Members of the Vermont Senate will call on state DMV officials to testify after documents released by the ACLU show that the department colluded with ICE officials to identify undocumented immigrants who applied for driver’s licenses, which undocumented residents of the state are allowed to do under 2013 law. In at least one instance, the coordination led to deportation proceedings for one man: 

The practice appears to have continued even after Vermont’s Human Rights Commission found that the DMV discriminated against a Jordanian national who was applying for a Drivers’ Privilege Card, a class of license that allows undocumented residents to legally drive in Vermont.

When Abdel Rababah, who had lived in the state for a decade, tried to apply for the card in late 2015, DMV officials were “openly hostile” to him and eventually contacted ICE, according to a statement from ACLU-VT. DMV officials then took the extraordinary step of calling a meeting with Rababah–ostensibly to talk about his application–where ICE officials ambushed and arrested him, which triggered deportation proceedings.

At the time, DMV Commissioner Robert Ide said department officials were still learning how the new law, which went into effect just weeks before Rababah applied, was supposed to work in practice and they didn’t mean him ill will.

The DMV later settled with the man for $40,000, “but, as the ACLU documents apparently show, the practice didn’t end. Vermont Governor Phil Scott said in a press conference that he would ‘rectify’ the issue.” Members of the State Senate also appear set to take action:

Here comes the Freedom Caucus—again—with yet another "deal" they're making on Trumpcare, as if pleasing their ranks was going to make this monster live.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) on Tuesday told a local radio station that he expects to hear back from Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) by noon about "two options" on the table. He did not elaborate.

"We're very close. The biggest thing for all of us is we want to make sure we don't just have repeal, but we have a replacement that drives down insurance premiums," he said.

"It's our encouragement to have a vote as soon as we possibly can, even perhaps before we return back to DC in 13 days."

Sure, you do that. You bring everybody back from recess to try and have a vote on this thing that is universally reviled and will never get a vote in the Senate in its latest form.

Meadows has some backup this time, though, in the form of the Club for Growth—which is going to try to bully "moderate" House Republicans in to supporting it with a $1 million ad campaign. That's sure to work.

What the ad does not mention is that Trump himself has blamed the Freedom Caucus—not the moderates—for the health bill's failure so far, and that there is deep concern among both House Republican leaders and the GOP rank and file that rolling back the ACA mandates could easily be cast as a betrayal of Trump and other GOP leaders' pledges to protect insurance access for those with preexisting conditions.

Anything the Freedom Caucus cooks up will be so reviled by the entire population that any not-Freedom Caucus member is safe in continuing to oppose them, no matter how much money Club for Growth spends.

It’s recess week for our elected representatives and many are back in their districts to face their constituents at town hall events. Republican Rep. Justin Amash, a member of the House Freedom Caucus (a.k.a the tea party) who refused to get on board with the Republican efforts to take away insurance from 24 million people because the plan wasn’t conservative enough (!!) did take the unusual step of telling a town hall audience the truth about Trumpcare, that it puts the most vulnerable at risk. Listen to this short clip:

Amash also noted the hasty plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with Paul Ryan’s plan would’ve suffered an embarrassing defeat had it come to a vote:

At a town hall meeting in Cedar Springs Monday, Amash said it wouldn't have just been members of the House Freedom Caucus opposing the health care plan that was not brought up for a vote last month -- he estimated anywhere between 50 and 80 Republicans would have voted no.

"It would have been really embarrassing," he said.

You might get drawn in to the story of Robert Bentley’s resignation as the governor of Alabama by all the variously sordid and cringeworthy details of his affair with a married staffer and his wife’s discovery of said affair. You might pause to be shocked by his abuse of power in trying to shut the story down. But it turns out Bentley’s affair with Rebekah Mason didn’t just affect the people around him. It contributed to one of the other most notorious recent stories coming out of Alabama politics: the attempt to close driver’s license offices in predominantly black counties.

Mason's role was highlighted in a 131-page report released Friday by the investigator leading impeachment efforts against Gov. Bentley, a report largely focused on the relationship between Mason and Bentley.

The report and exhibits can be found here.

According to that report, which was compiled by lead investigator Jack Sharman, it was Mason who "proposed closing multiple driver's license offices throughout the State" and asked the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency to "put together a plan."

According to Sharman's report, former ALEA head Spencer Collier understood Mason's intentions were to have the plan "rolled out in a way that had limited impact on Government Bentley's political allies."

It does not take an illicit affair for Republicans to try to suppress voting by people of color and other likely Democrats, of course, but it’s striking how this one played out. A Republican governor and the senior staffer he was having an affair with just happened to come up with a plan intended to have “limited impact” on “political allies,” and oh, look, it hurts majority black and majority Democratic counties. Who could have predicted?

