Trump Has Turned The United States Into A Lawless Rogue State

It was bad enough that Donald Trump was flouting United States laws to gain more power (and wealth) for himself. But now he's decided that's not enough. He has begun to ignore and violate international laws.

Trump's is trying to justify his actions against Venezuela by claiming he is doing it to protect Americans from illegal drugs. That's ridiculous. Grabbing and kidnapping Maduro (and his wife) will do nothing to decrease the amount of drugs available on the streets of the United States. 

Venezuela (and Maduro) was not a major importer of drugs in this country. Other countries are far bigger importers of hard drugs - Colombia and Ecuador (cocaine), China (fentanyl), Afghanistan (heroin). And Trump's pardon of the Honduran president, who was convicted of exporting over 400 tons of hard drugs to the United States, also gives lie to Trump's claim.

The truth is that Trump doesn't care about the drugs or the plight of Venezuelan citizens. He wanted Venezuela's oil reserves - generally considered to be the largest in the world. And he didn't care what he had to do to get them.

Trump's bombing of small boats and killing those on them is a violation of international law (and U.S. due process laws).

Trump's seizing of tanker ships and stealing their oil is a violation of international law.

Trump's bombing of Venezuela and killing of its citizens is a violation of international law (and an act of war).

Trump's kidnapping Of Venezuela's leader is a violation of international law.

And Trump's current attempt to steal Venezuela's oil reserves is a violation of international law.

The United States used to be a freedom-loving country that supported democracies around the world. But Trump has turned it into a lawless rogue state that threatens democracy and world peace. All Americans who love democracy (at home and abroad) should be ashamed of Trump's actions - and dedicate themselves to opposing his lawless regime. 

Trump/DOJ Ignore The Law - Release Only A Partial List Of Heavily Redacted Files

 

The DOJ released only a partial list of the Epstein files they have. That is a violation of the law passed by Congress (and signed by Trump). All of the files were supposed to be released. This is not a surprise. Trump has shown no regard for the law throughout his life, and since the Supreme Court gave him immunity, he has shown even less.

It's also no surprise that over 500 pages of the released files were completely redacted. The DOJ is no longer an independent organization upholding the rule of law. It is ruled by Trump, and on his orders they are making sure that nothing about him will be in the released files.

Did anyone really think the entire files were going to be released - regardless of what the law says?

The Letter From A Group Of Former Military JAG Officers On The Boat Attacks

 

From justseciruty.org.

Another Idiotic Texas Abortion Law Goes Into Effect On December 4th

 From The Texas Tribune

Can Trump's Lawless And Unconstitutional Actions Be Stopped?

Last week, Trump instructed Pete Hegseth to fire the military Judge Advocate Generals. This is on top of Trump firing 17 Inspector Generals of important federal agencies. Why would he do that? These people, in both cases, are not political hires. They operate on a bipartisan basis no matter which party occupies the White House. So why would they be fired?

Their purpose:

An agency inspector general (IG) acts as an independent watchdog within a government agency, primarily tasked with conducting audits, investigations, and inspections to identify and prevent fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement within the agency's operations.

So these are the people who police the agencies - the ones who make sure the agencies obey the law and carry out their function as Congress intended. The only reason for the mass firing on these individuals is to prevent them from doing their jobs.

Trump claims to be trying to get rid of waste and fraud. If that was true, it would make no sense to fire the people trying to root out that waste and fraud. The only thing that makes sense is that in his effort to seize more power, Trump doesn't want these Inspector Generals calling attention to laws he is breaking (or instructing agencies to break).

It is doubtful that Trump really had the authority to fire the Inspector Generals. It is just another example of his lawless actions since returning to office. But it does clear the way for other future lawless actions. 

We probably should have expected that a convicted criminal, once getting into public office, would continue his criminal behavior - and get rid of any officials who could possibly stop him. Sadly, too many voters were not smart enough to see that.

Who can stop Trump's lawless rampage? It won't be Congress. Both houses are controlled by the Republican Party. Many are card-carrying members of Trump's cult, and the rest are too scared of being voted out of their cushy job in a party primary.

