I am one of the few people in my zip code who was not horrified by President Trump’s comments about the US Intelligence Community’s investigation of Russian activity during the 2016 presidential election.

I figure I can be horrified later if necessary.  In the meantime, what is the answer to the president’s question?  Why didn’t the FBI examine the servers that the Russians hacked back in 2016?

The answer that the Intelligence Community will offer would go something like: “/////////// information //////////.  //////// and ////////.  ////////// Security.   Next ////////.”

Unredacted, that would be: “We cannot provide that information at this time.  Sources and Methods.  National Security.  Next Question.”

The media chorus would add: “Only a pawn of the Russians would ask such a question.  Putin must have something on him.”

Granted, the President did not handle the situation artfully.  Instead of directing attention to the FBI’s curious behavior, he might have said something along one of these lines:

I can’t comment on a matter that is under investigation.

We have the finest investigative organizations in the world looking into various aspects of this matter.  Mr. Mueller and his team are still gathering evidence.  Several Congressional committees are actively looking into it.  Let’s wait until all the facts are in.

Mr. Putin and I each lead a great country.  I am not going to conduct a conversation on a matter as delicate as this in front of a gaggle of reporters.

He might have tried a little subtlety, perhaps something like this:

It’s too early to make a comment about any of this.  Look, in 2016, the FBI and the DOJ signed off on an application for a FISA warrant telling the court that Carter Page was a Russian agent.  It’s almost two years later and Mr. Page is still at liberty, uncharged with any crime.  Obviously, our justice system works at its own pace.  I don’t want to rush anything.

These were among the alternatives available to him, but the president’s rhetorical palette is dominated by bolder colors.

He could have done better.  Everyone agrees, including him. But what’s the answer to the question?  How did it happen that the Intelligence Community declined to examine the Democratic National Committee’s servers, yet concluded that Russian GRU agents (not the KGB, but Alger Hiss’s old clients in military intelligence) were in there hacking away?

If the authorities told us that the Russians burglarized an office, we would expect them to enter the building, secure the crime scene, and dust the office for fingerprints.  When it came to the servers, they didn’t do the equivalent.  Yet, anyone who questions their conclusion is accused of aiding and abetting the burglars.

This sounds like groupthink, which happens when members of an organization value their membership in the group and the survival of the group more than the group’s actual mission.  If you’re part of the group, you don’t question its assumptions.  You could be ridiculed.  You could be shunned.  There is safety inside the group.  It helps if the group tells itself that it is smarter, more knowledgeable, more attuned to the world around it than anyone outside the group.

The president bruised the delicate sensibilities of the Intelligence Community.  His critics think he should accept the work of the Community as settled.  But think of all of the Community’s blunders that resulted from groupthink.  They missed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the rise of Al Qaeda in the 1990s, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the simultaneous bombings of two US embassies in East Africa in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000.  They continued to assume that airplane hijackers wanted hostages, so they missed the change in tactics that converted airliners into guided missiles on September 11, 2001.

The “Community” sent the U.S. Secretary of State (Colin Powell, appointed by George W. Bush) and the Director of the CIA (George Tenet, appointed by Bill Clinton) to the UN Security Council to provide ironclad evidence of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.  Those weapons could not be found by the occupation force when it arrived.  After the occupation of Iraq, the “Community” dismantled the only Iraqi organization that knew anything about governing that unhappy country and then supervised that nation’s descent into chaos.

Following those blunders, the Community rushed to the opposite extreme and announced that Iran was not attempting to develop a nuclear weapon.

Then there is Benghazi, a complete failure of intelligence.  Add the underwear bomber from Nigeria, whose own father had informed on him to the U.S. embassy in Lagos and the Boston marathon bombers, whose threat had been disclosed to U.S. authorities by – of all people – Russian intelligence.

This is not a complete list.

But the Community gets upset if anyone questions their wisdom.  They check with each other and they agree: they’re right nearly all of the time.  It’s treason to say otherwise.  John Brennan, the CIA director under President Obama, made that charge on television.

