Category: Immigration

Trump’s Threat To The Constitution

The Daily Escape:

From Steve Inskeep, speaking about the legal plight of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who Trump says he can’t get back from El Salvador:

“If I understand this correctly, the US president has launched a trade war against the world, believes he can force the EU and China to meet his terms, is determined to annex Canada and Greenland, but is powerless before the sovereign might of El Salvador. Is that it?”

There is a lot of stuff happening. Trump has tested all sorts of limits, including defying a 9-0 Supreme Court order in  the case of Abrego Garcia’s extradition to El Salvador mentioned in Steve Inskeep comment above. He has turned the US economy into a giant guessing game by toggling tariffs on and off.

From Dan Pfeiffer:

“….everyone is focused on Trump’s tariff policy. How could you not be? The stock market has been crashing, the bond market is freaking out, and worries about inflation and recession are mounting. When watching your retirement account drop like a rock, it’s hard to focus on anything else.

But we are also amid an emerging Constitutional crisis that could fundamentally reshape democracy.”

Last month, Trump deported Abrego Garcia to El Salvador where he is being held in a notorious prison known for torturing and starving inmates. Abrego Garcia is from El Salvador and was in this country illegally. But a judge had ruled that he could not be sent home because the gangs there posed a threat to his life.

After Abrego Garcia’s illegal deportation, the case went to the US Supreme Court where the Trump Administration admitted that Abrego Garcia was sent to El Salvador in error, but they have refused to do anything to bring him back to the US. The Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, declared:

“The order properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”

In a bit of a coincidence, Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, was in Washington  Monday for a previously scheduled meeting with Trump, where Bukele said he refused to return Abrego Garcia  to the US.

Moreover, in the single most disturbing display since he was reelected, Trump asked Bukele to build several more Terrorism Confinement Centers to house US citizens. Trump also told reporters that he was open to deporting US citizens if they had committed violent, criminal acts. Trump said:

“If it’s a homegrown criminal, I have no problem….We’re studying the laws right now. Pam [Bondi, the attorney general] is studying. If we can do that, that’s good.”

But, US citizens cannot legally be deported.

The only exception is if a US citizen is credibly accused of committing a crime in another country and the government decides to honor an extradition request.

The administration’s position is that they can remove people in error or in defiance of court orders, and once deported, they cannot be compelled to engage in any specific act of diplomacy or foreign policy since those are the exclusive powers of the Executive Branch.

What this all means is that Trump will most likely escalate to deporting US citizens. The courts can try to stop this by, for example, holding executive branch officials including the president in contempt. That is highly unlikely since the Supreme Court ruled last year that the office of the presidency cannot commit a crime if it is done in the pursuit of normal job responsibilities, which would include foreign affairs.

It seems that Trump may not be held legally accountable even for deporting US citizens.

There is nothing to stop him unless the Republicans in Congress decide to stop him. He could be impeached and removed from office, of course, But the Republicans have taken a pass twice already on that option, despite airtight cases against him.

Republican politicians are behaving with deference to power and a fear of standing out. From Kyla Scanlon:

“As Umberto Eco warned in Ur-Fascism, authoritarian systems don’t return with parades and uniforms. They return in a culture where obedience masquerades as patriotism – or as economic strategy.

When disagreement becomes disloyalty, when nuance is dismissed as weakness, when conformity becomes civic virtue, we’re no longer living in a democracy. We’re participating in the performance of one.”

Congress could stop him. They have the authority, but they do nothing. This paralysis is what Umberto Eco described as a “fear of difference” where dissent is dangerous, alternative views are threatening, and deviation is punished.

What we get is a legislative body that performs democracy, but no longer willingly exercises its Constitutional powers.

Standing up to Trump would mean risking access to donors, media cycles, committee power, and the favor of a political ecosystem that now functions more like a loyalty marketplace than a deliberative body. So they completely ignore the Constitution at great costs to their constituents.

At this point, the Democrats can no longer treat Trump with any deference. The entire House Democratic Caucus should draw up articles of impeachment and seek to introduce them. The Senate Democrats should put a hold on everything until hearings are granted. Everything must stop until this is resolved.

From Dan Pfeiffer:

“This is the moment. We are at a crossroads. It’s time to speak up. Corporations have bent the knee; law firms are submitting to Trump; Congress is ceding its authority, and corporate media is making excuses. The courts are trying to stop Trump’s worst offenses, but he ignores their dictates.”

This is the most serious threat to our democracy since the Civil War.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Political Advertising: How Effective Is It?

The Daily Escape:

Wrongo’s calendar says there’s just 29 days to go until Election Day. The campaigns are in high gear, but what are they saying? And is what they’re saying getting through to both their base voters as well as to those who are “persuadable” enough for them to get out to the polls and vote? Time is running out.

Timing is a point raised in this NBC story, which describes that, after having taken the last 76 days to introduce the Vice President to voters, the campaign now plans to ratchet up negative advertising about how unfit Trump is to be President (emphasis by Wrongo).

“Leaning more heavily into negative campaigning is a strategic shift for Harris. While she has routinely been critical of Trump since becoming a candidate in July….Harris campaign officials said they intend to continue laying out her policy positions, background and plans…But emphasizing what Harris campaign officials view as Trump’s major vulnerabilities is seen as possibly one of the only ways to finally win over some voters who haven’t made up their mind in a static race that Democrats want to push in their direction.”

A recent poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs suggests that Harris’ attacks on Trump’s brand of hyper-masculinity appear to be working. As the Daily Beast summarized the findings, respondents:

“…chose Harris 59% over Trump’s 57% when it came to which candidate they felt was tough enough to be president…and favored Harris 55 to 46 % on “which candidate would change the country for the better,” and by 54 to 43% on who “was more likely to fight for them.”

Harris also is micro targeting the message of Trump’s weakness. From the WaPo:

“For the millions of football fans who tuned in from home for Saturday night’s much anticipated matchup between the University of Georgia and the University of Alabama, she also ran a new ad nationally on ABC that hammers home her point.”

