Canada, the US and Mexico reached agreement on a revised version of NAFTA.
When asked by a reporter if he has a message for young men in America, Trump said “it’s a very scary time for young men in America when you can be guilty of something you may not be guilty of. This is a very difficult time.” When asked if he has a message for young women, he said “Women are doing great.” On Tuesday night Trump mocked Ford at a rally: “Thirty-six years ago this happened. I had one beer, right? I had one beer,” Mr. Trump said, imitating Dr. Blasey. “How did you get home? I don’t remember,” he said. “How’d you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Ben Wittes, who admires Kavanaugh and supported his nomination, makes the case this week that senators should not confirm him, in part because of his partisan attacks undercut his judicial temperament, and also because he thinks the weight of evidence more corroborates Ford’s testimony: namely that she told people Kavanaugh was the attacker before Trump was president, and she has intimate knowledge of Kavanaugh’s high school social circle.
David French makes the opposite argument, that Ford’s case is collapsing, in part because she cannot corroborate who was at the party or get anyone else to back her up.
The FBI concluded its investigation on Wednesday after interviewing nine people. The White House sent the report to the Senate in the middle of the night, and senators began reviewing it Thursday morning. On Friday the Senate voted to approve Kavanaugh for a final floor vote. Manchin, Collins and Flake voted for Kavanaugh. Murkowski voted against. Collins make a 43 minute floor speech laying out her case for her vote: her belief that Kavanaugh is a mainstream jurist who will not overturn Roe (implied here is that Kavanaugh’s replacement may be more conservative); that she believed Ford was attacked but to deny Kavanaugh the nomination there had to be at least some corroborating evidence to make it “more likely than not” he did it.
The final vote was 48 to 50. One GOP senator was not present because he was at his daughter’s wedding, and Murkowski voted present instead of nay to spare Kavanaugh from being confirmed with a one vote margin, which has not happened since 1881.
Here is a history of the nomination strategy that McGahn helped to steer, including how Kavanaugh was coached to come across as angry and go on the attack to goose wavering Republicans and the GOP base to see his confirmation through an exclusively partisan lens. 538 has the data to back this up: “Graham and Trump, even if they have not studied the data, have figured this out. And while those two were perhaps the most vocal in suggesting there is an ongoing war on men, there was little resistance to that idea from other prominent figures in the Republican Party, male or female.”
Immigration Policy
1,600 migrant children are being shipped to a tent city in Tornillo, Texas. The permanent shelters are over crowded due to an influx from Central America, especially Guatemala, combined with the fact that the Trump administration is making it harder to unite the children with families already in the US. The average stay in custody has increased from 34 days to 59 days. The children are being taken from their current shelters at night: they “are being woken up and moved in the middle of the night because they will be less likely to try to run away in the dark.” Here is a good explainer of some key questions.
The Department of Homeland Security inspector general released its report on child separation, saying that the government was unprepared for the consequences of the policy; unable to keep track of the families once separated; held children for longer that the law allows; and made decisions that caused huge lines at official ports of entry that lead to more asylum seekers crossing illegally.
Lawfare speculates that agents who carried out the separation policy may find themselves in court for their actions. The list some egregious behavior that has come into the news recently: “A lawsuit recently filed by parents separated from their children accuses officials of “sadistically teas[ing] and taunt[ing] parents and children with the prospect of separation,” while another plaintiff reports that an officer told her “Happy Mother’s Day” before separating her from her child. An emergency physician who deals with migrant children described in the New Yorker a child’s guardians as threatening that an eight-year-old boy “won’t be reunited with his parents unless he behaves” and that giving the boy a hug constituted “rewarding his bad behavior.” Then the author concludes: “Agents who act in this manner could one day find themselves under scrutiny for violating the civil rights of children in implementing the separation policy. In this case, incompetence will not serve as an excuse; it may also mean culpability.”
A federal judge stopped the Trump administration from suspending the Temporary Protected Status for people from Sudan, El Salvador, Haiti and Nicaragua. Many of these people have been in the US for decades and have children who are citizens. Here is an in-depth story of one 14-year-old girl who is preparing for life without her parents, who may be sent back to El Salvador if the suspension of TPS is upheld by the courts.
In 2018 only 51 Iraqi refugees with US affiliates were allowed into the US, compared to three thousand, five thousand and seven thousand in the three year’s prior. About 100,000 had applied for special refugee status and were in the pipeline. The Trump administration is lowering the cap of all refugees allowed into the country, and the Pentagon requested that the Iraqis be allowed in without being counted against the cap. This was not approved by the White House.
The State Department will no longer grant visas to gay domestic partners of United Nations diplomats. The new rule requires that they be legally married even though only 12% of UN member states allow gay marriage.
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Trump’s Job Approval Rating: 42.4%