#bipartisan border deal

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 24, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 25, 2024

The dust is beginning to settle after last night’s New Hampshire primary. Former president Donald Trump won the Republican primary with 54.3% of the vote, netting him 12 delegates to the Republican National Convention. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley came in second with 43.3% of the vote, garnering her 9 delegates. Other candidates together took 2.3%, but none of them won any delegates.

There has been a lot of noise today about whether the New Hampshire results spell good news for Trump or bad news. While the result keeps him in the front spot for the Republican nomination, I fall into the category of observers who see bad news: more than 45% of Republican primary voters—those most fervent about the party—chose someone other than Trump. 

As David French pointed out in the New York Times today, Trump is running as a virtual incumbent, and any incumbent facing a challenger who can command 43% of the party faithful is in trouble. President Gerald Ford discovered this equation in 1976 when he faced Ronald Reagan’s insurgency; President George H. W. Bush discovered it in 1992 when he faced a similar challenge from right-wing commentator Patrick Buchanan. While both Ford and Bush went on to win the Republican nomination, they lost the general election. 

More important than opinions or history to indicate what the primary indicated, though, is Trump’s apparent anger about Haley’s showing. Politico’s Playbook noted that he “rage-posted” about Haley’s speech after her strong finish with posts that lasted far into the night. Ron Filipkowski noted that at 2:19 this morning he was still at it, posting: “NIKKI CAME IN LAST, NOT SECOND!”

In addition to attacking her from the podium, Trump appeared to threaten her when he warned her about “very dishonest people” she would have to fight. He said she was not going to win, “but if she did, she would “be under investigation…in fifteen minutes and I could tell you five reasons why already. Not big reasons, a little stuff that she doesn’t want to talk about, but she will be under investigation within minutes, and so would Ron have been, but he decided to get out.”

The tactics Trump might have been suggesting became clear this afternoon, when the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, Jeff DeWit, resigned after a recording that appeared to show him trying to bribe Arizona Senate candidate and fervent Trump supporter Kari Lake to stay out of the Senate race was leaked to the press. The tape itself was clearly contrived to show Lake as if she were in a campaign ad, defending Trump and America, but it includes DeWit’s pleas for her to stand aside for two years, presumably while the Arizona party regroups with less extremist candidates, and his request that she name her price. 

This sordid story reflects a problem in the state Republican parties as MAGA supporters have tried to take over from the party establishment. In Arizona, challenging the 2020 presidential election—remember the “Cyber Ninjas” who audited the Maricopa County vote?—ran the finances of the Arizona party into the ground. Lake has continued to insist, without evidence, that the election was stolen, and she and other MAGA activists have called for purging the party of all but the Trump faithful. The recording positions Lake as a Trump loyalist fighting against party operatives.

In his resignation letter, DeWit claimed the recording had been “taken out of context” and said he had been “set up.” He noted that Lake has “a disturbing tendency to exploit private interactions for personal gain,” calling out “her habit of secretly recording personal and private conversations. This is obviously a concern given how much interaction she has with high profile people including President Trump,” he added. “I believe she orchestrated this entire situation to have control over the state party,” he wrote.

DeWit said he had “received an ultimatum from Lake’s team: resign today or face the release of a new, more damaging recording. I am truly unsure of its contents,” he wrote, “but considering our numerous past open conversations as friends, I have decided not to take the risk. I am resigning as Lake requested.”

It seems clear the Trump team is eager to consolidate power behind him no matter what it takes, especially in the face of what appears to be his weakness. Rising authoritarians depend on the idea they are invincible, so being perceived as vulnerable—or as a loser—hits them much harder than it does a normal political candidate. 

Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel—who was recorded on November 17, 2020, pressuring two Republican officials in Michigan not to certify Joe Biden’s electors in a county he won by 68% and promising the officials to “get you attorneys”—has urged Haley to drop out of the race. Traditionally, party chairs stay neutral in primary contests. Tonight, Trump posted a threat to donors: “Nikki ‘Birdbrain’ Haley is very bad for the Republican Party and, indeed, our Country…. Anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them and will not accept them.” 

For her part, Haley has vowed to stay in the contest. While observers point out that there is very little chance she could actually overtake Trump, it’s also true that either Trump’s obvious mental lapses or his legal troubles could knock him out of the race, in which case she would be the most viable candidate standing.

Curiously, what happened to Trump in New Hampshire was what, before the election, pundits suggested could and maybe should happen to President Joe Biden: a challenger would show that he was weak going into the 2024 election. 

Instead, despite dirty-trickster robocalls in a fake Biden voice telling Democratic voters not to show up vote for Biden, he appears to be on track to win 65% of the vote as a write-in candidate—he wasn’t on the ballot—while Representative Dean Phillips and self-help author Marianne Williamson, who were on the ballot, together appear to have garnered just under 25%.. 

On Monday, Miranda Nazzaro of The Hill reported that the creator of ChatGPT banned a super PAC backing Phillips for misusing AI for political purposes. Billionaire Bill Ackman, who has been in the news lately for his fight against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, attacks on former Harvard president Claudine Gay, and threats to media outlets that pointed out plagiarism in his wife’s doctoral dissertation, donated $1 million to Phillips’s super PAC.  

There was other good news for the Biden camp today, too. Sign-ups for the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, have surged by 80% under Biden, with a record 21 million people enrolling this year. Trump has promised to get rid of the program, saying that “Obamacare Sucks!!!” and that he will replace it with something better, but neither now nor in his four years in office did he produce a plan. 

Biden also received the enthusiastic endorsement today of the United Auto Workers union, whose president, Shawn Fain, had made it clear that any president must earn that endorsement. Biden stood with the union in its negotiations last year with the big three automakers, not only behind the scenes but also in public when he became the first president to join a picket line. “[Trump] went to a nonunion plant, invited by the boss, and trashed our union,” Fain said, “And, here is what Joe Biden did during our stand up strike. He heard the call. And he stood up and he showed up.” “Donald Trump stands against everything we stand for as a society,” Fain told the crowd.

