Good morning.
Good Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-eight. Sunrise is 6:38 AM and sunset 7:19 PM, for 12h 40m 45s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}five hundred fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution takes effect:
Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.[1]
On this day in 1865, Wisconsinites defend the Union at the Battle at Gravelly Run, Virginia:
The Battle at Gravelly Run erupted east of Petersburg, Virginia. The 6th, 7th and 36th Wisconsin Infantry regiments participated in this battle, which was one of a series of engagements that ultimately drove Confederate forces out of Petersburg. Wisconsin’s Iron Brigade regiments fought at Gravelly Run, and when ordered to fall back before the enemy, they were the last to leave the field.
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ John Santucci, Matthew Mosk, and Stephanie Ebbs report EXCLUSIVE: More Cabinet trouble for Trump? EPA chief lived in condo tied to lobbyist ‘power couple’:
For much of his first year in Washington, President Trump’s EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt occupied prime real estate in a townhouse near the U.S. Capitol that is co-owned by the wife of a top energy lobbyist, property records from 2017 show.
Neither the EPA nor the lobbyist, J. Steven Hart, would say how much Pruitt paid to live at the prime Capitol Hill address, though Hart said he believed it to be the market rate. The price tag on Pruitt’s rental arrangement is one key question when determining if it constitutes an improper gift, ethics experts told ABC News.
“I think it certainly creates a perception problem, especially if Mr. Hart is seeking to influence the agency,” said Bryson Morgan, the former investigative counsel at the U.S. House of Representatives Office of Congressional Ethics. “That’s why there is a gift rule.”
➤ Betsy Woodruff reports ICE Now Detaining Pregnant Women, Thanks to Trump Order:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is ending its practice of automatically releasing pregnant women from detention, according to internal communications reviewed by The Daily Beast.
This is because of President Donald Trump’s executive order “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” which requires stricter enforcement of immigration laws. Previously, the agency’s general practice was to release women from detention who were pregnant.
Now, pregnant women will only be able to get released if an ICE officer determines so on a case-by-case basis.
Pregnant women were still sometimes detained under the previous internal guidelines. Immigrants’ rights advocates say the practice is dangerous to women and to their unborn children, and that pregnant women are more likely to miscarry if they’re in detention than if they are free. This new policy means more pregnant women will spend time in detention.
➤ Conservative Michael Gerson contends This madness [Trumpism] will pass. Conservatives can’t give up:
If Trump were merely proposing a border wall and the more aggressive employment of tariffs, we would be engaged in a debate, not facing a schism. Both President Ronald Reagan and President George W. Bush played the tariff chess game. As a Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney endorsed the massive “self-deportation” of undocumented workers without the rise of a #NeverRomney movement.
But it is blind, even obtuse, to place Trumpism in the same category. Trump’s policy proposals — the details of which Trump himself seems unconcerned and uninformed about — are symbolic expressions of a certain approach to politics. The stated purpose of Trump’s border wall is to keep out a contagion of Mexican rapists and murderers. His argument is not taken from Heritage Foundation policy papers. He makes it by quoting the racist poem “The Snake,” which compares migrants to dangerous vermin. Trump proposes to ban migration from some Muslim-majority countries because Muslim refugees, as he sees it, are a Trojan-horse threat of terrorism. Trump’s policy ideas are incidental to his message of dehumanization.
…
Trump defines loyalty to conservatism as contempt for many of our neighbors. One might as well have proposed a fusion between popular sovereignty and Abraham Lincoln’s conception of inherent human rights. They were not a dialectic requiring a synthesis. They were alternatives demanding a choice.
…
For elected leaders to remind Americans who they are and affirm our common bonds. For conservative policy experts to define an agenda of working-class uplift, not an agenda of white resentment — which will consign Republicans to moral squalor and (eventually) to electoral irrelevance. For principled conservatives to hear the call of moral duty and stand up for their beliefs until this madness passes. As it will.
➤ Paul Waldman writes Republicans are reviving all their worst ideas right now. Here’s why:
As The Hill recently reported: “Republicans in the House are pivoting to messaging bills and away from the hot-button issues that have dominated the first two months of the year.” In case you’re wondering, “messaging bills” are those that are practically meaningless, but are meant to fool voters into thinking they’re doing something when they aren’t.
Not to be outdone, the administration has some idiotic, discredited ideas of his own. Last weekend, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told “Fox News Sunday” that the administration wanted a line-item veto, which would allow the president to veto individual parts of bills he doesn’t like. It was left to host Chris Wallace to inform him that the Supreme Court has already ruled a line-item veto unconstitutional, which seemed to leave the secretary confused but still allowed him to pretend that the president is peeved about all the spending he’s been forced to support.
(The end of Trumpism is a condition for a return to normality.)
➤ Last Sunday, CBS 60 Minutes interviewed Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Milwaukee Bucks’ ‘Greek Freak’ (“Most people can’t pronounce his name, but he’s one of the best players in the NBA. And he has quite the story about how he got there”):