What a mess. The border bill is dead, Mike Johnson’s proposal for a stand-alone Israel bill will be vetoed by the president (if it even gets out of the House), and the fate of Ukraine and potentially Europe, as well as humanitarian aid for Gaza, hangs in the balance. These people are unrepentant chaos agents.
Here’s a report from Manu Raju of CNN from the smoldering ruins of the GOP Senate caucus:
McConnell, Cornyn and other top Rs say now the Senate should move ahead with the other aspects of the emergency aid package — Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan funding — and leave border provisions behind given deep divisions in the ranks. Schumer wouldn’t say how he would proceed after tomorrow’s failed vote. McConnell on his handling of talks: “I followed the instructions of my conference who were insisting that we tackle this in October. I mean, it’s actually our side that wanted to tackle the border issue. We started it.”
Even he admits that his senate Republicans are perfidious liars.
Will they end up passing those foreign aid bills? Who knows? All this could have been avoided if they hadn’t decided to be cute to try to force the president to eat shit and agree to a border bill that his caucus hates. They got what they wanted. And then they decided not to vote for it!
This isn’t the first time they’ve played this game and it never seems to work for them. I suspect they know it in this case. But Dear Leader demanded it and Dear Leader must be obeyed.
I’m sure you recall a few years ago when the right wing had one of their perennial meltdowns over the supposed plan to put conservatives in “FEMA camps.” I case you don’t here’s a brief recap:
The FEMA camps conspiracy theory is a belief, particularly within the American Patriot movement, that the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is planning to imprison US citizens in concentration camps, following the imposition of martial law in the United States after a major disaster or crisis. In some versions of the theory, only suspected dissidents will be imprisoned. In more extreme versions, large numbers of US citizens will be imprisoned for the purposes of extermination as a New World Order is established. The theory has existed since the late 1970s, but its circulation has increased with the advent of the internet and social media platforms.
This conspiracy theory had a huge revival during the Obama years and then died off when Trump came in.
But as you may have noticed from that Wikipedia entry,the plot really took off during the Reagan years because his administration actually did develop some sort of plan for … FEMA camps.
Rex 84B, short for Readiness Exercise 1984 BRAVO, was a classified scenario and drill developed by the United States federal government to detain large numbers of United States residents deemed to be “national security threats” in the event that the president declared a National Emergency. The scenario envisioned state defense forces rounding up 500,000 undocumented Central American residents and 4000 American citizens whom the US Attorney General had designated as “national security threats” as part of the secret Continuity of Government program. These people would be detained at 22 military bases in concentration camps run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
It’s a Republican thing.
Trump’s top henchman Steven Miller has been floating the idea of “deportation camps” and one of Trump’s big plans is to do sweeps in American cities and put the homeless into camps as well.
Camps are on the GOP agenda.
Now we have the laboratory of MAGA atrocities proposing the same thing:
We called them workhouses in Britain in the 1800s. Dickens wrote all about them
Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday endorsed a statewide strategy for dealing with homeless people that Republican lawmakers say is the first of its kind.
In short, put them in camps.
Legislators in the last week advanced bills that would require counties to ban homeless people from sleeping in public places and instead allow them to stay in designated camps with security, sanitation and access to behavioral health services.
Although the governor said the legislation is still a “work in progress,” he endorsed its goal of moving homeless people off the streets. He also said he was open to assigning money to help local governments treat and house them.
“We feel that if the Legislature is willing to lean in on this, that we want to be there to be able to offer support, but it’s got to be done right,” DeSantis said during a Monday news conference in Miami Beach.
“It’s got to be done in ways that is focused primarily on ensuring public order, ensuring quality of life for residents, ensuring that people’s property values are maintained,” he added.
And here I thought Florida didn’t have a homeless problem like these west coast hellholes…
Last year, Florida’s Council on Homelessness reported 30,809 people experiencing homelessness, up 9% from 2019. Of those, 15,706 were sleeping outdoors, in cars or in abandoned buildings, more than double the number from 2021. Hillsborough and Pinellas counties reported 4,144 people homeless last year, down about 300 since 2018.
According to this article there is actually some question about how this might work with some homeless advocates thinking it could be helpful if there was enough money to do it right. But most homeless advocates are rightfully concerned that there won’t be enough money to properly fund it and the idea that homeless people who don’t comply being arrested sounds like a recipe for disaster.
I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t trust Ron DeSantis to properly feed a dog much less show anything close to empathy for people who are in dire straits. You’ll notice that his priority is “ensuring public order, ensuring quality of life for residents, ensuring that people’s property values are maintained.” This is not a person who will be remotely concerned about the well-being of the people he’s incarcerating.
