Republicans want to investigate "windmills" but instead they must save DACA

An echo opinion letter published in the San-Diego Union Tribune newspaper, in California.  

Published on November 24, 2022

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals* program is in grave peril, and Congress must act before the end of the year to create permanent protections for the hundreds of thousands of people who were brought to this country as children, making it the only place they have ever called home. DACA recipients, “Dreamers,” are our health care providers, teachers and care workers.

They hold essential jobs that strengthen our communities. Ending DACA could leave labor market sectors already experiencing shortages in even worse conditions.

Moreover, without permanent protections, families will be separated, which is heartless and cruel. An estimated 300,000 U.S. children have at least one parent who is a DACA recipient.

Unless Congress acts, these children could lose their parents to detention or deportation! This is an opportunity for bipartisanship in Congress to support Dreamers and keep families together!

Americans have supported a legislative fix for nearly a decade. It is long overdue and critical to our community.

Beverly Marston in Carlsbad, California

*Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) provides temporary relief from deportation (deferred action) and work authorization to certain young undocumented immigrants. DACA was created on June 15, 2012, by then-Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano.

Although Republicans already put out fake news releases about how they want to bring their version of accountability to Congress, their agenda is the equivalent of fighting the Cervantes version of windmills. Instead of creating problems, the growing old party needs to resolve them.

Stop sedition! Vote! to kick out the seditionists!

Thank you to the San Diego Union-Tribune and the editor Chris Reed for this echo opinion!

Fed up by the four (IMO miserable !) years of Donald Trump and eight years of what they perceived as Barack Obama’s cautious moderation, progressive Democrats reacted to their party’s taking control of the White House and Congress last winter with the belief they had a mandate for massive change.

A perfect example was the revised version of the For the People Act. With at least 19 Republican-controlled state legislatures taking steps to make voting more difficult, Democrats stood up for the right to vote. The bill would take unprecedented steps to roll back GOP moves to limit early and absentee voting and to shut down many polls and limit their hours.

But the measure, which passed in the House on a near party-line vote in March, also included many provisions that had nothing to do with voting rights and everything to do with political power. 

Moreover, the For the People Act targets the Supreme Court’s 2010, Citizens United decision saying corporations (and labor unions) have free speech rights that allow them to spend as much as they want on independent political action committees. Specifically, it requires the disclosure of donors to such committees. The American Civil Liberties Union said this “could harm political advocacy and expose nonprofit donors to harassment and threats of violence should their support for organizations be subject to forced disclosure.” 

So, the For the People Act would also set up direct public financing for congressional campaigns.

Now, both these ideas may have broad appeal to Americans who believe corporations have too much clout. But you don’t have to be a Republican partisan to see the proposals as about changing the basics of political speech rights and campaign financing to help one side over the other. Unlike sticking up for voting rights, this doesn’t seem inherently idealistic at all. Instead, its motivating spirit is not that different from, well, making voting more difficult: the pursuit of power.

But whatever their merits, the For the People Act and the related John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act are unlikely to ever pass the Senate unless filibuster rules are changed. The left’s anger with filibuster defenders Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Arizona, isn’t changing their minds.

What’s needed is a mature appreciation that politics is the art of the possible. It’s also time for people to figure out that Trump and some other Republicans’ open interest in manipulating election results is a much more immediate and dangerous threat to U.S. democracy than limiting access to voting. Here’s how Trump put it Jan. 16: “Sometimes the vote-counter is more important than the candidate.” Unless you believe Trump’s hallucinatory claim that he was the victim of mass election fraud in 2020, that’s chilling.

This is why a powerful case can be made that the most important proposal before Congress is to overhaul the Electoral Count Act of 1887, a murky law about the vice president’s and Congress’ duties in certifying presidential elections. First disclosed by Axios on Jan. 6 — fittingly, the anniversary of the Trump riot at the Capitol — it would clear up the idea that Vice President Mike Pence had the authority during the Senate certification process to reject electoral votes submitted by states, as Trump wanted him to do. 

Capitol mob built gallows and chanted ‘Hang Mike Pence’

In fact, if Pence had done this (IMO seditious act!), nearly all scholars believe that the courts would have reversed the decision.

But there are two other loopholes that appear legal that offer tremendous opportunities for mischief. 

Yale Law School’s Matthew Seligman says the Electoral Count Act would theoretically allow a party that controlled both chambers of Congress to disregard election results and install one of its own in the White House. The law also says that Congress must accept the slate of electors designated as correct by a governor — whatever the election results — if a legislature sent the governor an alternative list. “We are at catastrophic risk in the next election and beyond,” Seligman told Yahoo News.

It’s vitally important to shore up election integrity soon. One obvious idea is setting up strong standards to ensure state election officials have only a ministerial role in counting votes — not the ability to “find 11,780 votes,” as Trump (IMO illegally!)asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to do.

The good news for America is that there is actually a chance election reform could pass on a bipartisan Senate vote. According to reports, Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Steve Daines of Montana have been meeting with Democratic Sens. Manchin, Sinema, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Dick Durbin of Illinois and Tim Kaine of Virginia on the topic. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is even reportedly interested, according to Vox.

