Cartoon

Second Thought

Written by SK Ashby

(Cartoonist - Stuart Carlson)

In other news, acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner John Sanders is planning to resign on July 5th. There are virtually no Senate-confirmed officials left at DHS, as you might have noticed.

Meanwhile, Politico reports that Trump is getting tired of his chief toady Mick Mulvaney. I bet Mulvaney will be out by Thanksgiving.

Finally, FedEx is suing the Commerce Department over Trump's order blacklisting shipments of products from Chinese telecom giant Huawei because screening every single package would be impossible and possibly illegal.

In its lawsuit, FedEx says U.S. export regulations "essentially deputize FedEx to police the contents of the millions of packages it ships daily even though doing so is a virtually impossible task, logistically, economically, and in many cases, legally." FedEx says it receives about 15 million packages per day for shipment and its system spans more than 220 countries and territories. [...]

FedEx says it faces substantial penalties — criminal penalties of up to $1 million and civil penalties of $300,000 per violation. That puts FedEx "between a rock and a hard place — absent the availability of review, FedEx must either forgo lawful activity because of its well-founded fear of prosecution, or willfully violate the Export Controls, thereby subjecting itself to criminal prosecution and punishment," the suit says. It also says that "requiring FedEx to indiscriminately inspect every package abroad could place" the company in violation of privacy laws.