If the charge of treason seems overblown, perhaps that’s because the president’s question struck deeper than the Community’s self-regard.  Kimberley Strassel in the Wall Street Journal details the methods deployed by Mr. Brennan, among the most hysterical of the president’s critics, to tie the Trump campaign to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

In 2016, when he was Director of the CIA, Brennan knew that the FBI thought that Russia was intervening in the election, but he didn’t like their opinion that Russia wasn’t taking sides.  The FBI view at that time was that Russia just wanted to sow confusion.  That wasn’t the conclusion he wanted, yet he wasn’t able to persuade the FBI or even James Clapper (then Director of National Intelligence) that Russia’s activities were aimed at helping Trump and hurting Mrs. Clinton.  At the time, there were elements within the FBI dragging other baited lines through the water that would eventually hook George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn of the Trump campaign, but let’s put off to another day a discussion of the FBI-DOJ attempts to tie Trump to Russia.  It’s entirely possible that Mr. Brennan’s efforts were not connected to those of Deputy Director McCabe, Agent Strzok, DOJ Attorney Lisa Page, and DOJ Attorney Bruce Ohr.

According to Strassel, in late August 2016 Brennan briefed Senator Harry Reid, then the Senate Minority Leader, on Russia’s efforts to advance the Trump candidacy.  Reid got the story out to the public.  Ultimately, the narrative has become the Community’s received wisdom.  The Intelligence Community has concluded not only that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, but that they did so to aid Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.

The reaction of the establishment – including members of both major parties – to the President’s stinging accusation can be explained in part by incompetence and groupthink, each of which can usually be found pulling an oar when government goes into action.  The extra measure of hysteria we are hearing from people like Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey and others may arise less from the insult than from the implications of the president’s question.  If there is no credible answer to why the servers were off-limits, we might ask further questions about other odd activities of the Community.  These would include:  how did the infamous “Steele dossier” came into the hands of the FBI, why was it used to procure a FISA warrant, did those warrants allow investigators to listen inside a political campaign, and why is it that after some two years all we have are indictments against U.S. citizens for meaningless process crimes (failure to register as a foreign agent, misstatements to investigators about when certain meetings took place, and the like) and against Russian nationals who aren’t going to appear in a US court (and when one of them did, the Mueller team refused to proceed).

The president’s question about the DNC servers pulls on the curtain and may start to reveal the wizard behind it.  If a robber cracks a safe, you examine it.  If someone is shot, you collect and examine the bullet.  If a check is forged, you examine the handwriting.  If a server is hacked, why would you leave it alone?  It’s only one small thread in a much more complex fabric.  Pull it and who knows what may be revealed?

A person more careful with his words than Mr. Trump might have been able to make the point that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election doesn’t imply that they favored one candidate or the other.  It means that they wanted to sow confusion, something they have accomplished.  The problem for him is that If he agrees openly that they meddled but fails to persuade that they were non-partisan, he opens the door to the segment of the news media – a mere 95% of them – who will report that he now admits that he had Russian help.

Instead of trying that more difficult rhetorical gambit, he focused on the FBI’s lack of curiosity about the Democratic National Committee’s servers.  But again: what is the answer to the president’s question?  The failure to examine the hacked servers is so glaring that the default explanation — incompetence and groupthink — may not be sufficient.  And if that’s the case, the answer to the president’s question – Russians or no Russians – can lead to some damaging revelations.  The truth always comes out eventually, but it can take a long time.  I wonder how many people in Washington are thinking, “If the truth has to come out, let it be after the statute of limitations has run.”

The Mueller team’s indictment earlier this week of a dozen Russian GRU agents confirms something I wrote on the subject back in March 2017.  Loyal readers hardly need me to remind them, but if you scroll back to an article headed “Thoughts on the Opposition to Donald Trump” that I posted in March of last year, you will see the point laid out in detail in the second half of the article.

Maybe too much detail.  Let me summarize:

The winning formula for a Democratic presidential nominee is: 1988 + 1992 + Florida > 270.

Until 2016, a Democratic candidate began with the states that every Democrat has won since 1988 (9 states; 90 electoral votes) and the states that every Democrat has won since 1992 (10 states, 152 electoral votes).

Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/11/breaking-blue-barrier-myra-adams]

That gets you to 242 electoral votes.  Add Florida’s 29 electoral votes or the equivalent from other states and you’re parking the family car at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The 1988 + 1992 part of the formula is the “Blue Wall”.  Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were part of the Blue Wall.  They went for Trump by narrow margins.  Secretary Clinton ran up enormous majorities in California and New York, two of the sturdiest bricks in the Blue Wall.  The votes in those states in excess of 50.0001% didn’t help her.  She needed some of those extra votes in the key states that she lost.

The politicians who told us in October 2016 that our democracy will corrode beyond repair if the loser in a presidential election complains about electoral foul play have changed their minds.  After the fact, the astounding outcome in 2016 had to be due to subterfuge and trickery, combined with collusion and foreign interference.

The interference – the meddling – had to be coming from the Russians.  How might the Russians have meddled?  I looked at two possibilities.

First, they might have tinkered with the mechanics of voting.  It’s possible that they tried and will keep trying.  But, as President Obama pointed out when he and everyone else thought Donald Trump had no chance, our voting system is dispersed.  If a foreign outfit somehow gained access to a voting machine or a ballot box here or there, only a few votes could be swung at each location.  The margins of victory in the three rogue states were small in percentage terms, but still amounted to tens of thousands of votes.  Intrusions into the system on the scale necessary to affect the outcome would have been noticed, particularly with the DOJ, the FBI, 95% of the country’s news media, and half of its federal politicians looking for it.

So, if Russian interference made the difference, it was because of the theft and publication of emails from servers of various Democratic party and campaign operations.

Was it the publication of those emails that swung Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to Donald Trump?  Blue collar voters in those states went for Trump.  Their votes usually go to the Democratic candidate, but they will sometimes make an exception.  They voted for Ronald Reagan.  These are voters who like tariffs on foreign goods that undersell the products of their employers.  Trump talked about the lousy trade deals that the country had signed.  He was going to repair the damage.  The wage earners of those three states liked that message and voted for the man who delivered it.  I don’t think they cared about the Democratic Party’s emails.

At the same time, African-American voters gave Hillary Clinton significantly less support than they gave to Barack Obama.  In 2012, President Obama received 960 out of every 1,000 votes cast by African-Americans.  In 2016, 10% of those voters stayed home.  Of the 900 per 1,000 who voted, 72 (8%) voted for Donald Trump.  Where Mr. Obama in 2012 got 960 votes per 1,000 African-American voters, Mrs. Clinton got 822 (counting the 100 who stayed home).  The gap adds up as those thousands are multiplied hundreds of times.  It wasn’t noticed in a place like California, where the size of her victory masked the softness of her support from critical segments of the voting population. It was decisive in the three states that fell out of the Blue Wall.  Was that nearly 14% swing (138 votes per 1,000) against Mrs. Clinton due to voter disgust with the content of stolen emails?  I doubt it.

Pocketbook issues and personal style were more important to most voters than the content of stolen emails.  Also, some voters like to be schmoozed.  If you’re undecided, you might give your vote to the person who asks for it.  Mrs. Clinton took too many votes for granted.  Donald Trump campaigned hard in those upper Midwest blue states.  Enough voters liked his rambling style and his announced plans – the wall, tariffs, lower taxes, reduced regulation, no cuts to Social Security or Medicare, end Obamacare, leave the Paris climate deal, end the Iran deal, renegotiate NAFTA, reject TPP, etc. — to enable him to eke out wins by small margins in critical states that Mrs. Clinton took for granted.  Even so, he had to win the states that any Republican needs — Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, and the like – in order to balance the parts of the Blue Wall that survived 2016.

This is the second set of indictments against Russian operatives.  The dozen this week were preceded by a baker’s dozen a few months ago.  Did you know that one of the baker’s dozen made a court appearance back in April?  Three of the thirteen that Mueller indicted were entities, not individuals.  One of the entities hired a DC law firm and made a court appearance.  They made discovery requests and asked for a speedy trial.  The Mueller prosecutors didn’t want to proceed.  They argued that the defendant had not been properly served with process.  That may be the first time a prosecutor anywhere in the world has made that argument about a criminal defendant who has voluntarily appeared in court.

