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A persuasive argument can be made that President Donald Trumps most trusted White House confidant is his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. The husband of first daughter Ivanka, Kushner has outlasted almost every presidential appointee except for his wife, who has hung on since Day One.

Recently, the Brookings Institution compiled a White House turnover analysis of Trumps most influential inside advisers, or A team. As of May 1, turnover is 86 percent, with many of the departures labeled as resigned under pressure.

More difficult to measure, Brookings admitted, is Cabinet turnover. Case in point, Nikki Haley was upgraded from U.N. ambassador to the Cabinet. After she resigned, her Cabinet post evaporated.

Despite the confusion associated with tracking the inner circles comings and goings, Brookings concluded, Trumps Cabinet turnover rate is record setting.

Throughout the turmoil, though, Kushner remains on the Cabinet. In January 2017 when Trump named Ivanka and Jared as advisers, his base wondered what possible good could come from adding family to the White House team. Little did the questioning base know theyd be poster children and proponents for high immigration, the equal of any congressional Democrat.

Well-placed Washington insiders reported that Kushner, who has a long history of immigration advocacy, was the loudest voice in the pushback against Trumps April 22 executive order to temporarily suspend immigration.

Globalist Kushner, sources said, immediately objected to the order and led an internal battle over the suspension. He quickly became one of the loudest voices pushing back on a full ban, and sought to carve out exemptions for refugees, temporary workers under the H-1B visa program, and farmworkers under the H-2A visa program.

Only a couple of weeks have passed since Kushner highjacked his boss original, more restrictive immigration order, and in that brief period the jobs landscape has dramatically worsened. The question is no longer When will the economy restart? or When will the 36 million unemployed creep back into the labor force?

The new reality is as long as the status quo remains, many companies will declare bankruptcy, their employees will be set adrift, and those individuals may eventually have to file for personal bankruptcy.

J. Crew was the first of the major embattled retailers to file bankruptcy, with 15,000 on its payroll. Neiman Marcus, with its 13,500 employees, quickly followed, and others on the brink include JCPenney and Rite Aid.

The Walt Disney Company, with its theme park, cruise line and entertainment businesses hammered, has lost one-third of its market value. It hopes to recoup $80 billion through a debt offering, but Wall Street analysts peg the company, with its 223,000 employees, at a 41 percent chance of going bankrupt.

While some failing companies have been teetering for years, the COVID-19 pandemic has landed the knockout punch. Their employees must now depend on slow-to-arrive unemployment insurance checks.

The longer this lockdown persists, the less the need for employment-based immigration. As the June 23 deadline for Trumps executive order nears, he can either listen to Kushner echo Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumers come one, come all immigration dream, or he can bury the hatchet and listen to his former attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

Sessions has said that the United States has no jobs, and will lay off more people this week than last week. Hes chided his old congressional colleagues for ignoring the interest of the American people. Its (high immigration) in the interest of their (Congress) corporate friends and some ideology that they adhere to.

Instinctively, Trump knows importing foreign labor during this economic implosion is folly, but he needs the political courage to act on his common-sense predisposition. Hes been reluctant to do that and come November, he may regret his waffling.

Joe Guzzardi is an analyst and researcher with Progressives for Immigration Reform who now lives in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at [emailprotected], or follow him on Twitter: @joeguzzardi19. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.

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Joe Guzzardi: As Unemployment and Bankruptcies Grow, Donald Trump Still Listening to Wrong Guy - Noozhawk

Could an environmentalist lawsuit against President Trump's border wall provide the Supreme Court with an opportunity to revive the nondelegation doctrine? Perhaps.

Under Section 102 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), the Secretary of Homeland Security is authorized to waive other provisions of federal law if doing so would facilitate the expeditious construction of border barriers. Specifically, Section 102(c)(1) provides:

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive all legal requirements such Secretary, in such Secretary's sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this Section.

No process is required for the Secretary to issue such a waiver; any waiver is "effective upon being published in the Federal Register." Further, the IIRIRA limits judicial review of the Secretary's use of this authority to constitutional challenges, and provides for no appellate review other than through a petition for certiorari straight from the district court.

