Or At Least Not A Big Enough Defeat To Lose Control Of The House Or Senate…
And he may be right.
No doubt this is an historic meeting, and we don’t mean to downplay that. Nothing super-concrete, but no one expected that. Instead, Trump and Kim today signing an agreement that includes (among other things):
- A commitment by North Korea to denuclearize. How and when and what that means exactly to be determined later.
- A commitment by the U.S. to end frequent military exercises on the Korean Peninsula. Although U.S. troops will remain in place. And for now, economic sanctions will also remain.
Here’s a photo of the signed joint agreement, taken when Trump held it up. (It was not immediately released to the media). Click on the photo for a larger version:
Although it’s not in the written agreement, according to the New York Times, Trump said Kim subsequently agreed to dismantle a missile engine testing site. That would be hugely significant because way-faster-than-expected improvements to North Korean missile engines are what put the mainland U.S. in range of North Korea’s nuclear missiles, and is kind of what got everybody to spring to action in the first place.
At a news conference after the summit, Trump said he’d invited Kim for a White House visit (and he’d be willing to visit Pyongyang), but not quite yet. And he hoped the U.S. would establish diplomatic relations with North Korea, but also not quite yet. Here’s a clip (click on the photo to watch):
Trump also said he did bring up human rights issues: “we’ll be doing something about that”, although “it was discussed relatively briefly compared to denuclearization.” Here’s that clip (again, click on the photo to watch):
A couple of other things that jumped out at us:
- The signed agreement designates Secretary of State Mike Pompeo by name as the U.S. point person for further negotiations. That makes sense since he’s been the one flying back and forth and is most responsible for the meeting taking place as it did. However, that level of specificity is not included for a chief North Korean negotiator. Which leads us to believe the stipulation is in there as a sort of guarantee that Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton will not be directly involved in the negotiations. As we’ve mentioned before, North Korea despises Bolton because he killed the last near-deal it had with the U.S.
- Despite Trump’s insistence that sanctions would stay in place, China almost immediately said it’d like to see sanctions lifted, and soon. As we’ve pointed out, the U.S. has no economic relationship with North Korea, so the success and effectiveness of sanctions is almost entirely a matter of China’s willingness to cooperate. Kim is expected to meet with China’s President Xi very soon after the Trump summit. They met twice recently prior to the summit.
Meanwhile, This Image Is Now The New “Yanni/Laurel”
Depending on whether you’re a Trump supporter or not.
A friend of ours wrote this unusual and insightful take on the aftermath of the G-7 summit for Canada’s Maclean’s Magazine. We also love this piece from Alexandra Petri in the Washington Post, which while focusing more on the Trump/Kim meeting, deftly ties everything together.
Supreme Court Just Made It A Hell Of A Lot Easier For Trump To Win Ohio In 2020 And Don’t Think For A Second This Stops There…
Federal law bans states from purging registered voters from voting rolls simply because they fail to vote. So Republicans who hold full control of Ohio’s statehouse, decided they’d try out a loophole: if someone doesn’t vote, instead of getting thrown off the rolls, they get a letter in the mail, and if they don’t respond to that, they’re off. In that way they’re technically not getting thrown off for not voting, they’re getting thrown off for not responding to a letter in the mail.
And they passed that into law, fully expecting a challenge, just to see if it would stick. And boy did it ever…
Key to the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling (“usual suspects”) is an assumption that if somebody gets something in the mail from the government and does not respond to it, it probably means they’ve moved. In the majority opinion, Justice Alito writes: “Ohio removes the registrants at issue on a permissible ground: change of residence“. And that the National Voter Registration Act “specifically allows states to remove a voter who has ‘failed to respond to a notice'”.
We can just see the smile creeping across Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s face. It’s all been worth it. And halfway around the world, the significance of the ruling was not lost on the President:
Several other states already have similar voter purge laws, though none as restrictive as Ohio, probably because they didn’t think they could get away with it. Ohio’s process is triggered after a registered voter misses a single federal election; they then have 4 years after that to comply. Now that the Supreme Court says that’s kosher, expect many of those other states to tighten up too.
But since this ruling theoretically applies equally to all voters regardless of party affiliation, why is this even an issue? Because according to the New York Times, a Reuters study found “voters have been struck from the rolls in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods at roughly twice the rate as in Republican neighborhoods.” (For reference, Trump won Ohio by about 450,000 votes.)
There is a legit issue with the fact that state election boards are notoriously bad at getting people who have moved or died off their voter rolls. But this ruling potentially puts even more of an onus on those underfunded and understaffed state boards, which also have a huge added burden of policing against hacking these days. We can easily envision a situation where the mailings are not distributed or tabulated properly.
And as Justice Breyer points out in his dissent, not replying to a letter could easily reflect “the human tendency not to send back cards received in the mail”.
What to do about it? There’s about only one thing: flip some State Houses and/or State Legislatures — especially in traditional swing states — back to Democratic control. That’s the only way these onerous laws will possibly be reversed. Which is now going to be even harder to do, with more Democratic voters potentially disenfranchised. Still, Democrats largely dug this hole for themselves by neglecting state and local contests, while Republicans invested huge amounts of time and money and effort to create the current situation. So Democrats will now have to work extra hard to start digging out.