monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have not yet rounded up the votes needed to pass immigration legislation they plan to take up later on Thursday, a member of the House Republican leadership said.

“Well, we’re working with our members. Obviously we have to get 218 votes, and we’re working hard to get there,” Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the head of the House Republican Conference, told Fox News Channel.

“We’re not there yet, but we’re working on it,” she said.

Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, was indicted Thursday on charges that she defrauded the Israeli government of close to $100,000 in personal expenses, largely by hiring some of Jerusalem’s best-known chefs to cater hundreds of private meals while covering up the fact that the prime minister’s residence already employed a full-time cook.

This is not the first time that the expensive tastes of Mrs. Netanyahu, 59, have come back to haunt her husband, who also faces indictment in a web of corruption scandals.

For three decades, Steve Schmidt has played at the highest levels of Republican politics, as a top strategist in presidential campaigns and as an adviser to other GOP candidates. He has also been one of the most vociferous critics of President Trump. On Wednesday, he made that opposition even more emphatic, renouncing his party affiliation and urging Americans to vote for Democrats in the November elections.

“Trump’s election did not spell doom for the Republican Party,” Schmidt said by telephone Wednesday while traveling. “The reality is that our Founders always predicted that one day there would be a president like Trump, and that’s why they designed the system of government the way they designed it. What they never imagined is the utter abdication of a co-equal branch of government, which we’re seeing now. . . . The definition of conservatism now is the requirement of complete and utter obedience to the leader.”

...The [GOP], he said, “is irredeemable,” at risk of going the way of the Whig Party or, as it now is in California, running third in registration behind Democrats and “decline to state.”

Schmidt will not enroll in the Democratic Party. He will change his registration from Republican to independent. But in a two-party system, he sees the Democrats as the lone hope to prevent an ultimate unraveling of democratic norms. “The Democratic Party is called to be the sentinel of American democracy and liberty,” he said. “It is beyond bone-chilling to consider what happens if that party fails in that task, in that duty.”

Trump to Propose Government Reorganization, Targeting Safety Net Programs
By Glenn Thrush and Erica L. Green
June 20, 2018

WASHINGTON — President Trump plans to propose a reorganization of the federal government as early as Thursday that includes a possible merger of the Education and Labor Departments, coupled with a reshuffling of other domestic agencies to make them easier to cut or revamp, according to administration officials briefed on the proposal.

The plan, which will most likely face significant opposition in Congress from Democrats and some Republicans, includes relocating many social safety net programs into a new megadepartment, which would replace the
Department of Health and Human Services and possibly include the word “welfare” in its title.

Mr. Trump and his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, the architect of the plan, have sought to redefine as welfare subsistence benefit programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and housing aid. It is part of a rebranding effort, championed by conservative think tanks and House Republicans, to link them to unpopular direct-cash assistance programs that have traditionally been called welfare.

“They have been using the word welfare because it is pejorative,” said Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. “The programs you can call welfare are actually very small in comparison to SNAP, which is an income support necessary to help families, workers and millions of kids.”

At the heart of the plan is expected to be an attempt to shift SNAP, which serves more than 42 million poor and working-class Americans, to the new agency from the Agriculture Department. Conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation and Koch-related entities, have long sought to de-link food aid from agriculture in hopes of cutting costs.

Senate Republicans, who have already rejected a more modest Trump administration attempt to increase work requirements for SNAP recipients, are unlikely to sign off on the shift, which was first reported by Politico.

As recently as earlier this month, Mr. Mulvaney was also considering merging the Labor and Education Departments, either in the new welfare agency or in a new stand-alone department, according to a person with knowledge of his plans.

Calls to the White House and its budget office were not immediately returned.

The recommendations also include a number of less contentious proposals to streamline the government.

Mr. Mulvaney’s proposal is, in part, a back-to-the-future bureaucratic move. From 1953 to 1979, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare housed most of the nation’s social welfare and economic support programs. It was abolished by Congress under President Jimmy Carter, and split into the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education, in recognition that no single department could manage all of the old department’s functions...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/us/politics/trump-welfare-department-reorganization.html

In defending its “zero tolerance” border policy that has caused the separation of families, the Trump administration has argued that the Obama and Bush administrations did this too. That’s misleading. Experts say there were some separations under previous administrations, but no blanket policy to prosecute parents and, therefore, separate them from their children.

“Bush and Obama did not have policies that resulted in the mass separation of parents and children like we’re seeing under the current administration,” Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, told us.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said at a June 18 press briefing: “The Obama administration, the Bush administration all separated families. … They did — their rate was less than ours, but they absolutely did do this. This is not new.”

Nielsen went on to explain that there is indeed something new, as we wrote in another article on this topic. Under a “zero tolerance policy” on illegal immigration announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in early April, the administration is now referring all illegal border crossings for criminal prosecution. By doing that, parents have been separated from their children, because children can’t be held in detention facilities for adults.
DHS told us that 2,342 children were separated from their parents between May 5 and June 9.

