The problem with bringing Social Justice cases before this Supreme Court is the likelihood you’ll get a bad result, and therefore set a bad precedent that lower courts will follow and will be difficult to undo (see Dred Scott).

In this particular case (actually 2 that are very similar- American Legion v. American Humanist Association and Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission v. American Humanist Association) the American Humanist Association is seeking to remove a Great War Memorial Cross from a publicly owned Park.

Now although I’m an atheist I’m not a member of the American Humanist Association (indeed the only organization I belong to is the Church of the Invisible Pink Unicorn which is so much more ancient (circa 1990) and prestigious than those Johnny-Come-Lately Pastafarians (2005) and their silly hats. My deity of choice is invisible, you can’t see her, can you?, and the Pink we take on faith. All praise the Invisible Pink Unicorn, may her holy hooves never be shod.), but I do know someone who worked for years to get Wicca recognized as an official (as far as the Military goes) religion so she can have a Pentagram on her grave at the National Cemetery.

Personally I think Wicca a little too structured and belief biased for my taste but she’s not militant and walking around the Yule fire widershins and shins and casting bits of paper into it with resolutions and regrets seem an appropriate and basically secular way to mark the passage of time.

What Paul Waldman points out in this piece is that, having lost so badly in the culture wars (legal weed! who’d a thunk?) there is a certain subset of Christianity that feels incredibly threatened that they can no longer make assumptions about the prevalence of their beliefs.

Indeed my own sect by training, the Methodists (and it bears pointing out that though the 3rd largest congregation in the U.S. they are not “mainstream Protestants” like Lutherans, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians, they are full on Fundamentalist Evangelicals- that’s where the “Method” comes in) has recently voted 53% to 47% to defrock LGBT clergy who do not practice celibacy and disallow Same Sex Marriage. The margin was mostly driven by Latin American and African Churches which are a good deal more conservative that is common in the U.S. and represent the fastest growing population of new parishioners. Many of the more “liberal” ministers are reconsidering their relationship with the Church because of this.

As “not a Christian” I certainly feel the coercive power of the State in every public display of the Cross and Christian iconography. My non-participation in certain societal rituals (like the Pledge) is actually a sign of respect for people’s beliefs. I don’t think it makes a dime’s worth of difference to my eternal soul if I take Communion or not (you know, it is ritual Cannibalism, especially if you believe in Transubstantiation) because I don’t believe I have one (and many people would agree), but on the other hand I don’t have to go out of my way to take a crap on your altar.

Conservative Christians are counting on the Supreme Court to stall their cultural losses
By Paul Waldman, Washington Post
February 28, 2019

What interests me most about cases such as this one is the effort on the part of conservatives to claim that plainly religious symbols are in fact not religious at all. This played out most vividly in a similar case in 2009, when Justice Antonin Scalia tried to assert that a cross is simply “the most common symbol of the resting place of the dead” and has nothing in particular to do with Christianity. One of the lawyers in the case replied, “The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of Christians. I have been in Jewish cemeteries. There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew.”

Nevertheless, the court ruled that that cross could stay, as it is likely to do with this one. Once again, the cross’s defenders argued that it isn’t a religious symbol; it’s just this thing we associate with graves and memorials. Believe me when I tell you that virtually no one who isn’t Christian agrees.

The question for the Supreme Court is what kind of legal standard it will establish to apply to cases such as these. The most radical idea is one that some conservatives would prefer, in which it would be fine for the government to make all kinds of religious statements as long as it isn’t coercing anyone into a particular belief. In other words, your town could place a giant statue of Jesus atop city hall and that would be fine.

Fortunately, most of the conservative justices on the court seem unwilling to go that far. But they are surely looking for new precedents they can establish to chip away at church/state separation and say that religious expressions such as this one are fine, just as they ruled in the Hobby Lobby case that corporations can decide which laws they want to disobey if they find a religious justification for their action.