More news dropped today about the damage MAGA Republicans are doing to the United States. A report published today in JAMA Internal Medicine estimates that in the 14 states that outlawed abortion after the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, 64,565 women became pregnant after being raped, “but few (if any) obtained in-state abortions legally.”  

Finally, Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan of Punchbowl News confirmed this evening that although MAGA Republicans have insisted the border is such a crisis that no aid to Ukraine can pass until it is addressed, Trump is preventing congressional action on the border because he wants to run on the issue of immigration. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told a closed meeting of Senate Republicans that “the nominee” wants to run his campaign on immigration, adding, “We don’t want to do anything to undermine him.” “We’re in a quandary,” McConnell said. 

Jennifer Bendery and Igor Bobic of HuffPost reported that Trump today reached out to Republican senators to kill the bipartisan border deal being finalized, “because he doesn’t want Biden to have a victory,” one source said. “The rational Republicans want the deal because they want Ukraine and Israel and an actual border solution,” Bendery and Bobic quote the source as saying. “But the others are afraid of Trump, or they’re the chaos caucus who never wants to pass anything.”

“They’re having a little crisis in their conference right now,”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[kcinpa]

TL;DR Project 2025

Project 2025 has crossed my dash several times, so maybe tumblr is already informed about the hellish 900-page takeover plan if Trump wins office again. But even the articles covering Project 2025 can be a LOT of reading. So I'm trying to get it down to simple bulleted lists…

Navigator Research (a progressive polling outfit) found that 7 in 10 Americans are unfamiliar with Project 2025. But the more they learn about it, the more they don't like or want it. When asked about a series of policy plans taken directly from Project 2025, the bipartisan survey group responded most negatively to the following:

Allowing employers to stop paying hourly workers overtime

Allowing the government to monitor people’s pregnancies to potentially prosecute them if they miscarry

Removing health care protections for people with pre-existing conditions

Eliminating the National Weather Service, which is currently responsible for preparing for extreme weather events like heat waves, floods, and wildfires

Eliminating the Head Start program, ending preschool education for the children of low-income families

Putting a new tax on health insurance for millions of people who get insurance through their employer

Banning Medicare from negotiating for lower prescription drug costs and eliminating the $35 monthly cap on the price of insulin for seniors

Cutting Social Security benefits by raising the retirement age

Allowing employers to deny workers access to birth control

Laurie Garrett looked at the roughly 50 pages within Project 2025 that deal with Health and Human Services (HHS) and other health agencies, and summarized them on Twitter/X in a series of replies. I've shortened even more here:

HHS must "respect for the sacred rights of conscience" for Federal workers & healthcare providers and workers broadly who object to abortions, contraception, gender reassignment & other issues - ie. allow them to deny services based on religious beliefs

HHS should promote "stable and flourishing married families."

Require all welfare programs to "promote father involvement" – or terminate their funding for mothers and children.

Prioritize adoptions via faith-based organizations.

Redefine sex, eliminating all forms of gender "confusion" regarding identity and orientation.

Eliminate the Head Start program for children, entirely

Ban all funding of Planned Parenthood

Ban birth control services that are "egregious attacks on many Americans' religious & moral beliefs"

Deny pregnancy termination pills, "mail-order abortions."

Eliminate Office of Refugee Resettlement; move all refugee matters to the Department of Homeland Security

Healthcare should be "market-based"

Ban all mask and vaccine requirements.

Closely regulate the NIH w/citizen ethics panels, ensuring that no research involves fetal tissue, leads to development of new forms of Abortions or brings profits to the researchers.

Redirect the Office of Global Affairs to promoting "moral conscience" & full compliance w/the Mexico City policy

The CDC should have no role in medical policies.

"Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism," HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence & by what method.

I'm still looking for a good short summary of the environmental horrors that Project 2025 would bring if it comes to fruition…

[mariacallous]

Former President Donald Trump participated in a town-hall-style event with undecided Latino voters on Wednesday night, facing a series of tough questions as Americans have begun casting early ballots across the nation.

Ramiro Gonzalez, a Florida Republican, gave Trump a chance to “win back” his vote after he said he was disturbed by the former president’s actions on and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“I am a Republican,” Gonzalez, a construction worker, told Trump during the Univision event. “I want to give you the opportunity to try and win back my vote. Your action, and maybe inaction, during your presidency and the last few years sort of … was a little disturbing to me. What happened during Jan. 6 and the fact that you waited so long to take action while your supporters were attacking the Capitol.”

He went on to voice concerns that some in Trump’s orbit, namely his former vice president, Mike Pence, no longer supported him.

Trump rejected that any notable portion of his supporters had broken with him and then launched into a series of falsehoods surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection while claiming there was “nothing done wrong at all” and “nobody was killed.”

“You had hundreds of thousands of people come to Washington. They didn’t come because of me, they came because of the election,” Trump said, discounting his efforts to inflame his supporters after his loss to Joe Biden. “Some of those people went down to the Capitol — I said, ‘peacefully and patriotically.’ Nothing done wrong. At all. Nothing done wrong.”

The former president then criticized Democrats and said they “couldn’t get me,” as he’d done nothing wrong. Trump has, in fact, been indicted twice on felony charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

He said Wednesday night that he believed many people remained tremendously loyal to his presidential bid, including Latinos.

“Maybe we���ll get your vote,” he added to Gonzalez. “Sounds like maybe I won’t, but that’s OK, too.”