But the bad news, alas, is that Vox also reported that some progressives see this issue as less important than the For the People Act. This is hard to follow. If progressives succeed in making it easier to vote, but Trumpians in state governments and Congress use loopholes to throw out voting results, what have progressives accomplished?

Promoting voting is a noble goal. 

Preventing sedition is an urgent one.

Mr. Chris Reed is the deputy editor of the editorial and opinion section of the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper, in California.

Commentary on "Shortest Way Home" - echo opinion

An echo opinion about Pete Buttigieg by David Brooks published in the San Diego Union-Tribune

Pete Buttigieg has some kind of magic right now. His campaign bio, “Shortest Way Home,” was the 25th-best-selling book on Amazon when I checked. That put him just a few dozen places behind Michelle Obama, and thousands or tens of thousands of places ahead of Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and the other candidates who have campaign books out.

In a recent Iowa poll Buttigieg surged to third place. 

His campaign just announced that it’s raised an impressive $7 million since January. And I can’t tell you how many Democrats in places as diverse as Nebraska, Indiana, New York and Washington have come up to me over the past few weeks, raving about the guy. 

In fact, I met a superfan in Frederick, Maryland, who says that every few hours she calls the campaign to give another $10.

This is the biggest star-is-born moment since Lady Gaga started singing “Shallow.” (with Bradley Cooper)

Why are people so in love with the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who almost nobody had heard of until his March 10 CNN town hall?

It’s important to remember that when Democrats vote next year, they’ll not only be choosing a policy alternative to Donald Trump, they’ll also be making a statement about what kind of country they want America to be.

The Trump era has been all about dissolving moral norms and waging vicious attacks. This has been an era of culture war, class warfare and identity politics. It’s been an era in which call-out culture, reality TV melodrama and tribal grandstanding have overshadowed policymaking and the challenges of actually governing.

The Buttigieg surge suggests that there are a lot of Democrats who want to say goodbye to all that. They don’t want to fight fire and divisiveness with more fire and divisiveness. They don’t want to fight white identity politics with another kind of identity politics.

They are sick of the moral melodrama altogether. They just want a person who is more about governing than virtue-signaling, more about friendliness and basic decency than media circus and rhetorical war.

Buttigieg’s secret is that he transcends many of the tensions that run through our society in a way that makes people on all sides feel comfortable.

First, he is young and represents the rising generation, but he is also an older person’s idea of what a young person should be. He’d be the first millennial president, but Buttigieg doesn’t fit any of the stereotypes that have been affixed to America’s young people.

Young people are supposed to be woke social justice warriors who are disgusted by their elders. Buttigieg is the model young man who made his way impressing his elders — Harvard, Rhodes scholar, McKinsey, the Navy.

Young hipsters are supposed to flock to coastal places like Brooklyn, New York, and Portland, Oregon, after college, Buttigieg returned to Indiana.

Young people are supposed to be anti-institutional, but Buttigieg is very institutional — his life has been defined by service to organizations not rebellion against them.

Second, he is gay and personifies the progress made by the LGBTQ movement, but he doesn’t do so in a way that feels threatening or transgressive to social conservatives. He has conservative family values; it’s just that his spouse is a husband, not a wife. He speaks comfortably about his faith and says that when he goes to church he prefers a conservative liturgy to anything experimental.

Third, he is a localist and a Washington outsider, but he carries no populist resentment and can easily speak the language of the coastal elite.

Buttigieg has spent his political career in Indiana, where pols are expected to go to county fairs and eat catfish filet and cheesecake on a stick. He wasn’t alive when the Studebaker plant shut down in South Bend, but he has the trauma of Midwestern deindustrialization in his bones. He lives in a house near his mother where the mortgage comes to about $450 a month. He was also friends with Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, earned a first at Oxford and thrived as a corporate consultant.

Finally, he’s a progressive on policy issues but doesn’t sound like an angry revolutionary. His policy positions are not that different from the more identifiable leftist candidates. But he eschews grand ideological conflict.

“The whole point of politics is everyday life,” he said in his CNN town hall. His book is mostly about how as mayor he faced problems like snow removal and fixing potholes. His big achievements were renaming city streets, repairing the sewer system and tearing down derelict buildings. 

He says he’ll do whatever works.

I’ve only met Buttigieg once, wTrhen we were seated at a table at a dinner in Detroit, a few months ago. He was smart, modest and self-effacing, and I can’t square that impression with his assumption that, at 37, he’s qualified to be president of the United States.

But maybe Buttigieg squares a lot of circles. He deftly detaches progressive policy positions from the culture war. He offers change without Sturm und Drang. (Brooks translation- "emotional turbulence") 

Children in cages - Kirstjen Nielsen a victim of the loyalty oath

Trump — the ultimate political narcissist — cares not one whit for the political fortunes of the GOP- the growing old party.

An echo opinion by Michael Gerson published in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The ouster of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen* — the implementer of some of the most unjust immigration policies since the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II — is another proof of Donald Trump’s ratchet-wrench theory of loyalty. It goes only in his direction.

In the end, the burnt offering of a staffer’s character is not enough. 

