The administration’s decision not to reverse the DACA policy is an announcement that the president played his voters for fools.
.. The New York Times reports today that Trump will extend indefinitely the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that confers residency and work rights on 800,000 people who illegally entered the United States as minors.
.. During the campaign, Trump had repeatedly promised to end the protected status of this group, the so-called Dreamers. In office, however, he had postponed a decision about their status. In the first three quarter of 2017, the Trump administration allowed the program to continue to operate. It issued some 17,000 new “Dreamer” visas and renewed more than 107,000 others as they came due.
.. This looked like the beginning of a legislative strategy on immigration reform: preserve DACA as a potential concession to be offered in a trade for other things
.. But to get something, you always have to give something. The Deferred Action program was the give. And Trump just gave it away for free.
.. The Trump administration is stepping up the tempo of arrests and raids. But without a stronger legislative basis for enforcement—including above all meaningful penalties for employers of illegal labor—that tempo will last only as long as Trump’s first cabinet
.. if Democrats take either house of Congress (or both) in 2018, they can cut or eliminate the funding for such enforcement.
.. The wall isn’t being built, won’t be built, and was anyway never anything more than an expensive symbol.
.. Exactly why Trump betrayed his most ardent supporters will be a study for reporters and psychologists. Was it the influence of his daughter and son-in-law? The advice of his pollsters and political strategists? Or was there no plan at all, just a consequence of his administration’s utter ineffectuality at passing anything through Congress—and the president’s own overwhelming concentration on his business interests and legal troubles?
How the Republican Coward Caucus is about to sell out its own constituents — in secret
a repeal bill so monumental in its cruelty that they feel they have no choice but to draft it in secret, not let the public know what it does, hold not a single hearing or committee markup, slip it in a brown paper package to the Congressional Budget Office, then push it through to a vote before the July 4th recess before the inevitable backlash gets too loud.
“We aren’t stupid,” one GOP Senate aide told Caitlin Owens — they know what would happen if they made their bill public.
.. Today, we learned that in a break with longstanding precedent, “Senate officials are cracking down on media access, informing reporters on Tuesday that they will no longer be allowed to film or record audio of interviews in the Senate side hallways of the Capitol without special permission.” Everyone assumes that it’s so those senators can avoid having to appear on camera being asked uncomfortable questions about a bill that is as likely to be as popular as Ebola.
.. This is how a party acts when it is ashamed of what it is about to do to the American people. Yet all it would take to stop this abomination is for three Republicans to stand up to their party’s leaders and say, “No — I won’t do this to my constituents.” With only a 52-48 majority in the Senate, that would kill the bill. But right now, it’s looking as though this Coward Caucus is going to be unable to muster the necessary courage.
.. Take Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, a state where over 175,000 people have gotten insurance thanks to the Medicaid expansion... Last week The Hill reported that Capito now supports eliminating the expansion after all — just doing it over seven years instead of the three years that the House bill required...Or how about Ohio’s Rob Portman? In his state, 700,000 people gained insurance as a result of the Medicaid expansion... They’d pay for the slower elimination of the expansion by cutting money out of the existing program, so they could get rid of all of the ACA’s tax increases.. — over half of Medicaid dollars go to the elderly and disabled... That means that they aren’t just undoing the ACA; they’re making things substantially worse for tens of millions of America’s most vulnerable citizens than they were even before the ACA passed... And they’re hoping they can do all this before anyone realizes what they’re up to, making this an act of both unconscionable heartlessness and epic cowardice. Their efforts to hide what they’re doing show that they are still capable of feeling some measure of shame. But it might not be enough to stop them.
It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Culture
Trump wanted Comey to repeat that fact publicly. When Comey didn’t, Trump took it as a sign that Comey was disloyal, an unforgivable sin. So he fired him, believing, insanely, that the move would be popular.
.. Donald Trump is characterologically at war with the norms and practices of good government. Comey emerged as a superb institutionalist, a man who believes we are a nation of laws. Trump emerged as a tribalist and a clannist, who simply cannot understand the way modern government works.
Trump is also plagued with a self-destructive form of selfishness. He is consumed by a hunger for affirmation, but, demented by his own obsessions, he can’t think more than one step ahead.
.. the Trump administration will probably not be brought down by outside forces. It will be incapacitated from within, by the bile, rage and back-stabbing that are already at record levels in the White House staff, by the dueling betrayals of the intimates Trump abuses so wretchedly.
.. Before the Whitewater investigators got to Clinton they took down Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, Webb Hubbell, Susan and Jim McDougal, and many others.
.. “No one in a position of authority at the White House tells you what is happening. No one knows. Your closest colleague could be under investigation and you would not know. You could be under investigation and not know. It can be impossible to stay focused on your job.”
.. Betty Currie, Bill Clinton’s personal secretary, finally refused to mention the names of young White House employees to the investigators because every time she mentioned a name, the kid would get a subpoena, which meant thousands of dollars of ruinous legal fees.
.. Trump is a rage-prone obsessive who will be consumed by this.
.. The good news is the civic institutions are weathering the storm.
Donald Trump’s Insult to History
Europe’s dismay could only have deepened when Congress seemed to cheer Mr. Trump on. Republicans, who once prided themselves as stewards of national security, have shown little concern about the way Mr. Trump treated NATO members or the links between Mr. Trump’s aides and Russia. In a statement, Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, gushed over Mr. Trump’s trip to Europe and the Middle East, saying it was “executed to near perfection.”
.. These new stresses in the alliance come at a bad time.
- Europe has been battered by the Greek financial crisis;
- the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey, Hungary and Poland;
- Britain’s decision to withdraw from the European Union;
- and the flow of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa.
Mr. Putin, always eager to expand Russian influence, has exploited every weakness and crisis, along with instigating a few of his own.
- Russia invaded Ukraine and has
- interfered in electoral campaigns in the United States, France and Germany.
- Mr. Putin has meddled in the Baltic States,
- cultivated far-right-wing allies in Hungary and
- wooed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey on NATO’s eastern flank.
- He is now courting Italy with a savvy ambassador to Rome and financing for anti-establishment parties.
There are some bright spots.
- One is that Ms. Merkel seems committed to playing a lead role as the United States pulls back; another is
- France’s election of President Emmanuel Macron, who has demonstrated a willingness to work in partnership with Ms. Merkel. The two won’t always see eye-to-eye, but
- Germany needs France and Mr. Macron is a good fit.
.. Mr. Macron gave Mr. Putin full honors but did not mince words on Russia’s destructive role in the Syrian conflict, in Ukraine and in its dissemination of fake news.