The ad says:

“’Winners never back down from a challenge. Champions know it’s anytime, anyplace. But losers, they whine and waffle and take their ball home,’ the narrator says at the start of the spot, over images of a football game and washed-out footage of Trump missing a golf putt. The 30-second ad ends with footage of Harris challenging him to another debate, with the words “When we fight, we win” hanging on a sign in the background.”

The money quote:

“Well, Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage. If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face,…

Harris also posted the ad on Trump’s Truth Social media platform.

Marcy Wheeler quotes CNN’s David Wright who tracks political spending by the candidates about where the money is headed in this final month as the ad wars intensify:

“You can see how each side is placing bets on their best path to 270 electoral votes. In the first week of October, the Harris campaign is spending the most in the critical trio of “Blue Wall” states – they’ve got more than $5 million booked in Pennsylvania, about $4 million booked in Michigan, plus about $2.7 million booked in Wisconsin. And that makes sense – if Harris wins all three of those states, plus Nebraska’s up-for-grabs electoral vote in the swingy second congressional district (where the campaign also has more than $300,000 in ad time this week), she’s the next president.”

Turning to Trump:

“…he’ s looking to the Sun Belt. This week, Trump’s campaign is spending the most on ads in Pennsylvania, $3.8 million – it’s really the linchpin to both sides’ strategies. But in addition to that, the campaign is also spending $3.4 million in North Carolina and nearly $3 million in Georgia, its other top targets, and if he wins those two states plus Pennsylvania, he’s heading back to the White House.”

The Electoral College will come down to which of the two campaigns potential voters consider more trustable, probably mostly on their personal economic situation and where that’s heading with each potential president. From the WaPo:

“Americans are finally starting to feel better about the economy, invigorating Vice President Kamala Harris’s pitch for the presidency as she narrows her Republican opponent’s longtime lead on an issue that is foremost on voters’ minds.”

More:

“Although voters still favor former president Trump over Harris on handling the economy, his advantage has dropped dramatically in recent weeks. Trump now averages a six-percentage-point edge on the economy…”

But Trump’s only answers for the economy are lower taxes on the rich and more tariffs. Yet, like everything else, Trump has no idea what tariffs actually do.

However, a new survey by Data For Progress’s top line finds Harris leading Trump by 3 points among likely voters nationwide. Nearly half of voters (49%), including a plurality of Independents (46%), choose Harris, while 46% choose Trump.

On the all-important economy, Harris has a trust advantage on most of the economic measures tested, including: supporting small businesses (+10 points), taxes on middle class Americans (+9), increasing wages (+5), lowering housing costs (+5), handling labor union policy (5%), improving our infrastructure (+3), lowering grocery costs (+2), creating jobs (+1), and protecting domestic manufacturing jobs (+1).

That says her campaign messaging is getting through.

Also the survey finds Trump with just a +1-point trust advantage over Harris on “reducing inflation,” an issue that voters have consistently ranked as their most important when deciding whom to vote for. Here’s their chart:

They also surveyed candidate favorability, which now tilts towards Harris. Harris’ rating is +2, while Trump’s is -12:

Is this poll on the money? Difficult to tell. A shorter election season makes it harder for campaigns to assess where to place their bets. And which of their cohorts in the electorate demand the most attention. We’ve focused on Gen Z and younger voters as being primarily swayed by economics. Messaging to women is another important element. Harris can run ads attacking Trump’s hyper-masculinity, (which will help with women).

From The Economist: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“And Harris needs to focus there. In the Obama years the gap between young men and women identifying as liberals was just five percentage points, during the Trump-Biden years this has tripled to 15 points, according to Gallup. This change has been caused almost entirely by young women moving to the left, rather than young men tacking to the right. The fact that this generation’s formative years were during the #MeToo movement, the Trump years and the decision to overturn Roe v Wade helps explain it.”

In 2020 a majority of white women voted for Trump. He will be in the minority in 2024. Leading among women is a real advantage. Since the 1980s a greater share of women than men has turned out to vote. In 2020 women made up 54% of the electorate. A final indicator that Democrats might be winning this battle of the sexes: in battleground states, according to Target Smart, a data firm, between July and September, twice as many young Democratic women registered to vote than young Republican men.

Trump’s bet is that Harris is the one with the turnout problem. They think their base is more committed to their candidate than is Harris’s. But Marcy Wheeler points to Harris’s investment in the Dem ground game:

“The Harris campaign claimed in late September to have 330 offices and more than 2,400 staff. They completed 25,000 weekend volunteer shifts on the final weekend of last month, contacting over 1 million voters over three days and completed the 100,000th event of the campaign.”

BTW: Ms. Oh So Right got a postcard from Harris to vote early this week.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Harris Needs To Speak To Gen Z’s Reality

The Daily Escape:

Before tackling the major subject for today, Wrongo wants to briefly cover something you probably missed. There was an abortion ruling in Georgia that overturned the state’s anti-abortion law. The judge plowed new ground with his reasoning: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“While the State’s interest in protecting ‘unborn’ life is compelling, until that life can be sustained by the State — and not solely by the woman compelled by the Act to do the State’s work — the balance of rights favors the woman….Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote. Forcing a woman to carry an unwanted, not-yet-viable fetus to term violates her constitutional rights to liberty and privacy, even taking into consideration whatever bundle of rights the not-yet-viable fetus may have….It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could — or should — force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another….When someone other than the pregnant woman is able to sustain the fetus, then — and only then — should those other voices have a say in the discussion about the decisions the pregnant woman makes concerning her body and what is growing within it.”

The ruling is unlikely to be the final word on abortion access in Georgia, since the case will ultimately be decided by the Georgia Supreme Court.

The judge has a solid argument: Why does society have an interest in a viable fetus when we know society won’t lift a finger to financially and medically support the newborn? Why allow the government to intervene at a time when the costs involved for the mother to continue with the pregnancy increase substantially?

Let’s move to a powerful idea that emerged in the VP debate. Wrongo thinks the key to winning the election will be how Harris reaches out to Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012). PBS Newshour interviewed Kyla Scanlon, who reminds us that Gen Z now has more people in the workforce than the Boomer generation, but they aren’t faring as well. Scanlon says that Gen Z has had a tough go of it, being essentially born into the tech bubble, growing up during the Great Recession and then graduating or being in college during the pandemic.