It won't be voters. Even though voters are starting to wake up and turn against what Trump is doing, we are a year and a half from the next election. Trump can do a lot of damage in a year and a half.

That leaves the Supreme Court. They have the power to stop Trump, but will they?

One would think that a true conservative majority on the Court would act to save the Constitution and its separation of powers. After all, they claim to be "originalists", who believe in the Constitution as written by the Founding Fathers.

But they are also the ones who gave Trump immunity in official actions. Will they follow their flawed immunity policy, or will they uphold the powers enumerated in the Constitution? I hope it will be the latter, but who can know right now.

They are our last and best hope to save our constitutional form of government. If they bow down to Trump, as Congress has, then our democracy is doomed.

What Pregnant Texas Women Can Do To protect Themselves

The following is part of an article in CourierTexas.com:

“It’s like a knife straight to your stomach,” Dr. Todd Ivey, a Houston-based OB-GYN at an academic hospital, told Courier Texas about a third woman dying in the state during a miscarriage.

“It’s just like, we’ve got to stop this. We’ve got to do something to stop this. Pregnancy is high-risk enough without putting all these complications on top of it.”

The “complications” that Ivey is warning Texas women about are the state’s two abortion bans, which outlaw abortions in Texas from the moment of conception.

The laws impose such harsh penalties on doctors that they are “terrified that they’re going to be criminalized,” said Dr. Austin Dennard, a Dallas-based OB-GYN.

And why wouldn’t they be terrified when they face a sentence of up to 99 years in jail if they perform an abortion that’s considered illegal? They’ll also be stripped of their medical licence, have to pay a $100,000 fine, and can also be sued civilly by anyone who wants to claim a bounty of $10,000 if they can prove a doctor provided an abortion. . . .

Young women who are having complications miscarrying can appear healthy before getting “sick very quickly,” Ivey explained.

How women can protect themselves

“If you are experiencing serious symptoms while miscarrying, you have to move very quickly to prevent (your) organs from failing,” Ivey said. 

And while only three Texas women have been documented to have died from miscarriages since the state’s abortion ban has been in place, the number of Texas women who died from pregnancy or labor complications soared 56% from 2019 to 2022, according to a study by the Gender Equity Policy Institute.

Kaplan said he advises pregnant mothers in Texas to pack a “to go bag” so that “if you need to get out of this state to get the care you need, you’ll be ready to go. Always be thinking — if something were to go wrong, where am I headed outside of Texas.”

But what can a pregnant woman who can’t quickly leave Texas do if local hospitals or urgent care centers don’t appear to be taking the risk to their lives seriously?

“Go to the biggest city near you and go to the downtown-ist hospital and don’t care what it looks like,” Binford said. ”They have the most volumes of deliveries and with volume come pregnancy complications and that means experience in handling them.”

Binford also advised that hospitals affiliated with medical schools will have established ethics committees that will include a lawyer and that committee members will be reachable quickly if a doctor is unsure about whether they can go ahead with a procedure to remove a fetus from a woman’s body.

Texas health lawyer Leah Stewart, who advises doctors and hospitals about the abortion laws, agreed that if a woman thinks she is having a severe miscarriage or another dangerous complication like an ectopic pregnancy or if her water breaks long before viability, then she should go to a large urban hospital.

They see “every single thing that goes wrong … and are better equipped to connect the right provider and give the woman standard care.”

And if you aren’t getting the attention you need quickly, she added, “You have to keep ramping up your fit throwing.”

“You don’t think it’s going to happen to you,” said Ryan Hamilton, a Dallas-area father whose wife nearly died when she miscarried with what would have been their second child at 13 weeks pregnant.

After multiple visits to medical centers over three days and three rounds of treatment with misoprostol, Hamilton’s wife passed out unconscious on the bathroom floor in a pool of blood.

She only survived because Hamilton raced her to a hospital ER for treatment.

“”Women are dying… under the circumstances we went through.. If I wouldn’t have been home to find my wife, she would have been one of those women… I could have lost her….it’s like, ‘oh my God, I really could have.’ That’s reality and that’s hard,” Hamilton added.