And while the driver’s license office closures were not a big political win for Bentley—they were a national story and were ultimately reversed—that sort of attack on democracy should be a bigger scandal and blot on a politician’s name than carrying on a tacky, obvious affair. But that sort of attack on democracy is the Republican Party’s bread and butter.

If you've heard any coverage of the gigantic amount of money Democratic upstart Jon Ossoff has raised for his bid to capture Health and Human Services Sec. Tom Price's former House seat in Georgia, you've probably heard reporters dismiss his eye-popping $8.3 million haul as mostly coming from "outside the district." It's a way of minimizing his staggering fundraising as part of a proxy war waged by external groups battling for turf. Republicans, meanwhile, are desperate to smear Ossoff’s appeal:

“He’s a far-left Washington insider whose campaign is propped up by Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, and the like,” said Maddie Anderson, spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

But upon a closer look, the average donation for Ossoff was only about $42.50 per donor. That's not the type of number that suggests high-dollar progressive donors are dominating Ossoff's giving. Instead, it's a reflection of grassroots energy nationwide (much of it driven by Daily Kos readers) matching the sense of urgency that exists among Democrats within GA-06. And make no mistake: that's a lethal combination heading into 2018.

Reports from both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have rightly emphasized the grassroots enthusiasm of progressive voters in the 6th Congressional District, which is transforming the way Ossoff's race is run.

The WSJ gets the outside-to-inside balance about right with its focus on voter Rachel Paule:

Everyone makes mistakes, and even the best are subject to producing something less than eloquence under pressure. But what White House press secretary Sean Spicer said at his Tuesday press conference went well beyond a slip, a gaffe, or any sort of ordinary mistake.

In the space of 10 minutes, Spicer first tried to make the case that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is worse than Hitler because …

"You look. We didn't use chemical weapons in World War II. We … We had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn't even sink to using chemical weapons.”

In itself, that’s an astounding statement. But it’s when Spicer was questioned about the statement that his clarification revealed the depth of the issue.

“I think when you come to sarin gas, there was no, he was not using the gas on his own people in the same way. that Assad is doing. There was not ... he brought them into the Holocaust center, I understand that.  But I’m saying the way that Assad used them were he went into town and dropped them down to innocent … to the middle of town.”

Even beyond Spicer’s renaming of concentration camps as “Holocaust centers” and his implication that dropping bombs is somehow worse than creating an entire infrastructure of genocide, there are key phrases that show Spicer’s statement was even worse than it seems at first blush.

“He was not using the gas on his own people” …. “and dropped them down to innocent”

Spicer drew a line both between Germans and Jews, and a line between victims of the Holocaust and “innocents.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, this was a portion of the prepared speech from Attorney General Jeff Sessions at the U.S./Mexico border today, where he “directed federal prosecutors to pursue harsher charges against undocumented immigrants who commit crimes, or repeatedly cross into the U.S. illegally:”

In remarks Tuesday to border patrol agents at the U.S.-Mexico border in Nogales, Ariz., Mr. Sessions spoke in stark terms about the threat he said illegal immigration posed.

“We mean criminal organizations that turn cities and suburbs into warzones, that rape and kill innocent citizens,” Mr. Sessions said, according to the text of his prepared remarks. “It is here, on this sliver of land, where we first take our stand against this filth.”

“This is a new era,” he said. “This is the Trump era.”

No matter how much the Trump regime tries to spin the sunshiny smiles of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, it is Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller who represent what this administration really is at its core: white nationalism. Donald Trump kicked off his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants criminals and “rapists” and never took it back because that’s what he actually believes. So does Sessions.

"The lawlessness, the abdication of the duty to enforce our immigration laws, and the catch and release practices of old are over,” Sessions also reportedly declared in the speech. No word if that lawlessness he’s going to target includes his own alleged crimes.

Tuesday night’s special election for Kansas’ 4th Congressional District has unexpectedly—shockingly—turned into a competitive affair, with Republicans scrambling to save a seat that they should never have had to worry about in the first place. The simplest way to appreciate just how safe this Wichita-area seat ought to be is to look at how well Donald Trump performed here last year: He absolutely crushed, beating Hillary Clinton by a 60-33 margin. That makes this one of the most Republican districts in the country, putting it in the reddest quintile of all 435 seats in the House.