From Scanlon: (brackets by Wrongo)

“…I think for a lot of Gen Z’ers, rent is definitely not as affordable as it used to be. Real wages have increased, so [have] wages adjusted for inflation, but rent has increased much more. And that’s sort of the foundation of how everyone experiences the economy. It’s where you live and how you have to pay for where you live….people look at the price of rent, they look at the price of gas, they look at the price of food, they just look at the inflation that we have experienced over the past few years, and it’s sometimes just not enough to even make those real wage gains worth it.”

More:

“It’s also the cost of childcare, eldercare, these things that are economically quite painful, but don’t necessarily show up in traditional economic measurements like GDP….They’re things that are… hidden costs that people experience.”

Scanlon also talked about the negative bias in the media that’s driving how people feel about their economic circumstances. Media sentiment on the economy has trended either skeptical or negative for a very long time, so people are reading negative headlines despite the economists and pundits saying the economy is OK. This is a big disconnect for the younger generations who get most of their news from social media.

In the debate, Vance said a few things that certainly resonate with Gen Z and others. He noted three things in particular:

  • People are struggling to pay the bills. Times are tough.
  • The American Dream is fading, and feels unattainable.
  • We should stop shipping jobs offshore.

It’s hard to disagree with any of that, and Harris shouldn’t cede any of this ground to Trump. How hard is it to build this into your stump speech? She could easily acknowledge that we’re in the midst of a global cost of living crisis. The biggest one in half a century.

But it was left to Vance and Scanlon to say the things that most Americans feel.

Gen Z and their younger cohorts mistakenly think that the economy is a zero sum game, meaning that if China is doing well or immigrants are coming here and finding work, that regular Americans must be doing worse, even though the economic statistics say otherwise.

Harris needs to deliver an economic message that’s grounded in the reality that Gen Z and others are experiencing. It can be as simple as acknowledging what Vance or Scanlon called out as problems for many younger Americans.

All she needs to do is “Just Say It”.

Many of Wrongo’s 12 grandchildren (17-32 years-old) largely feel that the American Dream is beyond their reach. They’re certain Social Security won’t be there for them. Most think that they’ll never own a home.

Why can’t Harris speak to this? Harris and the Dems talk vaguely about “the opportunity economy” but a more emotional and empathetic call out is required. People with economic problems need to trust the head of the ticket, and that trust starts with acknowledging their reality: That things aren’t as good for the younger generations as the economic statistics say they are.

The Dems have an actual track record: Investing in infrastructure and encouraging domestic production of strategic goods. Investment in manufacturing is at an all time high. We’re starting to produce advanced chips in Arizona. Unions are stronger than in recent years.

Harris needs to show empathy for those in Gen Z (and younger) who are not fully participating in the opportunity economy.

It will help her win in November.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Random Election Season Thoughts

The Daily Escape:

Camden Public Library, Camden, ME – September 2024 photo by Daniel F. Dishner Photography

When projecting economic outcomes, economists always caution about “Black Swan” events. While the term has been around hundreds of years, today it means an unforeseen but consequential event. Two potential Black Swan events occurred last week.

The assassination of Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and Israel’s seeming willingness to keep expanding operations against Lebanon seems very risky. Biden seems incapable of stopping Netanyahu from widening the war against Hamas and Hezbollah, and it’s clear that Netanyahu has never been a good faith negotiator regarding a cease fire. Harris now has to worry about how this impacts her campaign in Michigan.

The floods caused by the remnants of Hurricane Helene could be another “Black Swan”, although it’s difficult to see which candidate it will impact more severely. The flooding disproportionately affected the rural areas that Trump needs to win to keep North Carolina in the red column. Although heavily blue areas like Asheville also will still be recovering in early November. Here’s a map of power outages as of 9/28:

That said, the response to Helene may also highlight to voters the importance of FEMA and NOAA, both of which Project 2025 aims to defund. There are plenty of ads now running that emphasize that Project 2025 would defund NOAA. If the Feds can respond to the damage on I-40 like they did to I-95 in PA or Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge disaster, it may convince people in North Carolina that the government actually can be helpful.

Trump’s growing increasingly unhinged in public appearances is difficult to overlook. He’s adopted fascist language. Overall, he looks both weak and violent, but the mainstream press isn’t persistently covering him in that way. Its clear on Twitter that his crowds are smaller and are increasingly disengaged.

Lets turn to Elon Musk who tweeted this to his tech bros:

Let’s deconstruct this almost impossibly stupid thought:

  • People who enter illegally are not eligible for citizenship and non-citizens cannot and do not vote in federal elections.
  • People who are granted asylum can’t vote unless they become citizens, which takes ~5 years.
  • Even the most generous immigration reform proposal (which is unlikely to pass both Houses of Congress) would only apply to undocumented immigrants who’ve been here for years. And citizenship would require paying a fine, extensive background check, and going to the back of the line behind legal immigrant applicants – a process that could take a decade.
  • Currently, most of the undocumented population is of Hispanic origin – a demographic whose voting patterns have been moving to the right, not the left.

This is the same guy who after the second Trump assassin was arrested posted on Twitter:

“And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.”

And this guy has a top security clearance! Musk’s companies, including SpaceX and its subsidiary Starlink, have a $4 billion contract with NASA and multimillion-dollar contracts with the Defense Department.

But there’s a bigger picture in play with a few wealthy South Africans who have joined the tech bros world: Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the venture capitalist who has become a fundraiser for Trump and a troll of Ukraine, left at age five, and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent his childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartheid regime’s clandestine drive to acquire nuclear weapons.

And Paul Furber, an obscure South African software developer and tech journalist living near Johannesburg, has been identified by two teams of forensic linguists as the originator of the QAnon conspiracy, which helped drive Trump’s Maga movement.

In short, four of Maga’s most influential voices are fifty-something white men who grew up in apartheid South Africa.

