SAN DIEGO, Calif. (Reuters) - Apple Inc and Qualcomm Inc on Tuesday opened a complex trial with the iPhone maker using a fried chicken analogy to illustrate its claim the chip company is abusing its market power while Qualcomm alleged a years-long plan by Apple to deprive it of billions in revenue, $13 at a time. FILE PHOTO: A surveillance camera is seen outside an Apple store in Beijing, China December 12, 2018. REUTERS/Jason Lee/File PhotoThe fate of Qualcomm’s business model, which involves licensing more than 130,000 patents in addition to selling chips, is at stake in the case, which consolidates related lawsuits and countersuits. Apple alleges that Qualcomm’s patent practices were an illegal move to maintain a monopoly on the market for premium modem chips that connect smart phones to wireless data networks. Qualcomm in turn says Apple used its heft in the electronics business to wrongly order contract factories such as Hon Hai Precision Co Ltd’s Foxconn to withhold royalty payments from Qualcomm that Apple had historically reimbursed to the factories. A jury of three women and six men will hear the case over five weeks in the San Diego federal courtroom of Judge Gonzalo Curiel. On Tuesday, attorneys sought to cut through the technological complexity and frame key elements of the case in terms the jury could understand. Apple has objected to a practice that it calls “no license, no chips” under which Qualcomm will not sell chips to a company that has not signed a patent license agreement. Apple attorney Ruffin Cordell likened Qualcomm’s policy to a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant that refuses to sell a bucket of chicken to customers. “You first have to go over to this different counter, KFL - Kentucky Fried Licensing,” Cordell said. “You have to go pay that ‘eating license’ fee before they’ll sell you any chicken.” For its part, Qualcomm alleged that Apple bullied its contract manufacturers into choking off royalty payments to Qualcomm. Qualcomm had been doing business with those factories long before the iPhone, Qualcomm said. “The idea that Qualcomm can bully Apple is absolutely remarkable,” said Evan Chesler, Qualcomm’s attorney. Apple “dwarf us in size, but they cut off that money.” Qualcomm portrayed the move as part of a years-long Apple plan to weaken Qualcomm’s patent licensing business, showing jurors internal slides from Apple presentations where Apple talked of wanting to “hurt Qualcomm financially.” “It was all planned in advance, every bit of it,” Chesler said. Chesler also used iPhone price increases to $1,000 or more in recent years to frame Qualcomm’s technology licensing fees. “Out of a $1,000 for that phone, what they’re not paying us is $13,” Chesler said. “What would your iPhone be worth to you if you stepped five feet to the right and the call dropped out? That’s Qualcomm, not Apple.” Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Diego; Editing by Cynthia OstermanOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Historians broadly agree that lynchings were a method of social and racial control meant to terrorize black Americans into submission, and into an inferior racial caste position. They became widely practiced in the US south from roughly 1877, the end of post-civil war reconstruction, through 1950. A typical lynching would involve criminal accusations, often dubious, against a black American, an arrest, and the assembly of a “lynch mob” intent on subverting the normal constitutional judicial process. Victims would be seized and subjected to every imaginable manner of physical torment, with the torture usually ending with being hung from a tree and set on fire. More often than not, victims would be dismembered and mob members would take pieces of their flesh and bone as souvenirs.In a great many cases, the mobs were aided and abetted by law enforcement (indeed, they often were the same people). Officers would routinely leave a black inmate’s jail cell unguarded after rumors of a lynching began to circulate to allow for a mob to kill them before any trial or legal defense could take place.One chief among the trespasses (occasionally real, but usually imagined) was any claim of sexual contact between black men and white women. The trope of the hypersexual and lascivious black male, especially vis-a-vis the inviolable chastity of white women, was and remains one of the most durable tropes of white supremacy. According to the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), nearly 25% of lynching victims were accused of sexual assault. Nearly 30% were accused of murder.“The mob wanted the lynching to carry a significance that transcended the specific act of punishment,” wrote the historian Howard Smead in Blood Justice: The Lynching of Mack Charles Parker. The mob “turned the act into a symbolic rite in which the black victim became the representative of his race and, as such, was being disciplined for more than a single crime … The deadly act was [a] warning [to] the black population not to challenge the supremacy of the white race.”Because of the nature of lynchings – summary executions that occurred outside the constraints of court documentation – there was no formal, centralized tracking of the phenomenon. Most historians believe this has left the true number of lynchings dramatically underreported.For decades, the most comprehensive total belonged to the archives at the Tuskegee Institute, which tabulated 4,743 people who died at the hands of US lynch mobs between 1881 and 1968. According to the Tuskegee numbers, 3,446 (nearly three-quarters) of those lynched were black Americans.The EJI, which relied on the Tuskegee numbers in building its own count, integrated other sources, such as newspaper archives and other historical records, to arrive at a total of 4,084 racial terror lynchings in 12 southern states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950, and another 300 in other states.Unlike the Tuskegee data, EJI’s numbers attempt to exclude incidents it considered acts of “mob violence” that followed a legitimate criminal trial process or that “were committed against non-minorities without the threat of terror”.Unsurprisingly, lynching was most concentrated in the former Confederate states, and especially in those with large black populations. According to EJI’s data, Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas and Louisiana had the highest statewide rates of lynching in the United States. Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana had the highest number of lynchings.Among the most unsettling realities of lynching is the degree to which white Americans embraced it, not as an uncomfortable necessity or a way of maintaining order, but as a joyous moment of wholesome celebration.“Whole families came together, mothers and fathers, bringing even their youngest children. It was the show of the countryside – a very popular show,” read a 1930 editorial in the Raleigh News and Observer. “Men joked loudly at the sight of the bleeding body … girls giggled as the flies fed on the blood that dripped from the Negro’s nose.”Adding to the macabre nature of the scene, lynching victims were typically dismembered into pieces of human trophy for mob members. In his autobiography, WEB Du Bois writes of the 1899 lynching of Sam Hose in Georgia. He reports that the knuckles of the victim were on display at a local store on Mitchell Street in Atlanta and that a piece of the man’s heart and liver was presented to the state’s governor.In the 1931 Maryville, Missouri, lynching of Raymond Gunn, the crowd estimated at 2,000 to 4,000 was at least a quarter women, and included hundreds of children. One woman “held her little girl up so she could get a better view of the naked Negro blazing on the roof”, wrote Arthur Raper in The Tragedy of Lynching.After the fire was out, hundreds poked about in his ashes for souvenirs. “The charred remains of the victim were divided piece by piece,” wrote Raper. Lynchings were only the latest fashion in racial terrorism against black Americans when they came to the fore in the late 19th century. White planters had long used malevolent and highly visible violence against the enslaved to try to suppress even the vaguest rumors of insurrection.In 1811, after a failed insurrection outside New Orleans, for example, whites decorated the road to the plantation where the plot failed with the decapitated heads of blacks, many of whom planters later admitted had nothing to do with the revolt. It wasn’t a southern-specific phenomenon, either. In 1712, colonial authorities in New York City manacled, burned and broke on the wheel 18 enslaved blacks accused of plotting for their freedom.Communities of free blacks also faced the constant threat of race riots and pogroms at the hands of white mobs throughout the 19th century and continuing into the lynching era.Among the best known of these was the decimation of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, neighborhood of Greenwood in 1921, after a black man was falsely charged with raping a white woman in an elevator. The Greenwood neighborhood was sometimes referred to as “Black Wall Street” for its economic vitality before the massacre. According to the Tulsa Historical Society, it is believed 100 to 300 blacks were killed by white mobs in a matter of a few hours.Similar events, from the New York draft riots during the civil war to others in New Orleans, Knoxville, Charleston, Chicago, and St Louis, saw hundreds of blacks killed.The start of the lynching era is commonly pegged to 1877, the year of the Tilden-Hayes compromise, which is viewed by most historians as the official end of Reconstruction in the US south. In order to settle a razor-thin and contested presidential election between the Republican Rutherford B Hayes and the Democrat Samuel Tilden, northern Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the last of the formerly renegade states.The move technically only affected South Carolina and Louisiana but symbolically gestured to the south that the north would no longer hold the former Confederacy to the promise of full citizenship for freed blacks, and the south jumped at the chance to renege on the pledge. The end of Reconstruction ushered in a widespread campaign of racial terror and oppression against newly freed black Americans, of which lynching was a cornerstone.The vast majority of lynching participants were never punished, both because of the tacit approval of law enforcement, and because dozens if not hundreds often had a hand in the killing. Still, punishment was not unheard of – though most of the time, if white lynchers were tried or convicted, it was for arson, rioting or some other much more minor offense.According to EJI, of all lynchings committed after 1900, only 1% resulted in a lyncher being convicted of a criminal offense of any kind.Lynchings slowed in the middle of the 20th century with the coming of the civil rights movement. Anti-lynching efforts predominantly led by women’s organizations had a measurable effect, helping to generate overwhelming white support for an anti-lynching bill by 1937 (though such legislation never made it past the filibusters of southern Dixiecrats in the Senate).Also playing a major role was the great migration of black people out of the south into urban areas north and west. The exodus of some 6 million black Americans between 1910 and 1970 was pushed by racial terror and a waning agricultural economy and pulled by a surfeit of industrial job opportunities. The year 1952 was the first since people began keeping track that there were no recorded lynchings. When it happened again in 1953, Tuskegee suspended its data collection, suggesting that as traditionally defined, lynching had ceased to be a useful “barometer for measuring the status of race relations in the United States”.But foregrounding the intense new waves of brutality that would greet the nascent civil rights movement, Tuskegee continued in its final lynching report that the terror was switching modes by “the development of other extra-legal means of control, such as bombings, incendiarism, threats and intimidation”.In The End of American Lynching, Ashraf HA Rushdy argues: “The violence meant to act as a form of social control and terrorism had become less ritualistic and less collective. Individuals and small groups could throw bombs, perform drive-by shootings and torch a house,” as the resurgence of the KKK and similar violent white hate groups proved.The end of lynching cannot be said to be purely academic, though. While targeted violence against black people did not end with the lynching era, the element of public spectacle and open, even celebratory participation was a unique social phenomenon that would not be reborn in the same way as racial violence evolved.Despite the shift, the specter of ritual black death as a public affair – one that people could confidently participate in without anonymity and that could be seen as entertainment – did not end with the lynching era.Generally speaking and especially early on, the white press wrote sympathetically about lynchings and their necessity to preserve order in the south. The Memphis Evening Scimitar published in 1892: Aside from the violation of white women by Negroes, which is the outcropping of a bestial perversion of instinct, the chief cause of trouble between the races in the South is the Negro’s lack of manners. In the state of slavery he learned politeness from association with white people who took pains to teach him. Since the emancipation came and the tie of mutual interest and regard between master and servant was broken, the Negro has drifted away into a state which is neither freedom nor bondage … In consequence … there are many negroes who use every opportunity to make themselves offensive, particularly when they think it can be done with impunity … We have had too many instances right here in Memphis to doubt this, and our experience is not exceptional. The white people won’t stand this sort of thing, and … the response will be prompt and effectual. The black press, on the other hand, was arguably the primary force in fighting against the phenomenon. The Memphis journalist Ida B Wells was the most strident and devoted anti-lynching advocate in US history, and spent a 40-year-career writing, researching and speaking on the horrors of the practice. As a young woman she travelled the south for months, chronicling lynchings and gathering empirical data. Wells eventually became an owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight before being chased out of town by white mobs and relocating to New York and then Chicago.Eventually many white publications began to turn with overall white attitudes about lynching. “Missouri in Shame” was the headline of the first editorial in the Kansas City Star on the 1931 Maryville Lynching of Raymond Gunn. It read, in part: The lynching at Maryville was about as horrible as such a thing can be. Lynching in itself is a fearful reproach to American civilization. Lynching by fire is the vengeance of a savage past … The sickening outrage is the more deplorable because it easily could have been prevented. This article was amended on 1 May 2018 to correct the date of the 1811 New Orleans slave rebellion. Topics Pain and terror: America's history of racism features