But wait, you might say — this is all just about religious freedom and religious expression broadly, not about carving out special rights for Christians. But conservative Christians make these arguments precisely because they are in the majority, so they know that in almost every case where the government puts up a religious monument, it’s going to be their religion being honored.

This gets to the particular historical moment we’re in. When Donald Trump said that if he was elected people would once again be free to say “Merry Christmas,” he was lying in the sense that no one is forbidden from saying “Merry Christmas” and no one ever stopped saying it, but he was also getting at a deeper truth that conservative Christians face. They believe that they are an oppressed majority in America today, and while that’s not true either, they have indeed lost something. They’ve lost the cultural hegemony that they once enjoyed, in which their faith and only their faith is honored in the public arena, and everyone who isn’t Christian just has to suck it up.

In many parts of American life, that’s no longer true. We’ve now moved toward a more inclusive set of cultural norms that acknowledges that though most Americans are Christian, many other Americans follow other religions or no religion, and they deserve respect and acknowledgement, too. Many stores do indeed wish their patrons “Happy Holidays” in order to be inclusive. Schools in many areas are closed not only on Christmas and Easter, but also on Yom Kippur and maybe even Eid al-Fitr.

If you’re used to the entire society acting as though your religion is the only legitimate one, that might feel like a shock. Now combine that with the fact that you see the culture moving away from your values in other areas like sexuality and child-rearing, where society accepts same-sex marriage and condemns the use of physical violence as a child-rearing tool. You might sincerely feel that everything you believe in is under assault, and look to the courts to preserve your religion’s primacy in any way you can.

If you’re used to being on top, a move toward simple equality seems terribly unfair. You can see that impulse in recent comments from Paul LePage, the former governor of Maine. Speaking on a radio show, LePage warned against a plan promoted by activists to circumvent the electoral college by getting a large enough group of states to give their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote (under the Constitution states can assign their electoral votes however they please).

“What would happen if they do what they say they’re gonna do is white people will not have anything to say,” said LePage. “It’s only going to be the minorities that would elect. It would be California, Texas, Florida.” He went on to assert that “we’re gonna be forgotten people.” In other words, a system in which white people don’t have a disproportionately large influence on the outcome, a system in which every American has an equal say, is the same thing as whites being completely disenfranchised.

There’s no telling what the future of the electoral college is, but we can be sure that as America grows more diverse, conservative Christians will feel more and more alienated from the culture. But they’ll keep finding a friendly ear for their grievances on the Supreme Court. And that gigantic cross isn’t going anywhere.

Wag The Dog indeed.

Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio has blown his big foreign policy initiative by walking away with a ‘No Deal Brexit’ from his summit in Hanoi, disappointing the most minimal of expectations of agreement to disagree.

‘Sometimes you have to walk’: Trump leaves summit empty-handed at tough point in presidency
By Josh Dawsey and Philip Rucker, Washington Post
February 28, 2019

The Hanoi summit underscored the limits of Trump’s ability to translate the charisma and hustler instincts that made him a wealthy star in New York real estate into the more nuanced realm of international diplomacy. He has faced sharp criticism — including from within his own administration — for his approach, which relies more on style than substance.

“It exposed Trump’s overreliance on personal relationships and it highlighted his tendency to badly under prepare,” said Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Haass added that Trump “weakened his own hand by brimming with optimism. It signaled that he wanted an agreement too much, which then, I expect, only increased Kim’s instinct to ask for too much.”
…
Trump appeared chastened and unusually subdued in his 37-minute news conference here, a marked contrast to the celebratory and freewheeling postgame show he staged in Singapore last summer at the conclusion of his historic first summit with Kim.

He did not joust as he often does with reporters, although he called on a number of journalists from China whose questions were docile relative to some of the ones he fields from the White House press corps.

Even a friendly question from Sean Hannity, the Fox News host who stood with senior White House officials against the wall before Trump encouraged him to inquire, did not perk the president’s mood.