Finally we have some clarity on a subject that anyone with common sense could have said was obvious since the moment the constitution was ratified:
A federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected former President Donald J. Trump’s claim that he was immune to charges of plotting to subvert the results of the 2020 election, ruling that he must go to trial on a criminal indictment accusing him of seeking to overturn his loss to President Biden.
The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit handed Mr. Trump a significant defeat, but was unlikely to be the final word on his claims of executive immunity. Mr. Trump, who is on a path to locking up the Republican presidential nomination, is expected to continue his appeal to the Supreme Court.
Still, the panel’s 57-page ruling signaled an important moment in American jurisprudence, answering a question that had never been addressed by an appeals court: Can former presidents escape being held accountable by the criminal justice system for things they did while in office?
The question is novel because no former president until Mr. Trump had been indicted, so there was never an opportunity for a defendant to make — and courts to consider — the sweeping claim of executive immunity that he put forward.
The panel, composed of two judges appointed by Democrats and one Republican appointee, said in its decision that, despite the privileges of the office he once held, Mr. Trump was subject to federal criminal law like any other American.
“For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant,” the panel wrote. “But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as president no longer protects him against this prosecution.”
They also did an end run around his delay tactics by saying they will lift the stay and start the clock running unless Trump files an appeal with the Supremes by February 12th, effectively precluding an en banc appeal.
This is the key passage as it relates to how long a stay may now last in the DC case. https://t.co/00WA5Hee3y
— Andrew Weissmann (weissmann11 on Threads)🌻 (@AWeissmann_) February 6, 2024
Here’s Andrew Weissman on the ruling:
"All eyes should be on a filing that Donald Trump will certainly make in the next week asking for Supreme Court review. And what the Supreme Court does."
It’s rare that I bother with a Thomas Friedman column. He’s usually full of himself and his breathless “deepisms.” But the headline on his piece today grabbed me. It’s bumper-sticker messaging about Republican efforts to kill the border security deal, and it’s absent Friedman’s usual verbal filigree.
Every so often there is a piece of legislation on Capitol Hill that defines America and its values — that shows what kind of country we want to be. I would argue that when it comes to the $118.3 billion bipartisan compromise bill in the Senate to repair our broken immigration system and supply vital aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, its passage or failure won’t define just America but also the world that we’re going to inhabit.
There are hinges in history, and this is one of them. What Washington does — or does not do — this year to support its allies and secure our border will say so much about our approach to security and stability in this new post-post-Cold War era. Will America carry the red, white and blue flag into the future — or just a white flag? Given the pessimistic talk coming out of the Capitol, it is looking more and more like the white flag — autographed by Donald Trump.
Republicans have abandoned any “America First” pretense. When they say America they mean Mr. L’État, c’est moi. These are not serious people:
“The United States has for some time ceased to be a serious country. Our extreme polarization combined with institutional rules that privilege minorities makes it impossible for us to meet our international obligations,” the political theorist Francis Fukuyama remarked on the American Purpose website. “The Republican Party has grown very adept at hostage holding. … The hard-core MAGA wing represents a minority within a minority, yet our institutional rules permit them to veto decisions clearly favored by a majority of Americans.”
The WWII and Cold War generations are passing away, and the soberness they learned through hard experience with them, Friedman suggests. Joe Biden is one of the few. Although just a few years older than Trump the Unserious never held an office in public service until he was 70. And then just to boost his brand and make another buck.
Trump’s GOP is a throwback, U.S. foreign policy historian Michael Mandelbaum tells Friedman, “to the interwar period between World War I and World War II, when a whole segment of the elite felt World War I was a failure and a mistake — the equivalent today of Iraq and Afghanistan — and then approached the dawn of World War II as isolationists and protectionists, seeing our allies as either hopeless or leeches.”
If they’re not making money for Trump, that’s just what America’s allies are to him. His pre-White House dalliance with Russian President Vladimir Putin was about getting a Trump Tower-Moscow deal. Then Trump got a shot of real power up his nose and acquired a taste for something money couldn’t buy. He/they will sacrifice the world for more of it.
“Being president,” Michelle Obama said, “doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.”
Who Trump is was nakedly visible for those with eyes to see well before his election. Trump is emotionally stunted, mentally unstable, amoral, deeply insecure, needy, venal, vain and vengeful, a pathological liar and con man who has lived his life on the edge of the law (and outside it) using his father’s fortune to shield himself, and now his former office. The law may or may not finally catch up to him before the fall election.
