Tag: ice
Incoming GOP Majority Previews 2023 Agenda -- And Of Course It's Absurd

Incoming GOP Majority Previews 2023 Agenda -- And Of Course It's Absurd

Incoming House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) sent a letter Friday to the Republican conference outlining the agenda for the first few weeks of the session for the Republicans’ tiny new majority. That is, if they can actually get a speaker elected, because they can’t do any business at all until that’s accomplished.

Once they get past that hurdle, Scalise promises they’ll “begin bringing up meaningful, ‘ready-to-go’ legislation” that will “address challenges facing hard-working families on issues ranging from energy, inflation, border security, life, taxpayer protection, and more.”

It probably won’t come as a big surprise that the bills Scalise lists in his letter don’t do any of that. He also omits as “and more” three pieces of punitive, politicized abortion legislation. They sure learned their lesson from November!

That forced birth agenda includes codifying the long-standing Hyde Amendment that prevents federal funding for abortion and “funding for any insurance plan that includes abortion on demand.” That’s private health insurance coverage they’re talking about. They’ll also vote on a cruel “born-alive” bill that would require medical personnel provide care to infants born with conditions that will keep them from surviving outside the womb for any amount of time, torturing the babies in their only minutes on Earth with futile medical interventions and preventing parents from having the experience of being with their newborn for whatever time they’ll live. It’s just sick.

Speaking of sick, they have a gotcha bill to try to force Democrats on the record “condemning the recent attacks on pro-life facilities, groups, and churches.” Recent attacks? On churches for being “pro-life”? In the U.S.? Outside of the synagogues and the Black churches, that is.

They do have some energy-related bills, mostly attempting to tie President Joe Biden’s hands if we’re faced with another oil shortage with a bill that “prohibits non-emergency drawdowns of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve without a plan to increase energy production on federal lands.” Sorry, America, you can’t have both affordable gas and pristine national parks and recreation areas.

There’s also plenty of immigrant-bashing to be had, including a bill that “requires the National Instant Criminal Background Check system (NICS) to notify U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and relevant local law enforcement when a firearm transferee is illegally present in the United States.” So they found a gun restriction that they can support on a thing that probably never happens.

Oh, and they’ll try to repeal the increase in funding for the IRS that Democrats passed this year. They sure don’t want the agency to be able to investigate their well-heeled donors for tax fraud.

None of this is necessary. All of this was rejected by the American people in November. And none of it will make it to the Senate floor. But the Republicans don’t actually care about making policy. They want to score political points and shore up their shrinking base of fanatical bigots, because that’s all they got.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Demand Justice, But Stand Up For Law And Order Too

Demand Justice, But Stand Up For Law And Order Too

The conversation started on a long Uber ride. The driver, originally from Colombia, said he knows a lot of Colombians living in the U.S. "without papers." He argued that they are good people paying taxes and should be left alone. I responded that I believe they are good people paying taxes but our immigration laws should be respected.

He then said, to my surprise, "I kind of like Donald Trump." Why, I asked. He went on heatedly about the riots that followed the killing of George Floyd. He thought Trump was more serious about restoring order.

The public really dislikes civic chaos. Democrats, you need to address this more forthrightly.

It matters not that only 6 percent of the racial justice rallies from May through October of last year saw violence. Nor is the intention to downplay troubling cases of police brutality. And let's not forget that the most outrageous incident of savage lawlessness, the Jan. 6 rampage on the Capitol, was staged by the Republican right wing.

It's just that the right talks a big game on maintaining law and order while some on the left leave the impression that Democrats don't care so much. The liberal media tend to give these radical voices outsized attention, which the right-wing media happily scoops up.

Thus, we hear stupid calls to "Abolish ICE" (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the agency tasked with stopping cross-border crime and illegal entry. And there are demands to "defund police," which President Joe Biden and the vast majority of Democrats totally oppose.

I recently had dinner with progressive friends who were angry over the violent demonstrations in the liberal strongholds of Portland and Seattle. They complained that the rioters' destructive behavior — and the apparent toleration of it by cowardly local officials — was helping elect Republicans opposed to their progressive values. And they were right.

The recurring mayhem in Portland has become a sport for punks. Though they may invoke the usual woke causes, they are performers out for thuggish "fun." And though they often riff on "identity politics," the few who get arrested are almost all young and white.

Earlier this month, May Day demonstrations brought another fresh round of havoc to Portland. Buildings were damaged and windows smashed. Garbage piling in the streets prompted The Oregonian to rename the city "Dumptown."

Seattle is still recovering from the fallout of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, several blocks that city leaders astonishingly made off-limits to police last year. Early on, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan naively told CNN, "We could have the summer of love." Not quite. The area was tormented by rapes, assaults, burglaries, vandalism and shootings.

The Economist recently pointed to a study strongly suggesting that last year's civic disorder cost Democrats support in November. Biden's share of the vote, it noted, was lower in and around Kenosha, Wisconsin, than in similar places in the state. The apparent reason were the ugly riots that followed the Kenosha police shooting of a black man.

A poll of New York City voters has crime as the No. 1 issue. More than 60 percent of those responding said they wanted to raise the New York City Police Department's budget and hire more cops. The top-polling mayoral candidate is Eric Adams, a former police officer and the current Brooklyn borough president. When his chief rival, Andrew Yang, bashed the movement to defund police, Adams countered that he himself had bashed the movement first.

In Los Angeles, meanwhile, Mayor Eric Garcetti recently swatted down the noisy activists, saying, "If you want to abolish the police, you're talking to the wrong mayor."

This is how people in America's liberal cities feel. It's time the rest of America knew it.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

immigrant kids , ICE

Trump Says Immigrant Children He Orphaned Are ’So Well Taken Care Of’

Donald Trump on Thursday night defended his administration's policy of separating immigrant children from their families with no way of reuniting them, claiming they are "so well taken care of."

Asked at the final presidential debate about the 545 detained immigrant kids taken forcibly from their parents at the southern U.S. border under his administration's zero-tolerance policy, whose families the Trump administration has been unable to locate, Trump first suggested without proof that some had been brought into the country by "coyotes."

Former Vice President Joe Biden quickly refuted that argument, noting that the kids in question had come over with their families before being separated by border officials.

"Let's talk about what we're talking about, what happened. Parents, their kids were ripped from their arms and separated. And now they cannot find over 500 sets of those parents and those kids are alone, nowhere to go," Biden noted. "It's criminal."

Trump then falsely claimed that the children were being kept in great facilities.

"I will say this. They went down. We brought reporters, everything. They are so well taken care of. They're in facilities were so clean and have gotten such good..." he bragged.


In reality, the Department Health and Human Services' own inspector general has documented widespread trauma among those children, many of whom have been held in facilities with histories of abuse and misconduct. A September 2019 investigation found "some separated children expressed acute grief that caused them to cry inconsolably."

A separate 2018 report by the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general found that hundreds of children were also unlawfully detained for more than three days — often in cages, without beds or showers — and that the Border Patrol failed to even keep track of which of the nonverbal young kids were which.

Thursday night's question about the 545 separated children stemmed from a New York Times report published on Wednesday, which revealed that the Trump administration's poor record keeping had made it difficult to impossible to decipher the parents' whereabouts. And though in some cases, parents said they had left their children with friends after being deported, they only did so because they felt forced or were concerned for their children's safety if they came with them.

"The Trump administration had no plans to keep track of the families or ever reunite them and so that's why we're in the situation we're in now, to try to account for each family," Justice in Motion's Nan Schivone, who is working with other advocates to help find the parents, told the Times.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

Danziger Draws

Danziger Draws

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.