Call me a cynic, but the prosecutor’s behavior told me that the 13 indictments were done for show rather than for use.  Could it be that last week’s 12 were done for the same purpose?  I would be happy to be proven wrong.  If the Mueller team seeks extradition of the defendants from Russia or asks Interpol to arrest the GRU agents any time one of them steps outside of Russia, that would suggest that these indictments were made for a serious purpose.

Once these individuals are in a US courtroom, they can test the evidence against them and can be forced to pay the price for what they did if the evidence is sufficient.  But whatever these Russian operatives did, the voters in 2016 made up their own minds and cast their votes freely.  The traditionally Democratic voters who turned away from Mrs. Clinton made a judgment about her character and competence and either diluted their support or gave it outright to her opponent despite his flaws.  There are reports that she is considering a run in 2020.  If the voters decide they made a mistake in 2016, they will have the chance to correct it.  The voters will speak in their own voice.  Purloined emails won’t matter then any more than they did two years ago.

The historian Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics states:

The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

What other explanation is there for some of the recent additions to the National Mall and the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C.?

The World War II Memorial was completed in 2004.  Its location at the opposite end of the Reflecting Pool from the Lincoln Memorial is significant and symbolic.  The Memorial surrounds an elliptical pool whose long axis is perpendicular to the line of the Reflecting Pool that runs to the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.  One end of the ellipse has a large arch labeled Atlantic.  The identical arch opposite reads Pacific.  The China-Burma-India theater of war is not memorialized.

The pool is surrounded by smaller identical arches, each labeled with the name of one of the 48 states that existed in 1945, with additional arches added for each U.S. territory.  I have never seen an explanation for building a monument to the states and territories to memorialize one of the most significant national efforts ever undertaken by the United States.  Was this a war of Tennessee against Bavaria, South Carolina against Tuscany, Colorado against the Tokyo Prefecture?  What do the names of the states have to do with the world-historical event that the monument memorializes for all time to come?

The key elements of the Korean War Memorial are equally puzzling.  Realistic oversized statues of 19 service members, all in action, stand in a loose formation.  A reflecting element creates an image of an additional 19 figures.  The two together, the statues and their reflections, total 38.  The truce line at the end of the war was set at the 38^th parallel, which was also the line that separated the two Koreas at the war’s beginning.  A monument to an event that called for stern national purpose and personal sacrifice ought to use architectural, symbolic, and monumental elements to impress the historical significance of the war on the visitor’s mind.  Instead, we get numerology.

Moving from the National Mall to the Tidal Basin, this visitor to the memorials to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King has been disappointed.  These are two of the most consequential figures of the 20^th century, but their monuments will, I fear, fail to give the future a fair view of them.

In my opinion, FDR will in time be remembered more for his errors than for his accomplishments.  For example, he is credited with delivering the country from the Great Depression, yet the rate of unemployment was higher in 1940 than it was in 1930.  He presided over a major recession in 1937-38 in the middle of an economic depression, something that no one had ever done before.

In the fall of 1939, Adolf Berle, Assistant Secretary of State, informed Roosevelt of a credible report that the administration was honeycombed with Soviet spies.  Roosevelt refused to hear of it or to authorize an investigation.  As a result, figures like Alger Hiss (State Department), Laughlin Currie (Roosevelt’s personal staff), Harry Dexter White (Treasury) and many others were free to continue their work.

Roosevelt’s conduct of World War II successfully ended totalitarian regimes in Germany and Japan but allowed the expansion of the totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union.  World War II began in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, followed a few weeks later by Soviet forces once Stalin was sure that the Polish army was defeated.  At Yalta in 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill accepted Soviet control of the rest of Poland and eastern Europe.  Earlier, FDR had pressed Churchill to agree that Allied war aims should include the unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers.  This policy probably prolonged the war by denying to the German High Command the possibility of a negotiated peace through a de-nazified government.  Thus, it gave the Soviets additional time to occupy territory that might have been behind an armistice line established by a negotiated peace.  Tens of millions of people in eastern Europe endured 45 years of Soviet tyranny.  It might have been avoided.

Mr. Roosevelt was given star treatment by the press when he was alive and has had warm fans among the historians.  But a long-overdue reassessment will, I think, gain strength in the decades to come.