And what connects these men’s South African backgrounds with Maga? South Africa under apartheid offered an extreme version of some of what are now important themes of what Republicans want American life to look like today: Income inequality as the natural order of things and a contempt for government.

This is what the rich guys who support Trump want, and a few of the most influential rich guys grew up under apartheid.

Finally, Rachel Bitecofer, a political analyst who in July 2019 predicted that Trump would lose the 2020 election, with the Democratic candidate winning at least 278 electoral votes, has comments on polling that Wrongo hasn’t seen elsewhere about how older people are turning towards Harris:

If true, it will be helpful.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Osnos Finds Biden’s Sharp Despite His Age

The Daily Escape:

West Quoddy Head Light, Lubec, ME – February 2024 drone photo by Rick Berk Photography

Wrongo has lots of time for Evan Osnos, a writer for the New Yorker. Osnos wrote a great book “Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury”, a detailed look at America’s reactions to 9/11 and to the Jan. 6 storming of the US Capitol. He follows the lives of a few people that reveal how we lost the ability to see ourselves as part of a cohesive society. Highly recommended.

Apparently, Osnos is one member of the media that Biden is willing to spend time with. In a New Yorker article, Osnos offers a look into Biden’s state of mind as the 2024 election silly season begins. Osnos writes:

“If you spend time with Biden these days, the biggest surprise is that he betrays no doubts. The world is riven by the question of whether he is up to a second term, but he projects a defiant belief in himself and his ability to persuade Americans to join him….”

More:

“Now, having reached the apex of power, he gives off a conviction that borders on serenity—a bit too much serenity for Democrats who wonder if he can still beat the man with whom his legacy will be forever entwined. Given the doubts, I asked, wasn’t it a risk to say, “I’m the one to do it”? He shook his head and said, “No. I’m the only one who has ever beat him. And I’ll beat him again….”

Osnos thinks that for Biden, going against Trump is personal. After all, Trump tried to steal the presidency from him. Biden knows that Republicans have sold imaginary voter fraud to its voters to undermine the democratic process. Biden’s certain that he’s the best person to hold them at bay.

Biden knows that what Trump and the GOP are planning this fall is exactly what they did on Jan. 6, but with better planning.

The balance of the Osnos report is about Biden’s view of the upcoming election, about his view of Trump’s weaknesses, and about the negative polling on Biden’s policy stances and economic measures. Osnos asked Biden if it was possible for him to convert Trump supporters and others, given that he’s behind in the polls:

“Well, first of all, remember, in 2020, you guys told me how I wasn’t going to win? And then you told me in 2022 how it was going to be this red wave?….And I told you there wasn’t going to be any red wave. And in 2023 you told me we’re going to get our ass kicked again? And we won every contested race out there….In 2024, I think you’re going to see the same thing.”

Biden wants to make certain that we’re not going to buy into the 2022 red wave again. The NYT helped to push that narrative back then too just as it is today. Osnos, who wrote a book about Biden’s 2020 win, reflected on the changes brought about by age:

“For better and worse, he is a more solemn figure now. His voice is thin and clotted, and his gestures have slowed, but, in our conversation, his mind seemed unchanged. He never bungled a name or a date.”

Please. Will the American media just give Biden’s age a rest? John Harwood tweeted that the Osnos interview, like Harwood’s own last fall, “shows talk of his alleged mental decline as utter bullshit.”

No one should be a Pollyanna about Biden’s reelection chances – 2024’s gonna be a fight. Osnos reminds us:

“Biden should be cruising to reelection. Violent crime has dropped to nearly a fifty-year low, unemployment is below four per cent, and in January the S&P 500 and the Dow hit record highs. More Americans than ever have health insurance, and the country is producing more energy than at any previous moment in its history.”

But today, the two Parties have wildly different intentions for the country and have very similar levels of support. In 2020, seven states hinged on a difference of less than three percentage points. Everything will come down to improving turnout on the margins.

Osnos also talked to a Biden campaign staffer, Mike Donilon, about a “freedom agenda”:

“It’s easy to miss how unusual a “freedom agenda” is for a Democratic Presidential campaign. Since the nineteen-sixties, Republicans have held fast to the language of freedom—from the backlash against civil rights to the Tea Party to the Freedom Caucus. But….he sees an opportunity for Democrats to…lay claim to the freedom to “choose your own health-care decisions, the freedom to vote, the freedom for your kids to be free of gun violence in school, the freedom for seniors to live in dignity.”

He also interviewed Bruce Reed, a close Biden aide who talks about how to bridge the ideological divide:

“We live in abnormal political times, but the American people are still normal people. Given a choice between normal and crazy, they’re going to choose normal.”

This is a distilled message that Biden can use in the election: Trump and his anti-Constitution, anti-rule-of-law, anti-democracy cult will sure as hell try to steal your vote this fall to install Trump. Remind voters that it’s not just an abstract: Democracy is certainly on the line this fall, and if Trump returns to power, he intends to gut your freedoms.

We could all help Biden by asking our friends what are they prepared to do?

Facebooklinkedinrss

More Than The Border Bill Died This Week

The Daily Escape:

Trillium Lake, with Mt. Hood in background, OR – February 2024 photo by Mitch Schreiber Photography

In negotiations, there are four possible outcomes, two for “Yes” and two for “No”. The answers can come quickly or slowly. The fast “Yes” generally means that we offered more than we had to, while the fast “No” means there wasn’t enough in the deal for the other side to truly consider it. The worst outcome is the slow “No”. It burns tons of calories, and delays work on other important things. It is the most frustrating result for a negotiation, always raising the question of whether the other side was really negotiating in good faith.

Welcome to America’s politics in 2024 where if it wasn’t for bad faith, there would be no faith at all. Wrongo is speaking about the so-called border bill. Republicans had insisted that any allocation of funding for Ukraine be tied to an agreement about the border, saying that no money should go abroad until the US has addressed border security concerns here at home. They were also saying that the Democrats would need to agree to deal points that in the past, would have been very hard for the Dems to swallow.