The encounter was just one of many tough questions from undecided voters, many of whom stood stone-faced as Trump relied on falsehoods and fear common at rallies he holds before much more vocal supporters. When one voter asked Trump why he ordered Republicans to tank a bipartisan border deal that would have helped shore up funding along the border with Mexico, he refused to answer and instead blamed Democrats for poor management of American cities.

Another person asked Trump if he truly believed the lies that were spread about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating neighbors’ pets.

“This was just reported. I was just saying what was reported,” Trump fired back. “And [they are] eating other things, too, that they’re not supposed to be.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

As President Joe Biden (D) wraps up his term today, his four years in office had successes and blunders. I was proud to have voted for this man in the 2020 general and the 2024 primaries. Regardless of where he ends up on the Presidential rankings, he was still a better President than his predecessor or successor. His successes were the fact he led the US out of the COVID pandemic, defended Ukraine from Russian aggression, secured infrastructure investments, got COVID-19 vaccines out to the American people, signed the Inflation Reduction Act, signed the CHIPS Act, signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed the American Rescue Plan, delivered a 3rd round of stimulus checks, put Ketanji Brown Jackson on SCOTUS, appointed a record number of judges, signing the PACT Act, expanded food assistance benefits, expanded the child tax credit that lasted for 6 months (and should have lasted longer if it weren’t for the Sinema-Manchin duo), joined striking UAW workers on the picket line by becoming the first sitting President to do so, signed the Respect For Marriage Act into law to protect against a potential Obergefell overturn, made Juneteenth a federal holiday, signed the Emmitt Till Anti-Lynching Act that makes lynching a federal hate crime, got the US out of Afghanistan (though the handling of it can be debated), got Sweden and Finland to join NATO, blocked Nippon Steel from buying US Steel, managed to get a ceasefire deal done (though it came too late), brought home Brittney Griner, Paul Whelan, and Evan Gershkovich from Russian prison in prisoner swaps, tried to solve the student loan debt crisis (although the right-wing activist judges keep denying him that), and signing a bill that makes the bald eagle America’s official bird. His failures were his constant enabling of Israel’s genocide of Gaza, signing a bill banning TikTok in which SCOTUS upheld in TikTok v. Garland, signing the 2025 NDAA that banned trans children of military soldiers on Tricare from getting gender-affirming care, failure to get voting rights and Roe codified into law (though Sinema and Manchin are to blame here), and perceptions of chaos at the US/Mexico Border which he tried to solve with a bipartisan border security bill that Trump complained and forced the GOP to scuttle it. During his tenure in office, like Barack Obama-- who he served under during his time as VP-- Biden was subjected to partisan faux investigations by House Republicans. On June 27th, 2024, the debate between him and former insurrection-inciting felon “President” Donald Trump (R) revealed what a lot of Americans knew about Biden: his decline in cognitive ability and why running for a 2nd term was a colossal mistake. That awful debate performance led to him ending his re-election bid on July 21st after weeks of hemming and hawing. As a result of Biden calling it quits in the race, Vice President Kamala Harris (D) moved up to the lead spot on the ticket. Harris later picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) to her running mate. On November 5th/6th, 2024, the Harris/Walz ticket lost to the Trump/Vance ticket in the election, and the Democratic ticket not only lost the Electoral College vote but also the popular vote for the first time since 2004. The result left the question of whether aspects of Biden’s legacy will hold up better or worse in the long run.  There were lots of reasons why the Harris/Walz ticket list, and the key reasons for that are as follows (and some of these were out of the control of the candidate):

Right-wing disinformation and misinformation being amplified on social media, such as the infamous Springfield pet-eating hoax and paranoia-induced QAnon/Pizzagate-tinged conspiracy theories about Hurricanes Helene and Milton, Lahaina wildfires, East Palestine train derailment, LGBTQ+/transgender issues (such as pushing the false “social contagion” myth, baselessly comparing gender-affirming care to “mutilation”, and comparing LGBTQ+ community members to “pedophiles” and “groomers”), COVID-19 (especially the promotion of discredited treatments such as ivermectin), and vaccines.

Normalization of anti-vaccine and anti-expertise sentiments.

Biden’s continued enabling of Israel’s genocide of Gaza.

Biden signing a bill banning TikTok, which ended up being costly to Democratic chances among young Americans.

Worldwide anti-incumbent backlash.

President Biden’s low job approval ratings, especially in the 2nd half of his term.

Inflation rate during most of Biden’s Presidency.

House mortgages and grocery prices rising in recent years.

The fact that a sizable amount of Americans were afraid of a woman leading the country, and a Black/South Asian biracial one at that.

Right-leaning and right-adjacent podcasts such as Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Nelk Boys, Shawn Ryan, and Charlie Kirk-- especially those geared to young males-- helped normalized Trump and his misogynistic ways to that crowd.

Right-leaning posts/videos getting more traction than left-leaning or neutral posts/videos on social media outlets, especially on Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube. This is despite the overheated claims of “censorship” of conservative content on social media.

In shortened form: conspiracy theories, Gaza genocide, disinformation and misinformation, TikTok ban bill, anti-incumbent sentiment, right-wing content dominating social media, President Biden’s low job approval ratings, and inflation were the key drivers for the 2024 losses for the Democrats. As for Harris, I really don’t blame her for the loss very much considering the circumstances that she was thrown in, as I believe that President Biden, cost of living increases, and worldwide anti-incumbent sentiments were the main reasons for her loss. Harris replacing Biden as the Dem nominee helped save the Democratic Party in the medium-to-long term, as she fought Trump to an almost draw in the Electoral College and Popular Vote, got the House to a manageable distance for the Democrats to retake in the 2026 midterms, and got the Senate to a doable chance to flip within the next two election cycles. Imagine if Biden was our nominee in 2024 instead? The Democrats would have fared far worse at the polls, causing them to lose even more states such as New Jersey, Maine’s two statewide ECVs, Nebraska-02, Virginia, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and New Mexico, and potentially put safe states like Illinois, Oregon, Colorado, Rhode Island, and New York in peril. They would have lost 15-30 more House seats and 5-7 more Senate seats, which would have quashed any chance of getting a majority for at least the rest of the decade.

