A group of protesters gathered along 5th Avenue at the Cabell County Courthouse on Thursday to demonstrate disapproval of the deaths of two immigrant children who died while in U.S. custody.
Jakelin Caal Maquin, 7, died Dec. 8 while in Border Patrol custody and Felipe Alonzo-Gomez, 8, died on Christmas Eve in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, The Associated Press reported.
The protest was the final Third Thursday action of the year for the Huntington chapter of Women’s March West Virginia.
A sculpture of a child in a cage was displayed at the protest in Huntington. It was comprised of a white fiberglass statue of a small girl in a cage made of chain-link fencing that was painted white. Also in the cage was a bench modeled after those used in ICE cells and a Mylar emergency blanket. A black-and-white American flag flew over the cage.
The sculpture was created by protester David McGee, a 68-year-old veteran who said he has been involved in political protests since the Reagan administration. He said he had the sculpture of the little girl already and modified it for the demonstration.
McGee said he is active with political demonstrations because he is displeased with the direction the political climate in the U.S. is going and with the division of citizens.
Journalists are infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump wished “the Fake News Media” a merry Christmas on Twitter, but any holiday cheer the president felt toward the press promptly evaporated in the following days as the White House and its allies pushed back against reporting on the president’s first visit to troops in a combat zone.
“CNN will attack anyone who supports President Trump, including the brave men and women of our military who fight everyday to protect our freedom,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders tweeted Thursday in response to one report questioning whether Trump signing hats for troops broke military rules.
Trump’s appearance at Al Asad Air Base in Iraq followed several media reports questioning why he had not spent time with troops during the holiday season like Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama always did. On Christmas, NBC News published a story declaring that Trump is the first president since 2002 not to visit troops “at Christmastime.”
Less than 12 hours later, President Trump and first lady Melania Trump were on Air Force One heading toward Iraq for an unannounced appearance that had been planned in secret. NBC has now updated the original story with a lengthy editor’s note explaining that the reporting was accurate when it was published and it has changed the wording of the headline from “at Christmastime” to “on or before Christmas.”
NBC faced criticism from Fox News and others, including Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple, for its handling of the story. However, media analyst and former journalist John Carroll said some of the backlash against NBC is unwarranted because the facts clearly changed after the story was posted.
“That happens in daily journalism because the news is a moving target, and you would think other supposedly journalistic organizations would understand that instead of weaponizing it to make political points,” he said.
According to Tobe Berkovitz, a former political media consultant and a professor of advertising at Boston University, NBC and other media outlets backed themselves into a corner with critical reporting on Trump’s unwillingness to visit active duty troops in a warzone before the holiday while the president was apparently preparing for this trip.
“The problem with the coverage of the trip to Iraq was the lead was first, ‘The first president not to visit our troops,’ then sort of, ‘He ended up having to visit the troops,’” he said.[…]
“It’s a complicated, difficult story to cover because there is a story in its own right that the president traveled to Iraq to meet with the troops,” said Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief and director School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. “His time with the troops should be duly noted, just as other presidents have traveled to the troops. The complicating element of this is it took this president so long to visit troops in a theater of combat, and his behavior when he was there.”
Some service members showed up to meet Trump with “Make America Great Again” hats and other campaign items that they waved or asked him to autograph. Several retired military officials suggested the presence of Trump campaign hats and banners violated rules prohibiting troops from partisan political activities, but the White House slammed media outlets that raised the question.
“CNN & others within the Fake News Universe were going wild about my signing MAGA hats for our military in Iraq and Germany. If these brave young people ask me to sign their hat, I will sign. Can you imagine my saying NO? We brought or gave NO hats as the Fake News first reported!” Trump tweeted.
This may not sound like it’s a case about abortion but it is. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court overruled a lower court which had determined that a woman could be held liable for child abuse because she used drugs during her pregnancy and gave birth to a baby who spent two weeks detoxing in a hospital. The reasoning here is simple: Prior to birth a fetus isn’t a person thus the law can’t protect them from harm. From the Associated Press:
The Supreme Court’s main opinion said the law’s definition of a child does not include fetuses or unborn children, and victims of perpetrators must be children under the Child Protective Services Law.