But in how willingly MAGA Republicans have been baptized into Trumpism, they have revealed who they are. These are people without honor, bad people. Not just misguided. Bad. Except Friedman will not say so in the pages of The New York Times.
Where the First Church of Trumpism will lead the U.S. and the world is predictable, Friedman will say:
As Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman just reported, “the ammunition shortage” in Ukraine “has already led to an increase in Ukrainian casualties. … The shortage of weaponry is also having an effect on the willingness of Ukrainians to volunteer for military service. The mounting pressure on the Kyiv government is part of the explanation for the public falling-out between President Volodymyr Zelensky and his commander in chief, Valeriy Zaluzhny.”
If this is the future, and our friends from Europe to the Middle East to Asia sense that we are going into hibernation, they will all start to cut deals — European allies with Putin, Arab allies with Iran, Asian allies with China. We won’t feel the change overnight, but, unless we pass this bill or something close to it, we will feel it over time.
America’s ability to assemble alliances against the probes of Russia, China and Iran will gradually be diminished. Our ability to sustain sanctions on “pariah nations” like North Korea will erode. The rules governing trade, banking and the sanctity of borders being violated by force — rules that America set, enforced and benefited from since World War II — will increasingly be set by others, and by their interests.
Ater Trump is gone and the hangover sets in, cultists will have time to repent at their leisure. They won’t, of course.
“I want my war!” (Dustin Hoffman as Captain Hook in Hook, 1991). More fake hair.
The French famously supported Americans’ fight to win freedom from England and its king. But Republicans won’t support Ukraine’s fight to secure theirs against invading Russians. Republicans won’t take yes for an answer on a bill to enhance U.S. border security after hissing and spitting about it for years. They don’t want to govern, they want to rule, yet have no idea how to do it. But kowtowing before Donald “91 Counts” Trump? They’re hell at bowing and scraping.
Christian conservatives make up a sizable percentage of the GOP base. They are conditioned from childhood to serve a heavenly king and to long for his return. But since Jesus Christ has been delayed now for two thousand years, they’ve grown impatient. They are ready to settle. For Trump.
With President Joe Biden’s economy going gangbusters (even Fox News admits it); with the inflation Republicans expected to run on falling; with unemployment at historic lows and the stock market at historic highs; with the end of Roe following him like a dark cloud; and with the U.S. justice system breathing down his neck about insurrection and other crimes, Trump has no weapons left for waging his 2024 war on America except fearmongering about border security.
Trump wants his war. On nonwhite immigrants and, ultimately, on the freedoms the French helped us win in the eighteenth century.
His enablers in Congress will bow and oblige. They won’t take yes for an answer on the border security bill they’ve ranted about for years (Catherine Rampell, Washington Post):
A hard-won, bipartisan Senate deal dropped Sunday evening, with tons of items on conservatives’ border-policy bucket list, including many that former president Donald Trump had begged for. These include:
beefing up border security as a condition for giving any more aid to Ukraine (check!)
a tougher and faster asylum-processing system so that those who don’t meet asylum criteria cannot stay and work for years while their cases crawl through the courts (check!)
hiring more personnel for Customs and Border Protection as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (1,500 and 1,200, respectively — so, check, check!)
huge investments in fentanyl detection technologies and other anti-trafficking enforcement (check!)
reviving something like Title 42 restrictions, wherein the president can “shut down” most of the asylum system (though this version doesn’t require a public health pretext and has more severe consequences for border-crossers — so, check-plus, perhaps).
House Republicans should have been pinching themselves in disbelief. Yet within hours of this 370-page bill dropping, House GOP leaders ruled out letting their chamber vote on any of it.
“I’ve seen enough,” Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) said, later adding that it was “a waste of time.” He just can’t take yes for an answer, it seems.
Speaker Johnson denies he’s taking orders from the indicted former president, but that’s beyond laughable in this former political party.
“I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions & Millions of people, many from parts unknown, into our once great, but soon to be great again, Country!” Trump posted to Truth Social. Give him everything and he’ll insist it’s wrong.
Only he can fix it. His cult is willing to see Ukraine fall and the “chaos” they claim is occuring on the border (and the MAGA convoy in Texas could not find) continue until Trump is back in the White House. They will misinform the public about the proposed bill to justify killing it.
Maybe House lawmakers are genuinely confused about how immigration law works. After all, they keep insisting that President Biden take actions that courts have ruled would be illegal. They also appear to misunderstand (misrepresent?) an aspect of the bipartisan Senate deal, in suggesting that it “accepts 5,000 illegal immigrants a day.” This is not, in fact, what the bill would do; rather, it would force the United States to block anyone crossing between ports of entry from even applying for asylum when that threshold has recently been met (as is the case right now).