Here is my take on Joe Biden's four years of being the President of the USA: President Biden had his successes and failures.

Key successes: - funding Ukraine. - got the US out of the COVID pandemic. - got COVID vaccines and boosters out to millions of Americans. - set a record on judicial confirmations. - made Juneteenth a federal holiday. - the first sitting president to join a strike.

Key failures: - enabling Israel's genocide of Gaza - signing the bill that got TikTok banned. - perception of chaos. - declining cognitive abilities.

See Also:

The JGibson Report: Joe Biden's four years as President: The good and the bad

[kaapstadgirly]

US Senate unveils $118bn deal on border, aid for Israel and Ukraine

"The United States Senate has unveiled a $118bn bipartisan deal that would boost border security and provide wartime aid for Israel and Ukraine.

US President Joe Biden and Democratic and Republican leaders in the Senate have been pushing to resupply Ukraine with wartime aid but have faced resistance from conservative Republicans who have insisted on measures to tackle illegal immigration at the border with Mexico.

The bill announced on Sunday would provide $60bn in aid to Ukraine, whose efforts to push back Russia’s invasion have been hampered by a halt in US shipments of ammunition and missiles.

The deal would also provide $14.1bn in military aid to Israel: $2.44bn to address security in the Red Sea, where Yemen’s Houthi rebels have launched dozens of attacks on commercial shipping, and $4.83bn to support partners in Asia where tensions have spiked between China and Taiwan."

[beardedmrbean]

Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Dave McCormick is "optimistic" about working with his Democratic colleague Sen. John Fetterman to tackle issues and bring a glimmer of bipartisan hope to Congress.

Sitting down with Fox News' Shannon Bream on "Fox News Sunday," the freshman senator discussed a series of headlines – the first phase of Israel's cease-fire deal with Hamas, TikTok going dark and his willingness to work together with Fetterman, who has, at times, broken with his party on issues like border security and support for Israel.

"I wasn't elected to represent only Republicans. I was elected to represent every single Pennsylvanian," McCormick said. "I think that's the way he feels and so, even though we're from different parties, we have a mandate to help Pennsylvania. He's focused on working families. I'm focused on working families. We think we can find some common ground together. He's been an incredibly strong voice on Israel, against anti-Semitism. We find common ground on that."

"We're going to disagree on some things, but we'll disagree agreeably, and we'll focus on the things we can work on together, and I think he recognizes what many Democrats haven't recognized yet, which is the policies of President Biden and his party failed the American people, and we have a mandate for change, and I think Senator Fetterman is embracing some of that at least, and saying, ‘Hey, how can I be part of that change?’"

McCormick and Fetterman and their wives broke bread this month to bury the proverbial hatchet and find common ground on issues that matter. 

In a Jan. 9 X post about the meeting, Fetterman shared an image of himself with McCormick and their wives with the caption, "2 dudes + 2 better halves + bipartisanship + 67 counties = a stronger Pennsylvania." 

McCormick was sworn in earlier this month, replacing longtime Democratic Sen. Bob Casey after narrowly defeating him in the Nov. 5 election last year. 

Fetterman received the title of the Keystone State's senior senator in the process.

[izooks]

Trump is a loser on the Issues:

Abortion: keeps flip flopping

Border: Killed bipartisan border deal

Crime: He’s a convicted criminal

Defense: He was AWOL on January 6

Economy: Lost 2.7 millions jobs

Family Values: Hush money to porn star

Debt: Added $7-8 trillion in debt

[vbartilucci]

In recent weeks, Trump has been lobbying Republicans both in private conversations and in public statements on social media to oppose the border compromise being delicately hashed out in the Senate, according to GOP sources familiar with the conversations – in part because he wants to campaign on the issue this November.

So, to repeat that, the former president is telling Republicans not to fix the border issue...so he can complain, seven to nine months from now, that it's not fixed.

Republicans don't want to fix anything, they only want to complain that nothing's fixed.

Do they not realize that it's much better to list all the things you DID fix?

Not that they can., that is.

[tomorrowusa]

Bad news for Republicans: violent crime is down across most of the US.

Donald Trump and far right media want people to believe there is a massive crime wave sparked by hordes of bloodthirsty migrants charging in waves across the southern border. In fact, the spike in crime which began with Trump's botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic is over.

To hear the latest version of Donald Trump’s “American carnage” narrative of a country lost without him, you would think law-abiding citizens are cowering in their homes or stockpiling weapons to deal with a massive crime wave that’s due to illegal border crossings caused by various nations emptying their prisons and by leftist “Soros-funded” prosecutors gleefully opening our own penitentiaries. The idea of an ongoing crime wave is incorporated into all sorts of MAGA rhetoric, including claims that prosecutors pursuing cases against Trump in New York, Atlanta, Florida, and Washington, D.C., should instead be frantically trying and jailing predators who are cavorting on the streets. The alleged threat of murderous “animals” who entered the country illegally has been crystalized by Republican agitprop about the tragic death of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, who was murdered while jogging, allegedly by an undocumented Venezuelan migrant. But graphic, horrifying anecdotal evidence does not an actual crime wave make. And the more we learn about what’s actually happening in our major cities, the clearer it is that the surge in violent crime that did occur during the COVID-19 pandemic continues to subside. The COVID crime surge largely ended in 2022. Then the incidence of murder and other violent crimes dropped significantly in 2023, according to preliminary federal data, as CNN recently reported:

Fact check: Trump falsely claims US crime stats are only going up. Most went down last year, including massive drop in murder

To the degree that migrants are involved in criminal activity can now be attributed to Trump's blockage of border security legislation in the House by his spineless minions on Capitol Hill.