But this past Sunday, Senate negotiators released the details of their hard-fought bipartisan border agreement which is harsher than we would have seen under any Democratic administration or Congressional majority in the last 40 years. The Dems agreed to the terms because it was the price House Republicans demanded in order to fund Ukraine. So naturally, House Republicans immediately declared it dead on arrival. This wasn’t a shock because they’ve been saying that for weeks despite not knowing precisely what was in the language of the bill.

The bad faith started with House Speaker Johnson (R-Bible) lying to the media by suggesting that he wasn’t consulted on the negotiations, a contention refuted by the principal GOP negotiator, Sen. James Lankford, (R-OK) who said that Johnson had declined his invitation to participate.

That led to an avalanche of slow “No’s” by Republicans in the Senate. The GOP’s default to “No” is for the moment, an election year strategy. They see border chaos as an important weapon against Biden in November. But the GOP often says “No” simply because it can’t figure out what else that divided caucus wants to do. They sometimes prefer foaming rage to solutions, or to victories.

As Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) tweeted:

“I’ve never seen anything like it….They literally demanded specific policy, got it, and then killed it.”

You can’t engage in bad faith negotiations and expect that the other side will forget about it when the next issue comes along.

It’s unclear if this is a moment of Republican/Trumpian desperation or madness. But they came out against a serious, bipartisan bill targeted at what they said was required in order to tackle our border challenges. The Border Patrol Union, which endorsed Trump in 2020, has endorsed the Senate bill. The WSJ editorial page has endorsed the bill. Neither of these are Biden supporters.

The GOP is now committed to a policy that will keep our borders, which they say are in existential crisis, in chaos. They believe that chaos serves their 2024 political goals of winning the White House, while sweeping the Senate and the House. Wrongo is re-upping his quotes from Ezra Klein about American’s desire to vote for stability:

“Biden and his allies are framing this election as order against chaos. The party that gets things done against the party that will make America come undone.”

And this:

“…Democrats are right that voters are craving stability. But…Trump is leading in many polls because voters believe that he is the one who might offer it. What Trump is pitching….is a push for order — ‘I am going to be the one who secures the border. I’m going to be the one that cracks down on crime. I’m going to be the one that tries to stabilize your prices.’”

So where do we go from here? It would be nice to think that if they really want stability, the American people will see through all this and realize how the Republican Party has grown so adept at holding hostages. Their MAGA wing represents a minority within a minority, yet our institutional rules permit them to veto decisions clearly favored by a majority of Americans.

But, with all the noise, it’s difficult to understand if voters can hear this even if they’re paying attention. Walking away from the border bill has enormous implications for the presidential election. With Biden’s economy going gangbusters (even Fox News admits that); with the inflation Republicans had expected to run on falling; with unemployment at historic lows and the stock market at historic highs; with the end of Roe trailing Trump like a dark cloud; he (and the GOP) have limited narratives left for waging his 2024 campaign, except fearmongering about border security.

Today’s chaos will become tomorrow’s over the imminent need to fund the government. Speaker Johnson has until March 1 and March 8 to get deals with the Senate and the President if we are to avoid another government shutdown. Right now, it’s difficult to see how any good faith negotiations will occur after what has happened this week with the border bill.

The government funding chaos isn’t on the voters’ radar just yet. So Democrats ought to go on offense about the border bill, describing what’s in it, where the GOP is lying about it, and how even when you meet Republicans more than halfway, they move the goal posts. The Dems need to make every Republican House and Senate member defend killing the border bill vote every day between here and the election, by making the immigration bill a central message of Biden’s reelection campaign.

As the Cato Institute reported last November:

“The Biden Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has removed a higher percentage of arrested border crossers in its first two years than the Trump DHS did over its last two years. Moreover, migrants were more likely to be released after a border arrest under President Trump than under President Biden. In absolute terms, the Biden DHS is removing 3.5 times as many people per month as the Trump DHS did.”

But those are facts, not feelings. Time to dust off this snippet of Stephen Sondheim’s song, “Send in the Clowns“:

Don’t you love farce?
My fault, I fear
I thought that you’d want what I want

Sorry, my dear

But where are the clowns?
Quick, send in the clowns
Don’t bother, they’re here

Facebooklinkedinrss

Will The Law Restrain Trump And The MAGAs?

The Daily Escape:

Shiprock, NM – January 2024 photo by Matt Farber

Does the law matter anymore to Trump and his MAGA followers? As Heather Digby said, the MAGAs:

“…now believe that the law is what Trump says it is.”

That seems patently true if you read anything on Xitter by Right-wing Trump apologists, since they throw all sorts of pasta at the wall hoping some will stick. The latest is about the judge in the E. Jean Carroll case Lewis Kaplan and Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan (no relation) having worked together in the early 1990s. Somehow that constitutes a conflict of interest in the minds of the MAGATs.

Roberta Kaplan joined the firm in 1992 and left in 2016. Judge Kaplan was a partner there until 1994, so there was a two year overlap that occurred 30 years ago. They’ll try to make chicken salad out of this chicken shit.

A more serious attack on the law is occurring in Texas. Vice News is reporting that:

“A trucker convoy of ‘patriots’ is heading to the US border with Mexico next week, as the standoff between Texas and the federal government intensifies. The organizers of the ‘Take Our Border Back’ convoy have called themselves “God’s army” and say they’re on a mission to stand up against the ‘globalists’ who they claim are conspiring to keep US borders open and destroy the country.”

God’s Army. Vice quotes Ruth Braunstein, professor at the University of Connecticut:

“When people believe that they are working on behalf of God, they might be willing to resort to relatively extreme measures….And so you have a politically volatile situation that could become much more so, in part because of this rhetoric.”

The God’s Army website is “Secure Our Borders.” It is calling on:

“…all active & retired law enforcement and military, veterans, mama bears, elected officials, business owners, ranchers, truckers, bikers, media and LAW ABIDING, freedom-loving Americans…”

To join in the march on Texas. This has stoked civil war fantasies on fringe forums, as well as favorable comments on the social media accounts of GOP lawmakers and right-wing political commentators. And no surprise, this has bled into politics. The Daily Beast reported that on a news show, Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt and Newsmax host Carl Rigbie mused about the possibility of a “force-on-force conflict” erupting between the federal government and the Texas National Guard.