“The fact that the actor, at a later date, becomes a person who meets one of the statutorily-defined categories of ‘perpetrator’ does not bring her earlier actions — even if committed within two years of the child’s bodily injury — under the CPSL,” wrote Justice Christine Donohue.
Two judges dissented, arguing that this case should rest not on whether the fetus was a person at the time of the abuse (i.e. when mom was using drugs) but whether it was a person at the time the injury took place (when the baby spent two weeks in a hospital detoxing).
“The facts in this matter more closely resemble neglect cases where the injury manifests at some point in time after the neglect as in cases of malnourishment from lack of food, or suffering from a severe diaper rash from failure to routinely change diapers,” wrote Justice Sallie Mundy, joined by Justice Debra Todd.
The case involves a girl who spent 19 days in Williamsport Hospital last year after she was born, being treated for drug dependence that caused severe withdrawal symptoms. Her mother had relapsed into drug use after getting out of jail, and two weeks before the girl was born in January 2017 the mother tested positive for opiates, marijuana and benzodiazepines, Donohue wrote…
Superior Court Judge Geoffrey Moulton wrote a year ago that a mother’s substance abuse while pregnant “may constitute child abuse” if authorities can prove she “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly caused, or created a reasonable likelihood of, bodily injury to a child after birth.” Moulton wrote the word “after” in boldface.
The argument made by the woman’s attorney is that it would be counter-productive to make women liable for actions that harmed their unborn children:
In a filing with Supreme Court, the woman’s lawyers said most states, with a few exceptions, “have taken a non-punitive approach to the issue.”
“Almost every major medical and public health organization has recognized that punishing women for drug use during their pregnancies is counterproductive to public and private health,” wrote lawyers for the mother, identified by initials in court records.
“The rationale here is simple — women with a substance abuse disorder during pregnancy need treatment, both for their drug use and prenatal care, and the threat of being punished by the state will drive women away from treatment, thus risking their own and their child’s health,” her lawyers argued.
That seems to make sense until you realize that the same reasoning could apply to a mother (or father) of any young child. For instance, say mom decides to go on a bender and forgets to feed her one-year-old for a couple days. Well, you could charge her with abuse and neglect, but according to this reasoning threatening such charges could lead the mother to decide not to bring the sick infant to the hospital for emergency care.
Similarly, if dad gets drunk and beats up his five-year-old the fear of being charged for that crime would make it less likely he’ll bring the injured child to a hospital. No doubt this is true. In fact, the worse the injury to the child, the more the abuser is likely to want to avoid any place that might report the abuse. And yet, we still have child abuse laws on the books. We don’t say that breaking a child’s arm should be decriminalized because it makes it more likely he’ll get to a hospital. At some point, we criminalize bad behavior by parents even if the threat of punishment makes the parents want to conceal evidence of the crime (in the form of the injured child) from authorities.
The PA court’s decision makes more sense if you assume what is really at stake is giving the pro-life movement further grounds to claim a child is a person prior to birth. If that’s your main concern, then this decision makes perfect sense. And that is definitely a major concern of the pro-abortion movement. Yesterday the NY Times published a massive editorial which devoted several thousand words to arguing that fetal personhood is a danger to women’s rights. Here’s a very small sample:
Anti-abortion activists have patiently been working to pass fetal protection laws not only in hopes of establishing that a fetus is a person entitled to full rights, but also to create a vehicle for overturning Roe v. Wade. Many of these activists are hoping that the new conservative majority on the Supreme Court is prepared to take that step.
Alabama, which has prosecuted more pregnant women in the name of fetal protection than almost any other state in the nation, last month became the only state to amend its Constitution to give “unborn children” the right to life, a guarantee that conflicts with the legal protections enshrined in Roe.
Alabama and other states would better serve the interests of children by putting less energy into manufacturing legal fights and more into ensuring the dignity and protection of women.
The entire editorial is a one-sided argument which starts from the presupposition that unborn babies should have no rights and concludes based on a handful of cases that fetal personhood is an imminent danger to women’s rights because it could eventually overturn Roe.
Every human right is limited when it comes into contact with another human being. Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. That’s why pregnancy is such a special case and abortion is such a contentious issue. Assuming from the start that one side has no rights to protect makes it easy to argue the case that women’s rights are being unfairly infringed upon. No doubt the PA court ruling and the NY Times editorial will be a hit with people who already agree with the underlying premise.