Most Undocumented Immigrants Are Not "Illegals" Or "Criminals"

Donald Trump wants to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, and he has appointed people willing to do that (Miller, Homan, Noem).  That massive deportation will have serious consequences for our economy, inflation, businesses (who need those workers), and tax revenue (since these immigrants pay billions of dollars in taxes).

Some on the right have said Trump will just be deporting criminals. They are both wrong and right. They are wrong because Trump wants to deport millions who have committed no crime. They are right because Trump and his cohorts consider all undocumented immigrants to be "illegal" and therefore "criminals".

The idea that undocumented immigrants are criminals is a popular idea in this country, but it is wrong! Most undocumented immigrants are neither illegal nor criminal, because they have violated no federal criminal law.

Dharlawllp.com explains:

Most Want Law On Sale Of Handguns To Be Stricter

The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between March 3rd and 5th of a nationwide sample of 1,556 adults (including 1,450 registered voters). The margin of error was 3.6 points for adults and 3.2 points for registered voters.

Insurrection Act Must Be Fixed (In Case Trump Is Re-Elected)

The following is just part of an article by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith in The New York Times:

The Insurrection Act is a dangerous centuries-old federal statute that authorizes the president, with few restraints, to deploy the U.S. military inside the United States to suppress threats the president perceives to the constitutional order. Commentators have recently proposed tightening the law following reports that former President Donald Trump and his advisers are planning to use it aggressively for law enforcement and to quell domestic disturbances if Mr. Trump is once more elected.

This focus on Trump is understandable but inadequate in capturing the compelling case for reform. It has been clear for decades that the poorly drafted and antiquated law needs revision. There is an opportunity in 2024 to make targeted changes to the statute’s main flaws — and, critically, in a way that both parties would have good reason to support.

The Insurrection Act empowers the president to order the armed forces and state militias into action within the United States and against American citizens in numerous ill-defined circumstances. The president can, for example, deploy military force where states call upon federal assistance in quelling an “insurrection”; or as the president “considers necessary” to enforce federal law against “obstructions,” “combinations” or “assemblages”; or alternatively to quell any “domestic violence” or “conspiracy” that impedes the enforcement of constitutional rights or even “the course of justice” under federal law. . . .

The problem is that the act has very broad and imprecise triggers to its operation and no temporal constraints, and it does not specify any role for Congress to assess, shape or limit the president’s response to an emergency. It is in many respects like the Electoral Count Act, which Congress by large bipartisan majorities revised in 2022 to govern the final tally of the state electoral votes for presidents and vice presidents: a statute widely recognized to be poorly designed and clearly susceptible to harmful misinterpretation and application, yet left on the books for too long because the dangers it presented had not yet come to pass. . . .

There is no serious dispute, on the merits, that the Insurrection Act gives any president far too much unchecked power. It is hard for anyone to argue that a president should be able to unleash U.S. troops or state militias without any accountability beyond public opinion or impeachment. . . .

Insurrection Act reform has many potential moving parts. There are three vital elements.

First, Congress should tighten the triggers to presidential invocation of the act. It should eliminate vague and obsolete terms like “assemblage” and “combination”; clearly define other terms like “insurrection” and “domestic violence”; and narrow the president’s seemingly boundless discretion to determine when the act’s triggers are satisfied.

Second, it should require the president to consult with state and local authorities to ensure that troop deployment is needed to address a serious threat to safety; to make findings to that effect; and to report to and consult with Congress on a regular basis.

Third, and perhaps most important, Congress should place a relatively short sunset provision on a president’s invocation of the act — weeks, not months — subject to additional short-term continued deployments approved by Congress. This is where the rubber meets the road, since Congress might not approve the president’s continued use of the military.

But any threat that justifies using the military for domestic law enforcement should be severe enough for majorities of Congress to approve the action, and the dangers of presidential abuse here outweigh the dangers of congressional gridlock.

Amending the Insurrection Act along these three dimensions addresses the primary concerns with the statute without veering off into more contested issues that might make it harder for the parties to find common ground. Yet these simple changes would constitute a historic reform and would be far better than no reform at all. The primary and urgent task is to bring the core of the president’s promiscuous Insurrection Act authority to heel.

