National News Roundup: Year 4, Week 3 (February 2–8)

This week, ho boy–we saw the end of impeachment, a mess in Iowa, and a whole bunch of other stressful, inconclusive stories. Somehow the week doesn’t feel as dire as some of the weeks immediately preceding it despite all of this, but that might just be the exhaustion talking.

Standard standing reminders apply: I am no journalist, though I play one in your inbox or browser, so I’m mostly summarizing the news within my area of expertise. NNR summaries often contain some detailed analysis that’s outside my expertise–I’m a lawyer, not a primary!–but all offroad adventures are marked with an asterisk. And, of course, for the things that are within my lane, I’m offering context that shouldn’t be considered legal advice. Okay, I think that’s about it for the disclaimers. Onward to the news!

Constitutional Crisis Corners:

As the paragraph above suggests, it’s only a few days after the impeachment vote and we’re already seeing a smorgasbord of Disregard of Governing Norms. Here’s what has been happening:

• Frustrating Finale. In the few days leading up to the final vote, Trump’s State of the Union address made it clear that he knew he’d already won; he awarded bigoted blowhard Rush Limbaugh the Medal of Freedom and started calling sitting Congresspeople ‘socialists’ halfway through his speech. He wasn’t wrong, sadly; the first article of impeachment, abuse of power, failed by 48–52 vote. (That said, that exact number was apparently a surprise, as the team didn’t expect Republican senator and human white bread Mitt Romney to vote to acquit.) The second article of impeachment, obstruction of justice, failed entirely along party lines by 47–53 vote. This sets a very concerning precedent about checks and balances, and barely a day passed before Trump celebrated with an hour-long speech full of bananas rhetoric and personalized attacks. He also immediately started abusing more powers, which are outlined below, despite the fact that the Supreme Court has another case about his abuse of power on the docket this season. Oh, and by the way, Ukraine still doesn’t have its full aid as I type this.

As the paragraph above suggests, it’s only a few days after the impeachment vote and we’re already seeing a smorgasbord of Disregard of Governing Norms. Here’s what has been happening:

• Friday Night Massacre. The single biggest (and most obvious) abuse of power since impeachment ended has been Trump’s version of the Saturday Night Massacre, which happened this Friday. In one day, he removed both Lt Col Alexander and Lt Col Yevgeny Vindman from the National Security Council and recalled Gordon Sondland from his role as EU Ambassador. Then he immediately tweeted about Vindman’s testimony, in case we were all confused about why the man was fired–though to be fair, the other Lt Col Vindman hadn’t testified at all, so some confusion would be understandable. Needless to say, this type of retaliation is super illegal, and Chuck Schumer is already trying to get inspectors general involved. But Kellyanne Conway has signaled nonetheless signaled that there may be more retaliatory firings to come.
• Super Legit Biden Hunter.* On the tails of the retaliation mess above, the Justice Department also announced that they’ll go ahead and review sketchy malpractice man Rudy Giuliani’s intel on the Bidens. For bonus authoritarianism, Attorney General Barr also announced this week that nobody in the FBI is allowed to conduct investigations on 2020 Presidential election candidates now unless they get his permission, even though he’s literally conducting a backdoor investigation on a Presidential candidate while he announces that. This also happened in the same week that Rand Paul read a whistleblower’s name on the Senate floor with GOP support, which tells you how much integrity we can expect here all around.
• Emoluments Nightmare State.We saw some emoluments news this week too, and none of it was good. The Washington Post ran a story about the exorbitant rates the secret service is charged every time he travels to Mar-A-Lago and other Trump properties, which is pretty much literally just pouring taxpayer money into the Trump empire. They likely ran this story in response to an appeals court decision this week to reject the emoluments case brought by Congressional Democrats on the theory that they lack standing. This decision, and I cannot stress this enough, does not touch the merits of the case; it was made on a procedural technicality and is not a comment on whether Trump is violating the Emoluments clause of the Constitution (which, in my opinion, he super is).

Your “Normal” Weird:

• Iowant My Money Back.* All eyes were on the Iowa caucus on Monday–which has an imperfect record, but nonetheless usually represents the first real primary results we see in election season. But apparently not this year! The process is always a bit complicated, but it was confounded by an issue with a new app used to tally votes which caused voter inconsistencies. Of course, this didn’t stop Pete Buttigieg from declaring himself the winner even before we had official results–and now that 100% of precincts have reported in and the final results backing him up, several officials and news outlets are refusing to call it. So it’s not clear what we’ll do from here or what even happened (other than Biden’s underperformance). And now everybody’s kind of a hot mess as we move into New Hampshire’s primary tomorrow.
• New Hampshire Watch. After a relatively uneventful but nicely parodied Democratic primary debate on Friday night, everybody’s kind of a hot mess as we move into New Hampshire’s primary tomorrow. So far the lead-up appears to be mostly white guys taking swipes at each other and local polled voters saying they’d take a meteor crash over four more years of Trump, but at least New Hampshire is supposed to be an ordinary primary lacking the vulunerabilities unique to the caucus format, so we have that going for us. (And on the caucus front, Nevada has said it won’t use the infamous app in its own primary.)

The Bad:

• Coronavirus Creep.* The coronavirus situation is still worsening, with the death toll now over a thousand people, surpassing the SARS mortality rate in the early 2000s. We’ve also seen the first death of a U.S. citizen (though that person died in Wuhan), and the whistleblowing doctor who first tried to report the new coronavirus passed away this week as well. This epidemic remains primarily centered in China, and it’s still true that the flu is a much more serious virus in the U.S. at this time–and we should be thinking carefully about whether our responses are borne of racism rather than true public health concern. But we still might see transmission in the U.S. increase, and I will continue to track this epidemic.
• Immigration Updates. Unsurprisingly, we saw bad immigration news start to ramp up again as soon as the impeachment inquiry was over. CBP was in the news, first because a new policy will shield them from FOIA requests moving forward. Then they were in the news again because a 32-year-old who was a U.S. citizen has died in their custody this week, and there are so many different things wrong with that sentence that I don’t even know where to start. Similarly, ICE was in the news for shooting a man in the face as he tried to intervene in an arrest. And the Trump administration announced they are blocking New York residents from the Global Entry airport program because they are mad about a new policy called the Green Light Law which precludes sharing license databases with ICE. Unsurprisingly, New York is already suing over the policy.

The Good:

• Recent Court Resilience. A federal judge found this week that the criminal conviction of four humanitarian workers in Arizona with the humanitarian group No More Deaths should be overturned. The decision was made pursuant to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, with the court finding that it was an expression of their sincerely-held religious beliefs to help prevent deaths in the desert despite the administration’s “deterrence by death” policy. The decision cites the Hobby Lobby case of 2017 while articulating its reasoning, which is legally noteworthy but also just extremely edifying.

So that’s what I have for this week, and I’m sorry, there are no news refunds. For making it through, you deserve this Beluga whale returning a lady’s iPhone and an eventual better government. I’ll be back next week with more (and hopefully better) news, and I hope you will be back as well–but in the meantime, feel free to ping the National News Roundup ask box, which is there for your constructive comments. Send me questions! Send me feedback! Send me more impeachment articles!