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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Numbers [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-11
We begin today with Heather Digby Parton of Salon and the Tales of the Trumpian Grift.
Politics was immensely lucrative for the Trump family during the first term, but that looks like chicken feed compared to what they're doing now. This time it's no holds barred, straight-up grift and corruption in the billions, featuring foreign governments, sleazy scam artists and a big play in the arcane world of cryptocurrency. Eric Trump has been all over the region putting together real estate deals with the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, countries whose relationships with each other may be fractious but are all crucial to U.S. foreign policy. Eric Lipton and other reporters at the New York Times have been tracking these ventures, as well as others and reported last week that the Trumps now have six projects planned in the Middle East, in partnership with a firm tied to the Saudi royal family… [...] There's so much grift going on in Trump-realm that it's honestly hard to tell where the government ends and the family begins. One can only imagine what might happen in Trump's supposed trade talks as various countries and private companies appeal for carve-outs. There are already reports that foreign governments are getting strong-armed to buy Elon Musk's Starlink system if they want the tariffs lifted. That's likely to be the tip of the iceberg.
Steve Vladeck writes for his “One First” Substack about Stephen Miller’s dangerous statement that habeas corpus might be suspended to deal with the immigration “problem.”
x Stephen Miller: "The writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So I would say that's an option we're actively looking at." — The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) 2025-05-09T19:27:26.852Z [...] First, the Suspension Clause of the Constitution, which is in Article I, Section 9, Clause 2 is meant to limit the circumstances in which habeas can be foreclosed (Article I, Section 9 includes limits on Congress’s powers)—thereby ensuring that judicial review of detentions are otherwise available. (Note that it’s in the original Constitution—adopted before even the Bill of Rights.) I spent a good chunk of the first half of my career writing about habeas and its history, but the short version is that the Founders were hell-bent on limiting, to the most egregious emergencies, the circumstances in which courts could be cut out of the loop. To casually suggest that habeas might be suspended because courts have ruled against the executive branch in a handful of immigration cases is to turn the Suspension Clause entirely on its head. Second, Miller is being slippery about the actual text of the Constitution (notwithstanding his claim that it is “clear”). The Suspension Clause does not say habeas can be suspended during any invasion; it says “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” This last part, with my emphasis, is not just window-dressing; again, the whole point is that the default is for judicial review except when there is a specific national security emergency in which judicial review could itself exacerbate the emergency. The emergency itself isn’t enough. Releasing someone like Rümeysa Öztürk from immigration detention poses no threat to public safety—all the more so when the release is predicated on a judicial determination that Öztürk … poses no threat to public safety. Third, even if the textual triggers for suspending habeas corpus were satisfied, Miller also doesn’t deign to mention that the near-universal consensus is that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus—and that unilateral suspensions by the President are per se unconstitutional. I’ve written before about the Merryman case at the outset of the Civil War, which provides perhaps the strongest possible counterexample: that the President might be able to claim a unilateral suspension power if Congress is out of session (as it was from the outset of the Civil War in 1861 until July 4)...
Mahmoud Kahlil, the Columbia University student that was taken from his New York apartment for his activism for Palestine, writes an open letter to his two-week old son published in the Guardian.
Yaba Deen,* it has been two weeks since you were born, and these are my first words to you. In the early hours of 21 April, I waited on the other end of a phone as your mother labored to bring you into this world. I listened to her pained breaths and tried to speak comforting words into her ear over the crackling line. During your first moments, I buried my face in my arms and kept my voice low so that the 70 other men sleeping in this concrete room would not see my cloudy eyes or hear my voice catch. I feel suffocated by my rage and the cruelty of a system that deprived your mother and me of sharing this experience. Why do faceless politicians have the power to strip human beings of their divine moments? Since that morning, I have come to recognize the look in the eyes of every father in this detention center. I sit here contemplating the immensity of your birth and wonder how many more firsts will be sacrificed to the whims of the US government, which denied me even the chance of furlough to attend your birth. How is it that the same politicians who preach “family values” are the ones tearing families apart? [...] *Yaba Deen: “Yaba” (يابا ) is an affectionate term meaning “dad” in Arabic. In Palestinian Arabic, yaba is often used self-referentially to center the father-son bond in the greeting itself. So when a father says “yaba”, he’s using a tender, fatherly voice to address his child, somewhat like saying: “From your dad, Deen” or “My son, from your yaba (dad)”.
Adelle Waldman writes for The Atlantic about the part-time job “trap.”