Dan Rather On The Dangers Of Trump's Extralegal Actions

The following post is by Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner: 

When Donald Trump turned himself in for booking (and a mugshot and fingerprinting) in Atlanta, Georgia, for charges related to a conspiracy to steal the 2020 presidential election, it marked the latest chapter in a legal drama that has engulfed him and will shape the future of the nation in unknowable ways.

 

We — as a country, as a people — have never seen anything like this. But for all that is unprecedented in a former president (and current candidate for the office) facing dozens of federal and state criminal charges, there is also a lot that is familiar about the spinning wheels of justice. 

The law is, by definition, governed by rules that dictate how those involved are permitted to act: prosecutors, law enforcement agencies, judges, defendants and their counsel, and so on. There are rules for evidence, rules for testimony, and rules for juries. There is a well-trodden process for booking defendants, setting trial dates, hearing pre-trial motions, and the trial itself. 

Our courts are ideally places of rationality and decorum, where justice is free from intimidation and administered without bias. Of course, the judicial process is ultimately an exercise performed by human beings and thus shaped by our inherent frailties and shortcomings. The rules are intended to limit the outside forces of prejudice, terror, and street justice from influencing the workings of the court. And yet that sometimes proves impossible. 

As the trials of Donald Trump unfold, it will be vital that the nation keeps its eyes on both the action taking place inside the courtroom and that outside it. Because even while Trump’s lawyers will be presenting legal arguments before judges and juries, you can bet the former president will be seeking to defend himself in ways that lie far outside the traditional boundaries of our legal system. He’s done this his entire life, especially during his time as president and after his defeat in 2020.

 

In the wake of that election, Trump’s lawyers pursued all possible legal avenues to challenge its result, and they lost, everywhere. But at the same time, Trump was summoning his supporters to steal the election. It is for these actions — phone calls, tweets, and exhorting the mob directly on January 6 — that he finds himself indicted in both federal and state court. Trump was eager to use whatever means he could — legal or otherwise — to destroy America’s constitutional order. To what lengths will he go when trying to keep himself out of prison?

 

As president, Trump always used speeches, interviews, phone calls (like the one pressuring Ukraine), and social media to whip up passions and serve his naked self-interest. He has shown no compunctions about embracing bullying, divisiveness, intimidation, lying, and even the threat of violence. This has long been the playbook of autocrats. But it has also been the approach of mobsters seeking to avoid the reach of the law. 

It is portentous that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is using the RICO law to go after Trump and his co-defendants in their alleged plot to steal the election in Georgia. This has been a favorite approach of prosecutors to bring mafia kingpins to justice. In essence, Willis is saying that Trump’s election team had a lot in common with other kinds of criminal enterprises. 

With this context in mind, we should consider the long and sordid history of crime figures and extremist political groups eschewing traditional legal defenses in favor of “extralegal” ones: intimidating witnesses, spreading lies to pollute the jury pool, and even resorting to violence against those seeking to hold them accountable. We have already seen credible threats against judges and others involved in the Trump case. And that leads to an important question: How much of this turmoil has been encouraged by Trump’s defiant and antagonistic lie-filled rhetoric?

With most criminal defendants, judges can threaten punishment like fines or jail time for the kinds of things Trump regularly says about law enforcement, members of the court, and witnesses. But in Trump’s case, they have to tread with care lest they turn him into even more of a martyr — a role he is eager to play. And there are also legitimate First Amendment considerations for a leading candidate for president. In his case, the legal and the political are inextricably intertwined. 

Trump knows this and will eagerly push the boundaries of what he can get away with. He also knows he will almost assuredly have the backing of the Republican Party no matter what he does. Just look at all those who raised their hands on the debate stage to say they will support him as their party’s nominee even if he is convicted. It’s craven. And it’s dangerous. 

Violence against the rule of law and violence against a peaceful political process are two sides of the same coin. They have combined at some of the most dire moments in the history of our nation. In a recent column in The New York Times, Anthony Michael Kreis, assistant professor of law at Georgia State University, noted the historical context of Reconstruction after the Civil War — including in Georgia — for Trump’s fourth indictment. 