Trump had Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flank him onstage, and even called his top diplomat to the microphone to explain the failure to secure a deal with North Korea, as if he wanted to mount a defense.
…
Some of Trump’s advisers and aides, including national security adviser John Bolton, warned the president about being so eager for a deal that he hastily makes an unwise concession to the North Koreans, according to people familiar with the internal discussions.

Within some quarters, including among some critics of the president, there was a palpable relief that Trump was willing to walk away. After all, he left without lifting economic sanctions, agreeing to remove U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula or causing an international incident with an incendiary tweet or stray comment.

Evelyn N. Farkas, a former Obama administration defense official, said the Hanoi summit was “a disaster for Trump personally and, for America, a diminution of our stature.” But, she said there was a silver lining: “He didn’t make a bad deal, and a lot of people feared he would.”
…
Joseph Yun, who served as U.S. special representative for North Korea from 2016 to 2018 under both Obama and Trump, said, “Trump tried to be nice-nice. It’s a page out of his book, relying on one-on-one negotiations, face-to-face negotiations. But that’s doesn’t work, especially with North Koreans.”

Yun added, “Trump is beginning to realize that North Korea’s not going to completely denuclearize, not now and probably not ever.”

Trump claimed as a victory an assurance from Kim that North Korea would no longer fire nuclear tests, but he seemed to hedge on the definition of denuclearization, and indeed U.S. intelligence agencies have evidence that Pyongyang has sought to conceal its weapons programs despite publicly engaging in denuclearization talks.

Trump’s Talks With Kim Jong-un Collapse Over North Korean Sanctions
By Edward Wong, The New York Times
Feb. 28, 2019

On his flight leaving Hanoi, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said officials had worked through the previous night and into the morning to come up with terms acceptable to both leaders.

“When you are dealing with a country that is of the nature of North Korea, it is often the case that only the most senior leaders have the capacity to make those important decisions,” he said.

“We’ll each need to regroup a little bit,” he added.

There was no immediate statement from Mr. Kim or the North Korean government.

According to the Americans, the sticking point turned on what it would take for the North to begin dismantling a central part of its nuclear program — the Yongbyon enrichment facility. Mr. Kim said he would do so only if all sanctions on his country were lifted.

But Mr. Trump and Mr. Pompeo said the North would have to dismantle other parts of its program as well before the United States agreed to such a big concession.

The United States has long insisted that sanctions will be lifted only after North Korea completely dismantles its nuclear program in a verifiable manner. There was talk before the summit meeting, though, that Mr. Trump might agree to ease sanctions in exchange for initial steps toward denuclearization by allowing joint economic projects between North and South Korea.

It was not immediately clear if Mr. Trump made such an offer or how Mr. Kim responded.
…
The first sign of the collapse of the talks came after morning meetings, when White House officials said a working lunch and signing ceremony had been canceled.

The White House then issued a statement saying that Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim had “discussed various ways to advance denuclearization and economic-driven concepts” during “very good and constructive meetings,” but failed to reach an agreement.

“I worry about the consequences,” said Jean H. Lee, a Korea expert at the Wilson Center, a research organization in Washington. “Did these two leaders and their teams build up enough good will to keep the lines of communication open, or are we headed into another period of stalled negotiations — or worse, tensions — that would give the North Koreans more time and incentive to keep building their weapons program?”

“This result leaves very little room for Kim to save face,” she added.

Officials from both sides had hoped the Hanoi summit meeting would produce more concrete results than the vague communiqué issued by the two leaders after their first meeting last June in Singapore.

Since that first encounter, American national security officials have said that denuclearization should be the priority, while North Korea has pushed for lifting of sanctions and improving relations with the United States and South Korea first.

The administration of President Moon Jae-in of South Korea appears to have agreed with Mr. Kim that establishing a more stable peace is the first priority, and it has been moving much faster than the United States in opening up diplomatically to the North.

“It is regrettable that they could not reach a complete agreement,” said Kim Eui-kyeom, a spokesman for Mr. Moon. “But it also seems clear that both sides have made more significant progress than ever.”

