USA Today:
Judge says Trump team '100 percent' responsible for finding deported immigrant parents
A federal judge on Friday rejected a Trump administration request to make the ACLU primarily responsible for locating migrant parents who were deported after they were separated from their children, making clear that the government bears "100 percent" of the burden.
U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw said the ACLU and a team of non-governmental organizations, volunteers, and pro-bono attorneys can help locate about 400 parents who were deported and have not yet been located by the government. But Sabraw said that ACLU lawyers, who are representing plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit, are not the ones who separated the families in the first place.
Thomas Edsall/NY Times:
The Democratic Party Picked an Odd Time to Have an Identity Crisis
Can its unruly coalition take shape against Trump without one wing predominating?
The party has often been further out front on these issues than the public at large — and than many of its own voters. This has empowered the Republican Party, from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, to capitalize on opposition to a range of liberal Democratic initiatives on immigration, busing, women’s rights, abortion, crime, gay rights, gun control, affirmative action and so on.
The Democratic Party’s commitment to newly ascendant — and often assertive — constituencies has alienated some middle and working class voters who see their own values and interests downgraded.
Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, voiced this critique in an analysisof the 2016 election:
The Democrats have moved from seeking to manage and champion the nation’s growing immigrant diversity to seeming to champion immigrant rights over American citizens’.
While whites are a declining share of voters, they still constitute 60 percent of the Democratic Party, according to Gallup. Data provided by Pew Research shows that whites were 74 percent of all voters in 2016.
John Stoehr:
The Media's Addiction to Storytelling
Public opinion would be healthier with more analysis, less 'narrative.'
Thomas Edsall, in the Times, provides another opportunity for the Editorial Board to argue that politics in the US is simpler and more complex than most Americans realize, because our news media is addicted to the power of storytelling.
Nothing wrong with storytelling in and of itself. The problem arises when “narratives,” as they say in the editorial boardrooms of elite newspapers, take on a life of their own, when they distort political reality while pretending they do no such thing.
The premise of Edsall’s latest is that the Democratic Party is going through an identity crisis. This may seem reasonable given the party is out of power. If it can’t get its act together, the thinking goes, how can it possibly take the Congress in November?
But Edsall’s argument rests on the victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s a self-identified democratic socialist who knocked off Joe Crowley, the No. 3 House Democrat, in a June primary. Ocasio-Cortez is clearly in line with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, two economic populists. Given her surprise win, Edsall asks if a coalition can take shape against Donald Trump without one wing predominating?
Before I answer that, let me explain why this narrative distorts reality.
First, because Ocasio-Cortez’s victory is more about Crowley’s defeat.
Sidney Daily News (OH):
Local farmer calls it like he sees it
We keep hearing about the “Art of the Deal.” I’m waiting for the “Art” portion. Using a club to bludgeon our trading partners and allies is not negotiating. It’s nothing more than a playground bully stomping around to see who will flinch.
These pay-off dollars will do little more than put a target on agriculture’s back and make agriculture no better than those who come hat in hand wanting something for nothing. Farmers historically enjoy goodwill from the American public and taxpayer. This scheme will result in non-farm state legislators turning their back on agriculture when we need real help.
I spent 30 years administering federal farm programs with the USDA. I’ve administered and supported disaster programming, conservation programming, and price and supply stabilization. I believed in those supports because I believe a strong agriculture is directly related to our national security. I’ve never administered hush money designed to make me sit down and shut up about a ridiculous protectionist trade policy that has destroyed in a matter of months what my industry built with our own hands over decades.
The president calls ‘em like he sees them, and so do I. I won’t be silent any longer.
Ross K Baker/USA Today:
Don't sacrifice Democrats' Senate seats in a futile fight against Kavanaugh confirmation
Opposing Kavanaugh makes reelection difficult
Given the robust margins by which Trump won the states of the three Senate Democrats, voters there are likely to heed the urging of the president to defeat those who oppose his Supreme Court nominee. It is also a certainty that if Manchin, Heitkamp and Donnelly stick with their fellow Democrats, Trump will make multiple appearances in their states to campaign for their Republican opponents. It takes nothing away from the political skill and adroitness of the three vulnerable senators to conclude that simply voting against Kavanaugh would make an uphill struggle even steeper.
OTOH, you can make your points while you have the stage. In any case, this is the big debate.
Matt Yglesias/Vox:
Donald Trump is making Medicare-for-all inevitable
A market-based solution can’t work if Republicans won’t let it.
But it’s also thanks to the Trump administration, which, having failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, has undertaken a nearly unprecedented campaign of regulatory malfeasance that aims to prevent it from functioning and minimize the number of people on whom it bestows comprehensive health coverage.
Republicans are, of course, entitled to act like this if they want to. But their determination carries a powerful lesson for Democrats. If they believe that universal health insurance is a moral imperative — as they have since at least Franklin Roosevelt’s time — then only a very heavy-handed government program is going to get the job done.
There are lots of alternatives based on subsidies and regulations that work in principle and are used in practice in many European countries. But in a democracy, a workable regulatory system needs to be able to survive the regular alternation of parties in power. The lesson of the Trump era is that the Obamacare approach can’t do that. It’ll take a big, dumb program that just keeps trundling along unless Congress actually repeals it — like how Social Security checks keep going out no matter who’s president.
Susan B Glasser/New Yorker:
It’s True: Trump Is Lying More, and He’s Doing It on Purpose.
Only three members of Nixon’s enemies list are still alive. (Ron Dellums, a former member of Congress particularly loathed by Nixon for his anti-war protests and militant civil-rights activism, died on Monday.) I called one of them, Morton Halperin, to ask what he thought of the proliferating Trump-Nixon comparisons. Halperin, who oversaw the writing of the Pentagon Papers and then served on Nixon’s National Security Council staff before breaking with him over the invasion of Cambodia, sued when he found out that Nixon had secretly taped him and others in the White House. Over the years, he has been one of Nixon’s proudest and most persistent enemies. So I was surprised when Halperin insisted, strongly, that Nixon wasn’t nearly as damaging to the institution of the Presidency as Trump has been. “He’s far worse than Nixon,” Halperin told me, “certainly as a threat to the country.”
Axios:
"Russia, Immigration and Trade War Sticking to Trump" is the headline of a new polling memo for Priorities USA by Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group and Global Strategy Group.
Why it matters: "This translates into the worst ratings for Trump on his truthfulness, temperament, dealings with Russia, and immigration policies we have not seen in any of our eleven previous national tracking surveys on the Trump presidency."
- "Trump’s dealings with Vladimir Putin, his handling of immigration and the separation of children from their families, and the impact of his trade war have stuck with voters in a way nothing else has since the beginning of his presidency."
- "In response to an open-ended question, voters volunteer in large numbers concerns about these issues."
The Democratic pollsters see opportunity with "the record of Donald Trump and the Republicans in giving large tax cuts to drug companies and health insurance companies while allowing them to raise drug prices and insurance premiums."
- "Unlike Russia and immigration, voters won’t hear about this as much in the press, meaning Democrats must continue to carry the message in paid media and on the campaign trail."