The democratic failures of that era shared three common attributes. The political process was neither free nor fair, as citizens were prevented from voting and lawful votes were discounted. The Southern Redeemers refused to recognize their opponents as legitimate electoral players. And conservatives abandoned the rule of law, engaging in intimidation and political violence to extinguish the power of multiracial political coalitions.

At bottom, the theory behind the Fulton County indictment accuses Mr. Trump and his allies of some of these same offenses.

Kreis succinctly states: 

When authoritarians attack democracy and lawbreakers are allowed to walk away from those attacks with impunity, they will try again, believing there are no repercussions.

We should not make those mistakes again.

As we reckon with the uncertainty and the peril of our moment, we can recall the words of James “Jem” Coughlin in the Irish mob film “The Town.” Says Jem, “If we get jammed up, we’re holding court in the street.” Trump already showed us he feels the same way. 

Trump has a long history of winning court cases through bullying and the use of extralegal techniques. The least we can do is to be alert for them, recognize them for what they are, and stay determined that the verdict on him — whatever it may be — will be decided inside courtrooms, not by a power play outside them.

In a democratic republic, governed by the rule of law, we cannot allow extralegal methods, for anyone. And least of all for a would-be autocrat desperate to return to power and escape accountability for his actions. 

Most Say Trump Broke The Law & Threatened Democracy

 

The charts above are from a new AP / NORC Poll -- done between August 10th and 14th of a nationwide sample of 1,165 adults, with a 3.8 point margin of error.

People Expect Gun Violence To Increase - Want Stricter Laws

 

The charts above are from a Pew Research Center survey -- done between June 5th and 11th of a nationwide sample of 5,115 adults, with a 1.7 point margin of error.

Pride Month Is Needed Amid A Rise In Discrimination

The following (and very frightening) op-ed is by Charles M. Blow in The New York Times. Here is just a part of it:

This year there is a pall over Pride.

As the L.G.B.T.Q. community celebrates Pride Month, we are besieged by a malicious, coordinated legislative attack.

There’s been a notable rise in the number of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bills since 2018, and that number has recently accelerated, with the 2023 state legislative year being the worst on record.

According to the Human Rights Campaign, in 2023 there have been more than 525 such bills introduced in 41 states, with more than 75 bills signed into law as of June 5. In Florida — the state that became known for its “Don’t Say Gay” law — just last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation that banned gender transition care for minors and prohibited public school employees from asking children their preferred pronouns.

As Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, recently told me, the number of signed bills is likely to move higher: “There’s 12 more that are sitting on governors’ desks, so you could be at nearly 100 new restrictions on the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community by the end of this cycle.”

For that reason, on Tuesday, for the first time in its more than 40-year history, the Human Rights Campaign declared a state of emergency for L.G.B.T.Q. people in the United States.

I recently spoke with several leaders of L.G.B.T.Q. groups and historians who have documented the community’s history, and they all raised the alarm about the severity of what we’re seeing.

There have been other periods of backlash against the queer community, including with the passage of oppressive legislation, but this one has moved with alarming political calculation and efficacy.

“This is a terror campaign against our community,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and chief executive of GLAAD, the pre-eminent L.G.B.T.Q. media advocacy organization.

The way this kind of terrorism works is that it not only punishes expression, condemns identities and cuts off avenues for receiving care but also creates an aura of hostility and issues grievous threats. It’s like burning a cross on someone’s lawn: It’s an attempt to frighten people into compliance and submission.

The Republican politicians pushing anti-L.G.B.T.Q. laws usually pretend that their principal, if not their sole, motivation is to protect children. But these laws operate in furtherance and protection of the fragile patriarchy, in perpetuation of the twin evils of homophobia and heterosexism and in reinforcement of abusive gender-identity policing.

These politicians play to a segment of the population that sees any divergence from its primitive ideals as deviant. So they build boxes. But for too many people, particularly young people, those boxes can become caskets: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in five gay, lesbian or bisexual high school students attempted suicide in the past year. Last year the Trevor Project found that 45 percent of L.G.B.T.Q. youths seriously considered attempting suicide in the preceding year.

