The White House Press Corps Is an Embarrassment

The Republicans’ plan to gerrymander their way to holding on to the House took a blow this week when a three-judge panel struck down Texas’s new congressional redistricting map. The map, ordered by President Trump, sought to create five additional congressional seats for the GOP. US District Judge Jeffery Brown—a hardcore Republican appointed by Trump—struck down the map on the grounds that it was racially gerrymandered.

Mark Joseph Stern wrote an excellent breakdown of Brown’s 160-page opinion. The essential takeaway is that Harmeet Dhillon—Trump’s wholly unqualified pick to head the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division—irrevocably screwed up the case. She flatly misread a prior court opinion (either through maliciousness or gross incompetence) and ordered Texas to redistrict based on race. Brown argues that Texas is allowed to gerrymander for any reason other than race. Texas could have said, “We are moving districts around to give Republicans an insurmountable edge in the election” and that would have been fine. Instead, under Dhillon’s directives, Texas moved districts around specifically because of the race of the people who live in them. It’s the only thing Texas could have done wrong.

Unfortunately, as everybody now should know, lower-court opinions don’t really matter anymore. The Supreme Court has crowned itself the only court in the country that counts. The Texas map helps Republicans, and helping Republicans is the only thing the six Republicans on the Supreme Court care about. Judge Jerry Smith—a Ronald Reagan appointee—wrote a truly unhinged 101-page dissent from Brown’s opinion. The dude starts his dissent quoting Bette Davis, says that the majority opinion was designed to help George Soros, and closes with “Darkness descends on the Rule of Law.”

Judge Smith is 79 years old, by the way, and has been on the bench for 38 years. This seems like a good time to reiterate my objection to lifetime appointments.

The reasoning, to the extent there is any, in Smith’s dissent boils down to the fact that Texas officials said they were not being racist. Dhillon effectively ordered them to be racist, but Texas super double promised they weren’t doing exactly what she told them to do. According to Smith, that is the only evidence anyone needs to rule that the map is not a racist gerrymander.

While that argument is unpersuasive to me, it will certainly be the peg that Chief Justice John Roberts and his cabal of Republicans try to hang their hat on. Roberts has a long history of requiring racists to self-report before he’s willing to acknowledge that racism exists.

So what’s the play? My best guess is that the Supreme Court stays the lower-court order, thereby allowing the Texas maps to take effect pending a full hearing. By the time they get around to that hearing, the court will say that we’re too close to the midterm elections to require Texas to change its racist map. That will lock in the Texas map for the upcoming midterms. It’s possible that the court will eventually rule that the Texas map is unconstitutional (again, Dhillon is very bad at lawyering), but that will happen sometime after Texas hands Republicans five additional seats.

It’s frankly amazing that a Trump judge struck down the Texas map in the first place. But Judge Brown was just applying the law. The Trump judges on the Supreme Court did not get to where they are by applying the law. They got there by giving Republicans what they want. I do not expect them to stop now.

The Bad and the Ugly

• Texas isn’t the only state facing lawsuits over its mid-cycle redistricting plan. Lawsuits have been filed in California and North Carolina over their new maps. The people just want elections to be fair but, like bamboo in a carefully manicured courtyard, the gerrymanders keep coming. You can hack at them but never halt them, and eventually gerrymanders are all anyone sees. Eventually, inevitably, inexorably, the public is… bamboozled.
• Trump signed the bill calling for the release of the Epstein files, but it turns out the bill contains numerous exceptions that will, no doubt, shield Trump from his public reckoning. Why all the subterfuge? It’s as if Trump got down on his knees and carefully arranged all of the shoes in his Epstein closet, for love, and now can only hope he didn’t leave one boot buckle out of place.
• The grand jury that indicted James Comey never actually saw the final indictment, which is a huge legal problem that should invalidate the entire process. Like a Herschel backpack that never quite closes, the Trump administration can’t even carry out political retribution properly.
• The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Trump administration and ICE over its use of tear gas to break up protesters to ICE. “Amor fati, the Stoics advised—love your fate.” Big, globulous tears, provided by ICE, will surely make a thousand flowers bloom… before those flowers are killed by bamboo, of course.
• A federal bankruptcy judge approved a new settlement in the Purdue Pharma class action lawsuit that will see victims of the opioid marketing scam collectively receive $7.4 billion. Unlike the old settlement, which was thrown out by the Supreme Court (I wrote about why, here), the new one does not immunize the Sackler family from future lawsuits. If I swallowed every drop of water from the tower of the Sackler family’s comeuppance, I would still thirst for more.
• I’m… sure I’m missing one big story from this week. Something about minor presidential candidates and the women who love them? Or maybe it’s a story about the fact that a complete lack of journalistic standards somehow doesn’t exclude you from having a job in journalism as long as you’re part of the inside-the-Beltway journo clique? 

Inspired Takes

• For me, the height of journalism is when it makes me think of something that I never thought of before. I’m an educated person, and I have thought of a lot of things, but this piece in The Nation from Bryce Covert hit on something I’ve truly never considered: Why do we take children away from their parents when their housing isn’t safe and habitable? Shouldn’t we demand that landlords provide safe and reasonable housing for children instead of taking them from their parents?
• I also never think about crossword puzzles. Full disclosure: I hate crossword puzzles. I think about words for a living. I don’t want to spend my free time teasing that part of my brain: I need it fresh for work. Also… I can’t spell. But anyway, Natan Last’s piece in The Nation about the politics of crossword puzzles was fascinating. 