Bipartisan border deal hits legislative wall as Republicans say they will block bill

Republicans are now officially the owners of border chaos – not the solution to it.

Back to the featured article...

[W]hen a long upward trend in crime during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s — a true crime wave — finally came to an end, then dramatically reversed. The current numbers are beginning to show that we’re more than likely in a long period of stable (and, by past standards, relatively low) crime rates that were briefly interrupted by the many dislocations the pandemic caused in American life (and police effectiveness). So the myth of a deadly threat to Americans stemming from liberal policies on the border and in the justice system is mostly just that. Perceptions of public safety, of course, aren’t always in line with objective reality, and violent crime is horrifying even if it’s not as prevalent as law-and-order demagogues suggest. An October 2023 Gallup survey that coincided with growing evidence of dropping crime rates showed 77 percent of Americans agreed there was “more crime” in the country than in the previous year.

Spectacular crime stories are always going to grab headlines. If it bleeds, it leads has been one of the mainstays of American journalism for centuries. You'll never see a headline in the NY Post like Murder Rate Plummets!.

One thing that is often overlooked is that the "long upward trend in crime during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s" mentioned in the article came to an end in the 1990s during the Clinton administration.

For ideological reasons, Democrats have been too restrained about publicizing their own law and order successes. As with the 1990s, another drop in crime is taking place under a Democratic administration – despite GOP attempts to exploit individual incidents of crime.

Donald Trump himself is a "one man crime wave".

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Trust Joe Biden

June 19, 2024

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

President Biden announced a significant modification to the pathway to citizenship for “undocumented spouses” of US citizens. Even the hard-to-impress headline writers at the New York Times described Biden’s action as follows: “The new policy is one of the most significant actions to protect immigrants in years.” (This article is accessible to all.)

Per the Times,

Under the new policy, some 500,000 undocumented spouses will be shielded from deportation and given a pathway to citizenship and the ability to work legally in the United States. It is one of the most expansive actions to protect immigrants since Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, was enacted 12 years ago to protect those who came to the United States as children. [¶] The policy aims to help people who have been living in the United States for more than a decade, building lives and families here. Even though marrying an American citizen generally provides a pathway to U.S. citizenship, people who crossed the southern border illegally — rather than arriving in the country with a visa — are required to return to their home countries to complete the process for a green card. To be eligible, the spouses must have lived in the United States for 10 years and been married to an American citizen as of June 17. They cannot have a criminal record. The benefits would also extend to the roughly 50,000 children of undocumented spouses who became stepchildren to American citizens.

The Republican response to Biden’s humanitarian plan descended to new depths of mind-blowing hypocrisy. As The Hill reported in its headline, Republicans slam Biden immigration order as election ploy.

“An election ploy?” Hmm. Remember that time—six months ago—when Joe Biden had successfully negotiated a bipartisan immigration reform package that was set to sail through the House and Senate? And then remember that Donald Trump asked congressional Republicans to kill the bill to preserve immigration as an election issue for Trump? See HuffPost (1/24/24) Trump Privately Pressuring GOP Senators To ‘Kill’ Border Deal To Deny Biden A Win.

So, in the absence of congressional action, President Biden is doing the only thing he can —use executive action to address areas of immigration policy within the President’s discretion. Biden wishes it were otherwise but has no choice. Rather, he is willing to work with anyone who is interested in finding solutions.

In announcing the new policy, President Biden said,

Folks, I’m not interested in playing politics on the border or immigration. I’m interested in fixing it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again today, I will work with anyone to solve these problems. That’s my responsibility as president. That’s our responsibility as Americans.

No, Joe Biden is not playing politics. He is addressing an intractable problem despite obstructionist behavior from Republicans. A lesser president would give up in defeat. Not Joe Biden. He is a great president and deserves to be re-elected.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[mariacallous]

Sen. Ron Wyden wrote his new memoir before the re-election of Donald Trump, and at times it reads like a dispatch from a distant era that ended on, well, Jan. 20.

The Jewish Oregon Democrat’s book recalls fierce battles over his signature issues — healthcare reform, climate change, consumer protection —  and his success in attracting bipartisan partners. 

 “I routinely team up with deeply conservative Republicans to pass legislation, without sacrificing my equally embedded progressive principles,” he writes in “It Takes Chutzpah: How to Fight Fearlessly for Progressive Change.”

When I asked him Thursday if that is still possible when the Republicans hold the White House and both chambers of Congress, a conservative supermajority sits on the Supreme Court, and the president is issuing a flurry of executive orders that have challenged the separation of powers and norms of government, he insisted it was.

He sees hope in the frenzied response to Trump’s executive order freezing hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants and loans. The outcry from service providers, courts and politicians — including a few Republicans — pushed Trump to rescind the order. 

“I think now we’re starting to get people to come, we’re going to mobilize, we’re going to make a difference,” said Wyden. “We’re going to be heard.”

As his book’s title suggests, Wyden draws heavily on his Jewish background to explain his approach to life and governing. The son of two Jewish parents who fled the Nazis for safe harbor in the United States, he takes personally Trump’s order to end asylum entirely on the southern border.

He writes that his career in politics has been guided by two principles, chutzpah and tikkun olam. His take on tikkun olam — to “repair the world” – is a fairly standard version of a kabalistic concept that has come to mean social action in support of progressive causes. 

His definition of chutzpah is a little less traditional: Rather than describing an audacious and even shameless act of gall, his version of chutzpah is closer to moral courage. He writes that chutzpah is “shorthand for the individual’s self-confident, against-the-odds embrace of the possible.” 