But not everyone does agree with this premise, and for good reason. A viable unborn baby (now as early as 24 weeks) is a baby who should not be killed or endangered. Of course not all babies born this early survive, but many do. This little preemie born in Australia (I picked this clip at random off YouTube, there are dozens more like it) is a person and was just as much a person the moments before he was born. If our laws don’t recognize that at present then we’ll keep pushing to change it until it’s in line with reality.
via Hot Air
Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://hotair.com
A video of a vape shop employee appearing to explode at a man wearing a pro-Trump hat and shirt went viral on Friday after the video was posted on social media.
House Republican say their investigation into the FBI’s handling of Hillary Clinton’s email server and the Trump campaign’s alleged Russian ties, which quietly wrapped up this week, uncovered concerns about its ‘impartiality’ – yet Democrats have blasted the probe as being little more than a distraction from Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Republicans have said since the election that they believe Justice officials were biased against President Trump when they started an investigation into his ties to Russia and cleared Clinton in a separate probe into her email use.
In a letter released Friday evening, less than a week before Republicans cede the House majority to Democrats, the chairmen of two House committees described what they said was the ‘seemingly disparate treatment’ between the two probes and called on the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate further.
House Judiciary Chairman Robert Goodlatte and Rep. Trey Gowdy, House Oversight and Government Reform chairman, both of whom are retiring next week, sent a letter to the Justice Department and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell saying they reviewed thousands of documents and conducted interviews that ‘revealed troubling facts which exacerbated our initial questions and concerns.’ […]
Republicans have repeatedly asked for a special counsel to look into the 2016 questions, but former Attorney General Jeff Sessions never granted their request. The department is now led by Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker, a Trump ally who has not weighed in on the issue.
The Republicans sent the letter not only to McConnell but to several other Republican Senate committee chairmen, including South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who will become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Goodlatte and Gowdy wrote that ‘while Congress does not have the power to appoint a special counsel, Congress does have the power to continue to investigate. They said they believe ‘the facts uncovered thus far’ warrant continued oversight.
Goodlatte and Gowdy have also asked for the Justice Department release transcripts from their investigation. The committees sent the transcripts to the department last week so they could be reviewed for any classified information, but they have not been released.
President Donald Trump sounded off on the Democratic Party on Saturday over the deaths of two migrant children who recently died in U.S. Custody, arguing that if U.S. immigration policies were stronger, the migrants would never have ended up in such an awful position.
President Donald Trump heralded “big” trade progress from a long Saturday call with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“Just had a long and very good call with President Xi of China. Deal is moving along very well,” said Trump. “If made, it will be very comprehensive, covering all subjects, areas, and points of dispute. Big progress being made!”
Just had a long and very good call with President Xi of China. Deal is moving along very well. If made, it will be very comprehensive, covering all subjects, areas and points of dispute. Big progress being made!
China has been promoting progress on trade negotiations with the United States over the past two weeks. Leading up to Christmas day the two nations held trade talk phone calls that the Chinese commerce ministry was sure to promote afterward. China specifically promoted progress on not only trade but on the highly charged issue of intellectual property. President Trump has been adamant for months that China must stop the theft of U.S. intellectual property in order for a trade deal to be made.
President Trump told Breitbart News in October that China wasn’t ready to negotiate yet and that their economy was suffering under the U.S. tariffs on hundreds of billions in Chinese goods. He said the U.S. had rebuilt China over years of trade deficits. “What they’ve done to our country is take out anywhere from $300 billion to $500 billion a year. Rebuilt China,” he said.
President’s Trump and Xi spoke on the phone ahead of a December 1 meeting at the G20 summit in Argentina. At the time Trump refused to relent on tariffs and demanded China halt unfair trading practices and theft of U.S. intellectual property. During their G20 meeting Trump and Xi agreed to a temporary tariff truce. China agreed to buy more in U.S. goods and to participate in 90 days of focused trade talks.
