We begin today’s roundup with reaction to the president’s remark that Haitians, Africans, and others are from “shithole” countries, a blatantly racist remark which the White House is not denying (indeed, they are defending it claiming it will play well with the president’s base). First up, Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast:
Come on, America. What more evidence do you need?
Let me be overly generous here. Suppose you agree that Haiti is a “shithole.” It’s not one of your high-functioning nations, that is true. Of course, if you bother even to go to Wikipedia to read up for 10 minutes, you’ll find that the mess that is Haiti was partly made by these United States of America, with our ironclad support over three decades of the Duvaliers, father and son, brutal dictators and murderers and thieves, to whose crimes our governments turned many blind eyes. If you look around a bit more, you’ll see that Haitian soldiers fought in our Revolutionary War, in a battle in Savannah, Georgia. And if you’re really intellectually adventurous, you’ll read about how Haiti was a slave colony in the late 1700s, remorselessly brutalized by Napoleon, and how Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of Haitian independence, has inspired artists from William Wordsworth to Jacob Lawrence to Ralph Ellison to Jean-Michel Basquiat. [...]
We used to think everyone from everywhere wanted to move here. Of course. We’re America! We’re the beacon. But not anymore. With the President of the United States making racist comments like this — and proposing policies to match — the only people who’d be really excited about moving here are other racists.
David Graham at The Atlantic:
Since the start of his campaign, Trump has depicted immigration as a zero-sum game. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said during his candidacy announcement. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
His presumption seems to be that other nations are deliberately sending to the United States their least-desirable citizens. That sounds a lot like the Mariel boatlift of 1980, in which Cuba released a number of inmates from jails and mental facilities, dispatching them to the United States as part of a massive refugee exodus. It seems to shape the way Trump views all immigration—he and aides have cited it repeatedly.
But in the vast majority of cases, this is not how immigration works. Governments are not deciding who to send. People are deciding to leave, often at great risk, out of personal motivation. Those who come are the ones “who had a special love for freedom and a special courage that enabled them to leave their own land, leave their friends and their countrymen, and come to this new and strange land to build a New World of peace and freedom and hope,” as Ronald Reagan once put it.
Greg Grandin at The Nation:
Trump...is all id and pure appetite, unspooling raw, insatiable, childish hunger every night on Twitter. He’s the most unregulated, unself-governed president this country has ever had, an example of what happens to the psyche of rich white people after four decades of economic deregulation. But white folks—at least powerful ones—get to decide the exception to the rule. (“Some of the virtues of a freeman would be the vices of slaves,” as one 1837 defense of slavery explained.) And that’s what makes Trump the whitest of white presidents: He can openly tweet-mock moral conventions that hold that only those who demonstrate self-sovereignty are worthy of political sovereignty and still be the sovereign.
At The Week, Paul Waldman writes about the flood of Republican retirements:
[I]t will be particularly bad for Republicans in the next few years if Democrats take back control. [...] The mere thought is enough to send a congressman running to the waiting arms of a K Street lobbying firm, where at last he'll be properly remunerated for his unique talents. And there's a feedback loop: The more GOP incumbents opt to retire, the better the chances of Democrats taking over become, and the more attractive retirement looks for the members who remain.
There's no way to know how high the number of retirements will get, but it wouldn't be shocking to see it pass 40 or even 50. In the future, Republicans may look back and say that their congressional majority is just one more thing Trump ruined.
At USA Today, California Rep. Ted Lieu writes about how political favoritism governed the Trump administration’s decision not to drill off the coast of Florida:
It wasn’t that he acknowledged how offshore drilling would negatively impact Florida’s economy and tourism industry, it’s that he didn’t recognize how terrible it would be for all of the nation's coastal states.
His decision reeks of improper political favoritism. It’s also illegal. By treating Florida differently than other similarly situated states, Zinke’s planned program will likely be struck down by the courts and demonstrates that his decision-making is an abuse of discretion, and is arbitrary and capricious. There is no legal standard that would appear to allow his decision to stand.
Zinke has indicated he met with Florida government officials and quickly determined that Florida would no longer be a part of the Interior Department’s offshore drilling plan. Despite the widespread bipartisan backlash against his plan, Zinke seemed to heed input only from Florida officials.
Also at USA Today, Tom Nichols demolishes the GOP’s Fusion GPS conspiracy:
[C]entral to all of [the conspiracies] was the idea that without Fusion there would be nothing, and that we would know this if only we could know what Simpson said to the Senate investigators. But since the Senate intelligence committee wouldn’t release the transcript, we couldn’t know just how much Simpson had spilled his guts.
So now we know, and none of it supports the rickety Jenga pile of Republican conspiracy theories.
Instead of being the source of the FBI investigations, Simpson claimed that the FBI was already on to the Russians, not least because our Australian allies warned us that the Russians claimed to have dirt on Clinton, which they learned because George Papadopoulos, a Trump advisor, was bragging about it to an Australian diplomat.
Here are two pieces on the Republican attempts to require work for Medicaid benefits. Here is The New York Times editorial board:
When Ohio and Michigan expanded their Medicaid programs to broaden coverage, residents who became eligible found it easier to look for work, according to studies by the Ohio Department of Medicaid and the University of Michigan. That’s because having Medicaid gave them access to primary care doctors and prescription medicine that helped them live normal lives and get jobs.
That’s how you help people in the real world. The Trump administration said Thursday that it would get poor people to work by letting state governments deny them Medicaid if they don’t have a job.
Vanita Gupta and Fatima Goss Graves:
Some myths just won’t die, no matter how odious or untrue. And in the Trump era of outright lies masquerading as “alternative” facts, it is no surprise that we are seeing decades-old canards creep back into, and muddy, policy debates. A new Trump administration policy does just that by encouraging states to place work requirements on people who want to receive health insurance coverage through Medicaid. [...]
In fact, we don’t have to look any farther than welfare reform to find evidence that a Medicaid work requirement won’t help people find long-term employment or escape poverty. A study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on the impact of work requirements in Temporary Assistance to Needy Families programs found that the large majority of individuals subject to work requirements remained poor, and some fell even further into poverty.
Another study by the Urban Institute found that TANF work requirements made no difference in long-term employment rates. In other words, many families were worse off after work requirements were implemented. There is no reason to think that Medicaid work requirements will be any more successful than those imposed in TANF and other social safety net programs over the last 20 years.
On a final note, here is Eugene Robinson’s latest:
I want to be fair here. Of course all presidents would rather win fights than lose them, and, since they’re politicians, they want to be seen as winning those fights. But seeing each day as an “episode” of a reality-show presidency is a recipe for chaos, inconsistency, discontinuity, incoherence — a recipe for what we’ve seen in the first year of the Trump presidency. [...]
Trump had no ideas for reshaping the health-care system, with the result that Obamacare is still in place. He had no ideas for reshaping tax policy except “cut, cut, cut,” with the result that Republicans came up with a bill that balloons the national debt while offering caviar to the rich and peanuts to the middle class.
They say ignorance is bliss. Trump must be very happy.