American justice is holding a finger in the dyke of Trumpziism's onslaught of wrong minded calls for judiciary impeachment

Echo opinion column published in the Kansas City Star, Missouri:

By Stephen L. Carter: "Roberts was right to chastise Trump" 

Chief Justice John Roberts had to take the extraordinary step of chiding Donald Trump and his cult cheerleaders for their demands that federal judges who stand in the way of the administration's decrees be impeached. 

But the abhorrent Trump sort of behavior isn't new; the insistence by politicians that judges stand aside and let them have their way has been a depressing feature of our political landscape since the beginning. But in the current moment, with Trump issuing so many orders, no small number of which may be illegal, it's particularly important that we observe the forms of law. Currently in Trump's crosshairs is James Boasberg, the chief judge of the federal district court in Washington. The president is upset because the judge had the temerity to instruct the administration to cease the mass deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members until he decided on the legality of the program. Courts do this all the time - ordering parties in effect to stand still pending argument and decision. But on this occasion, Trump took to social media, calling Boasberg a "Radical Left Lunatic" and "crooked" and demanding his removal. TOP VIDEOS The video player is currently playing an ad. You can skip the ad in 5 sec with a mouse or keyboard That's outrageous and, from the leader of the free world, inexcusable. The holder of the highest elective office in the land owes the American people the highest regard for our fading democratic norms.

Chief justice pushes back against calls to impeach judges who rule against Trump. Chief Justice John Roberts issued a statement following President Donald Trump's call for a judge to be impeached for ruling against the administration.

Justice Roberts's response was straightforward and forceful: "For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose."

Has this sort of thing occurred in the past? Of course, it has, far more often than we might care to admit. Early in the 19th century, believing Justice Samuel Chase to have been biased against them in key cases, the Jeffersonians went after him with a vengeance. (Chase survived his impeachment trial by the narrowest margin.) During the Reconstruction, members of Congress threatened to impeach Supreme Court justices who were considered hostile to their program. Instances abound. The enemies of the Warren Court made no secret that their enmity stemmed from the justices' decisions. Online you can still buy colorful "Impeach Earl Warren" buttons dating back to the era. During the 1960s, an effort to impeach Justice William Douglas picked up sufficient steam that some predicted might succeed.

Prefer a more recent example? Here's the New York Times in March of 1996, describing President Bill Clinton's response to a decision by federal Judge Herbert Baer to suppress evidence in a major drug case: "The White House put a Federal judge on public notice today that if he did not reverse a widely criticized decision throwing out drug evidence, the President might ask for his resignation." 

Jon Newman, then chief judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, fired back that the criticism reflected "extraordinary intimidation." By that time, Senator Robert Dole, Clinton's opponent-to-be in the approaching presidential election, had called for Baer's impeachment and removal. 

Newman had harsh words for Dole too: "A ruling in a contested case cannot remotely be considered a ground for impeachment."

Examples go on and on. What they have in common is the realization by politicians and activists that judges are cheap and easy targets. 

But when the criticisms suggest punishment, the rule of law begins to flail. Since the Trump administration began ramping up its rhetoric, federal judges have faced rising levels of reported threats. Small wonder the chief justice felt compelled to speak up. But in taking on Trump, Roberts isn't taking sides. He's trying to protect the judicial branch against political assault, just as he did in 2020 after then-Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer launched his dreadful headline-grabbing attack on two justices of the Supreme Court: "You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price." Roberts replied, correctly, that those at "the highest levels of government" had no business threatening judges. 

As a matter of fact, Trump, then in his first term, also weighed in: "There can be few things worse in a civilized, law abiding nation, than a United States Senator openly, and for all to see and hear, threatening the Supreme Court or its Justices."

Exactly. Perhaps Trump II should read Trump I. No, judges shouldn't be free from criticism, and sometimes the criticism will be harsh. That's life in the rough and tumble of government affairs. But there's a world of difference between an online activist calling a judge a nasty name and the President of the United States calling for the judge to be removed from office. Only the second violates democratic norms.