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Worst Argument of the Week

This week, aboard Air Force One, Donald Trump deflected a question about the release of the Epstein files by telling the female reporter who asked him a question, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.”

In response, the White House Press Corps did… absolutely nothing. There was no outrage; there was no follow-up; nobody told Trump what he said was inappropriate; and even days later, his press entourage is still acting like nothing out of the ordinary happened.

I know Trump’s crass and boorish behavior is baked into the system at this point. I know that his misogynist ravings are titillating to those who support him. I know that Trump can deflect from a sex scandal with sexism, and it will not cost him a single vote.

I also know that if my boss said to a colleague I worked with, even one I didn’t like, “Quiet, piggy,” I’d tell him to go fuck himself. And I know that if I saw someone else’s boss answering a question that way, I’d tell that boss to go fuck himself. It has been my cherished privilege to have had precisely zero jobs I wouldn’t be willing to lose over that comment.

But here’s the thing, Donald Trump is not the boss of the White House Press Corps. Those journalists work for publications, and in a more consequential way, they work for us. They’re on that plane to be our eyes and ears. When Trump tells one of them “Quiet, piggy,” he’s really telling us to sit down and shut up.

By taking Trump’s comment without immediate or long-term reproach, the journalists on that plane failed at their jobs. Their job at the moment was to stand up for the American people (to say nothing of their colleague), and not one of them did.

Trump is gross, but the press is pathetic.

What I Wrote

I wrote about how Harvard needed to part ways with the always-wrong Larry Summers. It should have done so as far back as 2005, when he made his first set of famously sexist comments, but now, in the wake of the revelations about his e-mail correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein, it has no choice. After my story went up, Summers said that he was “stepping back” from teaching while Harvard investigates his gross conduct. I would very much like to tell myself I played some small role helping this along, but the true credit goes to the student journalists at The Harvard Crimson, who dug into his e-mails and exposed not just who Summers was talking to but what he was talking about.

I wish I could replace every member of the White House Press Corps with the students at college papers across the country. They’d do a better job.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

Illinois congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh plays video games on livestream to raise funds for her race and interact with potential voters. It’s a great, modern campaign technique that I wish more people would adopt. She plays a lot of different games, but this week she played Papers, Please.

I can’t believe she went there. Papers Please is a 2013 video game where you play an immigration agent at the border crossing of a dystopian country. Your job, in the game, is to determine who is allowed to come into the country based on their passport and other supporting documentation. The game throws impossible choices at you, often forcing you to deny entry to good people who don’t have the right forms. You can try to fudge it, sometimes, and let in people you “shouldn’t,” but if you do that too often or in the wrong way, you might get fired and hit the dreaded “game over” screen.

All of those horrible choices have stakes because you, the player, are incentivized to deny people entry to keep your terrible job. You get money for denying people entry, and you have to use that money to pay rent, and feed your family (whom you are supporting through this immigration job). Another way to lose the game is if your family goes into debt. That can lead some players to take bribes from the people who want to get in.

To be clear, Papers Please is not some kind of right-wing fantasy play made to entice people into signing up for ICE. I could prove that simply by pointing out that it’s a largely text-based game, and we know ICE officials don’t like to read. More to the point, the developer of the game, Lucas Pope, didn’t set out to make right-wing propaganda so much as a game with a “core empathetic message.” He recently said of his 12-year-old game: “It blows my mind that it’s only becoming more and more relevant over time. Honestly, it’s a tragedy.” My read on the game is that it’s trying to humanize people who are mainly talked about as statistics. That’s good art. It’s not a game that’s supposed to make you feel good about anything.

Given where we are in this country, it is a hell of a choice to play live, on stream, as a Democratic political candidate. You’d expect neither party to touch this game with a 10-foot pole—Republicans because it makes them look bad, Democrats because it makes them feel bad.

Abughazaleh played it straight, making choices such as “sorry guy, I have to feed my kid,” —which is in keeping with the mechanics of the game—and telling her viewers to “donate if you are also trying to feel chill in this fascist hellscape,” a reference to both the game and our actual country.

I would never play Papers Please, even privately. One critique of the game that I agree with is that it’s supposed to make the player feel like they’re part of the problem, which is not something I want to be reminded of in my free hours. At the same time, by gamifying the problem into a set of robotic “must win” choices, it takes the sting out of the morally horrible decisions the player is encouraged to make. That’s a big “no, thank you” from me. I’d… rather do a stupid crossword puzzle than ponder about whether I should separate a family at the border.

If Abughazaleh ever wants to play something where we can combat our dystopian enemies instead of working for them, she should hit me up. Surely we could just play Arc Raiders and fight the evil and oppressive AI. Or maybe we just load up Baldur’s Gate 3 and try to fight the worm that was in RFK Jr.’s brain? I play games to do what I can’t do in the real world: win, and look hot while doing it.

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