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Brazil’s far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro said on Monday he would stick to his hardline agenda on guns, crime and graft in the second round of the election on Oct. 28, alarming senior statesmen and human rights advocates alike. Bolsonaro, a former Army captain and veteran lawmaker, nearly won the presidency outright on Sunday, taking 46 percent of votes against leftist Fernando Haddad’s 29 percent, part of a swing to the right in Latin America’s largest nation. As neither candidate won an outright majority, Bolsonaro will face Haddad, the former mayor of Sao Paulo representing the Workers Party (PT), in the second-round vote. Some Bolsonaro supporters called on him to moderate his message to ensure victory, but the candidate said he would not ease up on an anti-establishment message that has resonated with voters. The world’s fifth-most populous country has been roiled by years of rising crime, recession and graft scandals. “I can’t turn into a Little ‘Peace and Love’ Jair, which would be betraying who I am,” Bolsonaro said in a radio interview. “I have to keep being the same person.” His words were a thinly veiled swipe at former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who dropped his fiery leftist rhetoric to win the presidency in 2002, dubbing himself the “Peace and Love” candidate. Lula, who founded the Workers Party and was president until 2010, is serving 12 years in prison for a bribery conviction. Reflecting confidence that he will win the second round, Bolsonaro said he had already begun talks with other lawmakers in Congress to build an eventual governing coalition. That raised expectations of swift, market-friendly reforms. Brazil's benchmark Bovespa stock index .BVSP jumped 4.0 percent on Monday, led by double-digit gains in state-led oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA (PETR4.SA) and state power companies which Bolsonaro advisers have said they will privatize. Related CoverageBrazil presidential candidate Bolsonaro says he poses no threat of coupBrazil's Haddad says presidential runoff will pit neo-liberalism against social gainsMarkets have cheered Bolsonaro’s advance toward the presidency since his recent conversion to free-market ideas under the tutelage of University of Chicago-trained economist Paulo Guedes. Signs that Bolsonaro could win enough support in Congress to push through his agenda added to enthusiasm. “Part of the market’s excitement comes from the renovation in Congress. Regardless of party, that provides hope,” said Pablo Syper, head of trading at Mirae Asset Global Investments. Bolsonaro’s popularity surged as exasperated Brazilians decided he represents the best chance to turn back a wave of violent crime and dismantle what prosecutors call the world’s largest political graft scheme. But his track record of fiery anti-democratic rhetoric, calls for police to kill as many criminals as possible and offensive comments on women and minorities have alarmed former presidents and observers across the political spectrum. Bolsonaro said in a TV Globo interview on Monday night that he posed “no threat of a coup” and that he was seeking to win office by the ballot only. Former Ceara Governor Ciro Gomes, who split with the PT and garnered 12 percent of first-round votes with his center-left presidential campaign, stopped short of endorsing Haddad for the second round but said he would “fight to defend democracy.” Asked whom he would endorse, Gomes referred to the slogan of anti-Bolsonaro protesters in recent weeks: “Not him, certainly.” With the field reduced to two candidates, some analysts see Haddad as the natural inheritor of many of the centrist votes that will be up for grabs, but the scale of Bolsonaro’s first-round success means that Haddad will have little room for maneuver. Jair Bolsonaro, far-right lawmaker and presidential candidate of the Social Liberal Party (PSL), arrives to cast his vote in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil October 7, 2018. REUTERS/Pilar OlivaresPolitical analysts said that to have a chance of winning the runoff, Haddad would need to move quickly to the center, distance himself from his political mentor, former President Lula, and denounce the corruption that flourished during his party’s 2003-2016 run in government.. However, one of his first moves on Monday was to fly to the southern city of Curitiba for a meeting with Lula in his prison cell, a weekly encounter that Haddad is authorized to make as a member of the former president’s legal team. At a news conference afterward, Haddad cast the second round as pitting Bolsonaro’s “neoliberalism” against the social programs that the PT has promoted. Allies recognized the uphill battle he faces. “It’s a tough situation, but God is with us. He better be, because just us isn’t enough,” joked Gilberto Carvalho, a former PT minister and senior party member. Brazil’s next Congress was also elected on Sunday, and in a seismic shift, Bolsonaro’s Social Liberal Party (PSL) was set to become the second-largest force in the legislature. The party would still need alliances to push Bolsonaro’s socially conservative policies and free-market reforms through Congress which was even more deeply fragmented after Sunday’s election. Thirty parties won seats in the lower house, up from 25 represented there before the vote. The acting president of the PSL, Luciano Bivar, told Reuters he expected to attract lawmakers converting from other parties, expanding the PSL’s ranks to overtake the PT as the largest party in the lower house. Slideshow (9 Images)“We’re going to have a huge caucus, perfectly governable, to pass the bills that the society is demanding — to conclude the reforms that are under way,” Bivar said, referring to stalled efforts to trim public pensions and close a budget deficit. Congressman Onyx Lorenzoni, the main political adviser to Bolsonaro, said his team was targeting individual lawmakers in parties opposed to the PT, including those in parties whose leaders do not yet support the right-winger. “We’ll speak with anybody who wishes to talk with us now, which is interesting because many of them did not want to have a dialogue with us before the first-round vote,” Lorenzoni said. Polling, issues and leading candidates in Brazil's election: tmsnrt.rs/2Ixe0NI Reporting by Gabriel Stargardter and Pedro Foneseca in Rio de JaneiroAdditional reporting and writing by Brad Brooks and Brad Haynes in Sao Paulo, Ricardo Brito and Lisandra Paraguassu in Brasilia, Claudia Violante in Sao Paulo; Editing by Daniel Flynn, Frances Kerry and Cynthia OstermanOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

As a child of the 1960s and 1970s, I grew up in a world imagined by industrial designer Charles Harrison—I just didn’t know it. The New York Times has published a wonderful obituary by Katharine Q. Seelye of Harrison, who died on November 29 at 87. I’m just sorry I had to read about his passing in order to appreciate his extraordinary career: Harrison, an African American, went from being refused a job at Sears because of his race to becoming the company’s chief designer.[Photo: Flickr user Enokson]In 1958, before he devoted his career to Sears, Harrison oversaw the redesign of the View-Master, the 3D viewer that had spent its first couple of decades principally positioned as a device for grown-ups to look at photos of vacation destinations. Harrison’s slicker, svelter, more colorful version—and a bevy of reels based on TV shows and cartoons—pivoted the gadget to the kid audience. For a couple of generations of us, there weren’t many toys that were more iconic.Along with his View-Master, Harrison worked on hundreds of products for Sears—from trash cans to cordless shavers—during an era when the merchant was the closest thing the U.S. had to an official outfitter. My family’s household must have had at least a few of his designs back in the day. I’m sure I saw many more when I whipped myself into a consumer frenzy as a kid by losing myself in the Sears mail-order catalog, a favorite pastime.The Dieter Rams and Eameses of the world have always gotten their share of industrial-design glory. But by taking on so many mass-market assignments for so long, Harrison must have touched the lives of far more people. That’s quite a legacy.

