Trump and Republicans are losing on this immigration and child abuse issue. There’s video, audio, pictures. There are five First Ladies. You can’t fight that. Sure, you can dig in. No point in a compassion appeal to someone who lacks the gene, but that’s separate from losing the public, and Trump is losing the public.
Republicans, your cowardly inhumanity will haunt you to your graves.
Quinnipiac:
Stop Taking The Kids, 66 Percent Of U.S. Voters Say, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Support For Dreamers Is 79 Percent
David Drucker/Washington Examiner:
Republicans fret about what family separations will cost them
“The issue is terrible for House Republicans, President Trump, and the Republican Party as a whole. For many voters, including crucial swing voters from suburban areas, it reinforces the absolute worst perceptions,” a veteran Republican strategist with clients on the 2018 ballot said, requesting anonymity in order to criticize Trump.
This Republican insider is not a reflexive Trump critic and conceded that this issue could be long forgotten in just a few days, as is typical with controversies surrounding the president. But speaking to the Washington Examiner via email, this strategist said that, if not, the political fallout could be devastating.
“Compounding the problem is the incompetence of the Trump administration to have a clear policy when it comes to these children at the border, let alone an articulate one. The president blaming the Democrats rings hollow because WE ARE IN CHARGE,” the strategist said.
Josh Kraushaar/National Journal:
Trump Picks a Losing Fight on Immigration
The growing economy should be improving Republicans’ odds at holding their congressional majorities. Instead, they’re preparing for a backlash against the president’s cruel and unusual family-separation policy at the border.
In our polarized times, the backlash against Trump’s immigration policy accomplishes a rare reverse trifecta: keeps the liberal base supercharged, alienates independent-minded suburbanites critical to the GOP’s ability to hold a House majority, and divides Republicans at the worst possible time. Republicans want the economy to overshadow all else, but Americans are sending an unmistakable message that they’re voting their values in 2018
Paul Waldman/WaPo:
So what we have here is in some ways reminiscent of the 2016 campaign, when a group of Republican officeholders trying to find some kind of accommodation on immigration got crushed when Trump stomped into the race offering a message unsullied by mercy or practicality. Mexicans are rapists, he said, ban the Muslims, build a wall. The GOP base couldn’t have been more thrilled.
But back then it was all hypothetical. Now you can listen to a recording of immigrant children sobbing and calling out for their mothers and fathers. And the GOP base isn’t the only electorate Republicans have to worry about.
WSJ Editorial:
Are Republicans trying to lose their majorities in Congress this November? We assume not, but you can’t tell from the party’s internal feuding over immigration that is fast becoming an election-year nightmare over separating immigrant children from their parents. This is what happens when restrictionists have a veto over GOP policy...
The immediate solution should be for the Administration to end “zero-tolerance” until it can be implemented without dividing families. Congress can also act to allow migrants to be detained with children in facilities appropriate for families. Until that is possible, better to release those who have no criminal past rather than continue forced separation.
This episode underscores the larger GOP dysfunction as it debates how to deal with the former immigrant children known as Dreamers. The threat of Dreamer deportation isn’t imminent while the courts consider Barack Obama’s legalization order and Donald Trump’s revocation of that order. But it is sure to return with urgency next year.
MJ Gerson/WaPo:
The Bible, like a gun, is a dangerous thing in the hands of a bigot. Segregationists and autocrats throughout Western history have claimed that Romans 13 covers oppressive or unjust laws. But the centerpiece commitment of Christian social ethics is not order; it is justice. For a good introduction to the concept, Sessions might read the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God,” King argued. “An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.” And how should justice be defined? “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”
Jane Coaston/Vox:
The scary ideology behind Trump’s immigration instincts
The debate over family separation plays into a familiar narrative that’s being pushed by the White House.