The bipartisan National Commission on Judicial Discipline and Removal, on which I was privileged to serve, addressed this issue in its 1993, final report, writing: "[F]ederal judges should not be impeached for judicial decision-making even if the decision is an erroneous one." Let's not forget that what keeps norms alive is consensus. The more we ignore democratic norms, the weaker they become. I've written before about the way those norms of democracy have been threatened in recent years by the left's assault on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. 

But the right has been laboring in those fields a lot longer. And the recklessness with which the labor is being done by the Trump administration and its supporters - yes, some backbencher has filed actual articles of impeachment against Judge Boasberg - is without parallel in our recent history. The norms matter particularly at this moment because the administration's flurry of sweeping orders has been met by a flurry of lawsuits. Maybe most of what the administration is attempting will survive judicial review. Maybe not. The way we find out is by trying the cases. That takes time. Impatience with the pace of law is a commonality of our history, but is, almost always, the enemy of democracy.

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of "Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster."

How Mexico survived the COVID pandemic while keeping Americans fed

Migration’s root cause isn’t that complicated

Echo opinion by Eduardo Porter for Bloomberg Opinion, published in the Lewiston Sun Journal, in Lewiston Maine.

"...at the height of the pandemic, it was migrant workers who guaranteed the availability of food."

Americans might want to remember how, at the height of the pandemic, it was migrant workers who guaranteed the availability of food❗

Why is it that Mexico did not implode? That may be one of the biggest economic mysteries left in the wake of COVID-19.

Mexicans weathered a disproportionate blow: By the first anniversary of the pandemic, Mexico had suffered the second highest rate of excess death in the world, trailing only Armenia.

The government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador did little to mitigate the suffering. It executed the tightest budget in Latin America in 2020 and then trimmed spending in 2021. “The support in response to COVID-19 was notably less than that of emerging market (EM) and regional peers,” noted the International Monetary Fund in its 2021, assessment.

Makeshift tents and debris are seen at a migrant camp in Matamoros, Mexico, Friday, April 21. About two dozen makeshift tents in the area were set ablaze and destroyed, across the border from Texas, witnesses said. AP Photo/Valerie Gonzalez

A study by researchers at Tulane University about COVID’s impact on Latin America’s four largest economies found that social assistance was expanded to offset the shock to poverty and inequality in three of them. The exception? “The offsetting effect is nil in Mexico since no expansion of social assistance took place in the country,” they wrote.

Still, Mexico didn’t implode. Indeed, after four years in office, López Obrador is more popular than his four immediate predecessors at the same point in their presidencies. Three years from the start of the pandemic, an explanation for the mystery is emerging from the broader story of the virus-borne disaster and its aftermath: 

Mexicans were saved by their people in the United States.

As the administration of President Joe Biden struggles to develop an effective holistic response to the swelling movement of migrants from across the hemisphere to the U.S. in search of a better life, it would do well to keep this economic reality in mind.

Remittances sent by migrants to their relatives in Mexico rose by over 10% in 2020, to $41.5 billion, according to data from Mexico’s Central Bank. They surged by 27% in 2021 and 13% in 2022, to a total of $58.5 billion. That is equivalent to more than 60% of Mexico’s total public social spending in 2019, the latest year it reported to the OECD.

This surge of remittances (sum of money sent, especially by mail) is, in fact, also a bit of a mystery. 

Hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants lost their jobs when the pandemic hit, forcing businesses to close across much of the U.S. The unemployment rate of foreign-born workers jumped to 16.5% in April 2020, from 3.6% in February.

The money kept flowing nonetheless. In part, that’s because the American safety net stepped in. The massive expansion of government assistance in the U.S. — between the CARES Act from March 2020 to the American Rescue Plan of March 2021 the federal government deployed a mind-boggling $5 trillion in emergency aid — also provided a net for migrants’ families back home.

