Emergency Aid for Migrants Badly Divides Democrats - The New York Times

"Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for passage of the emergency aid package, saying that it protects families and “does not fund the administration’s failed mass detention policy. ”Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times



WASHINGTON — Congress is trying to rush $4.5 billion in emergency humanitarian aid to the southwestern border while placing new restrictions on President Trump’s immigration crackdown, spurred on by disturbing images of suffering migrant families and of children living in squalor in overcrowded detention facilities.



But with a House vote on the package planned for Tuesday, some Democrats are revolting over the measure, fearing that the aid will be used to carry out Mr. Trump’s aggressive tactics, including deportation raids that he has promised will begin within two weeks. Republicans are siding with the White House, which on Monday threatened a veto. They oppose restrictions in the measure that are meant to dictate better standards for facilities that hold migrant children and to bar the money from being used for enforcing immigration law.



Those twin challenges have left the fate of the bill up in the air, even as evidence of deplorable conditions at the border underscores both the urgent need for the money and the bitter rift over Mr. Trump’s policies.



Officials confirmed Monday that hundreds of migrant children had been transferred out of a Border Patrol station in Clint, Tex., where they did not have soap, toothbrushes, clean clothes or enough food. The move followed detailed reports about the dismal conditions that there were no diapers for toddlers and that children as young as 8 were caring for infants.



A spotlight on the people reshaping our politics. A conversation with voters across the country. And a guiding hand through the endless news cycle, telling you what you really need to know.



Those reports led to a backlash from elected officials and a rise in donations to immigrant advocacy groups aimed at sending supplies to the shelter. Officials said only 30 children remain in the Clint station, which was intended as a temporary holding center. Children are supposed to be transferred out after 72 hours, but many had been held there for weeks.



Speaker Nancy Pelosi huddled privately into the evening with concerned Democrats on Monday to try to keep the bill on track, with little time to spare.



“Democrats distrust this president because we have seen his cruel immigration policies and lawless behavior terrorize our constituents,” Representative Nita M. Lowey of New York, the chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, said on Monday evening as she pleaded with fellow Democrats to support the package. “That is why we have language to stop transfers of money for immigration raids and detention beds. But we cannot allow our anger at this president to blind us to the horrific conditions at facilities along the border as the agencies run out of money.”



The aid package poses a difficult dilemma for Democrats, who are torn between their desire to champion humanitarian help for migrants and their concern that any money they approve will be used by the Trump administration to advance what they consider to be a fundamentally inhumane set of policies. They are also loath to be seen as the ones holding up soap, diapers and food for babies, keenly aware that Mr. Trump and his team are eager to blame Democrats for the dire conditions.



“The administration chooses to direct the vast majority of funding toward enforcement, and then cries poverty when it comes to diapers and food,” said Heidi Altman, the policy director at the liberal National Immigrant Justice Center. “It’s a hostage-taking way of engaging in policy.”



Hispanic-American lawmakers are particularly split; some are arguing that it is crucial to get the aid to agencies and outside groups assisting migrants at the border, while others say they will not be complicit in sending any money to the very departments that have carried out Mr. Trump’s harsh initiatives against immigrants.



“I will not fund another dime to allow ICE to continue its manipulative tactics,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, said on Monday evening on her way into the meeting in Ms. Pelosi’s Capitol office.



The gathering stretched on for more than an hour as lawmakers aired their differences and complaints about the package. “It’s intense,” Representative Tony Cárdenas, Democrat of California, said as he emerged from the session, saying he was leaning toward supporting the aid. “No yelling, no screaming, but it’s intense.”



Several members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus are pushing to attach stricter conditions to the money, including higher humanitarian standards for facilities that hold migrant children.



But given the urgent nature of the situation facing migrants, some lawmakers, particularly those from districts on the border, said there was no time to hold out for such additions.



“Are there things I would like to change? Absolutely,” said Representative Veronica Escobar, Democrat of Texas, whose El Paso district abuts the border. “But we have a real crisis.”



She said Democrats were trying to advance “a bill that reflects more of our values,” but added: “We’re running out of time. We all saw what happened in Clint — there’s no time.”



Concern about the funding bill swelled over the weekend, after Mr. Trump tweeted on Sunday that he was suspending the raids for two weeks to provide time for a bipartisan compromise on changing asylum laws and closing immigration “loopholes.” His abrupt reversal came after Ms. Pelosi telephoned Mr. Trump to ask for a delay.



Ms. Pelosi praised the postponement, and in a strongly worded statement later on Sunday she called for passage of the emergency aid package, saying that it protects families and “does not fund the administration’s failed mass detention policy.” It would also do nothing to change asylum laws to meet Mr. Trump’s demands.



“As members of Congress and as Americans, we have a sacred moral responsibility to protect the human rights and the lives of vulnerable children and families,” she said. “To do anything less would be an outrageous and unacceptable violation of our oath and our morality.”



But even as the speaker was pressing to advance the bill, dozens of House Democrats were in revolt over it. In separate conference calls on Sunday, more than 30 members of the Progressive Caucus and more than 15 members of the Hispanic Caucus aired their concerns, many of them arguing that the legislation did not set high enough standards for migrant shelters or do enough to block money from going toward enforcement.



“We all want to address the problems at the border, but we don’t know that there are enough sticks in this bill to make sure that the Trump administration actually spends the money the way they’re supposed to,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington and the co-chairwoman of the Progressive Caucus. “He’s creating these crises and then trying to point a finger at Democrats to give him more money, which he then uses for his own purposes.”