Trump’s adoption of racist views is at the core of the immigration debate
Bannon may be out of the White House (and Breitbart News). But his attitudes regarding immigration and immigrants remain in place, voiced by fellow immigration restrictionists like Sessions and Miller who believe that immigration poses a danger to American culture and American life — unless that immigration is from a predominantly white country.
Most importantly, those views are being voiced by Trump himself. After all, when the white nationalist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted, “You will not replace us” — a direct reference to the “white genocide” myth — Trump made sure to say that there were “very fine people” among those chanting.
This has a direct impact on immigration policy, including current negotiations regarding family separation at the Mexican border with the United States.
Quinta Jurecic/Atlantic:
A Choice Between Cruelty and Mercy
A 2,500-year-old play illustrates the emptiness of the administration’s arguments about enforcing the law.
“The man the city sets up in authority must be obeyed in small things and just but also in their opposites,” declares the tyrannical king in the ancient Greek tragedy Antigone. The plan to which he demands obedience calls for separating a brother and a sister across the city’s border—an act terrible in its cruelty but, he argues, necessary for security. The king wants to reestablish order in the city, and he is using the brother’s fate as deterrence.
In the family separation described by Sophocles, the brother is not just exiled but dead; the king, Creon, has left his body to rot outside the city walls without a burial. The Trump administration has not engineered anything quite this cruel. But when it justifies pulling migrant parents away from their children at the U.S. border, it is speaking Creon’s language.
Kirio Birks/Quilette:
Zero Tolerance at the Mexican Border
The UN’s Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees provides immigrants with the right to seek asylum and forbids states from deterring asylum seekers. Although states may apply necessary restrictions on movement, they may not impose penalties on account of illegal entry or presence, provided that migrants present themselves without delay and show good cause for entry. Good cause only needs to be argued for, it does not have to be legally demonstrated there and then. It should be enough to cite a plausible risk of persecution or an endangered life. The process of determining legitimate refugee status occurs after the individual in question has been provisionally accepted. Separating parents and children is therefore likely in violation of the UN Convention, unless the state has already demonstrated that the parents are there for the illegitimate reasons. If those crossing the border have voluntarily announced themselves and offered a credible reason for their flight, arresting them on the grounds of illegal entry is highly dubious. As Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, has since said, “The thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable.”
Monkey Cage:
This is why white evangelicals still support Donald Trump. (It’s not economic anxiety.)
My research indicates white evangelical conservatism correlates strongly with their perceptions anti-white discrimination, even after taking into account economic status, party, age and region. Fully 50 percent of white evangelical respondents to our 2016 survey reported feeling they face discrimination that’s comparable to, or even higher than, the discrimination they believe Muslim Americans face. Those who hold this perception are more likely to hold conservative attitudes on issues as wide-ranging as climate change, tax policy and health-care reform….
Here’s what is not behind these beliefs: economic anxiety. Like PRRI and political scientist Diana Mutz, I find economic anxiety isn’t a primary reason for supporting Trump. Rather, white evangelicals fear losing racial status. White evangelicals’ perceptions they’re the targets of discrimination – more so than other groups — influence far more than simply their votes for Trump.
Yes, 80 percent of white evangelicals supported Donald Trump in 2016. And the racial fears and anxieties that underlie their support for the president will probably remain the driver in their political views long after he leaves office.
Dan Gillmor/Medium:
Dear Journalists: Stop being loudspeakers for liars
Your job is not to uncritically “report” — that is, do stenography and call it journalism — when the people you’re covering are deceiving the public. Your job is, in part, to help the public be informed about what powerful people and institutions are doing with our money and in our names.
Kansas City Star:
Judge strikes down Kansas voter law, orders Kobach to take classes
A federal judge has struck down a Kansas voter citizenship law that Secretary of State Kris Kobach had personally defended.
Judge Julie Robinson also ordered Kobach, who is seeking the Republican nomination for governor, to take more hours of continuing legal education after he was found in contempt and was frequently chided during the trial over missteps.