Apple Inc. AAPL 2.26% may have gotten there first, but Amazon.com’s AMZN 1.25% rapid ascent to a $1 trillion market value should put the iPhone maker on notice that its days as the world’s most valuable company are numbered.On Tuesday, Amazon became the second U.S. company to reach a market value of $1 trillion. That happened barely a month after Apple crossed that threshold. Amazon’s price didn’t hold that level for long during a rather rough day overall for stocks, but it is still notable how quickly the e-commerce giant has covered ground. At the start of the year, Amazon was worth about $566 billion while the iPhone maker was worth about $860 billion. That is a 77% jump for Amazon compared with Apple’s 16% rise. Put another way, the gap in market value between the two largest tech giants has narrowed from 34% to about 9% in eight months. Amazon’s meteoric rise comes from the fact that it has harnessed its scale more effectively than even its Big Tech peers. Apple’s impressive growth over the past decade has come primarily from the iPhone. None of the other products the company has launched since have had anywhere near the same impact. Google also has logged significant growth since 2007 as it has ventured into many new areas, but its parent company Alphabet Inc. still relies on advertising for the majority of its revenue and profits. Amazon, meanwhile, has managed to both significantly boost its already huge retail business while also building sizable new ventures in devices, media and advertising. The most notable of those ventures has been its cloud service which now accounts for more than 11% of total revenue and most of its operating profit. As a result, Amazon’s revenue growth since 2007 has averaged 28% per year compared with 22% for Apple and 20% for Google. Amazon also has managed to fatten up its notoriously thin bottom line in the process. Operating income for the first six months of this year totaled $4.9 billion—triple that of the same period last year. Wall Street also expects Amazon to pass Apple in annual sales for calendar year 2019, according to analyst consensus figures compiled by FactSet. This is one of those times when investors count all the money they could have made if only they had bought or not sold, but Amazon was no sure thing during its ascent and is still no low-risk bet. A market value of $1 trillion puts the stock a little over 100 times forward earnings compared with 17 times for Apple. Apple’s current multiple is the highest the stock has fetched since 2010, though, while Amazon’s has fallen by nearly 40% since the start of the year thanks to the company’s rising bottom line. Amazon’s investors have never been terribly sensitive about valuation anyway. The company’s proven ability to keep delivering the goods has been well worth the price. Copyright ©2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

The European Union has rebuffed Boris Johnson’s attempts to tear up the Irish backstop, in a coordinated response that appeared to close the door on further meaningful Brexit negotiations.In remarks shortly before the prime minister departed for a whistle-stop tour to meet European leaders, Johnson put the blame for the EU’s hardline response at the feet of Conservative rebels, claiming his negotiating strategy was being undermined by those who said they could prevent no deal.The president of the European council, Donald Tusk, accused the British government of failing to admit that its policies would lead to the return of a hard border on the island of Ireland.Johnson suggested the EU’s position was influenced by the manoeuvres of Conservative MPs who have been examining legislative methods to stop no deal in the House of Commons, including former cabinet ministers like Philip Hammond.Downing Street has insisted that leaving on 31 October cannot be stopped by any means, even if parliament were to pass legislation.“One thing that slightly, I think, complicates the picture is that our EU friends still clearly think that there is a possibility that parliament will block Brexit,” the prime minister said. “And as long as they think there’s a possibility that parliament will block Brexit they are unlikely to be minded to make the concessions that we need. So it is going to take a bit of patience.”The standoff set the stage for tense encounters between Johnson and Angela Merkel in Berlin and Emmanuel Macron in Paris, before a gathering of G7 leaders on Saturday.The German chancellor is expected to dismiss Johnson’s call to scrap the backstop when she meets him on Wednesday.“The letter to the president of the European council is not a serious offer, and Boris Johnson knows it,” said Norbert Röttgen, an ally of Merkel who heads the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee. “If Johnson really wanted to achieve something on his visits to Paris and Berlin, he would have been well advised against writing this letter.”Tusk, who is also expected to meet Johnson this weekend, wrote: “The backstop is an insurance to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland unless and until an alternative is found. Those against the backstop and not proposing realistic alternatives in fact support re-establishing a border. Even if they do not admit it.”In a sign of the EU’s carefully coordinated response, the European commission issued its own statement minutes later saying it shared Tusk’s view.A commission spokeswoman welcomed the UK government’s “engagement and commitment to an orderly withdrawal” while making clear its objections.“We also note that the letter does not provide a legal operational solution to prevent the return of a hard border on the island of Ireland,” she said. “It does not set out what any alternative arrangements could be and in fact it recognises that there is no guarantee that such arrangements will be in place by the end of the transitional period.”Johnson admitted that the EU’s position was “a bit negative” but suggested Brussels must acknowledge the deal had been summarily rejected by the UK parliament.“I saw what Donald Tusk had to say, and it wasn’t redolent of a sense of optimism,” he said. “But I think, actually, we will get there. I think there’s a real sense now that something needs to be done with this backstop.”The prime minister said the UK had no intention of introducing any sort of new border checks or infrastructure at the Irish border. “It’s a bit of a paradox because it is the other side, a bit odd, the other side of the argument, the EU, who seem to think it might be necessary to have checks for them to preserve the integrity of the single market,” he said.Johnson had dashed any prospect of an early compromise in a letter on Monday night when he called on the EU to scrap the backstop, which he said was anti-democratic and “inconsistent with the sovereignty of the UK as a state”.The letter was addressed to Tusk, who chairs EU summits. Copies were also sent to EU27 leaders and the head of the European commission, Jean-Claude Juncker.As the EU made its first public statements, diplomats from the 27 countries were sent an analysis that described key arguments in Johnson’s letter as incorrect and misleading.The internal document seen by the Guardian states it was “incorrect” to suggest the people of Northern Ireland would have no influence over EU laws that applied to them, pointing to provisions in the Brexit agreement.Officials had already strongly rejected Johnson’s claim that the backstop was anti-democratic, pointing to the fact Northern Ireland had voted to remain in the EU and non-unionist parties were in favour of the backstop.Johnson’s claim that it would be possible for two separate legal and economic jurisdictions to exist on the island of Ireland with an open border was judged “misleading” as EU law provided “the common framework needed to enable frictionless trade between member states today”.While the EU has said it was ready to examine alternative arrangements to the backstop, officials have stressed that no such options exist today anywhere in the world.Neale Richmond, an Irish senator, said Johnson’s claim that the backstop posed a threat to the Good Friday agreement was “very disappointing language”.“The negotiations ended in November,” he told BBC Radio 4. “The British government in good faith agreed the withdrawal agreement. And the backstop isn’t impossible to get out of; that is simply misleading. However, it cannot be unilaterally exited by one state. What’s the point of the backstop if one side can simply just rip it up?”He ruled out a time limit on the backstop. “It is an insurance policy to protect a very fragile peace deal, therefore it needs the buy-in of both sides, because both the British and Irish government are co-guarantors of that Good Friday agreement.”An Irish government source played down the significance of Johnson’s letter, saying: “The letter just reiterates the British government’s position. The EU position remains clear. The withdrawal agreement cannot be renegotiated and the backstop is part of the withdrawal agreement.”The backstop was consistent with the Good Friday agreement and did not undermine the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, an analysis that London shared during and after negotiations, the source said. “It’s disappointing that the British government cannot stand over the commitment it gave in 2017 and 2018.”Guy Verhofstadt, who chairs the European parliament’s Brexit steering group, tweeted he did not see any majority in the UK parliament to remove the backstop. “It is a vital insurance policy, negotiated in good faith and supported by the people of the island of Ireland. The time for bluster and political blame games is fast running out.”Last week a leaked German government paper revealed that Berlin saw a “high probability” of a no-deal Brexit on 31 October as it was currently unforeseeable that Johnson would change his “tough negotiating position”.Additional reporting by Rory Carroll in Dublin and Philip Oltermann in Berlin. Topics Brexit Donald Tusk Boris Johnson Foreign policy European Union Ireland Europe news

Boris Johnson has told a Conservative leadership hustings in Belfast that the UK 'should not be terrified' of a no-deal Brexit. Johnson said farmers and just-in-time supply chains would be protected if the UK left the EU without a deal on 31 October, adding: 'I prophesy very confidently that we will have a successful Brexit, the planes will fly, there will be clean drinking water, and there will be whey for the Mars bars'

In the late 1980s, Lanier was a sought-after speaker in California, an enthusiastic supporter for theoretical, mind-bending experiences that technology would someday offer to audiences of blissed-out hippies. (Lanier discusses lots of drug use in the book but says he doesn’t personally partake, “not even marijuana.”) Two consequences of this early guru persona come out in the book: First, he offers dozens of different definitions of V.R. as a holistic force and cure-all. Second, he comes off as both a technically savvy inventor and a cult leader.ImageAs cult leaders go, he seems nice, and certainly preferable to most of the current crop of would-be Silicon Valley cult leaders. His vision is humanistic, and he insists that the most important goal of developing virtual reality is human connection, although he does talk about the fascination of seeing his own hand in V.R. a bit too often to be convincing on that point. He takes on ideology. He dismisses what he describes as the libertarian ideals that have replaced his friends the hippies, and more recently he strongly objects to the new Silicon Valley religion based on the all-powerful possibilities of artificial intelligence. “Every time you believe in A.I. you are reducing your belief in human agency and value,” he claims, and goes on to define virtual reality as “-A.I.,” the inverse of A.I., although whether he’s referring to technology or ideology he doesn’t clarify.Where Bailenson makes virtual reality more approachable and less like magic, as you’d expect from an academic scientist, Lanier plows into philosophy and expands the limits of what V.R. might achieve, blurring definitional lines and sometimes making it all sound truly surreal.In focusing on their authors’ own contributions to the development of this tool, these books miss a vital part of the discussion of virtual reality — the world of V.R. once the technology gets really good. They both mention the holodeck on “Star Trek,” a realistic and boundless virtual environment requiring no headset and causing no “V.R. sickness,” which stood as the background for countless episodes featuring tech failures and ethical dilemmas in subsequent “Star Trek” spinoff series.What “Star Trek” writers got right, and what both authors seem to miss or deliberately avoid, is that virtual reality is just a tool, and can be used for good or evil. Imagine the propaganda that can be developed once people can experience something almost firsthand. Far from being its opposite, V.R. can combine with A.I., creating realistic (and S.T.D. free!) virtual sex. This might be fantastic or terrible, depending on if we think sex with virtual robots is immoral, but imagine what would happen if abusive or pedophiliac makers got their hands on the controls. Instead of PTSD therapy, VR could be used for torture. I’m not trying to be cynical, just realistic: Once video became easy to manufacture, people started contributing widely to YouTube. And although I enjoy learning new knitting techniques on that platform, we have recently seen widespread propaganda and depraved cartoons that fool the recommendation algorithms into suggesting them for children. There’s no reason to imagine this won’t happen on a virtual reality platform when the time comes, which could be soon.Why the blind spot? I think it’s because the authors are themselves the current gatekeepers of this exciting technology, and although they plan for it to go mainstream, they desperately want it to be good for society. But Bailenson and Lanier cannot have it both ways: insisting that VR is very realistic, and thus affecting and potentially therapeutic, but also that it will be used only for good. That will happen only if it remains expensive and if the technology stalls. Fat chance.People interested in the current state of virtual reality’s applications will enjoy Bailenson, and people interested in the cultural and technological history of VR will likewise enjoy Lanier. As for my concerns about its possible future abuses, we might have to rely on science fiction writers for now.