Maybe House Republicans have convinced themselves that any legislation that could appeal to Democrats must, ipso facto, be too reasonable for them to consider. In a twist on the Groucho Marx line, they’d never belong to a club that would have anyone else as a member.
Hard-line Republicans had already begun efforts to punish their own party members who worked on this bipartisan deal, including lead GOP negotiator Sen. James Lankford(Okla.). Poor Lankford reportedly didn’t want this job at all, but he caught the falling knife anyway — and then got stabbed in the back with it.
The bill is too conservative for many Democrats, yet Biden is willing to accept it to get more ammunition to Ukraine’s defenders as part of the package. But Trump wants his political war. The Ukrainians have a real, one on their hands.
Trump is no Marquis de Lafayette, and the Republicans no allies of freedom like the French.
This very disillusioned participant with the Trucker’s Convoy said she just realized that the people who organized it don’t really care about America and are just grifting con artists. Go figure. pic.twitter.com/xCVmsQXPia
An urgent plea for reinforcements from the Border Trucker Convoy: “We need keyboard warriors. If you’re sittin’ at home, you’re on your phone, we want you to be warriorin’ fer us.” https://t.co/HFzEAyKdM9
The baptisms have begun at the trucker convoy to Take Our Borders Back that ended up at a sketchy Children's Ranch holding a religious revival #convoypic.twitter.com/eD6Hdb5xGq
These people are very stupid, so you can’t expect most of them to know history or understand basic governing requirements. The ones that do obviously don’t give a damn. They’ve been taking hostages for years on budget deals. Now they are using the security of the United States and the world as a weapon to get their way:
It is not unusual for Washington Republicans to receive visitors — candidates, lobbyists, political donors — who boast about their commitment to securing the border and cutting taxes.
It’s not every day that one of those visitors used to run Denmark.
Yet on a recent Thursday afternoon, several hard-line members of the House found themselves listening to Anders Fogh Rasmussen as the former Danish prime minister emphasized his small-government values. As a head of government, Rasmussen told them, he had restricted migration and held down taxes — stances even the conservative Freedom Caucus might admire.
“He was trying to draw parallels with Republican ideology,” recalled Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, who helped convene the meeting.
Then Rasmussen addressed his real agenda: a passionate appeal for aiding Ukraine.
The meeting between a statesman of the West and outspoken voices of the American right captured the tensions at the heart of the transatlantic security relationship — and served, perhaps, as a preview of just how strained old alliances could grow under a second Trump presidency. For Rasmussen, who is also a former head of NATO, it was a brief immersion in the brute transactional politics that now governs the U.S. Congress, even on the most sensitive matters of national security.
The group that met with Rasmussen, which included at least two Freedom Caucus members, heard him out politely and even sympathetically, according to Buck and others in the room. They liked his argument that holding the line against Russia would send a message to China about American resolve. Even more resonant was Rasmussen’s scathing criticism of the Biden administration’s pullout from Afghanistan — a costly error, he said, that emboldened the enemies of democracy and invited the invasion of Ukraine.
Then the pushback came.
Rep. Greg Murphy of North Carolina, a 60-year-old urologist by training, was the most direct voice in the room, laying out his raw political calculus in unperfumed terms.
Murphy told Rasmussen that the price for backing Ukraine must be a crackdown at the border with Mexico. Murphy said he agreed with Rasmussen about the Ukraine war, on the merits, but saw war funding as crucial leverage in a separate policy negotiation with President Joe Biden.
When I spoke with Murphy about the meeting, he echoed those lines. Blaming Biden for having “invited his own country to be invaded” by migrants, he said the Ukraine issue was the best tool for forcing the president’s hand.
“When you have fulcrums, you have to use them,” he said. “We have to use what we can — sadly enough, with the conflict in Ukraine.”
That theory of governing is not new to Washington. It has been a regular feature of legislative politics for decades. But this mode of brinkmanship has become more ordinary and more dangerous. The demands of recalcitrant lawmakers have grown. So have the risks they are willing to take with the real-world consequences of their actions.
It used to be considered radical to shut down the government over a spending dispute. Now, the future of European security is a bargaining chip in an unrelated policy battle.
Now these people are refusing to take yes for an answer. Joe Biden could agree to enact the entire Trump immigration agenda including his stupid wall and they would still not do it. Trump wants the issue for the election and they agree with him.
But lets face facts, they are also objectively pro-Russia and they hate Europe and would be fine if it fell to Vladimir Putin. It’s impossible now to see any other explanation.