But I will say two positive things about FDR.  First, although he was paralyzed by polio in the prime of his life at the age of 39, he never complained about his condition in public and he never allowed himself to be photographed in a wheelchair.  When he met Churchill for their first war conference in August 1941 at Placentia Bay in Newfoundland, he walked, supported by his son, down the length of HMS Prince of Wales, to the place where Churchill awaited him.  He refused to arrive in a wheelchair.  A photograph of the two men on board shows them sitting in identical conventional chairs, as do photos from their other wartime conferences.  Yet, the designers of the FDR Memorial insisted on showing him in a wheelchair as a way to inspire disabled persons who might visit the memorial.

Also, Roosevelt was a smoker.  Because he was also an aristocrat, he used a cigarette holder.  And because he was a master showman, he could use that cigarette holder as a prop to help make a point, to exude charm, and help cement his presidential persona.  Anti-tobacco scolds refused to allow the memorial to show Roosevelt with a cigarette.

So, the man who could play a cigarette holder like a violin and who kept his disability out of the public eye is presented for all time sitting in a wheelchair, waiting for the smoke that is not going to arrive.

King was a man of complex and subtle views who could use the cadences of a preacher to speak profound truths to a mass audience.  The place on the Tidal Basin that he occupies might have presented him with warmth and humanity.  Marble, such as that used to depict Abraham Lincoln inside his memorial, would have been the appropriate material to permit the sculptor to present the man in full. Instead, his gigantic statue was carved from unyielding granite.  He is posed with arms folded, breathing defiance.  He looks more like an angry Aztec deity than the man who called a nation to live up to the high ideals on which it was founded.  True, his attitude was becoming angrier, less patient at the time a murderer ended his life in April 1968.  But it is the restatement of the principles of the Declaration of Independence in his “I Have a Dream” speech that places him in the American pantheon.  His memorial fails to present him as, in my opinion, he ought to be remembered.

But really, the trouble began much earlier, inside the memorial to the man who wrote the document that expressed the ideals that Dr. King challenged the nation to actualize.  The Jefferson Memorial was built to celebrate the author of the document that stated our founding principles with clarity and elegance. The designers of the memorial edited Mr. Jefferson’s work to obscure his meaning for their own purposes.

Five great architectural structures are laid out on two lines that intersect at right angles at the Washington Monument.  The National Mall runs west from the Capitol through the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, a distance of some two miles.  A line of about a mile runs from the White House south through the Washington Monument to the fifth site, the Jefferson Memorial.  It was the last of the five to be built and was dedicated on April 13, 1943.  Jefferson’s birthdate was April 13, 1743.  At the time the memorial was planned, constructed, and dedicated, the federal government was as powerful as it had ever been to that time.  For the previous 14 years, the government had been intervening in the American economy in ways that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.  When the nation went to war in 1941, the extraordinary powers thought necessary to win the war were added to those that had already been exercised.  The memorial was planned by officials who were comfortable in the uses of power and confident in their ability to exercise it.

But the exercise of power is not legitimate if it is performed without the consent of the governed.  If those who exercise power illegitimately do so out of good motives, that is preferable to those occasions, unfortunately far more numerous, when the motives are bad, but it is better still not to exercise power except with the consent of the governed.  And that consent can only be granted through the use of documented, precise constructions aimed at ensuring that when power is exercised, it is held within the constraints that the terms of consent have established.  The governing class of 1943 was not happy with these constraints.  They shortened Jefferson’s elegant statement, to remove the concept they found so inconvenient.  This is the portion of the famous paragraph that appears in the Jefferson Memorial, marked to show the words they deleted:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Did they leave those words out to save space?  Other statements from later parts of the Declaration appear below the quoted language. It wasn’t a question of space.  They removed the phrase on consent because they didn’t want to remind the public that it was there in the original.

It’s not a minor excision.  A government “instituted among Men” that takes the first part of the famous sentence seriously, one that believes and acts on the principle that all humans are equal in their natural rights, the right as Lincoln said to eat the bread that one’s own hands have earned, must necessarily believe that no one has a right to govern another person without the other’s consent.  That is the logical consequence of the self-evident truth that all persons are equal in their natural rights. That’s one reason, the most important reason, why slavery is inconsistent with the principles of the Declaration.  But when a government ignores the terms of the compact under which its power was granted, it violates the purpose for which it was created.  To quote a former president: “We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around.”

