Lankford defends border bill amid GOP criticism: ‘Don’t just go off of Facebook’
Alexander Bolton – February 5, 2024
Lankford defends border bill amid GOP criticism: ‘Don’t just go off of Facebook’
Sen. James Lankford (Okla.), the lead GOP architect of the bipartisan Senate border security deal, pushed back on Republican critics, including Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), for rushing to condemn the legislation.
Lankford during an appearance on “Fox & Friends” also responded to the scathing criticism of the legislation by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who panned the proposal Sunday as the “Border Capitulation Bill” and more bluntly as a “crap-sandwich of a border bill.”
Lankford noted that Lee had previously insisted on giving senators at least three weeks to review the 370-page bill but is expressing opposition after having less than a day to study it.
“He needs three weeks to be able to read it, but he’s already opposed to it. So again, people have to be able to read it and go through it themselves. Don’t just go off of Facebook post somewhere on what the bill says,” Lankford said.
Lankford, who spent four months negotiating the legislation and said it “blew up” his Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s holidays, said it’s “unfortunate” that the Speaker has declared the Senate bill is “even worse than expected” and “dead on arrival” in the House.
The Oklahoma senator lamented Johnson’s condemnation of the bill without taking more time to digest reforms such as raising the standard of migrants seeking asylum, eliminating the backlog at immigration courts and granting the president new power to expel migrants and shut down the border.
“Unfortunate that he would step out and be able to see that right away, before, obviously, he has had a chance to be able to read it as well, and to be able to go through it,” he said of Johnson’s declaration that the bill has no chance of passing the House.
Lankford said Republicans need to make a decision about whether they want to enact some meaningful border security reforms into law or to let the border crisis continue unabated and allow an average of 10,000 people to steam into the country each day, many of them unvetted.
“The key aspect of this, again, is are we, as Republicans, going to have press conferences and complain the border’s bad and then intentionally leave it open after the worst month in American history in December?” Lankford argued.
“Now we’ve got to actually determine, are we going to just complain about things? Are we going to actually … change as many things as we can if we have the shot?” he said.
Lankford has told reporters that under the bill, once the daily average of migrants encountered at the border reaches 5,000, President Biden will be forced to shut down the border until the Department of Homeland Security regains operational control.
And he has dismissed talk among some GOP lawmakers that passing a bipartisan border deal will protect Biden from attacks over his immigration record.
“I’ve had some Republicans say, ‘Well, this will make Joe Biden whole [on immigration].’ I don’t think anyone is going to see Joe Biden as the border security president. I just don’t think there’s any chance of that. Because what we’ve seen the last three years is an open border like our country’s never experienced. So I don’t think when we pass this bill everybody’s going to suddenly think he’s the savior of the closed border,” Lankford told reporters last week.
ABC News hosts abruptly shuts down interview with J.D. Vance over right-wing nonsense
Gabriella Ferrigine – February 5, 2024
J.D. Vance; Donald Trump Drew Angerer/Getty Images
ABC News host George Stephanopolous abruptly ended a discussion with Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, on Sunday after the Republican alleged that a president would have the power to ignore the Supreme Court.
“Fire everyone in the government, then defy the Supreme Court? You think it’s OK to defy the Supreme Court?” the anchor asked after Vance said in 2021 that then-president Donald Trump should oust federal civil servants and disregard any Supreme Court ruling that instructed him to do otherwise. Vance at the time claimed Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The Chief Justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it,’” per The Daily Beast.
“That’s a fundamental component of our government, George, that whoever is in charge, agree or disagree with him, you have to follow the rules,” Vance said. “If those people aren’t following the rules, then of course, you’ve got to fire them.”
Stephanopolous in response pressed Vance to explicate whether he felt the president had to adhere to SCOTUS rulings.
“The Constitution also says the president must abide by legitimate Supreme Court rulings, doesn’t it?” Stephanopoulos asked, per ABC.
“The Constitution says that the Supreme Court can make rulings … but if the Supreme Court said the president of the United States can’t fire a general, that would be an illegitimate ruling,” Vance said.
“The Constitution says that the Supreme Court can make rulings but if the Supreme Court —and look, I hoped that they would not do this — but if the Supreme Court said the president of the United States can’t fire a general, that would be an illegitimate ruling,” Vance said. “The president has to have Article II prerogative under the Constitution to actually run the military as he sees fit. This is just basic constitutional legitimacy.”
“You’ve made it very clear — you believe the president can defy the Supreme Court,” Stephanopoulos replied. “Senator, thanks for your time this morning.”
Ahead of the conversation’s termination, Vance separately provided his thoughts on the 2020 election after Stephanopolous asked if Vance would have certified the election results if he had been acting as vice president at the time.