(Reuters) - U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts defended the independence of the federal judiciary on Wednesday a day after President Donald Trump called a judge who ruled against his policy barring asylum for certain immigrants an “Obama judge,” but Trump rejected the rebuke, chided Roberts and launched a new round of attacks. The remarks by Roberts represented his first public response to Trump over the Republican president’s persistent criticism of the federal courts. Opponents of Trump have called his criticism of judges an attack on the rule of law in the United States. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts, a conservative who was appointed by Republican former President George W. Bush, said in a statement released by the Supreme Court in response to a news media inquiry. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for,” Roberts added in the statement, which did not mention Trump by name. In a Twitter post, Trump wrote in response: “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.” It is unusual for a U.S. chief justice, who presides over the nine-member U.S. Supreme Court, to issue such a statement in response to a president. The U.S. Constitution established the federal judiciary as a co-equal branch of government with the executive and legislative branches as part of a system of checks and balances on power. Presidents nominate federal judges and the Senate confirms them. Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University in Virginia, said Roberts “is sending up a signal that Trump has gone beyond the pale of responsible political discourse.” “For a long time the chief justice didn’t respond to it. I suspect at some point Roberts decided enough was enough and he had to say something,” Somin added. Roberts, who administered the oath of office to Trump when he was sworn in as president last year, has himself been the target of Trump’s attacks, in particular because of a 2012 ruling that preserved Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement, the Affordable Care Act, dubbed Obamacare. In a tweet after that ruling, Trump wrote, “Congratulations to John Roberts for making Americans hate the Supreme Court because of his BS.” Trump on Tuesday took aim at U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar in San Francisco, who on Monday temporarily blocked an order by the president that barred asylum for immigrants who enter the country illegally from Mexico. Tigar was appointed by Democratic former President Barack Obama. “This was an Obama judge,” Trump said. “And I’ll tell you what. It’s not going to happen like this anymore.” Trump also blasted the entire San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears appeals from federal courts in nine western states including California. Trump called the liberal-leaning 9th Circuit a “disgrace.” That court has ruled against Trump in several high-profile cases including his travel ban targeting people from several Muslim-majority countries and his bid to rescind a program that protects from deportation hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants brought into the country as children. In Twitter posts on Wednesday, Trump heaped scorn on the idea that the 9th Circuit “was indeed an ‘independent judiciary,’” and again brought up the idea of breaking up that court because the region it covers is “too big.” He added, “Judicial Activism, by people who know nothing about security and the safety of our citizens, is putting our country in great danger. Not good!” Judges in that region have also blocked construction of the Keystone XL pipeline project Trump has championed, and his administration’s effort to restrict the military service of transgender troops. Trump last year referred to a jurist who ruled against him on his travel ban as a “so-called judge.” Trump as a presidential candidate in 2016 said a judge in a case involving Trump University was biased against him because of the jurist’s Mexican-American heritage. Neal Katyal, Obama’s former acting U.S. solicitor general, wrote on Twitter that Trump’s goal was to delegitimize the courts and Roberts because they are part of an institution designed to serve as a check “against his impulsivity and reckless disregard for the rule of law.” FILE PHOTO: U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts participates in taking a new family photo with his fellow justices at the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 1, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File PhotoWith the help of a Senate controlled by his fellow Republicans, Trump has appointed a succession of conservative judges in a bid to move the federal judiciary to the right. His appointments of Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court have solidified its conservative majority for perhaps years to come. Roberts issued his statement in response to a request for comment from the Associated Press about Trump’s Tuesday remarks. (For a graphic showing Trump’s impact on federal appeals courts, click tmsnrt.rs/2PPsGtM ) Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will DunhamOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

BERLIN (Reuters) - Slumping exports sent Germany’s economy into reverse in the second quarter, with prospects of an early recovery slim as its manufacturers struggle at the sharp end of a global slowdown amplified by tariff conflicts and fallout from Brexit. Overall output fell 0.1% quarter-on-quarter, data showed on Wednesday. With pressure growing on a thus far reluctant government to provide more fiscal stimulus, the economy minister said action was needed to prevent a second consecutive quarter of contraction that would tip the country into recession. The global slowdown, reinforced by Chinese industrial output expanding at its lowest rates in 17 years in July, has broadly impacted the euro zone, where corresponding data showed second quarter growth halved to 0.2%. But Germany’s traditionally export-reliant economy - Europe’s largest - has been particularly vulnerable, amid signs that the boost it has received from a sustained period of surging domestic demand is waning. “Today’s GDP report definitely marks the end of a golden decade for the German economy,” said ING analyst Carsten Brzeski. “Trade conflicts, global uncertainty and the struggling automotive sector have finally brought (it)... down on its knee.” On a calendar-adjusted basis, annual growth slowed to 0.4% from 0.9% in the first quarter, the Federal Statistics Office data showed, and for 2019 overall Berlin expects growth to drop to just 0.5% from last year’s 1.5%. (GRAPHIC - German, euro zone growth slowdown: tmsnrt.rs/2N3setK) The economy ministry called the outlook subdued, noting that Britain’s scheduled exit from the EU on Oct. 31 looked likely to be a disorderly one, while Economy Minister Peter Altmaier said Wednesday’s data was a wake-up call. “We are in a phase of economic weakness but not yet in recession. We can avoid that if we take the right measures,” Altmaier told mass-market daily Bild. His ministry said impetus was unlikely to come from the industrial sector, whose BDI association - in an unusual move -joined a growing chorus of voices urging the government to kick-start growth by ditching its balanced budget rule and finance more public investments through new debt. A government spokeswoman said Berlin did not currently see “any need for further measures to stabilize the economy,” which was still expected to grow slightly this year. FILE PHOTO: Volkswagen export cars are seen in the port of Emden, beside the VW plant, Germany March 9, 2018. REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer/File PhotoDespite Wednesday’s headline quarterly figure matching expectations, markets also took fright, with the yield on Germany’s benchmark 10-year government bond hitting a record low of -0.624%. “The bottom line is that the German economy is teetering on the edge of recession,” Andrew Kenningham from Capital Economics said, noting that exporters were facing an even bigger potential hit if a no-deal Brexit materialized. The statistics office said that net trade slowed second quarter economic activity as exports recorded a stronger quarter-on-quarter decrease than imports. Construction was also a drag, after the sector pushed up overall growth in the first three months due to an unusually mild winter. In a conclusion echoed by the economy ministry and Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann, the office said domestic demand remained robust. That has become an important growth driver for Germany in recent years as consumers benefit from record-high employment, inflation-busting pay hikes and low borrowing costs. But UniCredit analyst Andreas Rees suggested the positive impact of those factors was limited. “For a year now, the German economy has been only crawling forward,” Rees said, with the many uncertainties facing exporters presaging more pain over the rest of the year. ING’s Brzeski said a national debate about easing fiscal policy to provide stimulus - a focus for international criticism of the government’s economic management since the peak of the financial crisis - would get more heated. In a guest article in Wednesday’s edition of business daily Handelsblatt, BDI association managing director Joachim Lang said the balanced budget that the government has stuck to rigidly since 2014 “should be called into question in an economically fragile situation”. A government official told Reuters last week that Berlin was considering issuing new debt to finance a costly climate protection package. Slideshow (3 Images)On Tuesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel poured cold water on the calls for more fiscal stimulus, and on Wednesday the government spokeswoman said this position had not changed. “The fiscal policy of the German government is already expansive,” the spokeswoman added. Merkel had noted the already agreed removal of the Soli income tax surcharge for most employees from 2021, a relief worth some 11 billion euros per year that is likely to support domestic demand and with it overall growth. graphic by Sujata Rao, editing by John StonestreetOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Several analysts slashed price targets and earnings estimates for Apple in the past few weeks. Concerns about soft sales for iPhones may be hurting Apple's overall digital sales. Research firm eMarketer said in a report Thursday that it now expects Walmart (WMT) to overtake Apple as the third largest e-commerce firm in the United States because Apple's sales growth is forecast to slow. Both companies trail Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY).But one influential Wall Street analyst came out in defense of Apple Thursday. Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty wrote in a report that the "supply chain noise" about Apple suppliers was creating a buying opportunity for the stock.Huberty argued that investors are overreacting to the warnings from some components companies and "remain narrowly focused" on unit sales. She thinks investors are forgetting that Apple's services business, which includes things like the App Store, iCloud, Apple Music and Apple Pay, is growing more rapidly than most other Apple businesses.The services division generated about $10 billion in sales last quarter. That business -- which features lucrative recurring subscription revenue -- is much more profitable than the relatively low-margin business of selling phones and other hardware.

