Erwin Chemerinsky, the new dean of the law school at Berkeley, says Trump’s Pardon of Sherriff Joe Arpaio is “outrageous”—because it violates the separation of powers and empowers an official to violate the constitutional right to liberty of Latinos in Arizona.

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Erwin Chemerinsky: Why Trump's Pardon of Joe Arpaio is 'Outrageous'

Roane Carey, The Nation’s managing editor, reports from Houston on the political battles there: developers have defeated local anti-growth groups, but they can’t stop the climate changes that have brought unprecedented rainfall and flooding.

Plus: Erwin Chemerinsky, the new dean of the law school at UC Berkeley, says Trump’s Pardon of Sherriff Joe Arpaio is “outrageous”—because it violates the separation of powers, and encourages the police to ignore Latinos’ constitutional right to liberty.

And if you wanted to discredit the idea that Russians hacked the DNC and sent what they found there to Wikileaks to help Donald Trump, you’d need a counter-theory—right? Bob Dreyfuss looks at the leading Republican counter-theory, and how it crashed and burned.

Houston vs Climate Change: Roane Carey; Erwin Chemerinsky: Trump & Arpaio; Bob Dreyfuss: Seth Rich

John Nichols says Trump sent Jeff Sessions out to announce they were targeting the Dreamers for deportation because Sessions has always been bitterly anti-immigrant, and helped bring that constituency into Trump's base.

Plus: Trump could fire Mueller or pardon all of his targets—but that won’t protect him from investigation by the state of New York, and Mueller has formed a partnership with New York’s state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.  Elizabeth Holtzman explains -- she’s a former member of Congress from New York who won national attention for her work on the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate.  

Also: You’ve probably had this debate with your friends: Do we want Donald Trump to resign or be impeached, which would leave us with Mike Pence in charge?  Would Pence would be better, or worse, than Trump?  Joan Walsh has been thinking about this too – And she’s got some hard evidence and an original analysis.

Behind Trump’s Heartless Attack on Dreamers: John Nichols;  Holtzman on Mueller; Walsh on Pence

Sott Pruitt, who Trump appointed to head the EPA, says we should be helping victims of the hurricanes in Florida and Texas, and not debating climate change. Mark Hertsgaard says we need to debate the politics of climate change, because the deniers still have a hold on the media.  the debate, however, should not be about whether climate change is real – that’s scientific fact – but about what we should do to slow it down.  
Also, John Nichols talks about hurricanes, toxics, and Trump’s EPA under Pruitt—he's a disaster for the environment, because he's spent his career defending the oil and gas industry.
And Alfred McCoy reports on the Pentagon's plans for war with China, which they are planning to fight in space and cyberspace.  The Chinese, he reports, have more powerful supercomputers with better satellite communications and a stronger capability to hack our systems—that's why we might lose.

Hurricane politics & climate change in the Age of Trump: Mark Hertsgaard & John Nichols

Bob Dreyfuss reports the big news in the Russiagate scandal: the first indictments  Robert Mueller, the special counsel, has told Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort that he’s about to be indicted. And not only that: Manafort has been the subject of a court-ordered wiretap for years.
Also: Hillary’s new campaign memoir has its engaging moments, says Sarah Leonard of The Nation, but the former candidate still doesn’t really understand the populist political forces responsible for her loss.
Plus: Todd Gitlin responds to critics of Ken Burns’s 18-hour documentary for PBS on the Vietnam war.  It makes the antiwar case powerfully, he says; it presents Vietnamese understandings of the war brilliantly, and it’s fair to the anti-war movement.

Trump’s Campaign Chief Manafort Faces Indictment—plus Hillary’s Book & Ken Burns’s Vietnam Doc

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