If you think you have the right to govern me without my consent, you don’t think we are equal.

As I have written before, one of the great ironies of the nation’s presentation of itself on the National Mall and the Tidal Basin is that the author of the clearest and most elegant statement ever written on human equality, a man who hated to have his work edited, suffered, on the 200^th anniversary of his birth and at the hands of the government he helped to found, the most egregious editorial treatment his work had received since the day Congress authorized its publication on July 4, 1776.

In 1943, the reach of the self-assured arrogance that edited Mr. Jefferson’s work was limited to a single panel inside his memorial.  As time has unfolded, that same attitude has affected entire monuments and has permanently altered the structure of the National Mall and Tidal Basin.  Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics grinds on.

The outrage over the separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border was delayed – some of the triggering photos were more than three years old and were taken during the previous administration. In defense of the protestors, you can’t take action against a policy that you don’t know about, and the news media had taken an interest in the story only recently.  The opposition was heartfelt even if late.

Minor children who arrive at the southern border in the company of an adult create a problem for an administration that intends to enforce the law.  A consent decree dating from 1997 (the “Flores settlement”) says that children in this situation cannot be kept in custody for more than 20 days.  When the adult claims a right to asylum, the problem is compounded.  It takes a lot longer than 20 days to process an application for asylum.

What is a problem for the administration is an opportunity for its opponents.  The photos and video of children wrapped in foil blankets, being processed in facilities walled with chain-link fence, or crying for their mothers forced the administration to change course.  The age of the photos and their provenance were less important than their impact.

The photo that made the cover of Time magazine tells the story.  The crying child was not alone.  She was set down by her mother so that the mother could be processed.  The two were not separated.  The iconic photo misled Time’s readers. In fact, the mother had left three other children behind in Guatemala.  Her husband, gainfully employed, reports that his wife has always dreamed of living in the U.S.  This was the second time she had been caught trying to enter the country illegally.  Her claim for asylum is not well founded.

Time stood by the photo.  They might as well have said out loud that the purpose of the cover was not to present news but to influence policy.

The gambit worked. The president quickly changed course and allowed children to stay with their parents. Despite his self-proclaimed skill as a negotiator, he seems to be influenced more by the last thing he sees or hears than by any firmly held strategic plan (except when it comes to free trade, where he holds fast against it).

I had been wondering how the administration would finesse the problem in its new form.  How would they keep families together, adhere to the Flores settlement, and enforce the law on entry into the country? Twenty days is not a long time to wait to find out how they would square the circle.

I thought they might argue that minor children united with their parents in a detention facility are not being detained.  After the 20-day holding period is over, minor children in that situation could be considered visitors.  They would be free to leave if another family member, lawfully resident in the U.S., would take them and if their parents agreed.  But for as long as the parent agreed to have the child remain a visitor in the facility, parent and child would be free to remain together.

I don’t know if the administration would have used that argument or if it would have succeeded if challenged.  The question may no longer be in play after the latest court decision on the subject.  The president’s opponents may have accomplished more than they intended.

Opposition to the policy on reunification has led to an attack on enforcement itself.  The opponents of the president’s policy were not satisfied with the executive order reuniting parents and children.  The thousands who marched this past weekend did so after the president changed course and allowed reunification.  Last week, the ACLU obtained a court order requiring children under 5 to be reunited with their parents within 14 days and other minor children to be reunited within 30 days.

Why press for legal relief when you have already won politically?  Could the objective be to achieve the suspension of immigration enforcement at the border?  The judge did not order families to be released from custody.  He does not have the authority to do so (but that may not matter if the case comes before him again).  I think the judge and the ACLU have solved the administration’s immediate problem.  If children and parents are to be kept together in detention centers, it will be pursuant to the judge’s order rather than in violation of the Flores settlement.  Implementing the Flores agreement – removing the children from the detention center after 20 days – would contravene the order in the ACLU litigation. The ACLU is running a TV ad touting their victory over the Trump administration.  They may have succeeded in helping to overturn the Flores settlement, something the administration might not have been able to accomplish any other way.