Syracuse University in New York has suspended a fraternity chapter after members were filmed using "extremely racist" and "homophobic" language, the university's chancellor said.Kent Syverud called the footage "extremely troubling and disturbing".The video came to the attention of the staff after it was published by a university newspaper on Wednesday.It shows students using racist, sexist, and homophobic language, as well as performing pretend sex acts.The video was reportedly posted to a secret Facebook page but was discovered and published by the university newspaper, the Daily Orange.The university suspended the engineering fraternity, Theta Tau, following protests by students on campus on Wednesday afternoon. "I am appalled and shaken by this and deeply concerned for all members of our community," Mr Syverud wrote in an email to all students. The deadly problem with US fraternities 'Shocking apathy' to fraternity drinking "The conduct is deeply harmful and contrary to the values and community standards we expect of our students. There is absolutely no place at Syracuse University for behaviour or language that degrades any individual or group's race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, disability or religious beliefs," he wrote.Fraternities are student groups, usually based in residential houses, that operate with a high degree of autonomy. They have been caught up in several high-profile controversies in recent years, including the death of a student at Penn State University last year following a drinking game.Two public forums were held at Syracuse following the publication of the video.Speaking at one of the forums, Charity Luster, vice president of the university's National Society of Black Engineers, said: "I hope this event does not just spark a conversation on one video, but that it sparks a conversation around how people of colour and underrepresented people are treated on this campus."

This inference from the text is backed by founding-era practice. During that period, it was assumed that even suspected pirates captured at sea, whether U.S. citizens or not, were protected by the Bill of Rights and therefore entitled to the due process of law guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. Immigrants surely deserve at least as much protection as alleged pirates.During the founding era, the dominant view, held by Founding Fathers including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (the “father of the Constitution”), was that the federal government did not even have a general power to restrict immigration. The Supreme Court did not decide that Congress had a general power over immigration until the Chinese Exclusion Case of 1889, a ruling heavily influenced by racial prejudice. It is perverse that the exercise of a federal power that rests on such dubious foundations is largely exempt from the judicial scrutiny that applies to almost all other powers.Admittedly, since the late 19th century, many Supreme Court precedents have reinforced the so-called plenary power doctrine, which holds that normal constitutional constraints on federal authority largely do not apply to immigration restrictions. For example, a variety of Supreme Court decisions hold that migrants could be excluded based on their political views, and based on restrictive laws whose enactment was in large part motivated by racial and ethnic prejudice. But these precedents are not as clear as is often assumed. Many upheld discriminatory immigration restrictions when similar discrimination was also permitted in the domestic context. For example, some involved racially discriminatory restrictions at a time when courts also upheld domestic Jim Crow laws, and others upheld the exclusion of communists at a time when courts permitted domestic persecution of communists as well.Still, in addition to rejecting the reasoning of the travel-ban decision, uprooting the plenary power theory entirely would require reconsideration of the traditional interpretations of many earlier precedents, even though it would not require fully overruling those cases. The Court could instead accept that those precedents were justifiable insofar as they upheld discrimination that was also considered permissible in other areas of law at the time, but reject the idea that they require perpetuation of a double standard between immigration law and other fields.Rejecting that view is the right course. The plenary-power doctrine has no basis in the Constitution. It was born of the racial and ethnic bigotry of the late 19th century, and deserves to suffer the same fate as Plessy v. Ferguson and other products of that mind-set.Abolishing constitutional double standards in immigration law would not end all immigration restrictions. But it would ensure that immigration policy is subject to the same constitutional constraints as other exercises of federal authority. The government could still restrict immigration based on a variety of characteristics. For example, it could still discriminate using such criteria as migrants’ education, occupational credentials, and criminal records. But it would no longer be permitted to engage in racial, ethnic, religious, or other discrimination that is forbidden in other contexts.Ending this double standard will not be easy, and probably cannot be done by lawyers alone. The civil-rights movement, the feminist movement, and the gun-rights movement are all examples of how successful struggles to strengthen protection for constitutional rights usually require a strategy that integrates litigation with political mobilization. The lessons of that history might be useful to those who seek to end one of the most egregious double standards in our constitutional jurisprudence. Ilya Sominis Professor of Law at George Mason University, and author ofDemocracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is SmarterandThe Grasping Hand: Kelo v. New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain.

The Constitution, in fact, contains tools that enable elected officials to control the courts. Restructuring them is one. This option came up recently; in August, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, led several of his colleagues in filing a brief with the Supreme Court regarding the scope of the Second Amendment. It accused the Court of being governed by partisan considerations and concluded with a scarcely veiled threat: Quoting a recent poll about the judiciary, the brief hoped the Court could “heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.’”This threat may have been overheated—after all, the “neutral justiciability principles” the senators insisted be followed in the case of gun control could not have generated many landmark precedents sacred to the left—but congressional authority to control the court is unquestionable.It could not have been otherwise, because the Framers feared unchecked authority for any institution of government, a mood the pseudonymous writer Brutus—an opponent of the Constitution—captured in arguing that the document did not sufficiently check judges: “In short, they are independent of the people, of the legislature, and of every power under heaven. Men placed in this situation will soon feel themselves independent of heaven itself.”Supporters of the Constitution were eager to dispel this impression of unchecked judicial power. In “Federalist No. 81,” Alexander Hamilton denied that the Supreme Court could get away with sustained abuses of its power, in part because Congress could retaliate by impeaching justices—a second tool available to elected officials seeking greater control over the courts. “This is alone,” he wrote, “a complete security.”A third option for controlling the judiciary is Congress’s power to place boundaries around the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction. This power of “jurisdiction stripping” results from Article III of the Constitution, which gives the Court appellate jurisdiction in certain categories of cases, “with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.”The political authority inherent in wielding these tools, in turn, is subject to the oversight of the people, who have proved reluctant to support its frequent use. Even in the throes of the Great Depression, Americans rejected Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plan to save the New Deal by adding several justices to the Supreme Court.There is no comparable crisis that would justify congressional interference with the Supreme Court today. (Some assert that Donald Trump’s presidency presents such a crisis, but that is a crisis for voters, not judges, to consider.) The problem is not that these tools are unused, but rather that their deployment has become unthinkable. Justices know they will never be impeached for the content of their rulings, a power Congress has shunned since the abortive impeachment of Justice Samuel Chase in the early 19th century. Similarly, Congress should not restructure the Supreme Court because it disagrees with a single decision or even with a single generation of justices. But the idea that Congress could never legitimately do so encourages judicial arrogance.

The Trump administration seems to regard “extraordinary relief” from the high court as nothing more than its due. While the Court has not granted relief each time it has been sought, the government has gotten much of what it wants in high-profile cases such as the “travel ban,” the transgender military service ban, and the asylum rule. And, as Vladeck pointed out, until last week no one on the Court had even suggested that the government was abusing these procedures.Sotomayor’s dissent breaks the silence. But the majority, and in particular Chief Justice John Roberts, have stayed mum, suggesting to Vladeck that the Court has shifted its view of emergency motions. “That silence,” Vladeck told me in an interview, “is certainly resonating in the Solicitor General’s office”—meaning that the government may now feel secure in asking the high court to rein in judges below.One common response to Vladeck’s statistics is that the Court’s aggressiveness has been spurred by an increase in so-called nationwide injunctions issued by district judges. “That’s way too easy,” Vladeck said. Although there has been an increase in such injunctions (it began in the Obama years), many emergency stays have been issued in cases where no nationwide injunction is at stake, or in more or less routine disputes over “discovery,” the information the government must provide when it is sued. To Vladeck, the real change is that the new conservative majority is willing to in essence decide the cases before they are briefed or argued—to predict that the government will win when the case finally reaches them, and thus should have its way in the interim.In the article, Vladeck points out that one of the factors a court must decide is whether either party will suffer “irreparable injury”—either because an injunction is granted, harming the defendants, or denied, harming the plaintiffs. Thus, in a suit against the government, courts must balance the damage to the government caused by the delay of a possibly lawful policy against the harm to plaintiffs caused by being subjected to a possibly unlawful action. Under Trump, the government seems to be suffering all the harm. Vladeck argued that the Court should explain this shift. “If what’s going on in these cases is that the majority is no longer interested in considering the harm that these policies are—or could be—inflicting while they are in force, it would behoove them to say so,” he told me.The government’s use of these procedures smacks of entitlement, of a sense that Republicans went to great trouble to tilt the Court in their favor and should now reap their reward. Similarly, some conservatives have muttered that lower courts are wandering out of their lanes, with one Trump defender attacking anti-administration rulings as “the judicial resistance.” Indeed, in a surly dissent in the census case last June, Justice Clarence Thomas branded District Judge Jesse Furman, who had ruled against the government at trial, “a judge predisposed to distrust” the administration. Thomas also claimed Furman had “create[d] an eye-catching conspiracy web” out of unrelated facts. As judicial conduct used to be measured, it was a shocking breach of protocol. Yet Thomas’s opinion was joined by Trump’s two appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.Which brings us back to my initial question. What is the Supreme Court today, in 2019? I fear it has taken on the role of enforcing Trump’s will against fellow judges. Garrett Eppsis a contributing writer atThe Atlantic. He teaches constitutional law and creative writing for law students at the University of Baltimore. His latest book isAmerican Justice 2014: Nine Clashing Visions on the Supreme Court.