The GOP senator at first called the question “ridiculous” and claimed Stephanopolous was “obsessed with talking about this” before clarifying his thoughts.
“Do I think there were problems in 2020? Yes, I do,” Vance said. “If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there. That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that’s what we should have done.”
“So, he’s saying he would have engaged in the conspiracy to interfere with the lawful outcome of the election? Out loud?” tweeted former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance.
Former Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill., referred to Vance’s remarks as “So dangerous. So unconstitutional. So un-American. So cultish. So MAGA.”
“I’m glad JD Vance stated very explicitly that he believes we should shred American democracy and replace it with a system where the will of the voters is disregarded by partisan legislators,” MSNBC analyst Tim Miller quipped in a tweet. “A lot of Trump defenders talk around this and I appreciate his candor.”
Speaking candidly about Trump’s numerous legal woes — including the $83.3 million he was recently ordered to pay writer E. Jean Carroll in damages — Vance said he felt the former president had been partly wronged. Stephanopolous asked him to offer his thoughts on the argument that supporting Trump is, by extension supporting abusers — last spring Trump was found liable of sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, who has long said he assaulted her in a New York City department store dressing room in the 1990s.
“I think it’s actually very unfair to the victims of sexual assault to say that somehow their lives are being worse by electing Donald Trump for president when what he’s trying to do, I think, is restore prosperity,” Vance said. “If you actually look at so many of the court cases against Donald Trump, George, this is not about prosecuting Trump for something that he did. It’s about throwing him off the ballot because Democrats feel that they can’t beat him at the ballot box. And so, they’re trying to defeat him in court,” he added.
“I think most Americans recognize that this is not what we want to fight the 2024 election on. Let’s fight it over issues,” Vance said.
“So juries in New York City are not legitimate when they find someone liable for … defamation and assault?” Stephanopoulos asked after Vance seemed to wave off findings by “extremely left-wing jurisdictions.”
“Well, when the cases are funded by left-wing donors and when the case has absolute left-wing bias all over it, George, absolutely I think that we should call into question that particular conclusion,” Vance said.
Biden challenges House GOP to solve border crisis — or ‘keep playing politics’
Myah Ward and Jennifer Haberkorn – February 4, 2024
BLUE BELL, PENNSYLVANIA – JANUARY 5: U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event at Montgomery County Community College January 5, 2024 in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. In his first campaign event of the 2024 election season, Biden stated that democracy and fundamental freedoms are under threat if former U.S. President Donald Trump returns to the White House. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)More
President Joe Biden urged Congress to pass the bipartisan border deal unveiled Sunday night by Senate negotiators, ramping up the pressure on House Republicans who have repeatedly cast doubt on the bipartisan effort.
“Working with my administration, the United States Senate has done the hard work it takes to reach a bipartisan agreement. Now, House Republicans have to decide. Do they want to solve the problem? Or do they want to keep playing politics with the border?” Biden said in a lengthy statement.
The president’s response came not long after senators released the long-awaited $118 billion deal that would unleash stricter border and immigration policies, while sending billions of dollars to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan as well as the southern border. The bill’s introduction kicks off a sprint as the White House and negotiators work to sell the deal to Republicans and progressives before it heads for a procedural vote in the Senate scheduled for Wednesday.
The president said the agreement released Sunday includes some of the “toughest and fairest set of border reforms in decades,” and ones that he “strongly” supports. Biden asked Congress to pass the deal quickly — placing the fate of the deal in their hands. And he once again dared Republicans to reject the deal as it faces a make-or-break moment amid GOP fissures in both chambers.
“I’ve made my decision. I’m ready to solve the problem. I’m ready to secure the border. And so are the American people,” the president said. “I know we have our divisions at home but we cannot let partisan politics get in the way of our responsibilities as a great nation. I refuse to let that happen.”
The border has long been a challenging issue for the Biden White House. The president has seen record crossings since taking office in 2021, further straining a southern border already weighed down by irregular migration and an overwhelmed asylum processing system. Border Patrol agents reported a record 302,034 encounters with migrants over the southern border in December, according to figures released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
In addition, the fast-approaching 2024 election has piled on the pressure for Biden to take action on the border — to address the crisis but to also win the messaging battle on an issue Republicans frequently used to rally their base. Former President Donald Trump, Biden’s likely 2024 opponent, is sure to continue his efforts to combust a deal, adding another layer to efforts to sell the border legislation.
The legislation includes an authority that would effectively “close” the border if the number of migrant crossings reach a certain number over a certain period of time, although a limited number of people would still be allowed to apply for asylum at ports of entry.