After trying to enforce and anticipate Trump’s cruel or irrational whims, he or she is generally packed off without ceremony, with diminished professional respect and, presumably, with diminished self-respect. Trump has taken what should be the honor of a lifetime — serving the country at the highest levels of the executive branch — and turned it into a reputational black hole.

A few — think former Defense Secretary James Mattis and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley — have managed to serve without self-immolation. But this is only because they skillfully established some distance between their views and the president’s. Did anyone doubt that Mattis respected NATO, or that Haley was concerned about human rights?

Nielsen, however, took another route. After a career generally characterized by competence, Nielsen chose to reflect Trump’s priorities. Maybe she reasoned to herself that she was implementing the president’s agenda more humanely than others would have done. Aristotle referred to human beings as rational animals. They are, at least, rationalizing animals.

But the separation of crying migrant children from their parents as a deterrent, and the storing of children in prison-like conditions, will be some of the most enduring political images of the Trump era.**It says something about Nielsen that she took part in such practices. It says something about Trump that such actions were apparently too moderate and restrained for his taste.

Children in cages - a Trumpzi humanitarian disaster!

The status of immigration as Trump’s defining issue is still confusing. He returns to this topic in nearly every time of political stress. Yet it is difficult to imagine that his convictions are deeply rooted. Trump has a long history of hiring illegal immigrants, whom he clearly did not regard as potential terrorists and rapists. And it wasn’t too long ago that Trump criticized Mitt Romney for intemperance on the topic as the Republican presidential nominee. “He had a crazy policy of self-deportation, which was maniacal,” Trump said following the 2012 presidential election. “It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”

But now Donald Trump seems to find a message of exclusion positively invigorating. In his stump speech, he does not raise legitimate issues related to immigration. Instead, he easily outpaces Romney in the maniacal and crazy department. At the White House, he humiliates staffers who don’t share his enthusiasm and fires people who are not creative enough in their severity. Even a hint of reluctance is taken as betrayal.

The explanation cannot be purely political, at least from a Republican perspective. Trump carried a simplified version of these ideas into the 2018 midterm election — claiming that brown people were invading the country (!) and suggesting that they should be shot by the U.S. military. 

One outcome was the loss of 40 Republican House seats.

But Trump — the ultimate political narcissist — cares not one whit for the political fortunes of the GOP. He cares only about his political standing within the GOP. It is 85% to 90% support among Republicans that ensures the servility of senators and House members in opposing various investigations of Trump and his administration. And this support forestalls the possibility of a serious nomination challenge in the upcoming presidential election.

I have no doubt that Trump is using the issue of immigration in a cynical way to solve political problems. But the implications are disturbing. Trump clearly regards resentment against migrants as the common, binding purpose of the GOP. And so far he has not been wrong. The success of Trump’s cynical ploy depends on the existence of genuine enthusiasm for exclusion within his party. His play only works if GOP nativism is broad and authentic.

In the recent political past, these convictions were usually latent. Anti-immigrant Republicans such as Pat Buchanan and Tom Tancredo were generally viewed as cranks. And more visionary Republicans such as Jack Kemp or George W. Bush emphasized the economic contributions and positive social values of recent migrants.

But Trump’s appeal to inner demons above better angels proved easier than many of us hoped. And that makes the political and moral damage harder to repair.

Mrs. Gerson can be reached at michaelgerson@washpost.com. 

*POLITICO- Nielsen’s allies trying to rehab her image for life after Trump.  Liberal activists say she was complicit in an immoral migrant child separation policy — and she should be ostracized by corporate America. (Andrew Restuccia and Daniel Lippman)

NEWSWEEK- Kirstjen Nielsen testified before Congress, drew an air cage with her hands..... (Jason Lemon)


** New images reveal migrant children separated from parents living in cages. U.S. officials released images showing conditions inside an old warehouse in South Texas, where hundreds of immigrant children wait in a series of metal cages, with children using large foil sheets as blankets.

Mental heath clarion call from San Diego - stop mass shootings!

This letter to the editor is an echo opinion published in the San Diego Union Tribune newspaper:

Another mass shooting: Ignoring the mental health crisis leads to tragedy https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/11/08/the-latest-multiple-injuries-at-shooting-in-california-bar/  *

“Another mass shooting has readers looking for answers” (Nov. 8): This California tragedy is another sad example of what can happen when parents, who know their son and can see he needs medication or treatment, call the police for help to get their child taken to a hospital for evaluation and hold and are subsequently told by the police crisis team that he doesn’t meet the criteria of “a threat to himself or others” or is “gravely disabled.”

(In my Maine Writer's opinion, the evaluation criteria also considers the insurance status available to pay for the care of a person or child who is being evaluated.  It's just my opinion, but if there is a payment source for retaining the person under evaluation, that aids in getting them access to treatment.)

When will our country change the laws and definitions of when persons with a mental illness can be involuntarily medicated and treated until they are returned to rational thought? This untreated state, coupled with our weak gun ownership laws, is the crux of why these shootings are occurring. 

Linda Mimms, from Poway California

*Thousand Oaks acting Mayor Rob McCoy said that the city is hurting but will heal.