset defeat, but none of the 447 people who will be voting in this election seem to have heard it.

We can hope they don't go back to where they started two years ago, but in a glaring sign of chronic insanity, not a single DNC candidate running to replace DWS/Donna Brazile was willing to admit that the 2016 primary was rigged for Clinton.  Keith Ellison is as close to acceptable as it gets for actual progressives (not the alt-progs that comprise most of the party), and a lot of them are already stepping away from him because.... well, I suppose he just can't help himself.

In trying to woo the DNC delegates he needs to win the election, Ellison has reduced his criticism of Hillary Clinton and increased his smears of the Republican Party. He has endorsed a billionaire donor, Stephen Bittel, to become the Florida Democratic Party chair, and has announced that he will not be attending Trump’s Inauguration, which many commended. But what he failed to mention is that he will be meeting with billionaire donors instead at Clinton propagandist David Brock’s closed-door retreat. Though Ellison initially said he supported re-enacting a ban on lobbyists that former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz lifted in 2015 to help Hillary Clinton, he recently said he won’t unilaterally re-enact the ban but will put it to a vote for DNC members to decide. Many of the DNC members happen to be lobbyists.

Incidentally, only one candidate marched this past weekend.  All the rest huddled with David Brock instead.  I shouldn't have to point this out, but Republicans and Democrats are reduced to fighting over the crumbs from a couple of hundred American billionaire oligarchs, some of which hedge their losses by giving to both parties.  Another 'water is wet'-ism for the Blues: Trump did not get elected because he raised or spent the most money.

-- Kuff has kept tabs on the local D scene with updates to the Harris county chair contest, and the announcement of a bid for Congress by my neighbor, Deb Kerner.

Of the ten folks formally announced (so to speak) for the race, Art Pronin, Dominique Davis, and Lillie Schechter should be the front-runners.  This will again be a blacks vs. gays battle (an old storyline, and note that Keryl Douglas has come back for more of it) for control of the county party, so since Pronin still hasn't decided to run for certain, I would handicap it Davis and Schechter, not necessarily in that order, as early favorites.  DBC has a report on Johnathan Miller's appearance at the Houston Area Progressives meeting this week; he nails it from my perspective.

There are only a few hundred people voting in this election, too.

Kerner (her school trustee page has been updated) is popular with us southwest-siders, and unlike any of the recent challengers to John Culberson, has won an election before.  Keep in mind that Hillary Clinton narrowly carried CD7 over Trump in 2016, while Culberson pasted James Cargas by twelve points, his third consecutive defeat to the incumbent Congress critter.  Anybody that spares us from watching Cargas lose a fourth time is a good thing.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance won't be passing off any alternative facts in this week's roundup from the best blog posts and news stories of last week.

Off the Kuff stays on the bathroom beat.

Libby Shaw at Daily Kos attended the women’'s march in Houston yesterday.  Meanwhile, in that spirit, she recalls the old Republican healthcare plan.  Remember the GOP healthcare plan? “Don’t get sick”.

Socratic Gadfly looks at the most recent Back the Blue support tool, and decries its flag desecration hypocrisy.

Neil at All People Have Value visited the segment of the Berlin Wall at Rice University that was defaced by graffiti supporting Donald Trump. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

The Irish bookmaker Paddy Power laid odds on Trump's shade of orange at the inauguration, but PDiddie at Brains and Eggs took some of their easier money.

Before leaving on a fishing trip, CouldBeTrue at South Texas Chisme sees a lot of harrassment and some tough times ahead for people who live on the border.

The Lewisville Texan Journal reports that over one hundred people are suing an emergency care facility there.

Dos Centavos notices that there are no vendidos in Trump's cabinet.

Easter Lemming Liberal News, now on Facebook and Twitter, reports Pat Van Houte is running for mayor of Pasadena, Texas.  She opposed the redistricting that was just ruled illegal.

And jobsanger dissects Trump's promise of 25 million new jobs (hint: it won't happen no matter how much 'alternative math' gets employed).