Biden suggested publicly late last month that he’d be open to such an authority, vowing to “shut down the border” as soon as the bill was passed.
“I urge Congress to come together and swiftly pass this bipartisan agreement,” Biden said in Sunday night’s statement. “Get it to my desk so I can sign it into law immediately.”
Given the White House’s work with Senate Republicans on the legislation, Biden administration officials have focused their attention on Speaker Mike Johnson, casting him and House Republicans as the barrier to securing the border.
During the Senate talks, the Biden administration has tried to flip the long-held view — one borne out in public polling — that Republicans are better trusted on the issues of immigration and protecting the border. The administration argues the House GOP has blocked all of the president’s efforts to secure the border.
“Despite arguing for 6 straight years that presidents need new legal authority to secure the border, and despite claiming to agree with President Biden on the need for hiring more Border Patrol agents and deploying new fentanyl detection equipment, Speaker Johnson is now the chief impediment to all 3,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates wrote in a strategy memo released last week.
Johnson’s camp has blamed Biden for reversing Trump-era border regulations that led to an uptick in migrants crossing the border.
“In a desperate attempt to shift blame for a crisis their policies have induced, they have argued it’s a funding problem,” wrote Johnson spokesperson Raj Shah in a memo last month. “Clearly, they have no facts to back up their claim.”
The bill raises “credible fear” standards for migrants; if they are able to pass the more challenging and faster screening, the migrants would be released after full adjudication of their cases and be allowed to work immediately. The legislation would also provide 50,000 visas a year — a mix of family and employment visas, and include the Fend Off Fentanyl Act and the Afghan Adjustment Act.
A major sticking point in talks was the president’s humanitarian parole authority, which the administration uses to accept up to 30,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela each month. The legislation would not affect this program, which has been central to the administration’s border management strategy, including an agreement with Mexico to also accept 30,000 migrants a month from those four countries.
But the administration would no longer be able to offer parole grants to incentivize migrants to use the online app CBP One, which would curtail the president’s authority to allow more undocumented immigrants into the country.
“This agreement on border security and immigration does not include everything we have fought for over the past three years — and we will continue to fight for these priorities — but it shows: we can make the border more secure while preserving legal immigration, consistent with our values as a nation,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement.
“No, I would say maybe it’s going to be more than that,” Trump said when asked by Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures” whether he would consider imposing a 60% tariff, as The Washington Post has reported.
As president, Trump slapped tariffs of 25% on $50 billion of Chinese goods in June 2018. Beijing countered with its own tariffs, and the spiral continued until the two countries arrived at an agreement in 2020. The Biden administration has largely kept the Trump-era tariffs in place.
The former president also said he thought China would try to interfere in the 2024 presidential election.
“I think they will, and they won’t be interfering on my behalf. We should go same-day voting, paper ballots, voter ID and no mail-in ballots,” Trump said.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping told President Joe Biden that China would not interfere in the 2024 US presidential election when the two men met in November, CNN has reported. But FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Wednesday that Chinese hackers are preparing to “wreak havoc and cause real-world harm” to the US.
Trump also praised Xi, whom he described as “a very good friend of mine during my term,” and said, “I want China to do great, I do.”
Trump would not say whether he would intervene if China tried taking over Taiwan, arguing that doing so would “jeopardize my negotiating ability with China.”
China’s ruling Communist Party views Taiwan as part of its territory, despite never having controlled it, and leader Xi has not ruled out the use of military force to “reunify” the island with the mainland.
The US, meanwhile, is obligated under the Taiwan Relations Act to provide Taiwan with the military means to defend itself, something Beijing regards as interference in its internal affairs.
CNN’s Jack Forrest and Brad Lendon contributed to this report.
Former prosecutors: “Screw up” by Judge Cannon could lay groundwork for Jack Smith appeal
Tatyana Tandanpolie – February 1, 2024
Jack Smith Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon‘s next move in Donald Trump’s federal classified documents case could determine whether the government will have to seek an appeal, former federal prosecutors argued following the Trump-appointee’s meeting with special counsel Jack Smith Wednesday to discuss which classified materials will be excluded from the trial.
Ex-U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance explained that given that the case is about illegal retention of classified materials and not the “nature of the classified information,” the proceedings pertaining to their presence in the trial under Section Four of the Classified Information and Procedures Act should have been “straightforward” as they are routine for a case like this.
Cannon’s schedule for the CIPA Section Four proceedings, for which she scheduled hearings for mid-February, has been unnecessarily drawn out, Vance argued Sunday, noting that Cannon could have held them earlier without delay. Following Wednesday’s meeting, Cannon should “follow that simple path forward” for these types of proceedings, Vance added during a Wednesday MSNBC appearance.