“Chutzpah is inherently good, and people who don’t subscribe to that are essentially warping it,” said Wyden, drawing on an interpretation by Rabbi Tzvi Freeman, a Canadian contributor to Chabad.org. In the book, Wyden offers 12 ”Rules of Chutzpah,” ranging from “If you want to make change, you’ve got to make noise” to “There are two equally important paths to progress: Start good things and stop bad things.”

Chutzpah, he said, was behind his staff’s decision to gather and publicize the intel that 50 states were essentially having their Medicaid portals blocked due to the president’s spending freeze, and within a few hours, “we were on our way to being able to push back successfully and get it thrown out.” He calls it an example, “admittedly a modest one,” of traditional politics acting as a check on the executive. 

Wyden, who said political change almost always starts with the grassroots, believes a “great deal” more pushback is necessary, from his colleagues and everyday citizens. 

Wyden also calls on readers “to engage in serious political action to stop the United States from falling into the abyss of fascism” — at a time when activists have yet to take to the streets in large numbers to protest President Trump’s policies, and Democrats disagree about how aggressive they should be in fighting back against Trump’s nominees and agenda. 

“I think it’s starting to come back,” he said of the activist “resistance” that greeted Trump’s first term. “I mean, we went through the election, and certainly it was very different than when Trump won the first time, and people said, ‘My God, you know, we worked hard, but 77 million people voted for him. What can we do?’ 

“I’ve got town meetings coming up at home, and my colleagues are saying they’re starting to hear” more examples of people starting to mobilize. 

As Oregon’s senior senator, who’s served a total of 44 years in Congress, Wyden, 75, is the second-most senior Democrat in the Senate after Washington’s Patty Murray. When his party held the chamber, he chaired the powerful Senate Finance Committee, which oversees taxes, trade and tariffs, Social Security, Medicare and health policy. His seniority gives him status even in the minority: On Wednesday, as the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, a visibly angry Wyden grilled Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about his longstanding opposition to vaccines, saying that Trump’s nominee for health secretary was “both untrustworthy and unprepared.”

Wyden entered politics in law school as a campaign aide to former U.S. Senator Wayne Morse. Later, he was an advocate for seniors as co-founder of the Portland branch of the Gray Panthers advocacy group. (“By 27, I was among the nation’s youngest authorities on Medicare,” he writes.) 

After serving in Congress from 1981 to 1996, he was elected to the Senate in a special election to fill the seat vacated by Bob Packwood, a powerful Republican undone by a sexual harassment scandal. In doing so Wyden became the fourth Jewish senator from the state, following Richard L. Neuberger (1955 to 1960), his wife and successor Maurine Neuberger (1960 to 1967) and Joseph Simon, who served a partial term from 1898 to 1903.

Wyden says a tiny Jewish community flourished in Oregon due to the state’s iconoclasm. The same insular state that passed laws hounding Black people, Chinese immigrants and Catholics is also home to the arch-liberal Reed College and is a hotbed of progressivism, environmentalism and entrepreneurism, from Nike to the Harry & David fruit company, founded by Jewish brothers. 

Wyden said Oregon’s small Jewish community has also made a big impact because “Jewish values are Oregon values.” When I asked him for an example, he mentioned the environment. “A good example would be the way we treat the land. We constantly try to find a way to work together. You know, we want to protect our treasures. We want to have jobs. We don’t have some of the fighting and bickering that you see in other parts of the country, because we claim that both are of the soul” — that is, putting the land to use and protecting the environment. 

Wyden was a relative newcomer to Oregon when he was first elected to Congress. His mother, after divorcing his father in 1959 when Wyden was 10 and his brother Jeff was 8, left Chicago for Palo Alto, California, where the six-foot, four-inch Wyden would star as a high school basketball player.

Both his father, born Peter Weidenreich, and mother, Edith Rosenow, fled the Nazis with their parents in the 1930s. Peter’s family were upper-middle-class, assimilated German Jews; Wyden’s maternal grandfather was a prominent hematologist in Berlin and Königsberg.

After immigrating to the United States, Wyden’s mother and father both served in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II: his father as a member of the legendary Ritchie Boys, which enlisted German-speaking refugees for intelligence work, and his mother as a member of the Women’s Army Corps.

Peter Wyden, who moved east, would go on to become a well-known journalist and the author of more than a dozen books, including ”Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story,” and a memoir about his son Jeffrey’s struggles with schizophrenia. Wyden’s mother worked at various defense contractors before getting a research job at Stanford University, where the future senator would get his bachelor’s degree. 

Wyden dedicates the book to his mother, whom he described to me as “one of that small group of Jewish women in Germany, in Berlin in particular, who basically woke up all the men who didn’t fully understand what a dangerous threat Hitler was.” Still a teen, Edith convinced her father that Hitler was more than a “crackpot and a nut.” While other family members were killed by the Nazis, Wyden’s grandfather managed to get his family to New York. “I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for the courage of my mother, in terms of stepping up to antisemitism,” said Wyden.

He invoked his parents in 2023 when he and Senate colleagues reintroduced a bill to smooth obstacles to naturalization for immigrants and refugees. (The bill stalled in committee.)  “I think that we are better and stronger for having values that helped my family — and many others who want to work hard, play by the rules and are suffering under really oppressive, immoral conditions around the world” — seek to immigrate as asylum-seekers and refugees, he told me. 

And yet he criticizes fellow Democrats for failing to grasp the political potency of Trump’s anti-immigrant message.

“There’s no question that Democrats have been too slow in terms of fleshing out an actual immigration plan that could compete with Trump’s,” he said. “We tried to do one in the six months before the election, we had a bipartisan bill with [Sens.] Chris Murphy [D-Connecticut] and James Lankford [R-Oklahoma], and essentially Trump barked and everybody gave up. And that would have been an opportunity to keep pushing it, get it on the floor, start adding elements that would have made it more attractive to young people, for example, coverage for the DACA youngsters, that sort of thing, and I think Democrats were too slow.”