One of the great achievements of 20th-century American labor law was to set limits on how many hours of work an employer could demand from its employees. In recent years, however, working-class Americans have become susceptible to a different sort of exploitation. Instead of assigning employees too many hours, large corporations routinely give them too few, hiring multiple part-time staff in place of one full-time worker. These precarious, contingent workers aren’t entitled to benefits and are subject to inconsistent schedules in which the number of hours they work fluctuates dramatically from week to week. The result is an inversion of the situation that reformers confronted a century ago. For millions of American low-wage workers today, the problem is not overwork—it’s underwork. [...] In 2005, The New York Times obtained a revealing memo written by a senior Walmart human-resources executive. The memo, drafted with advice from McKinsey consultants, recommended various ways of cutting costs. One of those suggestions would become particularly consequential: hiring more part-time workers. A year later, the Times revealed that Walmart planned to double the percentage of its workers who were part-time, from 20 percent of its workforce to 40 percent. Walmart is hardly unique in that regard. At Target, for example, where pay starts at $15 an hour, the median employee makes not $31,200, the annualized full-time equivalent, but $27,090, meaning that at least half of its employees are part-time. Kohl’s and TJX (the owner of such stores as T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods) also rely on predominantly part-time workforces. The most obvious reason employers favor part-time labor is to avoid paying benefits. Starbucks, for example, talks up its generous benefits. But the median Starbucks worker made just $14,674 last year. For baristas, who earn a $15 minimum wage, this amounts to about 19 hours a week, just shy of the 20 hours a week that the company requires to be eligible for those benefits.
Katherine Pompilio of Lawfare takes a look into AG Pam Bondi’s claim that the tacky shoe salesman has saved 258 million American lives by stopping fentanyl at the borders.
You read that correctly. Trump has saved 258 million lives in a country of not even 350 million people—a country that had seen fewer than 75,000 deaths from fentanyl in all of the previous year. According to Bondi, were it not for President Trump in his first 100 days in office, approximately 75 percent of the American population would have died from a fentanyl overdose. [...] ...a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. And while the Justice Department’s explanations of Bondi’s words may be consistent, it is also very foolish. Even assuming that there were 258 million lethal doses seized, saving 258 million lives requires that 258 million Americans would have taken those doses. If you don’t have the impression that three-quarters of your acquaintances are taking the drug, that’s because they’re not. “One hundred nineteen million Americans do not even use fentanyl, and to risk an overdose requires intentional ingestion of fentanyl (or another illicit drug contaminated with fentanyl),” said one expert.
I can’t even laugh. I can only facepalm.
From there we go back almost 25 years to 35th Street right off the Dan Ryan Expressway.
x Shoutout to my guy Eddie - young fan next to the Pope - for the heads up on this. He joins us on a new episode of the @SoxOn35th pod dropping tomorrow — Joe Binder (@JoeBinder) May 11, 2025
I never suspected that the first Black POTUS would ever be surpassed as a Chicago White Sox fan.
(Note: I have lived the overwhelming number of the 35 years that I have lived in Chicago on the North Side. I have the appropriate baseball loyalties).
Ana Faguy of BBC News takes a look at the damage being dome to Port Huron, Michigan as a result of Trump’s tariffs.
Border towns noticed almost instantly when US President Donald Trump began imposing tariffs on countries around the world and saying he wanted to make Canada the 51st US state - because the number of Canadians crossing the border plummeted. Border crossings between the US and Canada are down some 17% since Trump started bringing in tariffs, according to CBP data. Canadian's car trips to the US are down almost 32% compared to March 2024, according to Statistics Canada. [...] People across the Blue Water Bridge are feeling the effects too, Mayor Anita Ashford says. She has heard from both residents of her town and Canadians frustrated about the increased tension between the nations. Nationally, a 10% drop in Canadian tourism would cost the US up to 14,000 jobs and $2.1bn (£1.56bn) in business, according to the US Travel Association.
Heather Cox Richardson writes for her Letters from an American Substack about the mothers who are mothers without the title.
Those of us who are truly lucky have more than one mother. They are the cool aunts, the elderly ladies, the family friends, even the mentors who whip us into shape. By my count, I’ve had at least eight mothers. One of the most important was Sally Adams Bascom Augenstern. Mrs. A., a widow who had played cutthroat bridge with my grandmother in the 1950s, lived near my family in Maine in the summer. I began vacuuming and weeding and painting for her when I was about 12, but it wasn't long before my time at her house stopped being a job. She was bossy, demanding, sharp as a tack...and funny and thoughtful, and she remembered most of the century. She would sit in her rocking chair by the sunny window in the kitchen, shelling peas and telling me stories while I washed the floor with a hand sponge to spin out the time. Sally (not Sarah) Bascom was born on December 25, 1903. (For folks in Maine keeping score, that made her almost a full year older than Millard Robinson, a fact she loathed.) She was the oldest of six children and spent her youth taking care of the younger ones. When I once asked her what was the most important historical event in her lifetime, this woman who had lived through the Depression and both world wars answered without hesitation: "the washing machine." It had freed her and her mother from constant laundry. She could finally have some leisure time, which she spent listening to the radio and driving in cars with boys. Because her mother always needed her at home, it was not she, but all her younger siblings, who went to college. By the time Mrs. A. was an adult, she was certain she wanted no part of motherhood.
Happy Mothers Day to all mothers! (Yes, I am one of the lucky ones!)
Finally today, we return to the time machine and go back...what, 45 years...and back to Michigan for one of the hottest hits that ever hit Detroit.
Much moonwalking was done to this Kraftwerk track.
Have the best possible day everyone!
[END]
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