“Where we will see fireworks is if she does not,” the MSNBC legal analyst argued. “If she tries to let the Trump lawyers, for instance, look at this, then there will undoubtedly be an appeal. And of course, the real ball game is what gets put into trial in a courtroom, ultimately.
Former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissman agreed that if Cannon “screws this up, to be blunt, this is the kind of issue that I would imagine the government would take an appeal so that they could have the 11th Circuit hear it.”
Weissmann went on to detail the circumstances that would prompt the government to appeal, including if Cannon drastically delays the proceedings or if she rejects Smith’s requests for redactions or non-classified summaries to protect the sensitive intelligence.
“Nuclear secrets” or “military plans” the documents could contain are “the kind of data that of course the government would be saying ‘I do not want that to be revealed,” Weissmann told MSNBC.
Putin’s official financial disclosure claims he earns just $175K a year and owns a couple of apartments and a parking spot
Mia Jankowicz – January 31, 2024
Putin’s official financial disclosure is out, and it’s almost comically modest.
It says his assets include a couple of apartments, some old cars, a camping trailer, and a parking spot.
It makes no mention of the vast palaces and superyachts widely reported to be under his control.
President Vladimir Putin’s latest financial disclosure has been released, declaring a modest set of assets that almost certainly does not reflect his true financial position.
The disclosure is one of the formalities associated with registering as a presidential candidate, which Putin did on Monday, ahead of Russia’s March 17 elections.
The latest financial disclosure makes no reference to the multiple palaces and superyachts said to be owned or controlled by Putin.
Drone footage by the Dossier Center showing what is allegedly a luxurious home belonging to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Karelia, northern Russia.Dossier Center
It described the property as comprising “three modern-style houses, two helicopter pads, several yacht piers, a trout farm, and a farm with cows for the production of marble beef, as well as a personal waterfall.”
The fulminations surrounding the world’s biggest pop icon — and girlfriend of Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce — reached the stratosphere after Kansas City made it to the Super Bowl.
By Jonathan Weisman – January 31, 2024
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce after the Chiefs’ victory on Sunday. They are the focus of right-wing vitriol and conspiracy theories. Credit…Julio Cortez/Associated Press
For football fans eager to see a new team in the Super Bowl, the conference championship games on Sunday that sent the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers back to the main event of American sports culture were sorely disappointing.
But one thing is new: Taylor Swift. And she is driving the movement behind Donald Trump bonkers.
The fulminations surrounding the world’s biggest pop icon — and girlfriend of Travis Kelce, the Chiefs’ star tight end — reached the stratosphere after Kansas City made it to the Super Bowl for the fourth time in five years, and the first time since Ms. Swift joined the team’s entourage.
The conspiracy theories coming out of the Make America Great Again contingent were already legion: that Ms. Swift is a secret agent of the Pentagon; that she is bolstering her fan base in preparation for her endorsement of President Biden’s re-election; or that she and Mr. Kelce are a contrived couple, assembled to boost the N.F.L. or Covid vaccines or Democrats or whatever.
“I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month,” Vivek Ramaswamy, the conspiratorial presidential candidate, turned Trump surrogate, pondered on social media on Monday. “And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall.”
The pro-Trump broadcaster Mike Crispi led off on Sunday by claiming that the National Football League is “rigged” in order to spread “Democrat propaganda”: “Calling it now: KC wins, goes to Super Bowl, Swift comes out at the halftime show and ‘endorses’ Joe Biden with Kelce at midfield.”
Other detractors of Ms. Swift among Mr. Trump’s biggest fans include one of his lawyers, Alina Habba, one of his biggest conspiracy theorists, Jack Posobiec, and other MAGA luminaries like Laura Loomer and Charlie Kirk, who leads a pro-Trump youth organization, Turning Point USA.
The right has been fuming about Ms. Swift since September, when she urged her fans on Instagram to register to vote, and the online outfit Vote.org reported a surge of 35,000 registrations in response. Ms. Swift had embarked on a world tour that helped make her a billionaire. Gavin Newsom, the California governor, praised her as “profoundly powerful.” And then Time magazine made her Person of the Year in December, kicking off another round of MAGA indignation.
Ms. Swift embarked on a worldwide stadium tour last year, which included a May stop at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Credit…Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times
Some of the Monday morning quarterbacking has been downright silly, including speculation that Ms. Swift is after Mr. Kelce for his money. (Her net worth exceeds $1 billion, a different universe than the athlete’s merely wealthy status.)
