Does Nick Merlino Speak For Gov. Matt Meyer? I report. You decide:
A Delaware lawyer and a state lawmaker have filed a federal complaint that seeks to have the state prevent transgender girls from playing on girls’ middle and high school sports teams.
Yet in Delaware, where students are permitted to play on school teams that match their gender identity, there are no known transgender athletes to ban. Nor have there been in recent years, if ever, state officials said.
That reality, however, hasn’t stopped attorney Thomas S. Neuberger and Sussex County Republican Sen. Bryant Richardson, who have long sought to keep transgender girls off girls’ track, swimming, volleyball and other teams.
Oh, Nick Merlino?:
The U.S. Department of Justice and officials at Delaware agencies named in the complaint would not comment.
Neither would Gov. Matt Meyer, who took office the day after Trump did. Meyer spokesman Nick Merlino did, however, outline the governor’s position on the divisive issue.
“Gov. Meyer doesn’t believe that trans girls should be playing in girls’ sports, but ultimately he defers those decisions to the leagues and localities,” Merlino said.
Ho-kay. Glad we cleared that up. Right, Matt?
The Secret Police Are Just Grabbing People Off The Street. AKA The Border Patrol:
The couple, who The Washington Post is identifying only by their middle names Cesar and Norelia, and their three children were allowed in the country by Border Patrol. Later, the Department of Homeland Security granted them temporary protected status —a legal promise of security against being deported to the country they fled. They settled in a D.C. neighborhood with their children — ages 4, 9 and 13 — received Social Security numbers, a driver’s license for Cesar and new jobs cleaning hotels. They gave immigration officials their address.
Then on Monday, every legal safeguard they thought was in place was seemingly upended. With two of their children looking on, screaming and crying, Border Patrol arrested the couple in D.C., removing them from their home in handcuffs on a misdemeanor charge of illegally crossing the border more than two years ago, according to court records, a video capturing a portion of the arrests, and interviews with them and their family. The family was apart for three days. By Thursday evening, the couple was back in their home with an order to appear in an El Paso federal court in 30 days to answer for the illegal border crossing.
And don’t you dare say anything ‘bad”:
He was Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student in his 20s, older than most of the students around him. Mr. Khalil, a Syrian immigrant of Palestinian descent, quickly emerged as a vocal and measured leader during rallies and sit-ins, doing on-camera interviews with the media in a zip-up sweater.
And he was unmasked. Many other international students wore masks and kept to the background of the protests, for fear of being singled out and losing their visas.
His wife worried. “We’ve talked about the mask thing,” Noor Abdalla, a 28-year-old dentist from the Midwest, said in an interview last week. “He always tells me, ‘What I am doing wrong that I need to be covering my face for?’”
Mr. Khalil was a negotiator on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the main coalition of protesting student groups, and one with its own spectrum of attitudes toward violence and dark rhetoric.
His decision to quite literally be the face of a deeply divisive movement would have huge consequences for Mr. Khalil. He was called out by critics by name on social media, and on March 8, seven weeks after the inauguration of Donald Trump, federal agents arrived at his door. He was swiftly taken to a detention center in Louisiana, where he is still being held for what officials have described, without providing details, as leading activities aligned with Hamas, an allegation he has denied.
Deportees: Wanna know which law Trump cited to deport people w/o due process?:
A little before 7:00 p.m. Saturday, a federal judge issued an order temporarily stopping deportations set in motion by President Donald Trump hours earlier when he announced that he had invoked a law last used to justify Japanese internment camps.
With planes departing nearly immediately following Trump’s announcement that he had invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — planes full of people the Trump administration would be deporting with no process — Chief Judge James Boasberg said at the conclusion of a Saturday evening hearing, “I am required to act immediately.”
Boasberg issued a nationwide temporary restraining order blocking removal of “all noncitizens in U.S. custody who are subject to [Trump’s order]” — people who the government decides are members of Tren de Aragua (TdA), a Venezuelan gang — for the next 14 days or until a further order from the court.
At the hearing, Boasberg added that planes in the air were to be turned around, telling the Justice Department lawyer that his clients needed to be informed of the TRO “immediately.”
We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. It’s been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way. The characters regarded as people to emulate, like Orban and Putin and so on, all indicate that the strategy is to create an illiberal democracy or an authoritarian democracy or a strongman democracy. That’s what we’re experiencing. Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions. You neutralize the branches of government; you neutralize the media; you neutralize universities, and you’re on your way.
Josh Marshall on moving forward:
None of this is good. But clarity in itself has power. Once you know where you are you stop being bewildered by each new development. You begin to be able to construct strategies based on the reality before you. You can take action with a realistic chance of success. The great majority of political media in the United States doesn’t get this or isn’t interpreting the news through this prism. They’re using the prism of conventional electoral politics and DC battles and trying to squeeze the new world into that model, all the while kind of getting and sometimes saying that something doesn’t quite seem to fit. Free media is yet another critical node of power.
I don’t want to re-litigate the events of last week in the Senate. That’s done and you know where I stood. What is still worth saying is that you should have made your decision (and all such future decisions) about the right course of action based on which one was more likely to slow, impede or defeat what Bollinger rightly calls “an authoritarian takeover” of the US government.
This is where we are. Observe, orient, decide, act. The side which acts faster and smarter wins.
What do you want to talk about?