The US Supreme Court left the future of the US asylum system uncertain Wednesday night by allowing the Trump administration to proceed with its plan to bar most asylum seekers at the southern border while a lawsuit over the rule makes its way through the courts.The justices’ decision effectively reinstated a Trump administration rule that prevents migrants from applying for asylum if they passed through another country other than their own before arriving in the US. That means that asylum seekers from any country but Mexico will now be ineligible for asylum if they show up at the southern border. There are limited exceptions to the rule: those who apply for asylum in another country, but are rejected may bring their claims in the US. Victims of human trafficking and migrants who traveled through countries that are not parties to certain international human rights agreements are also exempt. But for the most part, it effectively closes the door on seeking asylum at the southern border. The Court did not rule on whether the Trump rule is legal — just that the administration has the right to impose it temporarily.A case about the legality of the rule itself is still making its way through the courts and the justices are expected to eventually weigh in. But in the meantime, the Trump administration is moving forward to use it to block most asylum seekers’ cases.The decision outraged immigrant advocates: It represents a “massive reversal of American leadership to protect the most vulnerable people fleeing extreme violence and persecution from around the world,” Todd Schulte, president of the immigrant advocacy group FWD.us, said in a statement.The rule, which was issued on July 16, is one of many recent Trump administration measures to curtail asylum in the US. It strips asylum eligibility from any foreign national who “enters, attempts to enter, or arrives in the United States across the southern land border ... after transiting through at least one country outside the alien’s country of citizenship, nationality, or last lawful habitual residence en route to the United States.”It’s one of several measures the Trump administration has taken to make seeking asylum in the United States more difficult.Migrants to the US are able to seek asylum either by presenting themselves to immigration agents at ports of entry or by doing so when they’re arrested while seeking to cross the border without authorization. Those who pass through Canada on their way to the border have been required since 2002 to claim asylum in Canada instead under an agreement between Canada and the US government. But most migrants seeking asylum in the US pass through Mexico, coming from the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, where rampant crime, violence and corruption is driving tens of thousands to flee.President Donald Trump has seen rising numbers of border arrests, generally considered a proxy for levels of unauthorized immigration, as a crisis worthy of declaring a national emergency in February. But while he characterizes the crisis as one of national security, immigrant advocates argue it is instead a matter of humanitarian concern.To discourage unauthorized immigration, the Trump administration is also sending migrants who line up at a port of entry or who are arrested when trying to cross the southern border back to Mexico to await decisions on their asylum claims. Under the policy, which is known as “Remain in Mexico,” the US has returned more than 42,000 migrants to Mexico as of September 1, according to US Customs and Border Protection. And the administration in July vastly expanded its power to quickly deport migrants who have recently arrived, without offering them the opportunity to pursue their asylum claims before an immigration judge.The Supreme Court’s decision will likely deepen the crisis by pushing more asylum seekers into Mexico, which is ill-equipped to offer humanitarian aid. In Mexico, asylum seekers face dangers of kidnapping and sexual assault, overcrowded shelters, and slim employment prospects. They have difficulty finding lawyers, without which their asylum cases are almost surely doomed to fail.A federal judge in San Francisco had blocked the rule nationwide after the American Civil Liberties Union, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a lawsuit challenging its legality. The Supreme Court lifted that block Wednesday night, but has only reinstated the rule while the case goes through appeals in lower courts and has not yet decided whether it is legal. Opponents of the rule have argued that it violates longstanding principles in the Refugee Act of 1980, in which the US codified its international human rights obligations as a party to the 1951 United National Refugee Convention. The Refugee Act says that any noncitizen in the US can apply for asylum “whether or not at a designated port of arrival” and “irrespective of [their immigration] status.” The only exceptions are for those who were “firmly resettled” in another country before they arrived in the US or if they passed through another country with which the US had a “Safe Third Country” agreement. A Safe Third Country agreement is a bilateral treaty under which one country can reject and return an asylum seeker to another safe country. The US currently only has a Safe Third Country Agreement with Canada. The Trump administration is working on negotiating such agreements with the Northern Triangle countries, as well as Mexico and Panama, but immigrant advocates say that those countries are far from safe for asylum seekers. Opponents also argue that the Trump administration also skirted rulemaking requirements by issuing the rule without giving the public notice and the opportunity to submit comments on it. So the justices may still choose to strike down the rule as unlawful. Lee Gelernt, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union who is challenging the policy, noted in a statement on Wednesday that the ruling is just a “temporary step.” “[W]e’re hopeful we’ll prevail at the end of the day,” he said. “The lives of thousands of families are at stake.”In the meantime, however, the Trump administration seems to be charging ahead with its plan to expand the policy. Department of Justice spokesperson Alexei Woltornist said that rule will help “bring order to the crisis at the southern border, close loopholes in our immigration system, and discourage frivolous [asylum] claims.” Acting US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ken Cuccinelli, meanwhile, signaled that the administration would soon issue further guidance on its implementation in a tweet. (2/x) @realDonaldTrump’s administration uses every tool in the toolbox to try and solve the crisis at our southern border. @USCIS will commence implementing the asylum rule ASAP.— USCIS Acting Director Ken Cuccinelli (@USCISCuccinelli) September 11, 2019 The rule will now go into effect across the entire southern border, affecting tens of thousands of asylum seekers. Over 73,000 applied for asylum in fiscal year 2016, the most recent year for which statistics are available. That number has likely grown significantly over the past year.Migrants who already have already applied for asylum should be unaffected, as the rule will not be applied retroactively, Jorge Luis Vasquez, an attorney at the immigrant advocacy group Latino Justice, said. But it’s not immediately clear how exactly immigration authorities will handle asylum seekers that continue to show up at the southern border.Asylum seekers could be detained and make their case before an immigration judge, which would require proving that they had unsuccessfully sought asylum in another country prior to their arrival in the US. But that could create a huge backlog in the immigration courts because asylum seekers whose claims are denied will be more likely to appeal, Vasquez said.Alternatively, asylum seekers could be turned away and instructed to apply for asylum in Mexico first under the “Remain in Mexico” policy. But Mexico has neither the infrastructure to absorb tens of thousands of asylum seekers nor a legally robust asylum process. Vasquez said that individuals fleeing persecution in Central America — for example, on account of sexual orientation — are not likely to find protection in Mexico. The US regularly accepts asylum seekers from Mexico who have suffered from the same kinds of persecution, he added. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a policy analyst for the American Immigration Council, said that the rule will particularly hurt tens of thousands of asylum seekers who have been subject to CBP’s practice of “metering” at ports of entry on the border. Since at least 2016, CBP has been turning away migrants before they cross the international boundary between the US and Mexico if a port of entry is at capacity to process them, according to the DHS Office of Inspector General. Many of those migrants wait months for the opportunity to apply for asylum at a port of entry. “Because those people chose to do what the Trump administration asked them to do, they will now be banned from applying for asylum,” Reichlin-Melnick said.