They should be careful what they wish for. Sen. Ted Cruz, (R-TX), was quoted in the Dallas Morning News saying he expects to see continuing escalation in the legal battles between the state and the Biden administration:

“It’s striking that Texas Democrats are willing to side with Mexican drug cartels invading the state of Texas over their own governor and over the people of Texas…”

And most Republican governors recently signed a statement backing Abbott:

“We stand in solidarity with our fellow Governor, Greg Abbott, and the State of Texas in utilizing every tool and strategy, including razor wire fences, to secure the border….We do it in part because the Biden Administration is refusing to enforce immigration laws already on the books and is illegally allowing mass parole across America of migrants who entered our country illegally.”

Wrongo has written many times about the faction of MAGATs who sport flag lapel pins and show you copies of their pocket Constitutions. The irony is that these (mostly) dudes haven’t really accepted the words of the Constitution and its Amendments. They want to interpret the law based on referendums orchestrated by Trump and Fox News.

What Abbott, Trump, and the MAGAs are attempting with the “southern border resistance” is testing to see how much buy in they can get from red state governors, truck drivers, law enforcement, and “patriots”. Can they sow enough chaos that the presidential election is difficult to conduct?

Here’s a theory: Trump doesn’t expect to win in November. In fact, he may not even care about the November election. Why wait until November 2024 and/or January, 2025 to make his move? What if he can mobilize his followers to strike now? How would Biden and the federal government respond to multiple domestic attacks occurring simultaneously within our borders?

If the GOP and Trump can’t beat Biden one-on-one, why wait? Waiting means that Trump will likely be incarcerated. Both Trump and the GOP certainly know that time isn’t on their side.

It’s time for the federal government to step in and knock this shit off before somebody gets killed. All Guardsmen at the border should be federalized immediately and then ordered to assist other federal officials in enforcing the Court’s decision.

That’s the only legitimate authority in play here. The GOP Constitutional reading favoring the states against the federal government is laughable. What would the fallout be if the National Guard, federalized by Biden attacks Texas law enforcement along with guys who drove their pickups to the border?

Time to wake up America! The Gospel According To CB Radio isn’t an authority on anything! Ask Trump and Abbott how many federal law enforcement officers enforcing a Supreme Court ruling are you willing to kill for your political stunt?

To help you wake up, we recognize the passing of the 1970s singer Melanie Safka who died this week at 76. Melanie was one of the surprise stars at Woodstock in 1969. To Wrongo, her best tune was “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)”. She would later say that the sight of people in the Woodstock crowd lighting candles in the rain inspired her to write the song which she recorded with gospel-style backing from the Edwin Hawkins Singers. It was released in 1970 and became her first hit.

Here she performs it live with the Edwin Hawkins Singers in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1970:

The song was anthemic, in the same way the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ “Oh Happy Day” had been the summer before. And the Edwin Hawkins Singers are also the chorus on “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain).” The song is alternately hugely upbeat and dark.

Sample Lyric:

We were so close there was no room
We bled inside each other’s wounds
We all had caught the same disease
And we all sang the songs of peace

Lay down, lay down, let it all down
Let your white birds smile up at the ones who stand and frown
Lay down, lay down, let it all down
Let your white birds smile up at the ones who stand and frown

Facebooklinkedinrss

Will Texas Disregard The Supreme Court?

The Daily Escape:

Snow Canyon, UT – October 2023 photo by Cathy Mortensen

(We will not publish a Saturday Soother this week, but there will be a Sunday cartoons column)

In doing research for this week’s Fascism in America column, Wrongo came across this from Rick Perlstein:

“And I think…what…we have in the United States: a very weak political establishment, but a civil society underneath it that’s looking for a kind of expression. And the expression that it’s taking is pathological….Because the party system is unable to answer the demands they have.”

A weak political establishment means that Congress can barely get out of its own way. Our political institutions have become ineffectual. The current Congress is setting records for inaction:

“The 118th Congress is on track to be one of the most unproductive in modern history, with just a couple dozen laws on the books at the close of 2023…”

This void is being filled by judicial or political opportunists. This is even true when the US Supreme Court hands down a decision that Republicans don’t like. From the Texas Tribune:

“The US Supreme Court…ordered Texas to allow federal border agents access to the state’s border with Mexico, where Texas officials have deployed miles of concertina wire…..For now, it effectively upholds longstanding court rulings that the Constitution gives the federal government sole responsibility for border security.”

Last October, Texas sued the federal government after Border Patrol agents cut some of the wire strung along the Rio Grande, arguing the Department of Homeland Security destroyed the state’s property and interfered in Texas’ border security efforts. But in a 5-4 decision the Supreme Court vacated a previous injunction from the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals that prevented Border Patrol agents from cutting the wire.

So what does a sovereign state like Texas do in response? It’s governor Greg Abbott, issued a “Statement on Texas’ Constitutional Right to Self-Defense,” following calls by numerous Texas Republicans to resist the high court’s order. Abbott’s statement says that he had invoked his state’s “constitutional authority to defend and protect itself” which “is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary.”

OK, is it secession time anybody?

Houston Public Media quotes Charles “Rocky” Rhodes, teacher of constitutional law at South Texas College of Law in Houston:

“That’s a real blow to our separation of powers and the way that this country has governed itself….There have been situations in the past where governors and state officials have defied the Supreme Court, but that has led to constitutional crises.”

Teddy Rave, at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, another constitutional law expert, described the calls to defy the high court’s order as unconstitutional and dangerous:

“The last time that I’m aware of that this kind of defiance actually happened was resistance to desegregation orders after Brown v. Board of Education….The Supreme Court didn’t take it kindly and issued a unanimous decision in Cooper v. Aaron explaining that states need to follow its constitutional rulings.”

But since it’s Texas, won’t the Supremes give the Republican governor a hall pass to run amuck over the Constitution? Maybe so, maybe no. The decision was 5-4, meaning that two of the six conservative Supreme Court justices said Abbott had to comply. Could one switch sides? Certainly.