InCenter for Biological Diversity v. Wolf, several environmentalist groups argue that the relevant provisions of the IIRIRA violate separation of powers and the nondelegation doctrine in particular. According to the petitioners, the IIRIRA provides no intelligible principle to confine the Secretary's exercise of this waiver authority. Moreover, the petition suggests, the authority to waive "all legal requirements" is the sort of legislative authority that Congress should not be able to delegate. An amicus brief filed by state and local governments argues further that this wavier authority implicates important federalism concerns.

Most would have considered the petition to be quite a long shot. The federal government waived its opportunity to file a brief in opposition to certiorari. Then, on March 17 (just after the petition was first circulated for conference) the Court asked the Solicitor General's office to file a response brief, suggesting the case has caught at least one justice's eye. (With an extension, this brief is now due May 21.)

One final note:Although the petitioners do not make the argument, I would think there's also a question about whether it is constitutional to enact a jurisdictional provision that could have the effect of denying litigants the right to any appeal on the merits. (Although the U.S. Supreme Court has not recognized such a right, my colleague Cassandra Burke Robertson has made the case here that such a right is implicit in contemporary notions of due process.)

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A Nondelegation Challenge to Trump's Border Wall - Reason

A task force designed to unify the Democratic Party ahead of the presidential contest includes the presidents of the two national teachers' unions, as well as a top congressional leader for education and other figures with notable ties to education.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen Garca were selected by former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for president, and runner-up Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, to be on the "Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force" for education issues, the two men announced Wednesday.

In addition, Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., the chairman of the House education committee, is serving on the task force for criminal justice reform as a co-chairman.

The task forces will make recommendations to the commitee that will put together the Democratic National Committee's 2020 platform. There are six task forces in all; the other task forces deal with climate change, the economy, health care, and immigration reform.

"The work of the task forces will be essential to identifying ways to build on our progress and not simply turn the clock back to a time before Donald Trump, but transform our country," Biden said in a statement. And Sanders praised Biden for helping to put together "a group of leading thinkers and activists who can and will unify our party in a transformational and progressive direction."

It's no surprise thatGarca and Weingarten made the cut; both the NEA and the AFT endorsed Biden, although neither did so until March, when Biden had already built an essentially insurmountable lead in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. However, the education positions of the party and the two unions have largely merged on key issues such as education spending. For example, both Biden and Sanders pledged to triple federal Title I spending on disadvantaged students, a promise that will be extremely difficult to deliver, on especially in the short term.

How the task force's input affects the DNC's stance on charter schools will be particularly interesting to watch. The party platform on charters has changed significantly over the last several presidential campaign cyclesthe Democratic Party called for tripling the number of charter schools in its 2000 platform.

Some local AFT and NEA affiliates made their own endorsement decisions independently of the two national unions.

Other notable members of the unity task force include:

Photo:National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen Garca, left, andAmerican Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten in Philadelphia during the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

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Biden-Sanders 'Unity' Task Force Taps AFT and NEA Leaders, Ed. Committee Boss - Education Week

The US in now in a blind panic. The government, the Federal Reserve and stock-market dealers are trying to show a brave face. The cheapest way is to issue government bonds for the markets to buy, but the money is being given to major corporations who fund Trump and the GOP.

Dr. Professor Richard Wolff joins Thom Hartmann to discuss.

The Thom Hartmann Program covers diverse topics including immigration reform, government intrusion, privacy, foreign policy, and domestic issues. More people listen to or watch the TH program than any other progressive talk show in the world! Join them.

The Thom Hartmann Program is on Free Speech TV every weekday from 12-3 pm EST.

Missed an episode? Check out TH on FSTV VOD anytime or visit the show page for the latest clips.

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US Government & the Fed in Blind Panic - Free Speech TV

As climate change accelerates, theres also a strong argument to be made for developed countries to increase their migrant intake on the grounds of environmental justice. Ecological collapse, the product of developed-world industrialization, will hit those in poorer countries hardest. For centuries, Europe and the United States plundered these countries, and now their reward is impending obliteration by the ecological distortions that the rich worlds self-interest has unleashed. In addition to aid and other channels of economic assistance, significantly higher immigration intakes are one effective way for the developed world to discharge the moral obligation that this chain of cause and effect creates. This seems especially urgent at a time when those displaced by environmental degradation still have no formal refugee status under international law.