It is highly unusual to walk away from a summit with nothing. Normally your lower level flunkies have some innocuous statement such as both sides agree Apples fall down (barring some kind of systemic Quantum aberration) and you have a nice lunch and a ceremony.

This was not that.

It bears instead every indication it was thrown together at the last minute as a distraction from Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio’s current legal woes and it kind of failed ‘Bigly’ even at such a modest goal.

So my activist brother asked me, “Who’s that ranty guy in shirt sleeves?”

Cody Johnston.

“He’s really good.”

Yeah, Some More News.

Nobody likes the Vanity Project Penis Wall O’ Racism. Not even Republicans.

GOP unloads border angst on Pence
By BURGESS EVERETT, Politico
02/26/2019

Vice President Mike Pence faced a wall of resistance from Senate Republicans on Tuesday as he tried to sell President Donald Trump’s national emergency declaration on the southern border, according to multiple GOP sources.

The pointed reception at the GOP lunch raised further doubts among Senate Republicans that the administration will be able to hold down defections on a crucial vote to block the president in the coming weeks.

“There was a lot of passion from some of our members. And I think there is some skepticism. People are just genuinely concerned that we’re doing the right thing,” said one Republican senator, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

Pence told Republicans that Trump’s plan to unilaterally shift billions in military funding to border wall construction was not like President Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration, according to four attendees. He argued Trump is using an existing law and money approved by Congress, unlike Obama’s efforts to shield some immigrants from deportation.

The majority of the Senate GOP backs Trump, and many of them urged the party to back the president on Tuesday. But it appeared Pence’s pitch did little to move wavering GOP senators.

“I didn’t think his argument was very good. ‘We’ve got a crisis, that means the president can do this.’ That’s essentially the argument,” said a second Republican senator who is undecided on whether to stand with Trump.

As many as 10 Senate Republicans could support a resolution of disapproval if a vote were held today, according to four GOP senators who attended the lunch and heard Republican senators’ complaints. That’s far more than the four needed to pass the legislation on a simple majority and force Trump to issue the first veto of his presidency. Currently there are three public “yes” votes in the Senate GOP conference.
…
Pence did have some success in shoring up the president’s position, earning plaudits from GOP senators like Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Kennedy of Louisiana, who said he was persuasive and convincing in arguing that the border is in a true state of emergency.

Pence is “hoping that people will rally around the president. Senators are going to vote the way they are going to vote. I think this really helped,” Graham said.

“We talked extensively about the factual and the legal basis,” Kennedy added. “I’m going to support the president. I think he’s right factually and I think he’s right statutorily. … There were some people who raised questions about it who will ultimately end up voting for [the disapproval resolution]. I’m not saying all of them.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who previously warned the president against declaring the emergency, acknowledged Tuesday that there was a “fulsome discussion” at the lunch between GOP senators and Pence and Justice Department officials.

And the Kentucky Republican said he himself is not sure about the legality of the national emergency declaration, though he has previously vowed to support the president in a floor vote.

“The [DOJ] lawyer was there to make his arguments. There were some counter arguments. I haven’t reached a total conclusion,” McConnell told reporters. “I personally couldn’t handicap the outcome at this point … but we will certainly be voting on it.”

More from Politico–

Missing from Trump’s wall war: What immigration hawks really want
By NANCY COOK and GABBY ORR, Politico
02/26/2019

President Donald Trump sees his border wall crusade as a base-pleasing 2020 campaign asset, proof that he is the ultimate immigration hardliner.

But his wall may not be built for years, if ever. In the meantime, Trump has yet to deliver on several other campaign promises that immigration hawks call far more important — a failure that could cost him among conservatives demanding results on border security going into Trump’s reelection bid.

Over two years in the White House, Trump has struggled to execute numerous agenda items long on immigration hardliners’ wish list — like finalizing stricter regulations, overhauling the immigration court system, adding additional surveillance technology to the border, doing away with sanctuary cities and making sure employers electronically check the immigration status of all workers.

