{"id":176873,"date":"2020-03-01T20:13:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-02T01:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/03\/01\/oh-snap-5\/"},"modified":"2020-03-01T20:13:00","modified_gmt":"2020-03-02T01:13:00","slug":"oh-snap-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/03\/01\/oh-snap-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Oh, Snap!"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>A federal judge has ruled that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2020\/03\/01\/politics\/ken-cuccinelli-immigration-agency\/index.html\">Ken Cuccinelli was unlawfully appointed to head the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)<\/a>, and so all of the rulings that he has made are invalid:<\/div>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">A federal judge ruled on Sunday that Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II was unlawfully appointed to lead United States Citizenship and Immigration Services and that two policies he put in place that limited asylum seekers\u2019 access to counsel should be nullified.<\/p>\n<p>The judge, Randolph D. Moss of United States District Court in Washington, said the Trump administration violated a federal law that stipulates who can fill vacant leadership positions at federal agencies when <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/05\/24\/us\/politics\/kenneth-cuccinelli-l-francis-cissna.html\">Mr. Cuccinelli was tapped<\/a> in June to be the acting director of the agency that oversees legal immigration.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<p>The statute related to Mr. Cuccinelli\u2019s appointment is the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which says an official temporarily filling a cabinet-level position before Senate confirmation must be next in the line of succession by serving as the \u201cfirst assistant\u201d or must have worked as a senior official in the agency for at least 90 days. Mr. Cuccinelli, the former Virginia attorney general who aggressively defended Mr. Trump\u2019s immigration agenda on television in the months before his appointment, did not meet either of those requirements, according to the ruling.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<p>But Nitin Shah, senior counsel at Democracy Forward, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said lawyers would examine how other policies could be affected.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt raises serious questions about the legality of a number of policies that Cuccinelli has enacted and may yet enact, and we and others will be taking a closer look at that in the coming days,\u201d Mr. Shah said. He called the voiding of the asylum directives \u201ca big blow for the Trump administration\u2019s racist agenda.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The only saving grace of the Trump administration is that they are incompetent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A federal judge has ruled that Ken Cuccinelli was unlawfully appointed to head the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and so all of the rulings that he has made are invalid: A federal judge ruled on Sunday that Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II was unlawfully appointed to lead United States Citizenship and Immigration Services &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[469,450,439,438,374,486],"class_list":["post-176873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-bureaucracy","tag-employment","tag-government","tag-immigration","tag-politics","tag-schadenfreude"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176873"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176873\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}