Other accusations appear to be driven by fear and grounded in some truth, or at least in her command of her 279 million Instagram followers: that she has enormous influence, and has supported Democrats in the past. For much of her extensive music career, Ms. Swift avoided politics, but in 2018, she endorsed two Democrats in Tennessee, where she owns two homes: former Gov. Phil Bredesen, who was running for the Senate against then-Representative Marsha Blackburn, and Jim Cooper, a House member who has since retired.
“I always have and always will cast my vote based on which candidate will protect and fight for the human rights I believe we all deserve in this country,” she wrote on social media. “I believe in the fight for L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and that any form of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender is WRONG.”
She added, “I believe that the systemic racism we still see in this country towards people of color is terrifying, sickening and prevalent.”
The alarm bells were loud enough to pull Mr. Trump into loudly backing Ms. Blackburn: “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her,” he said at the time, knowing all too well how influential Ms. Swift could be. “Let’s say that I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?”
He probably liked her even less in 2020 when she criticized his pandemic response, and then endorsed Mr. Biden.
While her early pop music may have mainly attracted teens and preteens, those fans have reached voting age, and her music has grown more sophisticated with the albums “Evermore” and “Folklore” to match her millennial roots and her fans’ taste.
In September, Ms. Swift urged her fans on Instagram to register to vote, yielding a surge of 35,000 registrations on the website Vote.org. Credit…Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times
Much of the Swift paranoia has lurked on the MAGA fringes, with people like Ms. Loomer, the conspiracy theorist from Florida who declared in December that “2024 will be MAGA vs Swifties” and Mr. Kirk, who declared in November that Ms. Swift would “come out for the presidential election” after Democrats had another strong showing in an election that demonstrated the issue of abortion motivated voters to the polls.
“All the Swifties want is swift abortion,” he said.
Then Swift-bashing reached Fox News in mid-January. The host Jesse Watters suggested the superstar was a Defense Department asset engaging in psychological warfare. He tied Ms. Swift’s political voice with her boyfriend’s Pfizer endorsement to the remarkable success of her Eras tour, which bolstered local economies and landed her on the cover of Time.
“Have you ever wondered why or how she blew up like this?” Mr. Watters wondered on air. “Well, around four years ago, the Pentagon psychological operations unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset during a NATO meeting.”
Andrea Hailey, the chief executive of Vote.org, made the most of the Fox News criticism, saying the organization’s partnership with Ms. Swift “is helping all Americans make their voices heard at the ballot box,” adding that the star is “not a psy-op or a Pentagon asset.”
But her appearance on the field with Mr. Kelce in Baltimore after the Chiefs beat the Ravens on Sunday, complete with a kiss and a hug, appears to have sent conservatives into a fit of apoplexy that may only grow in the run-up to Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas Feb. 11.
The feelings are so strong that Fox News ran a segment on Sunday lamenting that Ms. Swift’s private “jet belches tons of CO2 emissions,” showing a sudden awareness of the leading cause of global warming.
Mr. Ramaswamy said his Super Bowl conjecture was dead serious.
“What your kind of people call ‘conspiracy theories,’ I simply call an amalgam of collective incentives hiding in plain sight,” he said.
The White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stoked speculation still more by invoking the Hatch Act, which prohibits political actions by civil servants, in declining to answer whether Mr. Biden would be appearing with Ms. Swift.
“I’m just going to leave it there,” she said Monday. “I’m not going to get into the president’s schedule at all from here, as it relates to the 2024 elections.”
The Trump campaign, which had initially planned to ignore the frenzy, dispatched Karoline Leavitt, a campaign spokeswoman, to dismiss concerns about a potential Biden endorsement.
“I don’t think this endorsement will save him from the calamity” of his record, she said.
Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.
Jonathan Weisman is a politics writer, covering campaigns with an emphasis on economic and labor policy. He is based in Chicago.
Ukraine Needs American Weapons, Not More GOP Drama
The GOP’s moral collapse threatens global security.
By Tom Nichols – January 31, 2024
Anadolu / Getty
Republicans need to recover their senses about the dire moral and strategic tests Ukraine and the West face in Europe.
A Test of Will and Commitment
Wars test people and weapons on a battlefield, but eventual victory rests on much more than combat. Wars also stress-test political institutions, ideas, and the courage of entire societies. At this moment, the United States is on the verge of failing a challenge of will and commitment, much to the delight of the neo-fascist Russian regime that has turned Ukraine’s fields and homes into an immense abattoir. President Joe Biden, most of NATO, and many other nations recognize the crisis, but the world could face a Russian victory—and an eventual escalation of Russian aggression against Europe—solely because of the ongoing drama and inane bickering within the Republican Party.