The day before we spoke, Trump issued another order, this one on antisemitism that included a threat that non-citizen college students could be deported for activism seen as abetting terrorism. Like many of Trump’s orders, Wyden thinks this is another example of the president acting on a “whim” rather than a carefully thought-out proposal.

“There’s serious  antisemitism on the far right, and it’s also on the left. But when I think about the biggest challenge, the intellectual antisemitism on the left is not as serious as the Holocaust-denying, Seig-Heiling antisemitism of the right,” said Wyden. “I think that’s the biggest threat right now to our families and our communities, and we ought to say so. This Trump proposal deserves a lot more work and a lot more preparation.”

Wyden has two grown children from his first marriage and three younger children with his second wife, Nancy Bass Wyden, owner of New York’s legendary bookstore, the Strand. The couple were married in 2005 in a ceremony performed by Rabbi Ariel Stone of Portland’s independent Congregation Shir Tikvah.

Wyden said the other Jewish leaders he turns to for guidance include “my rabbi,” Michael Cahana of Portland’s Reform Congregation Beth Israel; Keenan Wolens, a developer and Jewish nonprofit leader in Los Angeles; and Janice Shorenstein, the executive director and CEO of Hadassah.

For a political memoir, the book is surprisingly honest in talking about the compromises Wyden made and the disappointments he’s experienced on the way to bringing even incremental change. (Among his 12 Rules of Chutzpah: “Compromise isn’t about horse-trading bad ideas for  each other; it’s about blending good ideas together into a whole that’s better than the sum of its parts.”) 

The 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, act was seen as a negotiating victory for the outgoing Trump administration, although Wyden remains proud that his provisions for unemployment were ultimately included in the final legislation.

He feels President Obama could have done a better job in selling his health care reforms in red as well as blue states, but is gratified that the Affordable Care Act extended insurance coverage to 20 million Americans and included ideas — a health insurance exchange, a ban on insurers’ discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions — Wyden had championed years before.

Despite the public’s cynicism about government and the appeal of a strongman president who promises to cut through the gridlock, Wyden is optimistic that the institutions he has been a part of for over four decades will hold. 

“Lots of people feel that the government can’t run a two-car parade, and I get that,” he said. “And there’s no question that Donald Trump thinks that he is a presence above all of these matters like federal rules and statutes and the like. And I think he’s going to be due for an awakening… [because] Republicans are going to give us some opportunities to do it. They’re going to make a lot of mistakes.”

If Democrats are going to win back Congress or in four years the presidency, said Wyden, they’ll need to show the ways Trump fails to deliver on his own promises about the economy. 

“We’ve got to show that Trump is talking about economic change for his friends at the top, and a big way he goes about paying for his friends at the top is by making sure that Medicaid, hunger assistance, assistance for housing, all of the essentials for the working families, are slashed.

“We’re going to call him on that, and win it back. With chutzpah, we can achieve dramatic things.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ben Leonard, Meredith Lee Hill and Kelsey Tamborrino at Politico:

House Republicans are passing around a “menu” of more than $5 trillion in cuts they could use to bankroll President-elect Donald Trump’s top priorities this year, including tax cuts and border security. The early list of potential spending offsets obtained by POLITICO includes changes to Medicare and ending Biden administration climate programs, along with slashing welfare and “reimagining” the Affordable Care Act. Five people familiar with the document said those provisions are options to finance Republicans’ massive party-line reconciliation bill or other spending reform efforts, including those being spearheaded by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. The people, granted anonymity to discuss closed-door negotiations, said that the list originated from the House Budget Committee, chaired by Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas). Republicans involved in the reconciliation plans have been generally targeting the listed programs for several months, but internal GOP fights over trillions of dollars in potential cuts are just beginning. The overall savings add up to as much as $5.7 trillion over 10 years, though the list is highly ambitious and unlikely to all become law given narrow margins for Republicans in the House and Senate. Cuts to Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and the country’s largest anti-hunger program would spark massive opposition from Democrats and would also face some GOP resistance. House Speaker Mike Johnson can’t afford any Republican defections if he wants to pass a package on party lines. Even proposed cuts to green energy tax credits, worth as much as $500 billion, could be tricky — as the document notes, they depend “on political viability.” Already 18 House Republicans — 14 of whom won reelection in November — warned Johnson against prematurely repealing some of the IRA’s energy tax credits, which are funding multiple manufacturing projects in GOP districts. A House GOP source said that the “document is not intended to serve as a proposal, but instead as a menu of potential spending reductions for members to consider.” Johnson and GOP leaders are hunting for trillions of dollars in cuts, with lawmakers estimating Trump’s domestic policy agenda — including tax cuts and border security proposals — costing as much as $10 trillion over the coming decade. Johnson, with scores of House Republicans this week to chart the way forward, and groups of GOP members are set to meet with Trump in Florida this weekend. In addition to Medicaid and ACA cuts, the document floats clawing back bipartisan infrastructure and Inflation Reduction Act funding.

[...] Also on the chopping block are President Joe Biden’s climate policies, which are estimated to yield as much as $468 billion. That includes Trump’s repeated promise to repeal Biden’s “EV mandate,” as well as discontinuing “Green New Deal” provisions from the bipartisan infrastructure law and green energy grants from the IRA.

Medicare, PPACA, and climate change combatting initiatives could be on the chopping block, according to House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-TX).

See Also:

HuffPost: Big Cuts To Medicaid Reportedly On The Menu For House Republicans

[whatareyoureallyafraidof]

[stephen-barry]

Vice Pres. Harris said that former Pres. Trump "killed" a bipartisan border bill that would have added hundreds of border patrol, ICE agents and asylum officers and funded construction of a new border wall, among other measures.

This is true.

