Category: News

The attack dogs have been let loose.

That much was clear from the stark message North Korea delivered this week after the collapse of Donald Trump’s summit with Kim Jong Un in Vietnam last month: Kim is considering abandoning nuclear negotiations with the United States and resuming the nuclear and missile tests that brought the two countries to the brink of war early on in the Trump administration.

Just as important as the message was the messenger. North Korea’s vice foreign minister, Choe Son Hui, delivered the warning during a briefing in Pyongyang on Friday with foreign diplomats and journalists. Choe is an experienced diplomat (and a former English-language interpreter) who has dealt with Americans in official and unofficial talks for years. She knows the America file cold. But she also has a reputation for fiery remarks—like when she vowed to “respond to fire with fire” at the height of military tensions with the United States in 2017, or that time she nearly deep-sixed the president’s first summit with North Korea’s leader in 2018 by denouncing U.S. Vice President Mike Pence as a “political dummy” and threatening a “nuclear-to-nuclear showdown” with the United States.

[Read: Trump knows he can’t fix North Korea alone]

Choe’s principal foil in the Trump administration is National Security Adviser John Bolton, who prompted her outburst against Pence in the first place by calling on the North Koreans to ship their whole nuclear program to the United States the way Libya did. Bolton has been arguing since he served in the George W. Bush administration that North Korea’s leaders have no intention of negotiating away their nuclear weapons and that the only way to remove the grave threat their arsenal poses to the United States is through regime change brought about by economic pressure or a preventive war. (He’s mostly refrained from expressing these views since joining the Trump administration last April.)

And Bolton, whom Choe blamed on Friday for poisoning the Vietnam summit with “gangster-like” demands for North Korea to commit to full denuclearization before receiving sanctions relief, has been sicced on the North Koreans as well since the showdown in Vietnam. The national security adviser, who largely deferred (at least publicly) to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on diplomacy with North Korea, has emerged in recent weeks as the administration’s most prominent spokesperson on the nuclear talks.

Zipping around the Sunday shows, he’s urged North Korea to relinquish all its weapons of mass destruction as part of a “big deal” and pledged to maintain and perhaps escalate economic sanctions against Pyongyang if Kim doesn’t. He’s done all this with relish. “The North Koreans were very disappointed we didn’t buy their bad deal,” he said of Kim’s offer in Vietnam to dismantle his main nuclear complex in exchange for relief from most sanctions. “That’s life in the big city.”

[Read: How long will the U.S. live with a nuclear North Korea?]

It’s the kind of barbed rhetoric that Bolton and Choe avoided when their bosses were championing the results of their first summit in Singapore last year and promising to deliver a breakthrough when they met again.

The unmuzzling of the attack dogs on each side is a reminder that Trump and Kim are each contending with a hard-line faction at home that views the diplomacy they’re engaged in as a hopeless and dangerous endeavor. As Choe noted this week, Kim decided to press ahead with diplomacy in Vietnam despite the fact that military leaders are petitioning him not to give up his nuclear program.

But it’s also a sign of the paradoxical outcome of a summit that was intended to dramatically defuse tensions between North Korea and the United States: Each side has come away with the recognition that despite all the pageantry, there’s a huge gulf between their positions, and with the conviction that exerting pressure is the key to getting the other side to come around to its preferred approach. The Americans think sanctions will force the North Koreans to fully renounce their nuclear program. The North Koreans think the further development of their nuclear arsenal—through ongoing production of nuclear material, recent reversals of moves to dismantle a rocket site, and now the specter of more tests of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons—will compel the Americans to settle, for the time being at least, for something far short of full denuclearization. Tough talk from Bolton and Choe is a form of pressure.

[Watch: ‘Alaska DGAF’: North Korea’s missile test doesn’t faze Alaskans]

There is a very fine line, however, between applying pressure and shattering a delicate and deteriorating diplomatic process. As Chung-in Moon, a foreign-policy adviser to South Korea’s president, wrote this week, citing the way in which the spat between Choe and Pence nearly sabotaged the first Trump-Kim summit, “Mutual restraint in word and deed is essential for the resuscitation of negotiation. The surest way to derail the negotiations and precipitate a potential catastrophe would be for North Korea to engage in any nuclear or missile tests.”

AJAM reported on tribal communities and offered coverage on Indian Country that few could match

It’s not Alex Jones saying this — it’s the shooter, it’s Rush Limbaugh, and others — tune in and find out the shocking proof!

