Garland reverses Trump-era immigration order in move that will cut huge backlog of asylum cases
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday reversed an order from Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions that barred immigration judges from closing cases and removing them from their docket if they deem them low-priority.
The move will cut down on the ballooning backlog of immigration cases in the U.S., now surpassing 1.3 million, according to data compiled by TRAC out of Syracuse University.
The Senate Budget agreement is a BFD
this happened this week:
Senate Democrats reach $3.5 trillion budget agreement
Senate Democrats announced late Tuesday that they’d reached a budget agreement envisioning spending an enormous $3.5 trillion over the coming decade, paving the way for their drive to pour federal resources into climate change, health care and family-service programs sought by President Joe Biden.
The accord marks a major step in the party’s push to meet Biden’s goal of bolstering an economy that was ravaged by the pandemic and setting it on course for long-term growth — and includes a Medicare expansion of vision, hearing and dental benefits for older Americans, a goal of progressives.
this is a huge (and great) change in how things are done → How Big Spending Got Its Groove Back
The way it was: Some years ago I attended a meeting in which President Barack Obama asked a group of economists for unconventional policy ideas. I distinctly remember him saying: “Don’t tell me that I should spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure. I know that, but I can’t do it.”
The way it is: Top Democrats have agreed on a proposal to spend $3.5 trillion on public investment of various kinds, to be passed via reconciliation on top of a $600 billion bipartisan plan for physical infrastructure spending. And some news reports are treating this deal as a defeat for the left, because Bernie Sanders proposed spending even more.
Obviously the reported agreement is just a proposal, and turning it into actual legislation will require agreement from every single Democratic senator. Still, there has clearly been an incredible change — a sharp move to the left — in what is considered politically realistic.
and it impacts all areas:
Democrats push sweeping climate legislation amid a scorching summer
The far-reaching set of climate measures that Senate Democrats outlined this week came as a scorching summer brought deadly heat waves, deepened droughts and fueled wildfires across the American West — the latest reminders of why the party has sought to prioritize efforts to slow rising temperatures around the globe.
While the $3.5 trillion budget deal that emerged Wednesday could change in key ways in the months ahead, the proposal represents one of the biggest efforts yet that Congress has undertaken to address climate change.
and despite poo poo-ing reconciliation as a process months ago, Manchin now says he will play along
Manchin signals he'll be team player on spending deal
Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), a crucial centrist vote in the Democratic caucus, is signaling to colleagues that he won’t derail a $3.5 trillion budget resolution that contains many of President Biden’s legislative priorities.
Senate Democrats say Manchin has indicated he will not stand in the way of the measure moving forward and will be generally supportive as long as he’s kept in the loop on his top concerns: how to pay for the bill and a clean energy provision.
Manchin confirmed that he let colleagues know that he’s not interested in gumming up the works by blocking the budget resolution, a move that would stall efforts to start piecing together a bill that is expected to cost $3.5 trillion and pass with a simple majority vote later this year.
Other Great News
DNC launches organizing program ahead of midterms
The Campaign Pipeline Project will place organizers on the ground in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Virginia and New Jersey in an effort to elect the party's candidates up and down the ballot in the targeted states.
“In order to win, next year and in the future, our party must invest in young and diverse talent,” DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison said in a statement to The Hill. "Through the Campaign Pipeline Project, the DNC will be able to identify, train, and embed young, diverse staff in communities across the country to ensure that Democrats are on the ground, and on the ground early."
Pro-impeachment Republicans outpace GOP rivals in second-quarter fundraising
Republicans who voted earlier this year to impeach former President Trump are outpacing their primary challengers in the money race.
Now the 10 House Republicans who broke party lines in the chamber’s January impeachment vote are heading into the second half of 2021 flush with cash, financial reports filed on Thursday with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) show.
The Christian Right Is in Decline
“In 2004, if you had said, ‘We’re the majority, we oppose gay rights, we oppose marriage equality, and the majority of Americans is with us,’ that would have been true,” Jones told me. Youthful megachurches were thriving. It was common for conservatives to gloat that they were going to outbreed the left.
But the evangelicals who thought they were about to take over America were destined for disappointment. On Thursday, P.R.R.I. released startling new polling data showing just how much ground the religious right has lost. P.R.R.I.’s 2020 Census of American Religion, based on a survey of nearly half a million people, shows a precipitous decline in the share of the population identifying as white evangelical, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent last year.
Civilized nations’ efforts to deter Russia and China are starting to add up
The British Royal Navy destroyer HMS Defender recently broke away from the HMS Queen Elizabeth Carrier Strike Group to conduct a Black Sea mission that triggered Russia’s reflexive dishonesty. This was one episode among several lately that demonstrate increasing resistance to Russian and Chinese assaults on a rules-based international order.
The Financial Times recently reported U.S.-Japan joint military exercises — presented as disaster relief training — in the South China and East China seas, and “top-secret tabletop war games” in case of “a conflict with China over Taiwan.”
Henry Kissinger has said, not unreasonably, that we are in “the foothills” of a cold war with China. And Vladimir Putin, who nurses an unassuageable grudge about the way the Cold War ended, seems uninterested in Russia reconciling itself to a role as a normal nation without gratuitous resorts to mendacity. It is, therefore, well to notice how, day by day, in all of the globe’s time zones, civilized nations are, in word and deed, taking small but cumulatively consequential measures that serve deterrence.
American optimism is highest in more than 10 years
A new Gallup poll finds that 59.2% of Americans say they're thriving. Additionally, 73% of Americans said they experienced enjoyment for a lot of the previous day.
The former is the highest rating Gallup has ever recorded on the measure dating back to when it was first taken more than 13 years ago. The latter is the highest since the coronavirus pandemic began early last year.
On The Lighter Side