These politicians have Willie Horton-ized the transgender equality movement and, by extension, the whole movement for L.G.B.T.Q. equality. 

Santos Played Fast And Loose With The Law & Got Caught

 The following is part of an op-ed by David Firestone in The New York Times:

The scheme Mr. Santos is charged with is so flagrant, so spectacularly dumb in both conception and execution, that Justice clearly decided it had a no-brainer of a case. If Mr. Santos had structured an improper political money stream the way the grown-ups do every day, he might have gotten away with it.

The additional counts in the indictment — that Mr. Santos defrauded the unemployment insurance system and that he lied to the House about his finances — are embarrassing enough that his Republican colleagues should kick him back to Long Island, though they won’t because Speaker Kevin McCarthy needs every vote he can get these days. But the centerpiece of the indictment is a wire-fraud scheme in which Mr. Santos is accused of raising money for his campaign and then using it on a spending spree that included luxury clothing, car payments and other items on his personal credit card.

According to the indictment (Mr. Santos pleaded not guilty to all charges), he told donors they could support his campaign by giving money to a tax-exempt “social welfare organization,” known by its I.R.S. designation as a 501(c)(4). . . .

Many 501(c)(4) groups claim a large amount of “overhead” in their spending; crucially, it’s rarely itemized and therefore escapes close scrutiny, according to Saurav Ghosh, the director of federal campaign finance reform at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center. Mr. Santos might have gotten away with a lot of dubious spending in that category without anyone knowing.

But Mr. Santos didn’t structure his fraud the usual way, according to the indictment. Instead, the government said, he set up a regular business and falsely told donors that it was a 501(c)(4). That company, which The New York Times says appears to be RedStone Strategies, had nothing to do with supporting Mr. Santos’s campaign but everything to do with supporting his bank account. He “converted most of those funds to his own personal benefit,” the indictment says, and didn’t even go through the usual procedural sham of registering the social welfare group with the I.R.S., which is not exactly difficult to check.

Nor did he use his so-called leadership PAC to raise money for personal expenses, which more sophisticated politicians do all the time to buy expensive clothes, luxury vacations and country club memberships.

Instead of exploiting existing political loopholes, he just took the cash with all the finesse of a Long Island pump-and-dump operation, leaving a pathetically obvious paper trail for federal investigators to follow. . . .

The government says it has emails, text messages and telephone records showing that Mr. Santos knew the company wasn’t a legitimate social welfare or political group but told donors that it was and that the money they wired to him would be used for advertising. And it said the records show that he directed the contributions to be wired to his bank account. Apparently it didn’t occur to him that wire transfers can be traced and that using them illegally is a federal offense.

As Mr. Ghosh noted, even if RedStone had been a legitimate 501(c)(4), Mr. Santos would not have been permitted to solicit money for it, since the groups are legally required to be independent of political campaigns. . . .

This time, at least, the government used its enforcement power. But only because Mr. Santos so audaciously disregarded the rules.

Republicans Want To Put Poor Children Into Dangerous Jobs

This very troubling op-ed is by the editorial board of The New York Times: 

In February, the Department of Labor announced that it had discovered 102 teenagers working in hazardous conditions for a company that cleans meatpacking equipment at factories around the country, a violation of federal standards. The minors, ages 13 to 17, were working with dangerous chemicals and cleaning brisket saws and head splitters; three of them suffered injuries, including one with caustic burns.

Ten of those children worked in Arkansas, including six at a factory owned by the state’s second-largest private employer, Tyson Foods. Rather than taking immediate action to tighten standards and prevent further exploitation of children, Arkansas went the opposite direction. Earlier this month, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, signed legislation that would actually make it easier for companies to put children to work. The bill eliminated a requirement that children under 16 get a state work permit before being employed, a process that required them to verify their age and get the permission of a parent or guardian.

Arkansas is at the vanguard of a concerted effort by business lobbyists and Republican legislators to roll back federal and state regulations that have been in place for decades to protect children from abuse. Echoing that philosophy, bills are moving through at least nine other state legislatures that would expand work hours for children, lift restrictions on hazardous occupations, allow them to work in locations that serve alcohol, or lower the state minimum wage for minors. The Labor Department says there has been a 69 percent increase since 2018 in the illegal employment of children.