Instead, Trump has picked high-profile battles over a southern border wall and banning travelers from certain Muslim-majority countries that generated controversy and whipped up parts of his base, but did not do much to stem the flow of illegal immigrants. In fact, the number of illegal crossings at the southern border rose this past fall to levels not seen since 2014 under President Barack Obama, although they still remain low relative to historic numbers.

“The focus on the wall is a bit myopic,” said RJ Hauman, director of government relations at FAIR, a group that seeks to reduce immigration overall. “They are right to pursue fencing in some areas, but we need to remember: It is just one little cog in a much broader approach. Sometimes the wall can suck all of the air out of the room.”

Often Trump blames this lack of progress on uncooperative Democrats, recalcitrant Republicans and activist judges. But ultimately, the president might bear the blame as the campaign heats up.

How unpopular is the Declaration of Emergency? Thirteen Republicans and counting.

House Votes to Block Trump’s National Emergency Declaration About the Border
By Emily Cochrane, The New York Times
Feb. 26, 2019

The House voted on Tuesday to overturn President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the Mexican border, with just 13 Republicans joining Democrats to try to block his effort to divert funding to a border wall without congressional approval.

House Republican leaders kept defections low after feverishly working to assuage concerns among rank-and-file members about protecting congressional powers and about the precedent that Mr. Trump could be setting for Democratic presidents to use for their own purposes.

“Is your oath of office to Donald Trump or is it to the Constitution of the United States?” Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked her Republican colleagues in a speech on the floor ahead of the vote. “You cannot let him undermine your pledge to the Constitution.”

The resolution of disapproval, which passed 245 to 182, must now be taken up by the Senate, where three Republicans have already declared their support, only one short of the number needed for Congress to ratify a stinging rebuke of Mr. Trump’s efforts.

It remains highly unlikely that opponents will muster the votes to overturn a promised veto of the resolution. But final passage of a measure to assert Congress’s constitutional authority over spending is sure to bolster numerous lawsuits that maintain that Mr. Trump’s declaration is an unconstitutional end run around Congress’s lawful power of the purse.

Many of the 13 Republicans who defected in the House were adamant in their arguments. Representative Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, a veteran lawmaker who once helped manage Republican efforts to remove Bill Clinton from the White House, made it clear he supported the border wall.

But, he said, “insufficient action — however frustrating it may be — is still the prerogative of the legislative branch. It is imperative that no administration, Republican or Democratic, circumvent the will of Congress.”

In the Senate, where lawmakers are required to vote on the resolution in the coming weeks, those concerns persisted. Even Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader and an open supporter of the declaration, declined to offer his opinion on the legal merits.

“We’re in the process of weighing that,” Mr. McConnell said when asked at a news conference on Tuesday. “I haven’t reached a total conclusion.”

“You can’t blame the president for trying to use whatever tool he thinks he has to address it,” he added.
…
Democrats, who overwhelmingly endorsed the resolution of disapproval, framed the vote as an ultimatum on whether lawmakers would buck party loyalty in order to protect Congress’s constitutionally granted powers. Ms. Pelosi, in a floor speech on Tuesday, listed a number of instances in which House Republicans had objected to Mr. Obama’s use of executive power, vowing that “we are not going to give any president, Democratic or Republican, a blank check to shred the Constitution of the United States.”

Representative Joaquin Castro called the vote on the one-page resolution “the most important vote, probably in a generation, on the separation of powers.”

Mr. Castro, Democrat of Texas and the author of the resolution, warned Republicans that if the president’s declaration went unchallenged, the issue would resurface.

“If Congress lets this stand, if the courts let it stand, how am I to tell a future president that gun deaths that number in the tens of thousands every year in this country, or opioid deaths that number in the thousands in this country, are not an emergency?” Mr. Castro said in a brief interview. “Or climate change is not a national emergency?”

“If this becomes a short circuit to get other things done,” he added, “then how is a president not expected to use that tool in the future?”
…
“The Congress of the United States needs to have a spine, and not lay at the feet of the president,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader. “That’s not what the people elected us to do.”