The GOP, the party of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, once supported the bipartisan American understanding that U.S. leadership in the world was both a strategic and a moral imperative, especially in the great struggle with the Soviet Union. Reagan, however, supercharged the idea of the Cold War as a moral crusade. When he talked about the need for the West to oppose an “evil empire,” he meant it—and as we found out years later, his words stung Soviet leaders. As one adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev later admitted, Reagan’s rhetorical attack did not change much at the very top in the Kremlin, but for many of the people who worked in Soviet foreign-policy circles, “this term and this propaganda was perceived as punishment for what we did in Afghanistan. In other words, we felt that we deserved it.”
Soviet leaders deserved it then and Russian leaders deserve it now. Reagan’s detractors will point to his policies in Central America and elsewhere as examples of what can happen when righteous fixation on noble ends leads to the justification of bloody and repulsive means. But Reagan—like Jimmy Carter before him—was right to view opposition to the Kremlin as both strategically necessary and morally just, as it is again today. Biden’s policy of steadfast support for Ukraine wisely continues that tradition.
(One of Carter’s speechwriters told me years ago that, as you might expect, Carter never liked being compared to Reagan. But Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was as much a Cold War hawk as almost anyone in the Reagan administration, and Carter infuriated the Soviets so badly that by 1980 the Kremlin, according to the former Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, was rooting for Reagan to win because it thought Carter and Brzezinski were so dangerously bellicose.)
Reagan understood the Cold War as a moral issue, but today’s GOP is incapable of understanding anything as a moral issue. Indeed, the Republican Party is defined now almost entirely by its dedication to a cult of personality, the relentless quest for raw power, and the ongoing effort to institutionalize minority rule. It functions not as a political party but as an amoral claque whose members are dedicated only to their mutual protection.
Ukraine, of course, is an object of special hostility for Republicans because that besieged nation is inextricably bound up in Trump’s first impeachment. Some in the GOP also admire Russian President Vladimir Putin; Trump speaks of the Kremlin dictator in terms that would have made Reagan furious and disgusted. But nothing, it seems, can get through the Republican deflector shields powered by two of the strongest forces in the world: resentment and self-interest.
Money to help Ukraine is, for now, still tied to legislation regarding the situation on the U.S. southern border, but Biden has already surrendered on that issue: He said on Saturday that, if Congress sent him the bill that Republicans have been working on, “I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly.” (He is also cleverly using his legal authority to send surplus American weapons to allies—in this case, Greece—who can use these surplus U.S. arms to replenish their stocks while they send their older weapons to Ukraine.) But Republicans aren’t interested in fixing the border or helping Ukraine—not if any of it helps Joe Biden, a detestable position that abandons millions of people to slaughter under Russian guns simply for the sake of good press from the GOP’s infotainment system.
To their credit, some Republicans are trying to do the right thing. I was critical of Oklahoma Senator James Lankford on Monday for answering a question about Trump’s fitness to be president with a mouthful of mush that was, if I may paraphrase a Bible verse I’m sure the senator knows well, neither hot nor cold but lukewarm. But when it comes to the border and Ukraine, Lankford (along with some of his Senate GOP colleagues) is on the right side of both policy and history.
What, however, does a GOP senator gain by being on the right side of anything? In Lankford’s case, it earned him censure from his own state’s Republican Party. For others, it means facing an electorate that is now being flooded with news about Deep State Agent Taylor Swift instead of whether America and Europe can hold back a savage—and nuclear-armed—enemy.
The Republicans now wallowing in conspiracy weirdness and jumping at Trump’s commands are risking a mistake, in the words of CIA Director William Burns, “of historic proportions.” As the GOP plays games, the Russians continue blowing apart homes and shredding human beings, including their own hapless conscripts. The killing goes on every day, driven by a cruel and petty paranoid in Moscow and supported by a coterie of cowards who issue unhinged threats from behind the safety of the Kremlin’s walls.
Changes are afoot in the Ukrainian high command; TheWashington Post reported today that the top Ukrainian commander, General Valery Zaluzhny, is about to be replaced because of his ongoing disagreements with President Volodymyr Zelensky about strategy, mobilization, and other issues. Such moments, as retired Australian Major General Mick Ryan explained in a cogent thread on X yesterday, are a normal part of the civil-military tensions that inevitably arise in wartime.
Some Republicans, driven by their hatred of Zelensky, will no doubt seize on any news from Kyiv as an excuse to hold back aid, but the Ukrainians don’t need more drama from the self-absorbed GOP. They need brave and clear-eyed friends in the West who understand what is at stake, both for the security of the world and the defense of freedom. They need more than our good wishes: They need ammunition, and they need it now.