America’s founders probably would not have been surprised by former Attorney General Eric Holder’s statement last week that if he were president—though he’s not running—and the Democrats controlled Congress, he would “seriously consider adding two seats to the Supreme Court” to counteract Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s “power-grabbing antics.” The same goes for a competing proposal from South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who is running for president, seeking to expand the court to 15 justices. Within 20 years of establishing the new federal government, our early statesmen had changed the size of the Supreme Court three times to ensure that a politically hostile judiciary did not thwart the goals of the party controlling Congress and the presidency.

The Constitution does not entrust to public officials the responsibility to check their own power. The founders assumed that people with political muscle (including judges) would show little self-restraint, and they built a government that would provide each branch with many checks against the others. The Supreme Court was no exception. Rather than leaving the size of the Court in the hands of the justices, or fixing the size for all time, the Constitution grants that power to Congress. As soon-to-be Justice Robert Jackson testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1937, “It was obvious at the founding of the Government that the Court would not always remain of the same size, and that changes in its size would be made, as they have been made, at those times when its decisions caused dissatisfaction.”

Critics of Holder’s remarks, including at The New Republic, argue that if Democrats violate the “norm” of a nine-person court, Republicans will do the same once they return to power. This tit-for-tat allegedly will spell the end to an independent judiciary and our democracy.

Such end-time worries are nothing new. When Congress voted to increase the size of the Court during the Jefferson administration, one newspaper wrote that “the Constitution has received a wound that it will not long survive.” Another lamented: “The independence of the judicial power is prostrated. A judge, instead of holding his position for life, will hold it during the good pleasure of the dominant party. The judges will of course become partisans, and the shadow of justice alone will remain in our courts.” Despite these histrionics, a moment’s reflection on the history of the Court shows that it remained fiercely independent after each of the seven instances in which Congress changed its size. It is difficult to believe that a future expansion of the Court would break this mold.

Far from leading to democratic death spirals, changes to the size of the Court have gone hand in hand with the most vibrant periods of our democracy. The first three changes centered around the political reaction to the “Revolution of 1800,” when Thomas Jefferson and his new political party swept into power. The outgoing Federalist Party, which represented big-money interests, reduced the size of the Court from six to five to keep Jefferson from filling an anticipated vacancy. Once Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party was firmly in power, they increased the size back to six justices, then to seven, to allow Jefferson to appoint new justices. Over the next 30 years, Congress denied repeated attempts to expand the Court, but President Andrew Jackson gained sufficient power to add two new justices in 1837.

The final changes to the Court’s size flowed from the upheaval and revitalization of our democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans first increased the size to ten to prevent judicial attacks on his war policies. After Lincoln’s assassination, Congress reduced the size to eight to prevent the new president, Andrew Johnson, from harming Congress’ reconstruction efforts. Shortly after assuming the presidency, Ulysses S. Grant and his supporters added a justice to ensure the overturning of a recent Court decision that invalidated the legal tender law that had allowed the government to finance its war efforts. FDR’s failed attempt to pack the Court similarly took place at a time when political and economic elites were being replaced by a new coalition. These were not times of democratic decay, but of rebirth, and leading figures of the day knew that political change could and would be thwarted by the Supreme Court.

We were never intended to be a government by judicial fiat, but the threat has always existed. As Alexis de Tocqueville famously noted, every major political dispute in the United States eventually finds its way into the courts, and courts have the final say in these disputes. Courts can, and have at times, stagnated our government’s ability to respond to critical political and economic issues of the day. That is exactly what is happening today. A Supreme Court majority, sharing a constitutional vision that harkens back to the days when political power was enjoyed by only a landed, male, white aristocracy, is preventing our democratic processes from solving problems that go to the very heart of our democracy. The court’s conservatives stand in the way of our efforts to keep dark money out of politics, to prevent the suppression of the voting rights of people of color, and to solve the polarization that has come with political gerrymandering.

But as the Court’s originalists must acknowledge, it’s no accident that the Constitution grants Congress the right to make the Supreme Court as large or small as it likes. Having the ability to change the composition of the Court in this way ensures that Congress has the power to prevent stagnant visions of our law from threatening the growth of our democracy.

San Diego Sector Border Patrol agents apprehended a Mexican murder fugitive who illegally crossed the border with a group of migrants.

CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert ripped into President Donald Trump in a new interview, calling him a “delicious idiot” and saying that what he’s doing to American families is “horrible.”