Daily Bread for 9.5.17

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see a high of sixty-four and a four-in-ten chance of showers. Sunrise is 6:25 AM and sunset 7:21 PM, for 12h 56m 07s of daytime. The moon is nearly full, with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundredreth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Alcohol and Licensing Committee meets at 6:10 PM, and her Common Council at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1774, the First Continental Congress assembles in Philadelphia. On this day in 1864, the “12th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 24th, 25th and 32nd Wisconsin Infantry regiments along with the 10th Wisconsin Light Artillery” take part in a standoff at Lovejoy Station, Georgia.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jennifer Rubin observes that Ending DACA would be Trump’s most evil act:

First, let’s not think Trump — who invites cops to abuse suspects, who thinks ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio was “doing his job” when denying others their constitutional rights and who issued the Muslim ban — cares about the Constitution (any of the “twelve” articles). Trump says, “We love the dreamers. … We think the dreamers are terrific.” But in fact he loves the applause he derives from his cultist followers more than anything. Otherwise he’d go to the mat to defend the dreamers and secure their legal status.

To begin with, surely Trump could talk the nine Republicans attorneys general out of the suit they are contemplating, or at least try his hand in court (as he has done repeatedly with the Muslim ban and sanctuary city order). In any event, he could wait for a final adverse ruling that could be months or years from now rather than end the executive order on his own. Needless to say, longtime anti-immigrant extremists Attorney General Jeff Sessions and senior adviser Stephen Miller have no interest in explaining any of that to the president. (When a president is as thoroughly ignorant and non-analytical as this one is, his aides have ample opportunity to lead him around by the nose.)

Moreover, if Trump really thought he had to end DACA for constitutional reasons, how can he justify a six-month extension? (Why not 12 months? Two years?) And surely, if he really wanted Congress to act, he could insist it be tied (like Harvey funding) to the debt ceiling or, alternatively, to the funding bill to keep the government operating.

No, if Trump cancels DACA, it will be one more attempt to endear himself to his shrinking base with the only thing that truly energizes the dead-enders: vengeance fueled by white grievance. And it will also be an act of uncommon cowardice. (“Should Trump move forward with this decision, he would effectively be buying time and punting responsibility to Congress to determine the fate of the Dreamers,” writes The Post.) Dumping it into the lap of the hapless Congress, he can try evading responsibility for the deportation of nearly 800,000 young people who were brought here as children, 91 percent of whom are working. (And if by chance Congress should save DACA, it will be Trump who is the villain and they the saviors, an odd political choice for a president who cares not one wit about the party.)….

Noah Lanard predicted last week that Trump Looks Likely to End Protections for Dreamers. Here’s What Would Happen Next:

The fate of roughly 800,000 immigrants who came to the United States as children has never been more precarious. President Donald Trump is likely to end protections for the young adults, known as Dreamers, who were given permission to work and study in the country in 2012 by President Barack Obama, multipleoutlets are reporting. The decision, which could come as soon as this week, could lead thousands of Dreamers to be deported and many more to stay illegally in the United States, living with the fear they faced before Obama issued his order.

Ten state attorneys general have promised to sue the federal government on September 5 to force the courts to block Obama’s order, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), if Trump doesn’t scrap it by then. That means that one way or another, the program is likely to meet its demise soon. If Trump decides not to end DACA himself, then in order to keep it alive in the face of a lawsuit, he would have to overrule his attorney general, who opposes the program, and force him to defend it in court. The lawsuit would then be heard by a federal district court judge in Texas who is unlikely to be sympathetic to DACA. The judge, Andrew Hanen, already blocked a similar executive action by Obama that protected undocumented parents of citizens and legal residents.

If the fate of DACA is coming into focus, what will happen to Dreamers is less clear. Obama’s executive action let Dreamers work in the United States, instructed immigration agents not to detain them, and changed their status to “lawfully present.” To get those protections, Dreamers have to prove they’ve been in the country since 2007, arrived before they turned 16, and have not committed serious crimes. After getting DACA, they can renew their status for two-year increments. So far, the Trump administration has approved DACA applications at about the same rate as the Obama administration.

Trump, or the courts, could opt for a quick or slow phaseout of DACA’s protections from detention and deportation. As the libertarian Cato Institute, which supports less restrictive immigration policies, recently explained, when John Kelly—then the homeland security secretary and now Trump’s chief of staff—ended protections for parents of US citizens and legal residents in June, he explicitly stated that Dreamers would not be affected. A memo ending DACA could spare current Dreamers again—until their two-year protections expire and they become eligible to be detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The last Dreamers would then lose their protections about two years from now….

Greg Sargent cautions Don’t buy the latest round of laughable Trump White House spin:

It is a truly shocking coincidence that the same advisers who are telling Trump that DACA is unconstitutional were also the ones most responsible for the disguised Muslim ban and also pushed Trump to pardon Joe Arpaio. Bannon and Miller were key drivers of the ban’s original rollout. They both reportedly favored pardoning Arpaio. My point is not just that this strongly suggests their view of DACA’s constitutionality is rooted in their hostility to immigrants, though it does.

It’s also that this hints at an amusing double standard on the part of the White House’s immigration hard-line faction when it comes to the care with which they approach Trump’s exercise of his authority. Bannon and Miller’s haste to rush out the travel ban led them to trample all over the proper legal process for such measures, which in turn helped lead to its initial blockage by the courts. Bannon and Miller also appear to have privately told Trump that pardoning Arpaio would please his base, which only underscores how cavalier they were about a major decision with serious separation-of-powers implications. While Trump’s pardon power is quasi-absolute, there is widespread agreement that this nonetheless constituted an abuse of his power, something that plainly did not concern Bannon and Miller.

Nor was Trump remotely concerned about the legal details surrounding his use of executive authority to institute the veiled ban on Muslims, or about the prospect that pardoning Arpaio might constitute an abuse of his power. And do we really need to remind you of Trump’s abuses of power and lawlessness in other areas — the emoluments clause violations; the firing of the FBI director over the Russia probe after demanding his loyalty; the rage at his attorney general for failing to protect him from that probe; and the obvious use of the Arpaio pardon to signal that more pardons on Russia may be coming?….

Glenn Thrush tweets that “Sheriff Clarke, shut out by [Chief of Staff] Kelly, going to Trump PAC, via sources.”

(There’s a dispute about the reason Clarke is stuck in secondary role with a PAC – an alternative explanation says Kelly didn’t play a dispositive role; it was Clarke’s dishonesty about his academic work that would have kept him out in any event. Either way, he’s heading to the minor leagues.)

NASA SPoRT (Short-Term Research Prediction and Transition Center) shows what Hurricane Irma looks like from above:

The eye of a category 5 hurricane. #Irma #GOES16 pic.twitter.com/eATVZspJZx

— NASA SPoRT (@NASA_SPoRT) September 5, 2017