But DHS couldn’t provide any statistics on how many children may have been separated from their parents under the Obama administration.
Instead, when we asked, it pointed to numbers that show 21 percent of apprehended adults were referred for prosecution under President Barack Obama. From fiscal year 2010 to fiscal 2016, there were 2,362,966 adults apprehended illegally crossing the Southern border, and 492,970 were referred for prosecution, those figures show. But that doesn’t tell us anything about how many children may have been separated from their parents under Obama.
And we don’t have such statistics to compare the past to the present.
“We have not seen any data out of the current or prior administration on how many cases that were prosecuted were individuals who arrived with minors,” Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told us in an email. “So we cannot make any guesses or assumptions about how many separations based on prosecution there were or are.”

Brown said that even though DHS says 2,342 children have been separated from their parents in about one month, we don’t know what percentage of those cases are due to prosecutions for illegal crossings, and how many are due to other policies that would require separations — such as suspicion of trafficking, another outstanding warrant or insufficient proof of a family relationship.
We asked DHS if it would provide such a breakdown, but we haven’t received a response.

MPI’s Pierce said that the likely reason data aren’t available on child separations under previous administrations is because it was done in “really limited circumstances” such as suspicion of trafficking or other fraud.

“Previous administrations used family detention facilities, allowing the whole family to stay together while awaiting their deportation case in immigration court, or alternatives to detention, which required families to be tracked but released from custody to await their court date,” Brown and her co-author, Tim O’Shea, wrote in an explainer piece for the Bipartisan Policy Center’s website. “Some children may have been separated from the adults they entered with, in cases where the family relationship could not be established, child trafficking was suspected, or there were not sufficient family detention facilities available. … However, the zero-tolerance policy is the first time that a policy resulting in separation is being applied across the board.”

Jeh Johnson, DHS secretary under the Obama administration, told NPR earlier this month that he couldn’t say that family separations “never happened” during his tenure. “There may have been some exigent situation, some emergency. There may have been some doubt about whether the adult accompanying the child was in fact the parent of the child. I can’t say it never happened but not as a matter of policy or practice. It’s not something that I could ask our Border Patrol or our immigration enforcement personnel to do,” Johnson said.

The Obama administration faced a surge of unaccompanied children from Central America trying to cross the border in 2014. Cecilia Muñoz, director of the Obama administration’s Domestic Policy Council, told the New York Times this month that a multi-agency team was considering “every possible idea” at the time, including separating families. “I do remember looking at each other like, ‘We’re not going to do this, are we?’ We spent five minutes thinking it through and concluded that it was a bad idea,” the Times quoted Muñoz saying. “The morality of it was clear — that’s not who we are.”

Brown told us that while the Obama administration “did separate some families,” it also tried to detain families together. In 2016, a court ruling limited how long children with their parents could be in family detention centers. That ruling confirmed that a 1997 settlement applied to both unaccompanied and accompanied minors, as we’ve explained before.

“At that point,” Brown said, “family detention dwindled and most families were released into the US, either on their own with a notice to appear or under Alternatives to Detention, which could be an ankle bracelet or a supervised monitoring provision where they had to check in with ICE regularly until their immigration court hearing.”

On June 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing Nielsen to keep families in custody together “during the pendency of any criminal improper entry or immigration proceedings involving their members” at least “to the extent permitted by law and subject to the availability of appropriations.”

Heartlessness toward poor immigrants, now heartlessness toward struggling Americans...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel,

The dramatic about-face comes just one day after President Trump signed an executive order ending his administration’s widely denounced practice of separating families apprehended at the Mexico border.

Trump’s order said the government would maintain a “zero tolerance” policy toward those who break the law, but a senior U.S. official, when asked to explain how the federal government would change enforcement practices, told The Washington Post that Border Patrol agents have been instructed to stop sending parents with children to federal courthouses for prosecution.

“We’re suspending prosecutions of adults who are members of family units until ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) can accelerate resource capability to allow us to maintain custody,” the official said.

Trump administration will stop prosecuting migrant parents who cross the border illegally with children, official says

Quote:

The dramatic about-face comes just one day after President Trump signed an executive order ending his administration’s widely denounced practice of separating families apprehended at the Mexico border.

Trump’s order said the government would maintain a “zero tolerance” policy toward those who break the law, but a senior U.S. official, when asked to explain how the federal government would change enforcement practices, told The Washington Post that Border Patrol agents have been instructed to stop sending parents with children to federal courthouses for prosecution.

“We’re suspending prosecutions of adults who are members of family units until ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) can accelerate resource capability to allow us to maintain custody,” the official said.

The spin we're about to experience is going to be intense.

And the First lady Melania Trump visits the U.S.-Mexico border amid crisis over migrant children separated from parents ...

Do you ever get the feeling that this administration just doesn't know what the living **** they are doing?