What can Biden do if Abbott refuses to comply with SCOTUS’s decision?  He could federalize the Texas National Guard, which is what happened in Arkansas in 1957, when the then-governor Faubus tried to defy court orders allowing Black students to attend white schools in Little Rock.

Much like Abbott, Faubus’s fight was politically motivated. Faubus used the Arkansas Guard to keep blacks out of Central High School largely because he was frustrated by his political opponents’ success in using segregationist rhetoric to whip up support with white voters.

That eventually led President Eisenhower to federalize the Arkansas National Guard to effectively remove them from Faubus’s control. Eisenhower then sent the 101st Airborne Division to Arkansas to protect the black students and enforce the federal court order. The Arkansas National Guard later took over those protection duties, and the 101st Airborne returned to their base.

There seems to be a growing movement in Texas to fight the SCOTUS decision. A Texas nationalist urged Abbott to militarize the Texas State Guard if Biden federalizes the Texas National Guard. The Texas State Guard cannot be federalized. It has about 1,900 personnel, substantially smaller than the roughly 23,000 members of the Texas National Guard, but Abbott could attempt to beef up its headcount.

The Hill is reporting that Trump has urged states to deploy National Guard troops to Texas in support of Abbott. Various Right-wing twitter accounts are reporting that 25 Republican states have signed a statement supporting Texas against the Supreme Court. It’s not certain as Wrongo writes this is if these reports are true, but a presidential candidate and the governors of several states challenging the federal government seems an awful lot like the beginning of an insurrection.

Their joint statement isn’t in support of Texas, it’s in support of treason. This is what America has come to. It’s also symptomatic of the Supreme Court’s inability to check radical Trump-placed judges in lower courts who issue rulings with devastating consequences for democracy and human rights. States have no constitutional prerogative to nullify federal law. This principle was established during the nullification crisis of the 1830s and the Southern resistance to desegregation during the Civil Rights era. Nor, under the Constitution’s supremacy clause, can states interfere with the lawful exercise of federal authority. This rule is one of the oldest and most entrenched in all of our Constitutional law.

We often talk about Constitutional crises, and this could easily become one if Abbott and his enablers try to limit by force the US Border Patrol’s access in the upcoming days.

It’s also a test for Biden in an election year. Will he have to put down another insurrection by Republicans? If he does, what will be the political fallout?

Stay tuned.

Facebooklinkedinrss

Dems Need To Change Their Immigration Policy

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Roan Mountain, TN – January 2024 photo by Arpana Goyal

It’s time to talk about immigration. Immigration is a huge political football not only in the US, but throughout Europe. In all cases, the hard political Right is anti-immigration while the political center and left continue to try to duck the issue wherever possible.

Immigration is an extremely complicated issue that will figure prominently in our 2024 election. So far, the debate has been largely one-sided, with Republicans on the attack, and Democrats in a defensive crouch. In essence, the arguments break down to this: Democrats want more money to process the historic immigrant backlog while Republicans want to stop people from coming here in the first place. The politics of this for Dems are fraught.

But before we get to the 2024 election, the subject of immigration and the US southern border is already at center stage in the continuing effort to fund the government beyond the current Continuing Resolution that could end with another possible government shutdown in early March.

The complicating issue for avoiding a government shutdown is Biden’s request for funding for Ukraine. The MAGA House Republicans, including Speaker Johnson (R-LA), oppose the money for Ukraine and say that they won’t approve Biden’s request without dealing with the crisis at the border. From Dan Pfeiffer: (brackets by Wrongo)

“To summarize, Johnson demands a border bill in exchange for passing Ukraine aid; the White House and Senate [are] work[ing] on a border bill; Johnson opposes the bill without even seeing it, despite repeatedly declaring that the “crisis at the border” is the House GOP’s top priority.”

When Ukraine aid became a Democratic policy priority, it pushed Republicans who were once advocates of the Ukraine war effort to abandon their support.

The Republicans see the border crisis as a huge political vulnerability for Biden and want to keep  the issue in limbo until after the election. Polling bears this out. A January  CBS News/YouGov poll shows that the number of Americans who say the situation at the border is a “crisis” has gone up 7 points since May of last year:

There’s no question the Right has used their propaganda apparatus to put the situation at the border on the radar screen for voters. The chart below shows that in the NYT/Siena college poll, Biden is lagging Trump on who is trustable on immigration:

The biggest reason for the shift seems to be the surge of illegal immigration during Biden’s term. Many would-be migrants correctly believe that as long as they can reach US soil, they will be able to stay for years.

Let’s look at some numbers for October 2022 – September 2023 (the US fiscal year):

  • There were 3.1 million attempted crossings at the US Southern border in 2023. Of that total, an estimated 600,000 entered undetected. That leaves 2.5 million migrants that were “encountered” by the US border patrol, over two and a half times the number just four years ago. 83 percent of the encounters occurred between US ports of entry, often in remote locations like the Sonoran Desert. Over half a million were expelled under Title 42, a policy enacted under Trump that allowed border officials to expel migrants without a deportation hearing. The Biden administration lifted that policy in May 2023.
  • Of that 2.5 million, 1.9 million were “processed” under Title 8 of the immigration Law, covering asylum, visas, refugees and deportations.
  • Of that 1.9 million, 1.5 million became new immigration court cases in 2023.

This has caused a huge jump in the backlog of immigration court cases. Today, it takes an average of 3 years to complete an immigration case in the US, largely due to the fact that the backlog per judge now stands at 4,500 cases, up from around 1,000 cases in 2020.

Science tells us that you can’t put two pounds of shit in a one pound bag, so despite the wringing of hands on the part of the US political Left, immigration must be addressed. For the past few months, the White House has been trying to find a compromise with Republicans in hopes of reaching a deal on border security. But so far, the talks between the designated negotiators in the Senate (Chris Murphy D-CT, James Lankford, R-OK, and Kyrsten Sinema, I-AZ), haven’t found an agreed path forward.

