Apparently, It’s Illegal to Laugh at Jeff Sessions

By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post

06 September 17

 

id you hear the one about Jeff Sessions?

I’d like to tell you, but I can’t. You see, it’s illegal to laugh at the attorney general, the man who on Tuesday morning announced that the 800,000 “dreamers” — immigrants brought here illegally as children — could soon be deported. If you were to find my Sessions jest funny, I would be an accessory to mirth.

This is no joke, because liberal activist Desiree Fairooz is now being put on trial a second time by the Justice Department — Jeff Sessions’s Justice Department — because she laughed at Sessions during his confirmation hearing. Specifically, she laughed at a line about Sessions “treating all Americans equally under the law” (which is, objectively, kind of funny).

Police asked her to leave the hearing because of her laugh. She protested and was charged. In May, a jury of her peers found her guilty of disorderly conduct and another offense (“first-degree chuckling with intent to titter” was Stephen Colbert’s sentence at the time). The judge threw out the verdict, objecting to prosecutors’ closing argument claiming that laughter alone was enough to convict her.

But at a hearing Friday, the Justice Department said it would continue to prosecute her. A new trial is scheduled for November. Maybe Sessions, repeatedly and publicly criticized by Trump, thinks Justice’s anti-laughing crackdown will protect whatever dignity he has left.

If Justice Department prosecutors are determined to go after those who laugh at Sessions, they are going to need an awfully big dragnet. Sessions’s mannerisms, the things he says and the way he says them dare you to laugh. It’s practically entrapment!

Sessions is a wiry man whose eyebrows soar and eyes bug out when he speaks. He often pecks his head forward, like a pigeon. His Alabama twang causes snobbish elites from outside the Deep South to snigger (thereby risking 30 days in prison). And some of what he says is so absurd the comedy must be deliberate.

At Tuesday’s announcement about the DACA program, Sessions explained that the protections would be rescinded after a delay (of six months) “to create a time period for Congress to act” on the dreamers. Congress acting on immigration in six months? Hilarious! You could give Congress six?months to affirm that there are 13?stripes in the American flag, and Ted Cruz and the Freedom Caucus would insist on an amendment reducing the stripes to 11 to reduce the size of government. Nothing would pass.

Likewise, how do Trump and Sessions suppose they are going to deport 800,000 dreamers, many of whom have no memory of the lands they were brought from as children? Cull them in a big game of DACA, DACA, goose? Sorry, that wasn’t funny. Please don’t laugh, for your own protection.

I went to the Justice Department on Tuesday to watch the Sessions announcement, and it took strength not to commit misdemeanor mirth. Sessions had no fewer than five bodyguards — earpieces, lapel pins and menacing looks — to protect him from the credentialed press corps, more than the president uses in similar settings. He put his reading glasses on the tip of his nose, pecked his way through his written statement, mispronouncing various words, and turned to go.

NBC’s Kristen Welker and Politico’s Josh Gerstein shouted questions. Sessions didn’t answer, instead giving an awkward wave to the cameras and hastily deporting himself from the room.

It was darkly funny that Sessions thought he could banish 800,000 people, Americans in all ways but on paper, and then refuse to answer questions — just as it’s funny that he thinks people who laugh at him should be prosecuted.

But I bit my tongue. Sessions likes to prosecute journalists as well as people who laugh at his expense. To commit both crimes simultaneously might be a capital offense.

If the attorney general is going to continue doing laughable things and the Justice Department is going to keep making laughing at him a crime, we are going to need some new guidelines about which laughter is illegal (Fairooz claims her offense was “involuntary,” “reflexive” and at most a “chortle of disdain,” while others have described it as “two snorts” and a “giggle”) and a schedule of penalties.

A misdemeanor chuckle at the attorney general’s expense, for example, could be punished with up to 30 days in prison for first-time offenders. An aggravated guffaw would get you a year, and if you were to confront Sessions with a premeditated ROFLMAO, you’d be looking at 10 years, some of that in solitary listening to Sessions’s old Senate speeches. If you split your sides when you laughed at Sessions, your trial would be postponed until you were medically fit.