The U.S. government knows that migration policy must take into account the forces driving migrants from their homes. 

Back in the day NAFTA was sold, in part, as an economic stimulus designed to keep Mexicans in Mexico. As Ross Perot continued to fulminate about the “giant sucking sound” of American jobs moving south, President Bill Clinton chose to focus on American fears about Mexican workers moving north.

The Biden administration’s Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America is all about plugging migration at its source. The U.S. is even providing some money to help it along: Last year it gave $240 million to Guatemala, $150 million to Honduras and $108 million to El Salvador, to fund projects in health, education, economic development and the like.

A quick comparison illuminates one weakness of this strategy. According to research from the Inter-American Dialogue, remittances to Guatemala surpassed $19 billion last year. Honduras received nearly $9 billion and El Salvador just under $8 billion.

Remittances to these countries play an even bigger role than in Mexico to keep society afloat. For instance, El Salvador’s take last year amounted to a whopping 27% of the country’s gross domestic product, according to estimates from the Inter-American Dialogue, and were more than three times the government’s social spending in 2019. The numbers are also staggering in Guatemala and Honduras. Remittances to Mexico, by contrast, amount to less than 5% of GDP.

This does not mean, of course, that Washington should provide comparable amounts to keep Central Americans in Central America. But the comparison should help bring into focus the scale of opportunity that migration provides to the migrants, and their families and communities back home.

Whatever sense it makes for the U.S. to address insecurity, corruption and lack of opportunity in Central America’s Northern Triangle, policymakers must pay a lot more attention to what migration means to those who embark on the journey from their homes there. That will entail thinking less about border controls and more about how immigrants incorporate into and benefit from the opportunities the U.S. economy offers.

The core thing to understand is that the opportunities are immense, gargantuan. The surge of remittances in the COVID era underscores how immigration provides the best shot, bar none, at raising the incomes of millions of people across the developing world. Don’t waste too much time trying to figure out migration’s “root causes.”

A study a few years ago by researchers at the Center for Global Development, Harvard’s Kennedy School and the World Bank estimated that a Guatemalan worker could increase his wages 3.1 times by working in the United States. A worker in Mexico would boost wages by a factor of 2.35; a Haitian, by 7.8. A 35-year-old Peruvian man with nine years of schooling working in the formal economy in Peru made an average of $452 a month, they estimated. Working in the US, he would make $1,714.

Yes, immigration is, to put it mildly, a politically touchy subject in the U.S. Its most vociferous opponents, those who scream loudest about a border overwhelmed, will discount these gains as irrelevant. After all, they accrue to non-Americans who may not even speak English.

They might consider how the U.S. actually needs migrants too. It needs them to stabilize the population and stop the workforce from shrinking; to harvest the crops and deliver the meals; to take care of the kids and change the bedpans of the old.

During the pandemic, remittances from the U.S. provided an indispensable lifeline to communities across Mexico and Central America. But Americans might want to remember how, at the height of the pandemic, it was migrant workers who guaranteed the availability of food.

Such recognition may not provide a blueprint for responding to large flows of migrants heading toward the U.S. But dealing with them effectively requires first acknowledging the true economic drivers moving people from their homes. It requires being at least a little grateful for a steady supply of food. And to be thankful that Mexico didn’t implode.

Eduardo Porter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin America, U.S. economic policy and immigration. 

Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo - toxic synergy

Synergy- interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater(and more evil!) than the sum of their separate effects. Mike Pompeo + Donald Trump = toxic synergy

Bloomberg Opinion echo- published in the North West Indiana newspaper The Times of NWI.

Mike Pompeo has poisoned the State Department.  (Maine Writer opinion- he reminds me of the Nazi doppelgänger Hermann Goering-b. 1893-d. 1946-, was Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, President of the Reichstag, and initially he was Hitler's chosen successor.)

Mike Pompeo seems to me like a reincarnatioin of Hermann Goering (1893-1946)

At one level, the (fake!) Secretary of State Michael Pompeo's decision to fire the department's inspector general tells us nothing we didn't already know. 