In Biden’s pledge to ‘shut down’ border, a stunning political shift
Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN – January 29, 2024
President Joe Biden’s evolution on the key election issue of immigration entered a new phase when he promised to “shut down the border right now” if given new powers by Congress.
The deeper policy context of the comments, delivered at a campaign event in South Carolina Saturday and in a statement from the White House on Friday, is that Biden wants to resuscitate a bipartisan deal to pair new border powers with additional military aid for Ukraine and Israel.
But the Trump-like rhetoric from the Democratic president – and the fact that Democrats are not even talking about a pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants currently in the country – is also an important political admission as immigration-focused Donald Trump zeroes in on the Republican presidential nomination and the border crisis reverberates through the country and into Washington, DC.
Biden is willing to offer concessions so he can make deals, and Trump wants to keep this as a campaign issue.
Trump wants to kill bipartisan deal
“As the leader of our party, there is zero chance I will support this horrible, open-borders betrayal of America,” Trump said in Nevada on Saturday, although future Republican presidents would also benefit from the new power Biden is seeking.
Trump doesn’t think the president needs new power to shut the border. He has promised that, if elected, he will act as “dictator for one day” to do it, and he’s actively working against the bipartisan effort even though parts of it are straight out of his policy playbook.
“The reality is that this includes many provisions that when Donald Trump was president, he hoped would be made into law,” said CNN’s Lauren Fox, appearing Monday on “Inside Politics.” These Trump-friendly priorities, she said, include making it much more difficult for migrants to seek asylum in the US and increasing the speed at which asylum cases can be processed in immigration courts.
Biden’s acknowledgment
CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, a White House reporter who is also an expert on the issue of immigration, documents Biden’s shift.
“Biden took office pledging to restore asylum and manage the border in a ‘humane’ way,” Alvarez writes. “But his administration has faced the harsh realities and challenges at the US-Mexico border amid record migration across the Western Hemisphere — making it a political vulnerability seized on by Republicans.”
A man crosses the Rio Grande River from Mexico to collect clothing and other items left on the Texas banks of Shelby Park at the US-Mexico border in Eagle Pass, Texas, on January 12, 2024. – Kaylee Greenlee Beal/Reuters
Permanent power for the president
The new permanent power pushed by Biden and Senate negotiators is in line with temporary, Covid-era restrictions originally put in place during Trump’s administration, but which lapsed last year on Biden’s watch.
Following Trump’s lead, rather than work with the president to secure the border, House Republicans have rejected even the idea of a Senate compromise and are gearing up to impeach Biden’s secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, for not applying current law to turn away more people at the border.
Still no deal in writing
The framing of this issue may end up being more important than the policy itself. The bipartisan group of senators has not released text for their compromise, but they insist it does exist.
“We do have a bipartisan deal. We’re finishing the text right now,” Sen. Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat who is a key negotiator on the deal, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
“The question is whether Republicans are going to listen to Donald Trump, who wants to preserve chaos at the border because he thinks that it’s a winning political issue for him,” said Murphy, adding the proposal would give the president, Republican or Democrat, permanent new emergency powers.
What we know
While the text of the bill has not been finalized, Biden ticked off the major points during that appearance in South Carolina:
“It includes an additional 1,300 Border Patrols — we need more agents on the border;
375 immigration judges to judge whether or not someone can come or not come and be fair about it;
1,600 asylum officers;
and over 100 cutting-edge inspection machines to help detect and stop fentanyl coming in.”
GOP negotiator censured by his own party
Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, the top Republican negotiator, is already facing blowback even though the deal has not been publicly released.
The Oklahoma Republican Party voted over the weekend to censure Lankford and demanded that he abandon the bipartisan talks.
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Lankford was pressed about the new authority for Biden, which would be triggered if there’s an average of 5,000 migrant crossings per day over the course of a full week. Lankford said this would not normalize 5,000 migrant crossings per day. And for context, border officials were dealing with more than 10,000 crossings per day for most of December.
“This is set up for if you have a rush of people coming at the border, the border closes down – no one gets in,” he said. “This is not someone standing at the border with a little clicker, saying, ‘I’m going to let one more in, we’re at 4,999 and then it has to stop.’ It is a shutdown of the border, and everyone actually gets turned around.”
Democrats waiting for details too
Rank-and-file Democrats would surely be frustrated with such a compromise, which does not address their long-term immigration priorities, like giving permanent legal status to the children of undocumented immigrants who were raised in the US or paving a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who have built lives and paid taxes in the US.
“We have milestones and we have a path to get there, but we were never going to get a path to citizenship in this bill,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday.
Frustration in US cities
Meanwhile, mayors of Democratic cities continue to raise the alarm about an untenable wave of migrants bused north from border states and draining their infrastructure.
