Here’s another Trump policy likely to get held up in courts.
a wall-to-wall ban on transgender Americans in the armed forces could only be understood as rooted in what constitutional doctrine calls animus: that is, the bare dislike of a group of people. And as the Supreme Court has held in cases going back at least to the 1970s, animus is never a constitutionally valid reason for government action.
.. The Israeli military, which is not known for compromising its fighting effectiveness out of deference to softheaded social causes, includes transgender individuals in its ranks.
.. Trump’s tweets did not speak of barring transgender personnel from combat; it proposed to bar transgender persons from military service “in any capacity[.]”
.. The U.S. military employs people in a lot of capacities. It has doctors, lawyers, chaplains, cartographers, meteorologists, journalists, diplomatic attaches, cargo pilots, engineers and cooks. And it’s hard to think of any reason why transgender individuals should be banned from all of those roles. Indeed, it’s hard even to think of any reason why a government might want to ban transgender persons from all of those roles—except, of course, for simple dislike of transgender individuals.
.. Yes, the military might incur such costs if it paid the bill for the medical care associated with actual gender transition, as was the policy under Obama. But if that were the concern, the military could simply stop providing that benefit, thus saving the money without barring all transgender persons.
.. Regardless of whether the president himself bears ill will toward transgender people, his aim might be to appeal to a political base that does. But it’s well-established that one cannot escape anti-discrimination rules on the grounds that one is catering to someone else’s prejudice rather than acting on one’s own.
The classic example is a restaurant that refuses to hire black waitstaff, not because the restaurant owner is a racist but because the restaurant owner thinks the customers want the waitstaff to be white. This “customer preference” argument is a known loser, and it’s no different as an argument about voters rather than customers.
.. government actions discriminating on the basis of gender are subject to what constitutional doctrine calls “heightened scrutiny” and in particular that they can survive only if they are “substantially related to important government interests.”
.. If a policy is based in animus, it is unconstitutional regardless of whether a similar policy or even the identical policy could have been enacted for permissible reasons. What makes such a policy invalid is its purpose rather than the specifics of how it is carried out.
Trump Threatens to Withhold Payments to Insurers to Press Democrats on Health Bill
‘Democrats will start calling me’ if turmoil hits insurance markets, President Donald Trump tells The Wall Street Journal
In suggesting that he isn’t willing to proceed with changes to the tax code until health care was addressed, Mr. Trump sent a strong signal to members of his own party.. He didn’t rule out the possibility of a tax bill passing before the congressional recess in August, though many White House officials and lawmakers believe that timeline is unrealistic... Mr. Trump said he had mixed feelings about creating turmoil in the insurance markets… A federal judge in 2016 ruled the government payments were improper but let them continue while Mr. Obama’s administration pursued an appeal. After Mr. Trump’s election, Republicans requested and received an initial delay in the case.
.. “Obamacare is dead next month if it doesn’t get that money,” Mr. Trump said. “I haven’t made my viewpoint clear yet. I don’t want people to get hurt….What I think should happen and will happen is the Democrats will start calling me and negotiating.”
.. House Speaker, Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) has said he would prefer to see the administration continue to fund the payments.
.. Mr. Trump said Mr. Schumer “should be calling me and begging me to help him save Obamacare, along with Nancy Pelosi.”
.. Mr. Schumer said the president was “threatening to hold hostage health care for millions of Americans…to achieve a political goal of repeal that would take health care away from millions more. This cynical strategy will fail.”
Still against Intervention in Syria
Trump’s act of war is in violation of the Constitution, which requires congressional authorization for such an offensive use of military force, provoked by no aggression against our nation.
.. Bashar al-Assad’s continuation in power, dismal as that prospect may be, is in no way the worst conceivable outcome for American national security.
.. If the United States has not been attacked or threatened, congressional approval should be sought, not merely for legal purposes but also to ensure that complexities have been thought through and public support for a risky intervention has been won. Here, quite apart from the want of American legal footing, Trump lacks even the fig leaf of international legitimacy
.. count me out of the virtue-preening that obsesses over the type of monstrous weapons employed when the issue is the monster using the weapons — of any kind. Both Assad and his opposition jihadists regularly commit atrocious war crimes targeting civilians. It is not beneath Assad, his enablers, or his enemies — al-Qaeda, ISIS, and their fellow militant Islamists, all of whom seek and would use weapons of mass destruction — to enter a village and firebomb or shoot up several dozen civilians (including women, children, and “beautiful babies”) with conventional arms. That is a commonplace
.. The barbarism characteristic of Syria’s years-long civil war is not materially different because chemical weapons have been used
.. There is no American interest is deposing Assad if he would be replaced by
(a) a Sunni sharia-supremacist regime that is more likely than Assad to make Syria a platform for jihadist attacks against our homeland and interests or
(b) a Libyan-style failed state that has the same effect.
.. the principal American enemy pulling Assad’s strings is Iran
.. Until we have a strategy for both vanquishing the Sunni jihadists and choking the regime in Tehran
.. accommodations had been made with Russia — particularly in sharing air space — in order to promote U.S.-led coalition attacks against ISIS. Last night’s missile strike against the Syrian air base puts an end to those accommodations. Is the Assad attack worth it if it makes the ISIS campaign more difficult?
.. Proportionality means that a use of force, and the collateral damage it is sure to entail, should be reasonably related to the military value of a lawful objective. It does not mean that an unauthorized, unprovoked attack is legitimate as long as it’s not too big.
.. what are we going to say when Putin cites last night’s strike as justification for his own unilateral but “proportional” attacks in Eastern Europe?
Court Temporarily Blocks Trump’s Travel Ban, and Airlines Are Told to Allow Passengers
The federal government was “arguing that we have to protect the U.S. from individuals from these countries, and there’s no support for that,” said the judge, James Robart of Federal District Court for the Western District of Washington, an appointee of President George W. Bush, in a decision delivered from the bench.
.. Judge Robart temporarily barred the administration from enforcing two parts of Mr. Trump’s order: its 90-day suspension of entry into the United States of people from the seven countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — and its limits on accepting refugees, including “any action that prioritizes the refugee claims of certain religious minorities.”
.. The order said that when immigration from the seven countries resumed, persecuted religious minorities would be given preference, and in an interview the day of the signing, Mr. Trump said the United States would give Christians from those countries priority because they had suffered “more so than others.”
.. lawyers for some travelers had described getting one as a Kafkaesque exercise, with the State Department’s website warning that no emergency applications would be heard, and Customs and Border Protection agents at United States airports all but unreachable because their clients were not being allowed to board planes.
.. In the Virginia courtroom, spectators gasped when a lawyer for the government told Judge Brinkema, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, that more than 100,000 visas had been revoked as part of Mr. Trump’s order.
.. the legal arguments in the last few days have centered on the government’s contention that there is “no potential irreparable harm” to justify keeping the extraordinary orders in place pending fuller briefing and arguments.