Presuming the details of any Senate deal are within the range of what would be acceptable, getting a border deal and passing aid for Ukraine and Israel would be the best outcome for Biden and the Democrats. Dems might be forced to play the cards as they’re dealt. Biden should take the deal and declare a victory for bipartisan politics.

The biggest shift is that the Democrats are reluctantly realizing that they are holding to a losing position. Many asylum claims are bogus and are simply people looking for a better economic life. We need to make policy about how many immigrants the US should be looking to bring into the country every year. That policy should balance the number of immigrants with our ability to help them get started on a fruitful life.

That still would be a pretty large number. It just can’t be infinite.

Time to wake up Democrats! We’re headed for the first presidential election rematch since 1956. Both candidates are unpopular and both are also extremely well-known to voters. That means for the first time in forever, a clear understanding of the policy stakes of an election will be important. That makes our immigration policy important.

To help you wake up, listen to “Why Do We Build The Wall?” from the 2019 Broadway play “Hadestown”. The song was written by Anaïs Mitchell, and this is from her 2010 album “Hadestown”. Note that this song was written in 2010, long before Trump or any politician had any interest in building a wall:

Sample Lyric:

Who do we call the enemy?
The enemy is poverty,
And the wall keeps out the enemy,
And we build the wall to keep us free.
That’s why we build the wall;
We build the wall to keep us free.

Facebooklinkedinrss

More Immigration Disinformation

The Daily Escape:

Pemaquid Point Lighthouse, ME – December 2023 drone photo by Rick Berk Photography

There are plenty of newsworthy items as we end another week. You can read about them all over the internet. Wrongo wants to highlight just one: The Dow Jones index is up 29% since bottoming on Sept. 30, 2022, climbing to a new all-time high.

This is mostly due to the announcement by the Federal Reserve on Wednesday that in all likelihood, there will be no more increases in interest rates, and that there may be as many as three interest rate reductions in 2024.

Professional investors aren’t following the Dow, but it remains a mental benchmark that many Americans use to gauge the health of the stock market and the economy. So accept good news when it shows up.

Today we return to the topic of illegal immigration. As Wrongo writes this, there is still no deal on immigration, which is thought to be the hold-up on funding for Ukraine and Israel. From Semaphore:

“GOP negotiators said they believed they were making progress in securing a border policy package that’s tilted toward conservative priorities….They also welcomed the…Democratic attacks on the negotiations…..’There are several Democrats that have spoken against it,’ GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, (R-NC) told Semafor. ‘That means we’re hitting the right sort of tone.’”

Wrongo mentioned that it is very difficult to find facts from either side in the immigration debate. One constant refrain from the Right is that terrorists are slipping over the southern border, posing an existential threat to America, and it’s all Biden’s fault. From CBS:

“Republican lawmakers, GOP White House hopefuls and conservative media figures have argued that the Biden administration’s border policies have given terrorists an easier way to enter the US and harm Americans. On Monday…Trump claimed that the “same people” who killed or abducted more than 1,000 civilians in Israel are coming across the southern border separating the US and Mexico…”

And Media Matters added:

“Since the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and the subsequent bombing campaign in Gaza, Fox News has seized on the chaos in the Middle East to revive its relentless fearmongering campaign suggesting that migrants crossing into the US at the southern border are terrorists, this time from the Middle East. Fox’s toxic rhetoric follows “a spike in hate incidents” against Muslims in the US.”

There has been an increase in Border Patrol apprehensions of individuals who are on the US terror watchlist over the past two years. But they represent a tiny fraction of all migrants processed along the southern border. From the NYT: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“From October last year to this September, officials at the southern border arrested 169 people whose names matched those on the watch list, compared with 98 during the previous fiscal year and 15 in 2021, according to government data. But that is a minuscule fraction of the total number of migrants who were apprehended at the border over the past year, more than two million.”

That fraction is less than 0.01% for those of us without calculators. Finding illegals who are on the terror watch list is far more common along the US-Canada border, despite much lower levels of unauthorized migration there. Here’s a US Customs and Border Protection chart:

Customs and Border Protection recorded more than 430 watchlist hits along the northern border in fiscal year 2023, the vast majority of them at official ports of entry.

Still, there are concerns. In its homeland threat assessment for 2024, the intelligence branch of DHS said:

“…record encounters of migrants arriving from a growing number of countries have complicated border and immigration security…”

The assessment also said a recent increase in apprehensions of migrants from the Eastern Hemisphere, while still significantly lower than those from the Western Hemisphere, has “exacerbated border security challenges” because those individuals require more vetting and processing and because it’s more difficult to deport them.

There’s also the question of migrants who aren’t apprehended. The Border Patrol estimates more than 1 million individuals have entered the country surreptitiously over the past two years.

Republicans in Congress now talk about the southern border primarily as a national security issue rather than largely as a collective fear of the “great replacement”. If hundreds of thousands of migrants are evading apprehension, these national security fears have merit. But since terror watch list apprehensions are tiny and a lot higher along our northern border, that border most likely poses an equal threat to national security, if not more, since the security along the northern border is lax. We don’t really have any idea how many evade apprehension by crossing it.

Despite the constant hammering by Fox and the Right, since 1975 no one has been killed or injured in a terrorist attack in the US that involved someone who came across the border illegally. Whenever Congress gets around to dealing with illegal immigration, the solution will require more manpower both for the border patrol and immigration services.

Immigrants will keep on coming. Migration is a part of human nature. Europeans came to North America before America was a country. The peoples of the UK are not the peoples that were there 5,000 years ago. The vast majority of UK citizens have little DNA from the original peoples of those islands. That is also true in the US.

History shows that trying to stop immigration all together is a fool’s errand.

Regardless of how successful we are at controlling immigration, the US demographics of the past 250 years will look VERY different from the US demographics of 100 years from now. That doesn’t mean we should give up on controlling the process as much as possible. Part of that is to increase the costs of crossing the border, which we are doing today with instant expulsion and denial of asylum claims.

And once people are here, we must do all we can to get them integrated into US society.

Facebooklinkedinrss