And yet. Despite the obvious benefits, these are not hospitable times for immigration across the developed world. Inspired by the Great Replacementinflected thinking of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbn, several countries in Eastern Europe are pulling up the drawbridge to foreign migrants, their dim demographic prospects notwithstanding. Even in nations with a healthy immigration intake today, the story is not much happier, and migrants continue to attract a xenophobic backlash. In some of these countries, such as the United States, nativists have ascended to the highest chambers of power. But even in those societies run by less nakedly reactionary governments, the dog whistle and the assimilationist value-grab remain sturdy tools of everyday policymaking. Theres a hypocrisy at the heart of immigration policy in the West today. On the one hand, immigrants are seen as useful agents of growth; on the other, immigrant-bashing is now a reliable vote winner. Openness to migrants is justified and encouraged as a matter of policy, in order to boost a countrys demographic and economic prospects, but the demands of electoral politics simultaneously require that openness to be undercut. Its not quite the case that democracy dictates that immigrantsmustbe demonized, but all too often short-term electoralism means they are.

Shedding immigration policy of its xenophobic skin is especially hard when it comes to climate change, since environmental destruction has long been associated, in the popular political imagination, with the libidinous, foreign Other. Indeed, theres a direct line connecting the thinking of post-Malthus populationists and those who oppose immigration in the developed world today. More important to the history of U.S. policy formulation than EhrlichsThe Population Bombwas a pamphlet of the same title published in 1954, 14 years before Ehrlichs book, by Dixie Cup co-founder Hugh Moore. Moores pamphlet paralleled the Eisenhower administrations approach to international aid policy at a time when the Unites States major concern was to limit the spread of communism. Containing population growth in the global southa place to be exploited for its natural resources and cheap labor but feared for its fecund and potentially Marxist billionsbecame a major priority for U.S. administrations during the Cold War. When an adviser to Lyndon Johnson suggested increasing relief to India in advance of a visit by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Johnson replied, Are you out of your fucking mind? Im not going to piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems. Before long, the international development community had joined this misguided effort to tie aid to reproductive suppression. The full horror of postwar population control measuresforced sterilization, infanticide, the state invasion of womens bodies, whole countries left demographically distorted for generations to comerested on this basic, orientalizing notion: The real danger to social order, not just globally but also at home, came from the irresponsible, untrustworthy foreigner incapable of controlling basic human urges.

This is to say nothing of the more general historical links between environmentalism and race science, which are plentiful. Californias Save the Redwoods League was founded in 1918 by eugenicists who explicitly linked the protection of the environment with the preservation of racial purity. In 1974, Garrett Hardin, a eugenicist and self-styled human ecologist, published Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor, in which he compared the United States to a lifeboat with little space to spare and argued that admitting more people would cause everyone to drown. World food banks move food to the people, hastening the exhaustion of the environment of the poor countries. Unrestricted immigration, on the other hand, moves people to the food, thus speeding up the destruction of the environment of the rich countries. Hardins anti-immigration environmentalism paralleled the U.S. governments campaign against undocumented workers from Mexico. By the late 1970s, environmental policy scholar Robert Gottlieb has written, population control was becoming synonymous with efforts to control the flow of Mexican migrants. The heirs to Hardins xenophobic brand of environmentalism today are organizations like the Center for Immigration Studies and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, both of which continue to push the line that curbing immigration will help reduce carbon emissions. The United States is not the only country where powerful interests employ a veneer of environmental concern to decorate the caravan of bigotry. In Australia, for example, a loose coalition of electronics store owners, ecologists, mining profiteers, and parliamentarians (with some overlap between these categories) has assembled to push the agenda for a smaller, whiter country. The Hardinesque slogan critics have mockingly tarred them with: Fuck off, were full.

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Making Life Cheap - The New Republic