Hours after the draft legislation was unveiled, Trump urged his party to oppose the bill, even as many Republicans have spent years lobbying for some of the security measures included in the deal.

Learn more:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fact-checking-kamala-harris-donald-trumps-1st-presidential/story?id=113567997

[beardedmrbean]

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is telling lawmakers that President Joe Biden is preparing to sign off on an executive order that would shut down asylum requests at the U.S.-Mexico border once the average number of daily encounters hits 2,500 between ports of entry, with the border reopening only once that number declines to 1,500, according to several people familiar with the discussions.

The impact of the 2,500 figure means that the executive order could go into immediate effect because daily figures are higher than that now.

The Democratic president is expected to unveil the actions — his most aggressive unilateral move yet to control the numbers at the border — at the White House on Tuesday at an event to which border mayors have been invited.

Five people familiar with the discussions on Monday confirmed the 2,500 figure, while two of the people confirmed the 1,500 number. The figures are daily averages over the course of a week. All the people insisted on anonymity to discuss an executive order that is not yet public.

While other border activity, such as trade, is expected to continue, the 1,500 threshold at which the border would reopen for asylum seekers could be hard to reach. The last time the daily average dipped to 1,500 encounters was in July 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Senior White House officials, including chief of staff Jeff Zients and legislative affairs director Shuwanza Goff, have been informing lawmakers on Capitol Hill of details of the planned order ahead of the formal rollout Tuesday. But several questions remain about how the executive order would work, particularly how much cooperation the U.S. would need from Mexican officials to carry out the executive order.

The president has been deliberating for months over how to act on his own after bipartisan legislation to clamp down on asylum at the border collapsed because Republicans defected from the deal en masse at the urging of Donald Trump, the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Biden continued to consider executive action even though the number of illegal crossings at the southern border has declined for months, partly because of a stepped-up effort by Mexico.

Biden administration officials had waited until after Mexico’s presidential elections, held Sunday, to move on the U.S. president’s border actions. Mexico elected Claudia Sheinbaum, the nation’s first female leader, and Biden said in a statement Monday that he was committed to “advancing the values and interests of both our nations to the benefit of our peoples.” The two spoke on the phone Monday, although White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to say whether they spoke about the pending order.

“We continue to look at all options on the table,” Jean-Pierre told reporters traveling with Biden on Air Force One on Monday evening.

The executive order will allow Biden to declare that he has pushed the boundaries of his own power after lawmakers, specifically congressional Republicans, killed off what would have been the toughest border and asylum restrictions in some time. Biden’s order is aimed at trying to head off any potential spike in border encounters that could happen later this year, closer to the November elections.

Trump’s campaign said in a statement that the order would not be effective and that if “Biden truly wanted to shut down the border, he could do so with a swipe of the same pen.”

Trump, describing illegal border crossings as an “invasion,” is trying to blame Biden for recent incidents of migrants being charged with violent crimes, though many studies have shown that immigrants typically commit violent crimes at lower rates than those born in the U.S.

For Biden’s executive order, the White House is adopting some policies directly from the bipartisan Senate border deal, including the idea of limiting asylum requests once the encounters hit a certain number. The administration wants to encourage migrants to seek asylum at ports of entry by using the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s CBP One app, which schedules about 1,450 appointments per day.

Administration lawyers have been planning to tap executive powers outlined in Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which gives a president broad authority to block entry of certain immigrants into the U.S. if it is deemed “detrimental” to the national interest. It is the same legal rationale used by Trump to take some of his toughest actions on migration as president.

That has advocacy groups already preparing to challenge Biden’s immigration order in court.

“We will need to review the (executive order) before making final litigation decisions,” said Lee Gelernt, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union who led several of the most high-profile challenges to Trump’s border policies. “But a policy that effectively shuts down asylum would raise clear legal problems, just as (it) did when the Trump administration tried to end asylum.”

The White House is also sure to encounter vocal resistance from many Democratic lawmakers. California Sen. Alex Padilla, an outspoken critic of the Senate’s earlier border bill, said the pending executive order was “just not the solution we need and it’s very incomplete as a strategy.”

Padilla, who was also briefed by the White House on the proposal, wants an approach that works with countries throughout Latin America to address the poverty and unrest that drives migration to the United States. In recent weeks, Padilla has also pressed the White House for executive actions that benefit immigrants and said the message he has heard in return is, “We’re working on it.”

Biden will unveil his executive order flanked by several border mayors whom the White House invited for the announcement. Texas Mayors John Cowen of Brownsville and Ramiro Garza of Edinburg both confirmed their invitations, and San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria’s office also said the White House invited the mayor, but he could not attend due to scheduling difficulties.

Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat who said he was briefed on the plan, said he wishes the White House would have taken executive action a long time ago and said cooperation from Mexico would continue to be critical as the administration implements the order.

“If you think about the logistics, where else can they go?” Cuellar said. “If they’re not going to let them in, where do they go? Do they return them (to Mexico), or do they try to deport as many as they can? We did add a lot more money into ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) so they can deport, but the easiest thing, of course, is just send them back to Mexico. You’ve got to have the help of Mexico to make this work.”

Jennifer Babaie, an attorney at Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, Texas, said she would be alarmed if Biden issued formal deportation orders without an opportunity to seek asylum. Advocates worry he may attempt that under the 212(f) provision.

Pandemic-era expulsion authority known as Title 42 had “a silver lining” for migrants because they could try again without fearing legal consequences, Babaie said. But a formal deportation order would expose them to felony prosecution if they attempted again and it would impose bars on legally entering the country in the future.

“This is even more extreme than (Title 42), while still putting people in harm’s way,” Babaie said.

[rebeleden]

Trump praises collapse of bipartisan border deal: ‘I think it’s dead’

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4459861-trump-praises-collapse-of-bipartisan-border-deal/

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