Even before Pompeo enabled the smearing and sidelining of U.S. Ambassador to (foriegn service heroine!) Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch last year, he had made it clear that he would tolerate political attacks and even retaliation against members of the U.S. foreign service.

Just ask Inspector General Steve Linick, whose previous investigations into such instances and calls for accountability were flicked off by Pompeo. Yet Linick's own Friday-night defenestration may have far more sinister consequences than past insults and indignities. Whether Linick was sacked for investigating Pompeo's role in legally dubious arms sales to Saudi Arabia or his alleged use of State personnel to run personal errands is irrelevant. Either way, his unplanned departure tells the men and women of the State Department that there is no impartial recourse, no objective outlet for complaint. Pompeo is the final arbiter. Perhaps that is what Pompeo meant when, on his first day on the job, he pledged to bring "swagger" back to Foggy Bottom.

This is a tragedy for America's foriegn service reputation:

Linick's firing will also have more subtle effects that will darken the building's increasingly decrepit and empty hallways for years. Careers in the State Department, where I served for eight years from 1989 to 1997, often rise or fall on the basis of "corridor reputation": your demonstrated competence, specialized skills, schmooze ability and friends higher up.

This "careers" logo is an embarrasment with Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump undermining our nation's brave foriegn service professionals.

A case can be made that corridor reputation counted for too much at the State Department, especially in its heyday as a stratified white boys' club. But there can be no argument that, under this administration, only one thing has really counted: loyalty to the secretary of state and the president.

On North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, China and Russia, Donald Trump has made clear that he does not put much stock in strategy, expertise, consistency, process or, finally, multilateral diplomacy. 

Tragically, Trump's gut and ego are his sole guides. Under his administration, career officers at State who have risen to positions of responsibility increasingly come in three types: Those who are true believers in the (failed!) MAGA movement; go-along, get-along professionals willing to swallow outrage; and those who are overseeing issues or parts of the world that Trump either doesn't care about or (more likely) doesn't know exist.

It's this third category that concerns me. If some of them have been made ambassador or deputy assistant secretary or special representative, then good for them. After all, more than a few of the classmates with whom I entered the Foreign Service have suffered in what should have been now their glory years: deputy chiefs of mission thrown off embassy parapets by wealthy Republican donors, "acting" officials who will never get the nod because their loyalty is suspect, former "water-walkers" (superstars) turned into hall-wanderers hoping for a job somewhat befitting their experience.

But in today's toxic State Department, in an administration better known for its malice than its competence, anyone who has risen in these last three years will be forever suspect. Did they finally get the brass ring because they were good at what they do - or good at catering to the whims of higher-ups, and seen as unlikely to resort to the dissent channel or the inspector general's office? After more than three decades of public service, diplomats shouldn't have to entertain those kinds of disquieting questions or dispel those kinds of suspicions. And such ethical question marks are hardly inspiring for those who will follow in their footsteps.

Finding a new inspector general won't be hard. Today's party-line committee approval of the previously withdrawn nomination of John Ratcliffe as the new director of national intelligence suggests the Republican-controlled Senate would confirm a ham sandwich if that's what Trump wanted. But restoring morale, much less faith in the State Department's willingness to defend its professionals and principles? That may take a generation.

About the author: James Gibney is an editor for Bloomberg Opinion. Previously an editor at the Atlantic, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Foreign Policy and the New Republic, he was also in the U.S. Foreign Service from 1989 to 1997 in India, Japan and Washington.

Right Wing extremism is terrorism

A forensics official works at the al Noor mosque after the white supremacist massacre attack.
Tessa Burrows/AFP/Getty Images

Police Commissioner Mike Bush speaks to the media during a news conference in Wellington New Zealand. Bush said two improvised explosive devices were attached to a vehicle as part of the attack. One device was disabled and authorities were working on the other.
Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

Echo opinion published in the Central Maine newspaper Kennebec Journal by Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

The deadly attacks on two New Zealand mosques should draw attention to an obvious fact: Terrorists linked to the far right are no less murderous than the Islamist groups that get more headlines and attention from politicians.