As it stands today, they are tanking the border bill and have no plans to pass Ukraine aide despite their demands being met on the former but Speaker Johnson is rushing to put a stand alone Israel aid bill on the floor. They are 100% bad faith actors in every way.
Luckily Biden is calling their bluff on that last one:
Biden on the GOP’s Israel bill:
Does nothing to secure the border, does nothing to help the people of Ukraine, fails to support the security of synagogues, and denies humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians, most of whom are women & children.
Despite endorsing Senator James Lankford in 2022, Donald Trump claims he did not endorse Senator James Lankford: pic.twitter.com/wV51ifEU54
— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) February 5, 2024
Uhm…
He told Bongino, “I won 77 out of 77 counties [in Oklahoma]. Ronald Reagan is second with 56.” Bush ’04, McCain and Romney swept all 77 as well. The GOP hasn’t lost a county in Oklahoma since the 20th Century. In other words, Trump is nothing special in Oklahoma. It is a dyed in the wool red state.
It appears that Lankford, a far right GOPer, has decided that he wants to do the job of being a far right legislator instead of a full time MAGA sycophant. I wonder how well that’s going to work out for him.
“I’m frustrated when people put out intentionally false information. I expect more. There are policy disagreements on that, I get that,” he said. “If people think that politics are wrong, and now we’re in a presidential year, so let’s not help Biden in the process, we’re just going to disagree on that. I get frustrated when people put out things that are intentionally false, that they know are false, because I expect more of Americans.”
Lankford: “It was funny for me just to be able to watch some of their conversation last night from members that I’ve talked to that have said to me, ‘Hey, I really need weeks to be able to review this. It’s really complicated.’ And then within an hour they were coming out in opposition,” he said. “It was like, so much for the weeks I need to review it. I can tell now the weeks of review wasn’t actually to review, it was just to try to kill it, stall it.”
Asked him if he were frustrated with Trump. “His job is to run for president. My job is to serve the nation,” Lankford said. “I’m in the Senate right now on Homeland Security, doing border management, I’m doing my job. He’s doing his job, he’s running for president.”
Lankford said that the law needs to changed — and more must be done besides just administrative action. He pointed to House GOP passing HR2
“If there really is a problem on the border – which there is a problem on the border, it’s not like just enforcement, which clearly Biden’s not enforcing the border – but it’s also a problem in the law,” he said. “Which is why they put out H.R. 2 because they saw the problems in the law, which is why we said in October we need to change the law to be able to deal with these things. We see a change in law, then the House needs to be able to put out a bipartisan proposal that’ll pass the House and the Senate.”
It even appears that he might be a human being. How novel:
Sen. Lankford on Fox & Friends: "It is interesting. I have some folks that are upset about trying to get humanitarian aid to people who are struggling. We are Americans. We provide food and water to people and don't just leave them in the desert to be able to die." pic.twitter.com/R9uAqaqIYz
Unfortunately, for Lankford, I’m afraid this is The Kiss Of Death:
Sen. Lankford on Newsmax: "I would remind folks that during the Trump administration we also had days of more than 4,000 people that were illegally crossing the border in 2019 and they were struggling because there were gaps and loopholes in the law." pic.twitter.com/U1tKcKSVwS
People would like to know if a jury of Trump’s peers find that he has committed crimes before they vote next November. It’s not too much to ask:
Most Americans want to see a verdict on the federal charges former President Donald Trump faces related to election subversion in 2020 before this year’s presidential election, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. And looking ahead, most expect Trump to pardon himself of any federal crimes he’s convicted of if he wins the presidency – or to refuse to concede if he loses in November.
About half of Americans, 48%, say it’s essential that a verdict is reached before the 2024 presidential election, and another 16% that they’d prefer to see one. Just 11% say that a trial on the charges should be postponed until following the election, with another quarter saying the trial’s timing doesn’t matter to them. A 72% majority of Democrats and 52% of independents say it’s essential that a verdict is reached pre-election. Republicans are more split. While 38% say that a verdict should be reached before the presidential election, including 20% who call that essential, another 39% say it doesn’t matter when the trial is held, and 23% that they think the trial should be held after this election.
It’s absurd that the Republicans are so far gone that they refuse to find someone other than a man under 91 criminal indictments in several different jurisdictions to nominate for president of the United States. Personally, I think that’s enough to disqualify him, along with dozens of other acts of corruption and malfeasance before and after he was president. It terrifying that almost half the country seems prepared to put such a person back into the the White House. But if some of them need to see a jury verdict before they can decide that he is unfit then they damned well should have one. It’s outrageous that the courts are dragging their feet on this.