So state Treasurer Ron Estes, the Republican candidate, has no excuse. Why should he do any less well against his Democratic opponent, civil rights attorney James Thompson, than Trump’s 27-point margin? Indeed, former Rep. Mike Pompeo, whose confirmation as Trump’s CIA director created this vacancy in the first place, won re-election by more than 30 points every time. And this heavily evangelical district isn’t trending toward the Democrats: Mitt Romney won by an almost identical 26-point spread in 2012. This is solidly conservative turf.

Yet Republicans are panicked: The NRCC jumped in with nearly six figures worth of attack ads last week; both Trump and Mike Pence recorded robocalls on Estes’ behalf; and Ted Cruz even came to Wichita for a rally on Monday. There are many possible explanations for this sudden closeness, but the bottom line, again, is that this race should have been a layup for the GOP.

And that’s why the thing to watch on Tuesday is the final margin—and how it compares to Trump’s performance. It would be an upset of historic proportions if Thompson prevailed, but even if he doesn’t, Republicans will have good reason to fret over future races if Estes doesn’t win in a blowout.

Even if Estes were to win by, say, 15 points, that would represent a collapse of a dozen points compared to Trump’s win. Just imagine if Democrats everywhere started improving over last year’s presidential margins by 12 points. A ton of seats would come into play that no one ever dreamed of contesting—more than enough to flip the House.

The GOP can and will try to spin the results and re-set expectations, but the math is the math. If Thompson winds up making this race closer than in ought to be, that will have significant implications for upcoming special elections in other parts of the country—and the 2018 midterms. Stay tuned.

Dear sweet fluffy unicorns. This man speaks for the president of the United States, albeit a popular-vote-losing unstable one. 

As David Nir said, “Nah, just some Zyklon B.”

Amazingly, given a chance to rethink that answer, Spicer did not improve the situation:

So German Jews were not Hitler’s “own people”? Or is it just the method of gassing people that makes the difference?

It’s technically true that Hitler’s methods were different from Assad’s, but “rounded them up into camps and then put them in gas chambers” is … not really better. Especially when Spicer’s way of saying this was “He brought them into the Holocaust Centers, I understand that, but … “

What a dumpster fire of heinous offense, historical ignorance, and absolute tone-deafness.

Sign if you agree: Trump is enabling neo-Nazis.

Oh, so Donald Trump wants tax “reform” but he doesn’t want to release his own taxes? Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has some things to say about that:

“It’s going to make tax reform much harder” if Trump doesn’t release his returns, Schumer told reporters Tuesday. Anytime the president proposes something on tax reform, “the average American is going to say, ‘Oh, he’s not doing that because it’s good for me, he’s doing it because it’s good for him.’ So for his own good, he ought to make them public. And the big mystery is why he hasn’t.”

“I think he just has an obligation to come clean. When you clean up the swamp, it’s not keeping things secret and applies to yourself,” Schumer added.

In fact, tax policy isn’t the only area where Trump’s missing tax returns leave a big question mark hanging:

Schumer said that part of the reason Democrats are eager to see Trump’s returns is to determine whether Trump or his family’s business empire have any conflicts of interest with the federal government or foreign powers.

“When China just released those 38 approvals for him a month ago, a natural question to ask is are they doing that because they’re trying to win policy points related to American workers and the American people? No one knows the answer,” he said.

Also, you know, Russia.

We still don’t know what Trump is hiding, and the list of possibilities (and the ways that list could be affecting how Trump governs) is not getting any shorter.

Donald Trump likes to be unpredictable. Take people by surprise. Do things on the spur of the moment. Trump seems to think this gives him an edge over military people who actually—what’s that word … plan. But there’s an upcoming event that involves challenging logistics, and is already running afoul of Trump’s do-it-on-the-fly attitude.

“It’s the single most high-profile event that takes place at the White House each year, and the White House and the first lady are judged on how well they put it on,” said Melinda Bates, who organized eight years of Easter Egg Rolls as director of the White House Visitors Office under President Bill Clinton. 

There were several steps required to prepare for the event. First, someone needed to explain to Trump that this kind of egg roll doesn’t usually come with duck sauce. Second, they had to order the eggs—a step that, like most things Trump, required a flurry of last-minute confusion.

The staff of the company, based in Buckfield, Me., wondered whether the Trumps planned to continue distributing the wooden eggs as party favors, or whether they were even going to have a White House Easter Egg Roll at all.

As a result of bad planning, Trump’s egg-vent isn’t expected to measure up.

The late start in planning by the Trump White House points to a smaller and less ambitious Egg Roll than in previous years. There may be half as many guests, a fraction of the number of volunteers to manage the invasion of the South Lawn, and military bands in place of A-list entertainers like Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Idina Menzel and Silentó who have performed for Egg Rolls past.

So … small crowd, badly organized event, and poor entertainment. Why does that seem so familiar?