Western governments shouldn’t be fooled by the skewed headline count; watching white supremacists should be a priority — alongside preventing the radicalization of Muslim minorities. This is not just a moment to grieve the 50 dead in Christchurch. It’s time to review the data and make a conscious policy shift.

Islamist terrorists killed hundreds of people in Western Europe and the U.S. between 2014 and 2016, the heyday of the Islamic State. That drew attention away from far-right terrorists, but they have kept on killing: 66 people in 113 attacks around the world between 2013 and 2017, according to the Sydney-based Institute for Economics and Peace.

The Australian think-tank’s count is, however, too low. It includes only expressly politically motivated killings accompanied by white supremacist manifestos or preceded by racist social media posts – like those perpetrated by Norwegian Anders Breivik, who shot 77 people in 2011, or Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black worshippers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. There are other murders that aren’t always confessed so clearly. They are often mixed in with everyday thuggery and violent psychosis in police statistics.

The U.S. Anti-Defamation League attempts a broader count, stressing murderers’ links with far-right organizations rather than their stated motives. According to the group, right-wing extremists were responsible for 70 percent of the 427 extremist-related killings that occurred in the U.S. in the past 10 years. In 2018, every one of the perpetrators of the 37 extremist-related murders in the U.S. had ties to at least one far-right movement, although one had recently switched to supporting Islamist extremism, the ADL says.

Importantly, the number of incidents of violence perpetrated by the far-right is on the rise. The Institute for Economics and Peace noted in its 2018 Global Terrorism Index report that the number of such killings increased from three in 2014 to 17 in 2017.

Meanwhile, Islamist-inspired terrorism appears to be on the wane, with the attempt to create a caliphate in the Middle East roundly defeated and the ideal of pure Islamic statehood losing its attractiveness to the assorted misfits among the West’s Muslim minorities. 

According to Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center’s Global Attack Index, fatalities linked to Islamic State declined by 51.5 percent in 2018.

The far right has never killed on the same scale as the Islamic State. But it has grown by feeding off white supremacists’ fears of Muslim immigration and the public perception that terrorism is Islamist by nature. That process has been helped by the fact that Islamist-linked attacks receive disproportionate media coverage. 

A recent paper by Erin Kearns of the University of Alabama and her colleagues showed only 12.5 percent of the 136 terrorist acts that occurred in the U.S. between 2006 and 2015 were linked to such groups — but they received more than half of the news coverage. If the perpetrator is a Muslim, the number of stories about the attack increases by 357 percent, the academics calculated.

In a separate paper, Kearns showed that giving people more data about terrorism doesn’t necessarily change their minds about its prevalence and nature. Policymakers, though, should be more willing to put their biases aside. While it would be foolish to ignore militant Islamist groups, governments must pay close attention to right-wing extremist organizations.

In Germany, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution already monitors all such groups (or 25,250 people at the last count in 2017, up from 9,600 in 2012). The authorities don’t just make a special effort to track right-wing crime by motivation, they also try to assess how many of their members are capable of violence through monitoring and infiltrating radical groups.

Though the German record of fighting right-wing violence is far from spotless (and the growing membership of radical groups is evidence of that), the approach itself is correct. Western governments must make an effort to keep a close eye on the far right just as they do on potentially dangerous Muslim groups.

And they should adopt the approach to recording crime used by the Anti-Defamation League. This means assuming the specific motives of a violent crime are less important than the perpetrator’s links to a white supremacist group. 

Such assumptions, after all, are already being made about Islamists.

The mechanisms of radicalization are similar regardless of religion and ethnicity. Anti-terror policies should be based on that fact and be equally tough on every kind of murderous radicalism. The Christchurch killings are a reminder that this is not yet the case.

Leonid Bershidsky