Category: Immigration

Trump Gets Pushback from the Senate; Mitch McConnell Calls Dysfunction Dysfunctional; Reagan Anti-Government Crusade Marches On

McConnell implies Trump may have gone a step too far

While Senate Republicans cast about for some legislative hodgepodge to satisfy both President Trump and House Democrats in order to prevent another government shutdown, Mitch McConnell was saying, publicly, that he was “for whatever works that prevents the level of dysfunction we’ve seen on full display here the last month.” This not only addressed the narrow matter of the border wall standoff, but also spoke to calls from Democrats and some Republicans to create a legislative mechanism to prevent both the President and the legislature from using  government shutdowns as a bargaining tool on any legislation. McConnell, with the weight of  35 years in the Senate and at least six government shutdowns behind him, commented, firmly “I don’t like shutdowns. I don’t think they work for anybody.”

If such a mechanism could be put in place, that would take away what Trump feels is his strongest bargaining chip.  His other chip, the declaration of a national emergency, is proving so far to be too hot for even Trump to handle.

This would be the closest thing to a public rebuke of Donald Trump that Mitch McConnell has delivered since the Republican primary season in 2016 when McConnell supported Rand Paul and made evident his disdain for the eventual winner. He is now, obliquely, standing up to Trump’s cavalier use of the federal government as a hostage in his all-or-nothing campaign to get $5.7 billion for an expansion of the magnificent border wall.

By framing the shutdown dilemma as a matter of process rather than substance, McConnell may dodge a counterattack by the President.  He may think Trump owes him something for his month-long refusal to bring to the Senate floor a veto-proof bill to re-open the government. He may think that Trump himself believes he owes McConnell something. Enough to keep his trap shut for a few hours.

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Cruelty Paired with Environmental Havoc: Border Barriers Harming Wildlife

U.S. border wall – a looming crime against wildlife

Before getting to the matter of barbed wire fences in Europe, let’s address the never=ending saga of a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico—which the Trump administration keeps alive despite budget-busting increases in defense spending and, not coincidentally, the cost of beefing up border security with police and ICE agents.

A wall substantial enough to keep out immigrants would also stop the comings-and-goings of animals across the U.S.-Mexico border: more environmental havoc by the Trump administration. Scientists have risen up in opposition, now having accumulated more than 2,500 signatures in support of a paper describing the damage to wildlife that the wall would entail.  Read about it at: Wildlife-hostile border wall

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Climate of Fear: Short Term Effectiveness, Long Term Error

[Preface: since I wrote the comments below, Trump has, by executive order, changed the zero-tolerance anti-immigration policy to end—supposedly—the separation of parents from children.  Done not on humanitarian grounds, but because of bad optics.  But the optics won’t improve much any time soon, since the administration has no answer to the question of how to reunite the families already separated—records of who belongs with whom, and where they are, have evidently not been systematically kept.  The prospect exists of some children never being reunited with their parents. There is also no answer as to how they are going to house the thousands of families who are not being separated. Callousness and inattention to human rights have become hallmarks of the Trump government, and now we can add incompetence to that list.]

Fear here, there, and everywhere

Donald Trump has fear working for him on both sides of the Mexican border: he galvanizes his base with fear of immigrant hoodlums, and scares refugees with the prospect of separating children from parents, and sending  asylum-seekers back to the horrors from which they fled

The U.S. “will not be a migrant camp,” asserted the President in defense of the zero-tolerance policy that has resulted in more than 2,400 children, many of them toddlers and some infants, being separated from their parents, beginning in April.  He added he would not let migrants “infest” America.

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