A Travel Ban’s Foe: A Young Firebrand and Her Pro Bono Brigade

Tipped off by her Washington sources that an executive order blocking refugees was coming, Becca Heller fired off messages to her vast network of law students and pro bono lawyers:

Tell any clients who already have visas to board a plane for the United States. Get ready for the possibility that they will be detained upon landing.

.. After Mr. Trump’s election, she said, “I started thinking increasingly in military terms, so I was like: ‘What does it mean that we have an army of 2,000 lawyers who want to do stuff for refugees? What can we do with that?’”

.. In their eyes, she comes off as a naïve liberal who puts the plight of foreigners over the nation’s security.

.. “there can be no such thing as an immigration policy that puts the national interest first.” He said they treated the immigration system “like a giant global welfare program.”

.. To those critics, Ms. Heller says her role is to uphold the nation’s tradition of responding to humanitarian crises.

.. The night after the order was signed, an IRAP client, Hameed Darweesh, an Iraqi detained at Kennedy, won the very first court ruling against the travel ban, from a federal judge in Brooklyn.

Lawyers at airports showed the order to officials on their smartphones. Travelers began to be set free.

.. Though Ms. Heller and other challengers to the ban have been victorious in court, and popular among liberals, how broadly the public supports these efforts is an open question.

The health care bill could be Donald Trump’s Iraq War

Sold on lies, poorly planned, deadly to thousands, and a catastrophe for its authors.

Conservatives believe it is not the government’s responsibility to ensure the poor can afford decent health insurance. They argue that if taxpayers are pitching in for someone’s coverage, that coverage should be lean; a high-deductible plan that protects against catastrophic medical expenses is plenty for charity care.

Under this view, the basic structure of Obamacare — which taxes the rich to purchase reasonably generous coverage for the poor — is ill-conceived and should be reversed.

.. Much as Americans were told the Iraq War was about removing the threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, they have been told that the GOP’s health care effort is about replacing Obamacare with “something terrific” — a plan that covers everyone with good health insurance that they can actually afford to use. In both cases, they were lied to.

.. But Republicans have taken everything they said they didn’t like about the process behind Obamacare and supercharged it — it’s as if they’re using their critique of the ACA process as a playbook for retribution. They are moving faster than Democrats did, and they are doing so with less stakeholder support, with a smaller congressional majority, with less bipartisan input, with an unpopular bill backed by an unpopular president, with less information about what their bill would do, and while providing fewer opportunities for members of Congress to amend and improve the underlying ideas.

.. The 2003 “shock and awe” campaign to topple Saddam Hussein reflected a misconception that the hard part of the Iraq War would be fighting through to Baghdad — but once we were there, and once Hussein was gone, it would all work out. It didn’t. The hard part was after Hussein fell, and the United States was responsible for the future of a country it didn’t understand and faced with chaos it hadn’t planned for.

.. President George W. Bush famously called the invasion of Iraq a “catastrophic success” — it was a military victory that left America embroiled in a catastrophe.

.. This is the heath care version of Dick Cheney’s promise that American troops “will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

.. A cautious estimate, based off the best available evidence, suggests coverage losses on the scale Republicans envision will lead to more than 24,000 deaths annually.

.. Democrats could, within a matter of weeks, pass a short, clear law restoring and expanding the Medicaid expansion, restoring and expanding Obamacare’s tax credits, allowing Americans to buy into Medicare as an option on the exchanges, and paying for the whole thing by levying hefty taxes on the rich. The bill would be easy to write and easier to explain.

.. If Republicans upend Obamacare, their replacement plan is unlikely to survive the aftermath — it’s simply too different from what voters want, too vulnerable to future change, too loathed by existing interest groups, and too shoddily constructed to build support on its own merits. Rather, their plan will create chaos in insurance markets, anger among voters, and radicalization among their opponents; the policy that eventually fills the vacuum they create will not be one they like.

America, From Exceptionalism to Nihilism

The U.S. leads the free world in its helplessness
before the dissolution of its most cherished values.

Walter Lippmann worried that the promise of private wealth-creation was a weak moral basis for a national community.

For many midcentury thinkers, nihilism, a catastrophic breakdown of faith in national ideology and institutions that had occurred in Europe, was also a possibility in America.

.. The 1960s and 1970s did turn out to reveal a country sharply divided along generational, racial, religious, gender and political lines. White and black, gay and straight, men and women, religious and secular, antiwar protesters and hard-hatted patriots all faced off. For a time, the founding principles of American society — the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” — seemed like they would be unable to adjudicate between the competing, often clashing, interests.

.. It has been too easily forgotten that the calamitous failure of these “market Bolsheviks,” as the economist Joseph Stiglitz called them, helped spawn the first major demagogue of our time: Vladimir V. Putin.

.. In another self-protective move, these intellectuals have taken to blaming identity politics for Mr. Trump’s support among white male voters.

.. It could be argued that this frequently asserted and widely believed American creed of continuous and irreversible progress is what saved a diverse society not only from tragic social conflicts, but also from the mass manipulators who have periodically ruined other countries with their quack solutions. Today, however, more people seem to have seen through the constructed nature of this quasi-religious faith: It’s credible only if you believe in it.

.. They feel deceived by a class of politicians, experts, technocrats and journalists which had claimed to be in possession of the truth and offered a series of propositions that turned out to be misleading or wrong:

  • the rising tide of globalization will lift all boats,
  • the market is free and fair, shock therapy would bring capitalism to Russia,
  • shock-and-awe therapy would deliver democracy to Iraq.

Many of the aggrieved now see the elites, who offered to expedite progress while expanding their own power and wealth, as self-serving charlatans.

.. America has accelerated its most insidious tendency: nihilism.