The response in these states is not to protect those children from exploitation, but instead to make it legal. Voters in these states may support deregulation, but they may not know that businesses can use these bills to work children harder, cut their wages and put them in danger. There is time for them to persuade lawmakers to say no to these abuses. . . .

Lawmakers in these states have been vigorously lobbied by industry groups who like the flexibility of teenage employees and say that more children are needed in the work force to make up for labor shortages. One of the principal lobbying organizations pushing these bills in several states is the National Federation of Independent Business, a conservative group that supports Republican candidates and has long opposed most forms of regulation, as well as the Affordable Care Act. It has issued news releases praising lawmakers for passing bills that let businesses hire more minors for longer hours, and taking credit for supporting these efforts.

The Arkansas governor’s spokesperson said in a statement that the work permit requirement was “an arbitrary burden on parents,” but opponents noted that many child workers don’t have parents or guardians to look after their interests. In the cleaning company case, several of the child workers were unaccompanied minors who recently came over the southern border, according to their lawyers. Soon, they won’t even have the state to approve their employment or working conditions.

The real target of these rollbacks is not after-school jobs at the corner hardware store; they will have a much bigger effect on a labor force that includes many unaccompanied migrant children who work long hours to make or package products sold by big companies like General Mills, J. Crew, Target, Whole Foods and PepsiCo. As a recent New York Times investigation documented, children are being widely employed across the country in exhausting and often dangerous jobs working for some of the biggest names in American retailing and manufacturing. . . .

Despite the evidence that more children are being exploited and hurt in this way, state lawmakers are passing bills that defy the federal standards. They are inviting a court challenge, and, in effect, daring the Labor Department to come after them, knowing the department often lacks the manpower to prevent violations of federal law. The Ohio Senate, which passed a bill earlier this month extending working hours for minors under 16, in violation of federal standards, also approved a resolution urging Congress to do the same.

One of the worst bills, introduced by Republicans in Iowa, would allow 14-year-olds to work in industrial freezers, meat coolers and industrial laundries, and 15-year-olds to lift heavy items onto shelves. It is backed by, among others, the independent business federation, the Iowa Grocery Industry Association, and Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group backed by Charles Koch, the industrialist who supported many national efforts to deregulate businesses.

If states will not perform a role that has been fundamental for a century — protecting workers from abuse — the federal government will have to increase its efforts to do so. After the Times investigation was published, the Biden administration announced a series of new efforts to crack down on illegal child labor, many of which hold promise as possible deterrents.

The Labor Department said it would intensify its investigations of business violations, not just by direct employers of children but also by the larger companies that contract with those employers, or that use children in their supply chain. In many cases, big companies use contractors or staffing agencies to hire children and then claim they had nothing to do with the abuses. Some of those agencies shut down and reopen under new names when they are fined, said Meredith Stewart, a senior supervising attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center. The companies that hire them should be held accountable. The department also has the authority to seize any products that are made using illegal child labor, even through the use of contractors. Seema Nanda, the department’s chief legal officer, said in an interview that it would use that authority aggressively, as well as every other litigation tool available. . . .

The administration lacks all the tools to do the job right. Because its budget has been held flat by Congress, the Wage and Hour Division lost 12 percent of its staff between 2010 and 2019, and Ms. Nanda’s office lost more than 100 lawyers, so the Labor Department doesn’t have enough investigators to effectively pursue illegal child labor practices. In addition, under current law, the maximum fine for a labor violation by a company is $15,138 per child — often little more than the cost of doing business for big companies.

Comprehensive immigration reform would be the best insurance that migrant children have the protections they need. If families can stay together, minors will be less vulnerable to abuse and better able to seek legal protection.

The administration has asked Congress for more enforcement money in its current budget, and for higher penalties. Neither request is likely to be granted, and immigration reform seems far in the distance. Protections against “oppressive child labor,”however, have been part of American law since the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938; dismantling those safeguards now puts young lives at risk.