Day 12: A Supreme Court Nominee

Trump needed his ego stroked today, so he called for a dog-and-pony show during primetime TV in order to announce his pick for the supreme court: Neil Gorusch.

•  Overview of Gorusch from BBC, SCOTUSBlog, Huffington Post, Fox News, NY Times

In other news:

• Administration will retain Obama's protections for LGBTQ federal workers. While I'm pleased with this, it's only because the administration has set themselves a very, very low bar. Better would be to expand those protections.
• Not only did the acting Attorney General get fired yesterday, so did the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The administration has furthermore given an explicit message: step in line or get out. This is completely typical of totalitarian regimes.
• Administration accuses Germany of currency manipulation. This is bizarre. Picking a fight with the EU over trade is bound to leave us with a poor outcome.
• NOAA is set to be led by leading climate change denier. If there was any hope that this administration would value the environment, it's rapidly melting, just like the Arctic/Antarctic.
• Clandestine raid goes wrong in every way. Including the execution of children and their teacher. This does not bode well.
• Trump met with pharmacy lobbyists, and completely changed his tune. "Deregulation" instead of bringing pharmacy companies to heel like every other country in the world.
• Customs and Border Patrol are still refusing to obey federal court orders. The words "constitutional crisis" are beginning to be discussed more seriously in news reports. I expect further deterioration on this tomorrow.
• Army engineers ordered to give go-ahead to Dakota Access Pipeline. Well fuck.
• State Department "provisionally" revokes visas of people from countries targeted by Muslim ban. The best source I found for this is politico, which has a link to the paper version of the order. It was apparently presented in a legal filing in a Boston federal court. Should this order be enforced, it just made life miserable for any non-permanent residents already in the US. In particular: students at US universities from those countries. I expect further news on this in the coming days.

Unfortunately, this is what qualifies as a "quiet day".

I also found a brief overview of every executive order so far, in case you want to catch up.