======================

More Texas news!

Robin Paoli and Aimee Mobley Turney explain why they marched on Saturday.

Harris County may have more Latinos voting than previously counted, relays the Urban Edge.

David Collins at DBC Green Blog observes that the Harris County Democratic Party needs more precinct chairpersons (and more progressives, a different problem).

Allen Young traveled from rural Massachusetts to Austin to celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Rag, the iconoclastic underground newspaper that carries on today as The Rag Blog.

A Texas House Republican from Fredericksburg, Kyle Biedermann, sent out a highly questionable survey about Sharia law just prior to convening a 'Homeland Security Summit' in Austin this week.  The Houston Press quotes the head of Houston's Council on American-Islamic Relations as suggesting it's a fishing expedition.

 Protestors at Texas Muslim lobby day, two years ago.

G. W. Schulz at the Texas Observer shares the lessons he has learned from hustling in the new gig economy.

Luis Hestres wonders what Trump's election will mean for digital freedom of speech.

Equality Texas is tracking the pro- and anti-LGBT bills in the Legislature.

The Texas Election Law Blog analyzes the Pasadena redistricting decision.

The Lunch Tray says goodbye to Michelle Obama.

The Bloggess did what she could to help you get through last week.

And conservative Democratic political consultant Colin Strother advises us to hold on tight.

Sunday Funnies

Hell Toupee, But We Shall Overcomb

But...

Trump protests get rowdy

DisruptJ20 is my kinda people.  Wish I were younger and healthier and I'd be there with 'em.

Six police officers were injured and 217 protesters arrested Friday after a morning of peaceful protests and coordinated disruptions of Donald Trump's inauguration ceremony gave way to ugly street clashes in downtown Washington.

At least two DC police officers and one other person were taken to the hospital after run-ins with protesters, DC Fire Spokesman Vito Maggiolo told CNN. Acting DC Police Chief Peter Newsham said the officers' injuries were considered minor and not life threatening.

Bursts of chaos erupted on 12th and K streets as black-clad "antifascist" protesters smashed storefronts and bus stops, hammered out the windows of a limousine and eventually launched rocks at a phalanx of police lined up in an eastbound crosswalk. Officers responded by launching smoke and flash-bang devices, which could be heard from blocks away, into the street to disperse the crowds.

"Pepper spray and other control devices were used to control the criminal actors and protect persons and property," police said.

Anti-Trump protests also broke out Friday in US cities, including New York, Seattle, Dallas, Chicago and Portland, Oregon. Authorities in Seattle say one person was in critical condition at a hospital with a gunshot wound. Demonstrations also took place overseas in Hong Kong, Berlin and London.

In case you were wondering, there's going to be a lot more of this.  (Watch how AG-designate Sessions handles it.  He's already got Justice backing off from voter/photo ID lawsuits.  Update: More in depth on that from ProPublica.)

I won't expect too many people who voted for Hillary Clinton to be a part of this action; today's Women's March is more their speed.  "The pussy grabs back" is today's campaign chant.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the United States and around the world are set to join marches Saturday to raise awareness of women's rights and other civil rights they fear could be under threat under Donald Trump's presidency.

The key focus of the day will be the Women's March on Washington, which organizers say could attract a quarter of a million participants.

The march, which began with a modest Facebook call in the aftermath of the election, has grown in to what could be one of the larger political demonstrations ever seen in DC.

But there are also more than 600 "sister marches" planned around the country, with some of the biggest expected in Boston, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

And women and men in cities around the world -- including Sydney, Hong Kong, London and Paris -- are also marching in solidarity and in opposition to the values they think President Trump represents.

And all across Texas, as posted yesterday.

You're released from yesterday's media blackout to tune in to the demonstrations if you can't do anything more, but keep avoiding teevee coverage of President Twitler wherever possible. Concentrations of Trump, televised, is how we got here in the first place.  Don't continue to enable a media that wants to treat this administration as normal.   And punch a Nazi every chance you get.  Zero tolerance for fascism is a great way to resist.