China’s commerce ministry promoted Friday an agreement between the two nations to holdin-person trade talks in Beijing sometime in January. “Even as the U.S side is in the Christmas holiday period, China and U.S. economic and trade teams have been in close communication, and the consultations are progressing in an orderly manner as scheduled,” spokesman for China’s commerce ministry Gao Feng said upon announcement of the agreement to meet. One report claimed the meeting has been set for January 7. Feng did not confirm this at the time of the announcement. “The two sides have indeed made specific arrangements for face-to-face consultations in January in addition to continuing intensive telephone consultations.”
Michelle Moons is a White House Correspondent for Breitbart News — follow on Twitter @MichelleDiana and Facebook
On November 30, students at Princeton University celebrated the third annual Menstruation Celebration. The event, coordinated by Princeton Students for Gender Equality and Princeton Students for Reproductive Justice, "aims to destigmatize conversation about periods," according to Marissa Michaels of The Daily Princetonian.
Speaker of the House-designate Nancy Pelosi (D-California) announced the hiring of 40-year Department of Justice veteran attorney Douglas N. Letter as general counsel for the House of Representatives. The move happens just ahead of Democrats officially taking control of the House in 2019, and all of the subpoena power that comes with that.
Letter’s hiring is being hailed as a “very big deal,” just as his departure from the Department of Justice in January 2018 was regarded as a “very big deal.”
Letter had served for four decades in the Department of Justice and “distinguished” himself as the DOJ’s Director of the Civil Division Appellate Staff. Other career highlights included work as associate counsel to President Bill Clinton, work as Attorney General Janet Reno‘s Deputy Associate Attorney General and work as Attorney General Eric Holder‘s senior counselor.
President Donald Trump’s impact on the federal judiciary was recently on display when three judges he appointed to one federal appeals court quoted a fourth Trump judge on another court, rejecting arguments that courts should defer to federal authorities on how to interpret immigration laws.
Jasso Arangure is a lawful permanent resident (LPR, or green-card holder) who was convicted of home invasion in Michigan, which is a felony in that state. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) began deporting him, arguing that this felony was a “crime of violence” under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), because it satisfied the “residual clause” in the relevant portion of the INA.
However, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit later held the residual clause to be unconstitutionally vague. So DHS filed a new deportation proceeding, arguing that the home invasion was a “burglary offense” under the INA, which is specifically regarded as a “crime of violence,” and thus that the alien was still deportable for his crime.
The appeal before the Sixth Circuit in this case is an in-the-weeds argument of whether the doctrine of claim preclusion required the U.S. government to raise all possible claims – such as a burglary argument – in the first deportation proceeding, meaning that if preclusion attaches to the case, the government missed its only opportunity by not including it as one of the original charges.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) argued on appeal that preclusion does not apply, and that under Chevron deference, courts should defer to how federal agencies interpret the INA. Chevron is a seminal Supreme Court case that has increasingly come under fire for how much power it gives to bureaucrats, with both of President Trump’s Supreme Court appointees – Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh – among those critics.
Although none of that may sound interesting to a general audience, one item of particular interest in this appeal is that the three-judge panel hearing this immigration appeal is entirely comprised of judges appointed by President Trump: Amul Thapar, John Bush, and John Nalbandian.
“Courts have always had an emphatic duty to say what the law is,” Thapar began for the Cincinnati-based appeals court, quoting the Supreme Court’s historic Marbury v. Madison case. He continued:
When dealing with agencies, this abdication by ambiguity is even more tempting—and even more problematic. Because, under Chevron, ambiguity means courts get to outsource their “emphatic” duty by deferring to an agency’s interpretation. But all too often, courts abdicate this duty by rushing to find statutes ambiguous, rather than performing a full interpretive analysis.
“This abdication by ambiguity impermissibly expands on already-questionable Chevron doctrine,” the Trump judges continued, going to on quote yet another Trump appointee, Judge James Ho of the Fifth Circuit, who likewise criticizedChevron.
Thapar has previously knocked still another deference doctrine, Auer deference, which concerns interpreting regulations instead of statutes. The Supreme Court recently granted review in a case to decide whether to overrule Auer.
The Trump administration has expressed a desire to reduce the size, scope, and cost of the federal government, consistent with the president’s campaign promises. Revisiting doctrines like Chevron and Auer would be extraordinary steps in that direction, and the president appears thus far successful in picking judges who share that philosophy.
The case is Arangure v. Whitaker, No. 18-3076 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Ken Klukowski is senior legal editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @kenklukowski.