Democratic presidential candidates have mostly been able to avoid a substantive discussion of what immigration policy should look like. Expressing outrage over President Donald Trump’s policies has sufficed for debate soundbites.That might be politically expedient; immigration is one of the top issues on voters’ minds, but also one of the most divisive. Being vague is a way to put off alienating various wings of the party until the primaries are over. The candidates have tended to speak in platitudes, like when Amy Klobuchar said in the first debate, “Immigrants do not diminish America. They are America.” Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker got mixed reviews for answering questions about immigration in Spanish in an attempt to show solidarity with Latino voters.There was one moment that spurred numerous immigration think pieces. During the first debate in June, Julián Castro asked fellow candidates onstage to commit to repealing Section 1325 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, a provision in federal law that makes crossing the border without authorization a crime. But that moment stood out because it was unusually specific. If a Democratic president makes “comprehensive immigration reform” a priority, as virtually all of the candidates have vowed, voters do not have much information about what that means. With a (mercifully) smaller pool of 10 candidates taking the stage for Thursday night’s upcoming debate, there might finally be more room to elaborate. Here are four questions that moderators should ask to get a more expansive view of the candidates’ positions:1. What immigration-related executive actions could we expect from your administration in your first 100 days? The US Supreme Court has historically recognized the president’s broad powers over immigration, but Democrats have accused Trump of overstepping his executive authority with his unilateral, sweeping changes to immigration policy.In the wake of Trump’s travel ban, when the president issued an executive order banning individuals from seven countries, Democrats in the House and Senate proposed a bill that would rein in the executive authority of all future presidents such that they could not issue any similar ban. House Democrats also filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the southern border, claiming that he could not invoke his emergency powers simply to circumvent Congress’ refusal to fully fund his border wall in its 2019 budget deal. But limiting executive authority over immigration is a double-edged sword for Democrats. If Republicans retain control of the Senate as expected in 2020 and gridlock in Congress continues, a Democratic president’s only means of reversing the Trump administration’s immigration policies would be by executive fiat. Others have suggested executive actions they will pursue, but haven’t nailed down a timeline: Elizabeth Warren says she will first “work with Congress to pass broad-reaching reform” but is “prepared to move forward with executive action if Congress refuses to act.”Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, meanwhile, have not made formal commitments to use executive authority to reverse Trump’s immigration policies. While all of the candidates have promised wide-reaching, progressive change in immigration and across other issues, presidents only have so much time and political capital. After pushing through sweeping health care reforms with the Affordable Care Act, former President Barack Obama failed to pass a comprehensive immigration reform package in 2013. So, asking the Democratic candidates to elaborate on their immigration priorities for their first 100 days will help determine whether the issue is actually a top priority for them. 2. What would your overall approach be to immigration enforcement on the US-Mexico border? Republicans have accused Democrats of pushing for open borders. In reality, few go that far; some just think that crossing the border without authorization should not be a crime, as it is currently under Section 1325 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Historically, most immigrants who cross the border illegally have never been prosecuted, but the Trump administration has begun doing so under its “zero tolerance” policy and cited those prosecutions as the basis of family separations. Polls show that a majority of Americans oppose Trump’s border wall, but not all forms of border security: About three-quarters of the public support hiring “significantly more” border patrol agents and a third say that immigration levels should be decreased overall.If voters’ attitudes toward border security are nuanced, Democrats’ border security plans should reflect that. To start, they will have to answer questions about how they will detain immigrants (if at all), what kinds of unauthorized immigrants might be targeted with limited enforcement resources, how much funding immigration enforcement agencies will get, and how they will reduce the backlog of cases in immigration court. Democrats can agree that Trump’s method, which includes separating families in immigration detention and sending Central American migrants back to Mexico, is abhorrent. But how they would go about securing the border is a tricky question, and previous Democratic administrations have not exactly provided a good model. Obama struggled to balance humanitarian concerns with border enforcement. As Trump has repeatedly noted, it is true that Obama did separate families in immigration detention, albeit on a much smaller scale than the current administration. Immigrant rights groups labeled him as the “deporter in chief” because he deported more immigrants than any other president — over 385,000 in fiscal years 2009 to 2011 and peaking at 409,849 in fiscal 2012 (though former Obama officials have defended that the administration only targeted recent arrivals and violent criminals). Five years later, Democrats are still wrestling with how they will approach immigration enforcement, tackling it piecemeal for now. The idea of abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has gained the most attention in advocacy circles. Elizabeth Warren has endorsed the “Abolish ICE” movement, and Kamala Harris has also pushed for major changes to the agency, suggesting that the federal government should “probably think about starting from scratch.” Castro has backed the decriminalization of unauthorized border crossings, challenging his opponents to do the same during a Democratic debate in June.3. How many refugees should the US aim to resettle?This is a simple, numerically based question that can help voters gauge the candidates’ commitment to reestablishing the US’s reputation as a world leader in protecting the most vulnerable immigrant populations. So much of the conversation around refugees and asylees in the debates so far has been dominated by denouncing Trump’s policies, so it would be useful to force the candidates to commit to hard numbers of how many they would admit.Historically, the US has taken in more refugees, about 3 million since 1980, than any other nation. But the US has scaled back its refugee program under Trump, lowering the cap on refugees admitted to the US from 110,000 in fiscal year 2017 to 30,000 in fiscal year 2019 — the lowest number since the Refugee Act was signed into law in 1980. And the Trump administration is expected to cut refugee admissions even further.Some Democratic presidential candidates have proposed elevating the refugee cap as part of their immigration plans. Booker and Castro have proposed reverting to the pre-Trump refugee cap of 110,000, but Elizabeth Warren would go even further, setting the cap at 125,000 initially and increasing it to 175,000 by the end of her first term.4. How would you work with governments in Central America to reduce factors driving migrants away from their home countries?In light of declining migrant arrests, Trump may claim that he is delivering on his promise to secure the southern border, but it’s not so clear that his policies have done anything to address the underlying problem: unprecedented numbers of migrants fleeing Central America. This question would illuminate how Democrats would reduce push factors and think not just about a border crisis but a regional crisis. Previously, migrants arrested at the southern border were primarily single adult males from Mexico. But since the summer of 2018, there has been a fundamental change in migration patterns: Now, it is primarily Central American children and families.Castro and Booker have proposed significant aid packages, but Democrats would also likely need to smooth over political tensions with Mexico and the “Northern Triangle” countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador in Trump’s wake. In June, Trump had threatened to impose tariffs on all Mexican goods if it did not step up its immigration enforcement efforts.And acting US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan told reporters Monday that Trump is pressuring Northern Triangle countries to adopt agreements that would effectively cut off migrants before they reach the US. The so-called Safe Third Country agreements would make any migrant who passes through those countries ineligible to apply for asylum in the US.

On Monday, the supreme court will reconvene after its annual summer recess. Gun control, immigration and transgender rights are set for argument and abortion will be there too – just in time for the Democratic convention in July. John Roberts, the chief justice, may yet be called to preside over a Senate impeachment trial.Hovering over this tableau are Merrick Garland’s confirmation that never was, the debacle of Bush v Gore in 2000 and Donald Trump’s 2.86m popular vote defeat. A minority has imposed its will upon the majority twice in less than 20 years, and there is sufficient reason to believe history may repeat itself next year.With America’s cold civil war getting hotter by the day, Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist and Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network jump headfirst into the scrum, with Justice on Trial. Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly of the New York Times stake their turf in the knife fight, meanwhile, with The Education of Brett Kavanaugh.Unlike Carl Hulse’s Confirmation Bias, which captured in vivid nuance the cynicism and power politics in which the Kavanaugh nomination marinated, these books generate more heat than light, serving as competing cultural surrogates.Practically speaking, Justice on Trial could have been subtitled “Christine Blasey Ford Was No Saint”. Hemingway and Severino also give the president space on Charlottesville, make de jure segregation sound legally defensible and misstate a basic fact.As for Pogrebin and Kelly, they fail to deliver a smoking gun and their book has seen the Times dragged into a pit of “fake news” and allegations of biased reporting. Their book lacks the wallop of She Said, also by Times reporters, which broke new ground on the Harvey Weinstein story.During Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Ford came forward to say he sexually assaulted her at a party in Bethesda in 1982. He denied it.Justice on Trial delivers anonymous allegations by “female classmates and friends at area schools”. They recall Ford as a “heavy drinker who was much more aggressive with boys than they were”. One such “friend” quips that if Ford “‘only had one beer’” on the night of the alleged assault, “then it must have been early in the evening”.Hemingway and Severino effectively give cover to the Maine senator Susan Collins for voting to confirm Kavanaugh, a choice which weighs heavy on her chances of re-election. With Trump’s impeachment by Thanksgiving a real possibility, Collins, who would serve as a juror at Trump’s trial, could use all the help she can get.The authors also tacitly acknowledge the role of white identity politics in providing glue for Trump’s coalition and the GOP. Describing a 2017 meeting about supreme court choices between the president and Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, Justice on Trial records a backdrop of a “tumultuous summer” marked by the firing of the White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and “riots in Charlottesville”.“Riots”? Not even “good people” and “both sides”!This is not an isolated instance. After Hemingway and Severino do their best Robert Bork imitation and attack the supreme court for striking down a Connecticut statute that outlawed the sale of contraceptives even to married couples, the authors trash the legal underpinnings of Brown v Board of Education, the landmark ruling that state-imposed school segregation is unconstitutional, and that there is no such thing as a “separate but equal school”.Decisions such as Brown, they write, “may have been correct in their result but were decided on the basis of sociological studies rather than legal principles”.“May”?Not a word is said about another foundational document, the Declaration of Independence, its assurance of “unalienable rights” and its fundamental premise that “all men are created equal”. To some conservatives like George Will, the constitution was the Declaration of Independence made marble. To others, not so much.Trump appointees to lower courts have taken a similarly dim view of Brown and dodged on whether it is binding precedent and properly decided.Andrew Oldham, now on the court of appeals, bobbed and weaved at his confirmation hearing, decrying the doctrine of separate but equal but refusing to vouch for Brown. As he put it, the case merely “corrected an egregious legal error”.Neomi Rao, who replaced Kavanaugh on the DC circuit, likewise danced around the topic, telling a Senate committee “Brown is a really important precedent” and Plessy v Ferguson was a “real black mark on our history” – but punting on the vitality of Brown.Then there is the ghost of Merrick Garland. Here, Justice on Trial forgets its history, claiming: “There had been only three confirmations in the final year of a presidency when the opposing party controlled the Senate, most recently in 1888.”Not exactly.The last time that happened was a full century later, in 1988. Ronald Reagan was president and a Democratic Senate unanimously confirmed Anthony Kennedy, for whom Kavanaugh would clerk.Pogrebin and Kelly do little to dispel the suspicion they are playing to the Times’ core audience. They announce where they attended college, Yale and Columbia, and also where they went to prep school: Riverdale Country and National Cathedral.Of course, it may be to their advantage that this is the privileged world from which Kavanaugh sprang. Unfortunately, the authors – or more precisely, their employer – fumbled the lede. Prior to publication, the blockbuster revelation that Kavanaugh’s friends once “pushed his penis into the hand of a female student during a drunken dorm party” took on a life of its own.The paper of record appeared to have sat on the story. Furthermore, the version of the story the Times eventually published omitted a key fact contained in the book: “The female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident.”When the president is branding the paper the “enemy of the people”, and attendees at Maga rallies lustily nod in agreement, these things matter.Pogrebin and Kelly quote Ben Rhodes, a senior adviser to Barack Obama, who lambasts the GOP on the “cynicism of their strategy” over Garland. But the book does not ask what the Democrats would have done in 2016 if they were in control of the Senate and Mitt Romney were in the Oval Office.They also tread lightly on the cultural significance of Kavanaugh, connecting him mainly to the #MeToo moment. His confirmation, Pogrebin and Kelly write, “was an education in the political partisanship and cultural sensitivities of the current moment two years after a polarizing presidential election”.In fact, the Kavanaugh confirmation crystalized the red-blue chasm as no other confirmation has, highlighting a divide that has been rapidly growing for at least two decades and which was birthed during the heyday of the 1960s.The Kavanaugh hearings helped Mitch McConnell stay Senate majority leader but cost the GOP control of the House. On election day 2018, a majority of Americans said they disapproved of Trump’s record on “supreme court nominations”.If past is prelude, in 2020 the court will be on the ballot again. Topics US supreme court Brett Kavanaugh US constitution and civil liberties Law (US) US politics Trump administration Republicans reviews