Of course, Sessions, as the victim of the crime, must recuse himself, and a special prosecutor for laughter must be appointed. I suggest James Comey, just for giggles.

Don't Be Surprised if Trump's Assault on 'Dreamers' Works - Politically

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

06 September 17

The president is behaving like a candidate again, which is bad news for his political opponents

ere is an unpopular observation about Donald Trump's latest assault on immigrants: It might work, politically.

Delivering the odious message through his feckless, oft-humiliated Justice Department subordinate, Jeff Sessions, Trump this week announced that the Department of Homeland Security would stop processing applications under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.

Begun under Barack Obama's administration in 2012, DACA allowed undocumented immigrants who entered the country as minors to receive work permits and renewable exemptions from deportation.

Sessions delivered the news with anxious excitement, like he was finally getting to the fun part of being the designated organ grinder's monkey of the Trump administration. He insisted that he was only righting a wrong, undoing an executive branch dictum that Obama had forced down the throats of Congress years before.

"Such an open-ended circumvention of immigration laws," Sessions said, "was an unconstitutional exercise of authority by the executive branch."

Sessions was just warming up. The bulk of his argument against DACA was phrased with an unmistakable nod to the kind of nationalist, identitarian rhetoric you'd expect to hear from someone like Steve Bannon.

"We have inherited from our founders, and have advanced, an unsurpassed legal heritage," Sessions said. "[This] is the foundation of our freedom, our safety and our prosperity."

The idea of anyone from Alabama bragging about his unsurpassable "legal heritage" sounds like a joke, but it's not – there's not a lot of irony to go around in American politics these days.

In a statement issued after Sessions', Trump himself doubled down on the Bannonite themes. He promised to "resolve the DACA issue with heart and compassion," but added that compassion isn't just for penniless children fleeing violence and corruption in foreign countries.

"We must also have heart and compassion for unemployed, struggling and forgotten Americans," Trump explained.

Trump announced a plan to continue renewing permits for anyone whose status expires in the next six months, then saddled Congress with the mess, giving them a March 5th, 2018, deadline to preserve or kill DACA.

The press, a parade of celebrities and a significant portion of our national elected officials denounced the maneuver as transparent racism and cruelty.

Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg both ripped the decision. Lena Dunham, Susan Sarandon and George Takei unsurprisingly chimed in with their own denunciations. Director Rob Reiner put it as follows: "Unfortunately there is no other way to say this: Donald J. Trump is a heartless prick."

Democrats, too, lined up one after another to take a whack. The move, said Elizabeth Warren, was "part of the bigoted policies that are a cornerstone of [Trump's] administration."

"Cruel. Not America," was Joe Biden's contribution.

Some Republicans rushed to condemn the move, or at least seemed to. Paul Ryan said he hoped Congress could find a solution so that "those who have done nothing wrong can still contribute." Sen. Jeff Flake, facing re-election in Arizona, said that DACA kids "should not be punished for the sins of their parents." John McCain said in a statement that Trump's move was the "wrong approach."

It's these Republicans who are being targeted politically with this move.

This just-concluded month of August saw Trump in political freefall, denounced worldwide for his decision to stand up for the "very fine people" who, according to him, were included among a crowd of marching neo-Nazis in Charlottesville.

But September so far shows Trump returning to what has worked for him over and over in the past two years: Daring establishment Republicans to enter into policy agreement with the liberal consensus, particularly on immigration.

Trump won the presidency thanks in significant part to the Republican Party's misread of its own electorate on that issue heading into 2016. Essentially, Trump and the Republican leaders were reading the same tea leaves, but coming to two different conclusions.

While leaders in both parties saw a general trend toward acceptance of immigrants – in January of 2016, 55 percent of Americans overall said immigrants strengthen America – Trump courted the recalcitrant half of Republican voters who continued to decry immigrants as a menace who weakened the country.

The establishment Republicans saw they couldn't be viable as a national political party long-term if they continued to maintain an intolerant stance on immigration.

