Politico:
A last-minute effort to salvage a House GOP immigration bill appeared to flounder Tuesday, amid unyielding opposition from the far right.
Desperate to flip conservative votes, centrist House Republicans offered to add a controversial provision requiring the use of E-Verify, which mandates all companies certify the legal status of their workers.
But it doesn’t look like it will be enough.
Remember, this is a compromise bill between hard-liners and hardliners.
Noah Feldman/Bloomberg:
A Decision That Will Live in Infamy
It will take generations for the Supreme Court to live down its approval of Trump’s travel ban.
In what may be the worst decision since the infamous Korematsu case, when the Supreme Court upheld the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the court today by a 5-4 vote upheld President Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban.
Like the Korematsu decision, Trump v. Hawaii elevates legal formalities as a way to avoid addressing what everyone understood is really at issue here — namely, prejudice. Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion downplays Trump’s anti-Muslim bias, focusing instead on the president’s legal power to block immigration in the name of national security.
The decision will be a stain not only on the legacy of the Roberts court, but on that of the Supreme Court itself. The court tried to compensate by saying how bad the Korematsu decision was.
Nieman Reports:
We helped change the course of history.
We likely made the difference in a close presidential election.
We helped Russia undermine our democracy.
We compounded the self-righteous mistakes by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
We helped make Donald Trump president.
We were used.
That, ultimately, is the conclusion from a much-discussed report by the Justice Department’s inspector general about how the FBI handled the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
At least, that’s the conclusion conscientious journalists would take away from it, more than we should focus on salty, private text exchanges by FBI agents who didn’t much like Trump or even James Comey’s repeated assertion that he made the right call by intervening in the 2016 election at the 11th hour.
Jon M Ladd:
Recent events provide a great illustration that, while it is a social norm in polite society to support nonviolent protest, in the face of actual nonviolent protests, most political and social elites really want no protest at all.
When people imagine nonviolent protest, elite only think of hopefully ineffective strategies like scheduled, fully permitted marches or rallies. Or strongly but politely worded opinion columns.
Actual effective nonviolent protests involve making life more difficult/uncomfortable/embarrassing for the targets of the protest. That's why it sometimes works.
Why are they boycotting and driving the bus system out of business? Do they want to live in a society without viable bus companies! How can we live like that? What a confrontational and hostile strategy! Can't we wait and do this in a more civil way?
Hannah Dreier/ProPublica:
I’ve Been Reporting on MS-13 for a Year. Here Are the 5 Things Trump Gets Most Wrong.
The gang is not invading the country. They’re not posing as fake families. They’re not growing. To stop them, the government needs to understand them.
I’m spending the year reporting on MS-13 members and their associates. I’ve been combing through their text messages. I’m talking with the detectives building cases against killers not yet old enough to buy cigarettes. And I’ve been spending long evenings with the gang’s victims, who often start crying as soon as they start talking about the violence that has marred their lives. Everyone agrees the gang is bloodthirsty. Most of the other assertions I’ve heard from the Trump administration this year about MS-13 have almost no connection to what I’m seeing on the ground.
NY Times:
Democrats Are Turning Out to Vote in the Most Competitive Primary Races
In more than 20 of the most competitive House races of 2018, the share of Democrats voting in primaries notably increased, compared with 2014, the last midterm election cycle.
Charlie Cook ($$)/National Journal:
Trump’s Risky Bet on His Base
The president has decided to double down on the aggressive strategy that worked for him in 2016. But it may not work for the rest of the GOP.
One finding in the June 1-4 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that did not get nearly enough attention was that on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being those with a very high interest in the upcoming midterm election, 63 percent of Democrats pegged themselves as either 9 or 10, compared to just 47 percent of Republicans and 44 percent of independents. Another is that while Democrats had a 10-point lead on the generic congressional-ballot test, respondents in currently Democratic-held districts gave Democrats a 22-point lead, while those in Republican-held districts gave the GOP just a 1-point advantage.
What that means is that Democrats don’t need to worry about holding onto their own districts, but a lot of Republican members who may not be worried today should be.
Alex Roarty/McClatchy:
Why women are dominating Democratic primaries
Their success has intrigued Democratic pollsters, who say the data offer no singular explanations for this phenomenon. Instead, leading pollsters describe multiple factors boosting women this year, ranging from sweeping cultural forces to a subtle feeling among liberal-leaning voters that women are more progressive. The wins are also tied to President Donald Trump, they say, but not just because of his personal behavior.
“I’m highly skeptical that there’s one theory or a dynamic that explains this voting trend,” said Matt Canter, a Democratic strategist and former deputy executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “It’s a confluence of a number of important factors, most importantly that these women who are winning are great candidates.”
Nearly every pollster interviewed emphasized one point: Women running for office are benefiting just as much from male voters as female voters. It isn’t just female voters (who make up between 55 percent and 60 percent of the primary electorate) who want the party to nominate women.
Here’s a look at the key drivers of female candidates’ victories across the map this year, according to top Democratic pollsters.
Michael Gerson/WaPo:
Loyalty to Trump demands a lack of character
But most people who serve the president are probably in Nielsen’s category. To remain part of Trump’s team, they must defend the indefensible. They must struggle against conscience to do their job. This is an explanation, not an excuse. Enthusiastic or reluctant, the result of complicity is the same. Trump said, in effect: Prove your loyalty by endorsing cruelty toward migrant children. Nielsen willingly stepped across that line.
Also true for his supporters.
And this from last night, watch the debate: rent, health care, and abolition of ICE...
A classy concession. Ocasio-Cortez will likely be the youngest Congress critter in the new Congress.
See NY 14. And see Parkland kids.
As for the border crisis, Monkey Cage/WaPo:
The news media usually show immigrants as dangerous criminals. That’s changed — for now, at least.
Among nearly all racial and ethnic groups, male immigrants were pictured more often than female. This gap was largest among images of Latino immigrants, which showed only 21.5 percent women — although in fact, 49 percent of Latino immigrants were women as of 2010.
Our findings are similar to that of Martin Gilens and Bas W. van Doorn, political scientists whose research finds that news media are far more likely to portray poor people as black than white, despite the fact that there are more poor whites. We find that the media typically over-represents Latino men in comparison to their presence in the general immigrant population.
In other words, the current wave of images of women and children at the border is unique.
Media is a sucker for images over substance, so this is a big deal.
Even Trump noted discomfort with the “sight or feeling of families being separated.” As Trump’s positions change, the news media may wish to show women and children more often if it wants to more accurately portray immigration.