Enlarge this image The Supreme Court justices, pictured in November 2018, start a new term on Monday. J. Scott Applewhite/AP hide caption toggle caption J. Scott Applewhite/AP The Supreme Court justices, pictured in November 2018, start a new term on Monday. J. Scott Applewhite/AP The Supreme Court may be eager to portray itself as an apolitical institution. But this term, political questions writ large are knocking at the high court door.The upcoming term will almost surely be a march to the right on almost every issue that is a flashpoint in American society. Among them: abortion, guns, gay rights, the separation of church and state, immigration and presidential power.Also headed to the court are cases testing the power of Congress to get information from the executive branch and elsewhere, information that is relevant to congressional oversight and potentially, to impeachment.Clearly, President Trump had something like that in mind when he said of the current impeachment inquiry, "It shouldn't be allowed. There should be a way of stopping it, maybe legally through the courts."And if that isn't enough, pending before the court is a sleeper case testing the very structure of our presidential election system.The Supreme Court, by tradition, has tried to stay out of big controversies in an election year. But the justices, even if reticent, don't always have control over their docket. When the lower courts are divided on major questions, the justices cannot always escape their responsibility to be the final decider.Here are themes to watch:Some justices are itching to play their conservative cardsThe Supreme Court is a very different place since the 2018 retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, a centrist conservative, who often cast the deciding vote in closely contested cases. With President Trump's appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to replace him, hard-core conservatives now have a firm majority on the court. And some of them have been itching for quite some time to reverse Roe v. Wade, to expand gun rights, religious rights and more. Law A Brief History Of Anthony Kennedy's Swing Vote — And The Landmark Cases It Swayed If there is a new swing justice now, it likely will be Chief Justice John Roberts. But his swings to the left have been rare indeed — upholding Obamacare in 2012, and seven years later, repudiating the citizenship question on the census.SCOTUSblog publisher Tom Goldstein calls the chief justice "a solid conservative vote." The disagreement among the five justices on the right of the court, he adds, has been, "How fast do you move?"Is the right to abortion going to be struck down?The first place that disagreement could become apparent is on abortion, in a case that asks the court to essentially reverse a 2016 decision that struck down a Texas law making it very difficult for clinics that perform abortions to exist. And now the Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments in a case that presents a nearly identical law from Louisiana.Goldstein, who frequently argues cases before the court, expects the conservative court majority to eventually reverse Roe v. Wade outright, or to hollow it out."It's coming." he says. "But nobody knows whether it's in one year, five years, or maybe 10."Guns: a major testAt a time when voters seem to approve of more gun regulation, the court seems headed in the opposite direction. Before the court is the first major test of gun regulations in the more than 10 years since the justices ruled that there is a constitutional right to own a gun for self-defense in one's home.Court observers have long attributed the hiatus on gun cases to a closely divided court on which neither the four conservatives, nor the four liberals, were sure how Justice Kennedy would cast his deciding vote.But now Kennedy is retired, replaced by Kavanaugh, who as a lower court judge was an outspoken critic of gun regulations and a strong supporter of expansive gun rights. Politics New Calls To Impeach Justice Kavanaugh: How It Would Work And Why It Likely Won't How separate should church and state be?Also before the court this term are major questions involving the separation of church and state. For generations, the court sought to erect a relatively high wall of separation. But that has begun to change, and religious rights advocates are poised to pounce."I actually can't recall a time in the last 20 years where there were so many cases ready for decision" in this area of the law, says Mark Rienzi, president of The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. Law Supreme Court: Cross Can Stand On Public Land In Separation Of Church And State Case In particular, Rienzi and others have set their sights on invalidating or undermining provisions in most state constitutions that bar direct or indirect aid to religious schools."The mood music at the court" is that the justices "would probably say that's just discrimination on the basis of religion, and that's forbidden by the federal Constitution," says former Solicitor General Paul Clement.Can an employer fire an employee because he is gay? On another hot-button issue, the court will hear a case that tests whether employers are free to fire gay employees because of their sexual orientation, or trans employees because of their gender identity. Shots - Health News Sheriff's Deputy Sues Her County To Get Health Coverage For Transgender-Related Care The 1964 Civil Rights Act bars discrimination in employment "because of sex." The fired employees contend that that language protects them from such discharges. The employers argue that the law was never meant to cover gay or transgender employees.A victory for the LGBTQ community would be "huge," says Georgetown University Law professor Paul Smith, who notes that discrimination against gay and trans individuals remains "rampant," especially in the private sector.The Dreamers Then too, there are a variety of immigration cases, the biggest being the Trump administration's attempt to roll back the Obama administration program that continues to protect from deportation some 700,000-800,000 "Dreamers" brought to the U.S. by their parents, without legal authorization, when they were children.Presidential power and impeachmentMultiple cases are on "rocket ships headed towards the Supreme Court," notes SCOTUSblog's Goldstein. That, he says, is "because the president has been so aggressive in asserting his immunity from investigations," whether they are criminal investigations, subpoenas for his financial records, or potentially records relating to the impeachment inquiry.The court, as Goldstein observes, is going to "hate the idea" of tackling these cases in a presidential election year, but "they may not have a way out."Faithless electors, the Electoral College and the 2020 election Finally, pending before the court is a case that could involve the 2020 election. It is a test of " faithless elector" laws. These are laws passed in many states that impose penalties on Electoral College delegates or sometimes provide for the removal of electors who refuse to vote for the presidential candidate of their designated party. Politics Abolishing The Electoral College Would Be More Complicated Than It May Seem The question is: Are these laws constitutional? The Supreme Court has never before weighed in on the issue.There have been 167 faithless electors in the history of the United States, and in no case has the outcome of an election turned on the vote of these electors. But there is no guarantee that won't happen in 2020.

Enlarge this image Pedestrians on the Puerta Mexico bridge, which crosses the Rio Grande, wait to enter Brownsville, Texas, at a legal port of entry in Matamoros, Mexico, in August. Emilio Espejel/AP hide caption toggle caption Emilio Espejel/AP Pedestrians on the Puerta Mexico bridge, which crosses the Rio Grande, wait to enter Brownsville, Texas, at a legal port of entry in Matamoros, Mexico, in August. Emilio Espejel/AP To stem the flow of migrants across the southern border, the Trump administration is sending tens of thousands of asylum-seekers back to Mexico to await their day in U.S. immigration court — including some pregnant women.On the Mexican side of the international bridge that leads to Brownsville, Texas, immigration attorney Jodi Goodwin prepares her client, an asylum-seeker named Yulisa, for what happens next. Goodwin warns Yulisa that things may get tense; then they walk halfway across the bridge and talk to the officers stationed there. Goodwin tells the officers they need to let Yulisa into the U.S. because she is 7 1/2 months pregnant. Law Advocates Say President Trump's Immigration Policy Is 'A Tool Of Cruelty' "One of the officers was just shaking his head," Goodwin said. "The other one, I just asked him to see a supervisor because they're not going to be able to make a decision on the bridge. We'll see what he says."When an officer returns, he asks to see Yulisa's sonogram and other identification. Goodwin shows him the documents and demands to see a supervisor. But they are told Yulisa must stay in Mexico.Under the Remain in Mexico program — formally known as Migrant Protection Protocols — more than 48,000 asylum-seekers have been sent back to Mexico to wait for their immigration court hearings. Rochelle Garza, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said vulnerable populations are supposed to be excluded. "Pregnant women in particular should not be in the program because they are especially vulnerable," Garza said. The ACLU has asked the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security to investigate and for the agency to stop turning away pregnant asylum-seekers. Garza said at least 18 women have been sent to dangerous Mexican border towns where they have very little food, shelter and health care. "They don't have access to running water; they don't have access to showers," Garza said. "A number of the women we spoke with also have other children with them, so that's also a huge challenge for them to take care of their children and to maintain their health throughout their pregnancy." National Sidewalk School Aims To Give Migrant Kids A Sense Of Stability One asylum-seeker in the complaint was 8 1/2 months pregnant. She told the ACLU that U.S. immigration authorities took her to a hospital to stop her contractions before she was returned to Mexico. Another woman cited in the complaint said her water broke the same day she was sent back. She told the ACLU that she didn't report her labor pains for fear her child would be taken from her. Yulisa was also in the complaint.Yulisa fled Peru after getting death threats from the father of her child and asks that we not use her last name. She wasn't very hopeful as her first asylum hearing in the U.S. drew near. "I think they're going to send me back, like they've been doing," said Yulisa in Spanish.She has been in Mexico more than two months and has heard horror stories from other women."There have already been several pregnant women who have tried to enter, and instead of helping, they gave them a longer court date," said Yulisa in Spanish. Yulisa believes U.S. officials don't want these women to give birth in America where the children would get automatic citizenship. Enlarge this image Yulisa and her attorney, Jodi Goodwin, walk out of a Customs and Border Protection facility after Yulisa is allowed to wait in the U.S. until her next immigration court hearing. Reynaldo Leaños Jr./Texas Public Radio hide caption toggle caption Reynaldo Leaños Jr./Texas Public Radio Yulisa and her attorney, Jodi Goodwin, walk out of a Customs and Border Protection facility after Yulisa is allowed to wait in the U.S. until her next immigration court hearing. Reynaldo Leaños Jr./Texas Public Radio In an emailed statement, Homeland Security says officers do take physical and mental health into consideration when deciding whom to send back to Mexico. But they don't exclude all pregnant women because doing so, the agency says, could mean officers having to perform invasive pregnancy tests on every female asylum-seeker.Yulisa's asylum hearing takes place in a tent courtroom. Her attorney, Goodwin, leaves the facility after a few hours surprised and relieved."They paroled Yulisa, so she can continue her court proceedings here in the United States," Goodwin says. "She'll no longer be in danger in Mexico."Goodwin says it was the Mexican government that refused to receive Yulisa because of her late-term pregnancy. "I want to stress that that was not any change on the part of the U.S. government — it was a humanitarian action and change on the part of the Mexican government," Goodwin says.Yulisa plans to stay with a relative in Utah until her next hearing. Her baby is due any day now.