But Trump, thinking on a more selfish and short-term basis, understood that he could control the Republican Party in the here and now by running sharply in the other direction. He wiped out the likes of "low-energy Jeb" and "little Marco," both party-approved choices with some pro-immigration leanings, by blasting both as "weak" on the issue.

Ted Cruz, who probably never imagined he'd have to start off running to the left of anyone on immigration, spent much of the campaign trying to prove he was just as dickish as Trump on border matters – a tough trick to pull off, when you're leading off your stump speeches with tales of your immigrant dad sneaking into Texas with a hundred bucks sewn into his underpants. Ben Carson found himself promising a campaign of drone-striking border-crossers, and it still wasn't enough. And so on.

A few weeks ago, Trump looked finished as a politician. He was wrapping his arms around Nazis in public and then emptying his id for all the world to see in a pair of remarkable unscripted tirades, first at Trump Tower, and then in a 77-minute rant in Phoenix.

He is now fighting back, and it's a mistake to be distracted by the transparent loathsomeness of this DACA maneuver. Trump knows that while this doesn't play in newsrooms or in Lena Dunham's trailer, it goes over pretty damn well in other parts of the country.

He also knows that other Republicans are watching what's happening with the likes of Flake, who is currently getting roasted for opposing Trump on this and other issues. The Arizona Republican is getting beaten like a gong in the polls by a more conservative and Trump-aligned primary challenger in Dr. Kelli Ward.

Flake's numbers are currently so bad that there are some who think he might consider dropping out before the primary. If such a wipeout were to take place, it would have a devastating effect on the opposition to Trump generally.

For all the talk about unseating Trump with impeachment or an Article 25 proceeding, the reality is that Trump will likely have a chance to rack up some kills of his own first in the midterm elections – even if they come from his own party. Longtime Trump advisor Roger Stone said as much at the end of last month:

"Most members of Congress are arrogant, and until a scalp is actually taken they are going to continue to be defiant," Stone told The Hill.

Though this is not the smartest strategy in the world, it is, at least, a kind of plan. Trump won the White House by battering the Republican establishment with an exaggerated, parodized version of its own irresponsible rhetoric. If he can continue to show he dominates the party base, even if it’s just a thin plurality of voters overall, he can put some doubt into the minds of any Republicans who are thinking of joining in an effort to topple his presidency.

Just one particularly gruesome loss by an open Trump antagonist like Flake or even the suddenly-waffling Bob Corker of Tennessee – who recently wondered aloud about Trump's "stability" and "competence" – might be enough to chill out any hint of serious Republican rebellion. Trump just tweeted a clear, if ungrammatical, 2018-themed warning to Corker: "Tennessee not happy!"

As historically unpopular as Trump has been as a president, he is still nowhere near as unpopular as the institutions of the House and Senate generally. Last month, across five different polling agencies – Gallup, CNN, CBS News, Monmouth University and Quinnipiac University – public approval of Congress never exceeded 20 percent. Trump's numbers, hideous as they are, consistently run about twice as high.

Meanwhile, a major Republican leader like Mitch McConnell was last month running at about 30 percent approval rating among Republicans, according to Public Policy Polling. That's compared with 81 percent favorability for Trump among the same Republican respondents. Trump still has a hammer over most of the elected hacks in his own party.

For two years now Americans have been bewildered by the train-wreck persona of Donald Trump, wondering how he could be succeeding despite a seemingly fierce determination to offend every voting bloc on earth outside of angry half-literate white dudes.

The answer lay in the fact that the rest of the political landscape is increasingly fragmented, and other institutions – Congress, the media, the Republican and Democratic Party establishments – all have ratings that are nearly as low or lower even than Trump's. This allows the Orange One to survive seemingly unsurvivable scandals.

Not even Trump can thrive embracing torch-bearing Nazis. But just a slight retreat from that extreme, pushing Jeff Sessions forward to air out a watered-down, tie-clad version of the same racialist politics, might be enough to help Trump reassert control over the same furious anti-immigration plurality that won him the election.

That giant blob of dumb support might not be enough to help him win re-election. But it could easily be enough to help him survive all four years, and that's bad enough.

Watch below: Attorney General Jeff Sessions announces Trump's plans to end DACA.