The public view of the current immigration situation has shifted
Nearly half – 45% of Americans in a CBS News poll released early this month – said the situation at the border is a crisis.
And a strong majority of the public – 63% now compared with 55% in September – said the Biden administration should be tougher on immigrants crossing at the border. More than two-thirds, 68%, said they disapproved of Biden’s handling of the border, although that does not translate into support for Republicans. Sixty-five percent of Americans said they disapproved of congressional Republicans’ handling of the issue.
Americans are still broadly supportive of immigration, however. In a Gallup poll released last July, 68% said the overall effect of immigration was a good thing for the US, compared with just 27% who said it was a bad thing.
After publication, White House spokesperson Angelo Fernandez Hernandez provided this statement:
“The American people overwhelmingly agree with what President Biden underlined in his Day One reform plan: that our immigration system is broken and we have an imperative to secure the border and treat migrants with dignity,” Fernandez Hernandez said in an email. “After opposing the record border security funding President Biden has delivered every year of his administration, House Republicans are blocking the border security resources President Biden is fighting for in order to hire more Border Patrol officers and invest in cutting edge technology to detect fentanyl.”
Republicans tried to hammer Biden on immigration. But they turned into a circular firing squad
Eric Garcia – January 29, 2024
(Getty Images)
President Joe Biden might finally be running out of patience with Republicans when it comes to negotiations surrounding an agreement to restrict immigration in exchange for aid to Ukraine.
After weeks of negotiations, Republicans hit a snag last week as former president Donald Trump came out swinging against any agreement. That forced Senate GOP leadership to recalibrate. On top of that, House Speaker Mike Johnson — who leads a far more rabidly anti-immigrant and anti-Ukraine conference than Mitch McConnell leads in the Senate — wrote in a letter to colleagues that the agreement “would have been dead on arrival in the House anyway.”
On Friday evening, Biden released a statement saying that the proposed legislation would give him the ability to “shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed” and that he would invoke the authority the day he signs the bill into law.
Of course, being able to “shut down the border” is an amorphous term and the definition of shutting it down lies in the eye of the beholder. Nevertheless, Biden wants to have some kind of agreement not only because he wants to free up dollars to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia: A Harvard CAPS-Harris poll from last week showed that more voters consider immigration their top policy concern than the economy.
Republicans have battered Biden on the border ever since he took office, essentially flipping the dynamic after Donald Trump faced numerous negative headlines about family separation and the infamous Mexican border wall. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has even bused migrants to cities with Democratic mayors. That particular move led New York’s mayor Eric Adams to openly criticize Biden.
But Republicans might have gotten high on their own supply when it comes to immigration. As Inside Washingtonexplained last week, Republicans delaying passing an immigration bill to allow Trump to benefit makes it hard for them to argue that the influx of migrants is a crisis that requires immediate addressing. If passing a bill can wait 12 months, then it’s hardly urgent.
Right-wing opposition to the immigration legislation also means that Republicans are turning against each other.
On Sunday, Fox News host Shannon Bream asked Senator James Lankford, the chief Republican negotiator, why he would give Biden the “cover of this deal” which she said would allow people into the United States. Lankford responded by saying four months ago, Republicans united to say they would demand changes in policy “and now it’s interesting a few months later, when we’re finally getting to the end, they’re like, just kidding. We actually don’t want a change in law because of a presidential election year.”
Lankford, a hardline conservative from Oklahoma, has staked much of his credibility on the legislation. So he’s understandably frustrated to see opposition. And shortly after making his case, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, a Trump ally, said on the same Fox program that Lankford was on a “suicide mission.” That also gives Scott the added benefit of knifing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, with whom he has a tenuous relationship.
Republicans likely had a chance to pass the legislation before Trump returned to his role of being the de facto nominee. But his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire — as well as the coalescing of the GOP around him — has meant that they have to defer to what he dictates.
The ultimate sign that Republicans might be overconfident is their plan to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Why? It’s not entirely clear. But what is apparent is that Johnson, who is a little more than three months into the job, has chosen to appeal to the most far-right factions of his conference.
Holding a series of sideshow hearings for a secretary most people have never heard of will do little to shed light on whether laws are being enforced at the border. But it will allow figures like committee member Marjorie Taylor Greene to pontificate and get more television air time. Indeed, Greene came out strongly against the bipartisan bill in the Senate, despite the fact no text exists.
It appears that Biden is attempting to create a foil to the feud. By saying he would willingly close the border if given the means to do so, he wants to put the pressure on Republicans to pass the bill. If not, he hopes to hammer them for not giving him the power to curb immigration into the US.