Ms. Jayapal said there was no reason to believe that the Trump administration would abide by any restrictions included in the legislation or standards dictated by the measure, given its “lawless” behavior when it came to immigrants.



The conflict in the House stands in contrast to the Senate, where Republicans and Democrats on a key committee came together last week to approve a $4.6 billion border aid package that contained some limitations to bar the administration from using the resources for enforcement. It would, for instance, prohibit the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the division of the Department of Health and Human Services that houses unaccompanied migrant children, from sharing information with immigration officials about people who take custody of the children.



Representative Pramila Jayapal said there was no reason to believe that the Trump administration would abide by any restrictions included in the legislation or standards dictated by it.Erin Schaff/The New York Times

The House bill goes further than the Senate legislation in placing restrictions on the money. Facilities that house unaccompanied children would have a slightly shorter time frame — 12 months instead of 14 months — to meet existing legal standards for healthy, sanitary and humane conditions; they would have to allow oversight visits from members of Congress without warning; and the Department of Health and Human Services would have to report a child’s death in its custody to Congress within 24 hours.



Representative Chuck Fleischmann of Tennessee, the senior Republican on the panel overseeing the bill, said he opposed the measure as written by House Democrats. “You will see just about every Republican in the House vote against the Democratic supplemental bill,” Mr. Fleischmann said, citing the added restrictions and the lack of funding for back pay for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.



And even if they are able to muscle it through, he added, doing so sets up a negotiation to resolve differences with the Senate that will only delay the aid. “The enemy right now is time,” said Mr. Fleischmann, who supports the Senate bill.



“It is agreeable to the White House,” he said, “so we have two-thirds of the puzzle complete there.”



The White House on Monday issued a statement threatening that Mr. Trump would veto the House measure because it “does not provide adequate funding to meet the current crisis” and “contains partisan provisions designed to hamstring the administration’s border enforcement efforts.”



Ms. Pelosi has told colleagues that while she understands their concerns about the aid measure, its demise in the House would essentially cede the issue to the Senate and its weaker bill, according to people familiar with the conversations who described them on the condition of anonymity.



But many Democrats are pressing for more. They want to give the administration less time to comply with existing standards for facilities that house children, and to include higher health, nutritional, hygiene and sanitation standards for Customs and Border Protection facilities.



They would ban for-profit companies from running migrant shelters and would scrap funding for the United States Marshals that is specifically geared toward referring people who entered or re-entered the country illegally for criminal prosecution. And they want stronger prohibitions against sharing the immigration records of people who come forward to take custody of unaccompanied migrant children.



The measure has also exposed a rift among immigrant advocacy groups, with some of the most liberal organizations actively calling on lawmakers to oppose it and others privately saying the aid, however imperfect, is desperately needed.



The grass-roots group Indivisible began a social media campaign to urge members of Congress to vote against the legislation as a way of starving “Trump’s deportation machine,” in a tweet with the hashtag #notonedollar.



The language echoes that of several liberal Democrats who announced on Friday that they were opposed to the funding bill, saying they could not “in good conscience” back legislation that sent money to Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to “support a fundamentally cruel and broken immigration system.”



“These radicalized, criminal agencies are destroying families and killing innocent children,” said a statement by four freshman representatives, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. “It is absolutely unconscionable to even consider giving one more dollar to support this president’s deportation force that openly commits human rights abuses and refuses to be held accountable to the American people.”



Emergency Aid for Migrants Badly Divides Democrats - The New York Times

New book discusses importance of Constitution in today's political climate. This is a must watch.

For Joe Biden, Friendship Is Magic. "His praise of white supremacists is not a blunder but a key to his clubby worldview.

"His praise of white supremacists is not a blunder but a key to his clubby worldview.



By Jeet Heer Today 6:00 am



Joe Biden loves to rattle off the names of dead racist politicians he befriended in the same spirit of nostalgic reverie that a hero of a 19th-century French novel might reminisce about the mistresses he enjoyed as a young man. At a fundraiser on Tuesday, the current front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary cited his warm relationship with the late James O. Eastland and the late Herman Talmadge, both ardent segregationists. “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Biden told the audience. “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’” (Was Biden even aware of the racist code that reserved “boy” for black men and “son” for white ones?). Biden added, “At least there was some civility. But today, you look at the other side and you’re the enemy.”



Biden’s rivals and the media jumped on this supposed blunder. Senator Cory Booker, among others, called on Biden to apologize. The Washington Post described Biden’s remarks as belonging to the “pantheon of campaign-defining gaffes.”



But did Biden really make a faux pas? Or was it a frank statement about what the veteran politician actually thinks? Biden’s advisers reportedly warned him against using Eastland as an example. Biden discounted their warnings, which suggests the remarks were made with forethought. Far from speaking off-the-cuff, Biden was expressing one of his deepest convictions: that the vocation of politics is all about friendship.



Biden’s famous affability isn’t just an aspect of his personality. It’s a core belief. Like the talking horses in the animated kids show My Little Pony, Biden believes that “friendship is magic.”



Biden’s vision is similar, in some respects, to Obama’s promise in 2008 to unite a divided America. But Obama’s post-partisan politics was an attempt to get debates on key issues like health care settled by reasoned public debate. Biden’s post-partisanship is more narrowly personal.



For Biden, one-to-one relationships are the essence of life and politics. In his 2003 eulogy for the famously racist Senator Strom Thurmond, Biden said that “friendship and death are great equalizers, where our differences become irrelevant and the only thing that is left is what’s in our heart.”



Biden knows all about death, having lost his first wife and a 1-year-old daughter in a car accident in 1972, as well as an adult son to brain cancer in 2015. Being a man of grief and resiliency defines Biden. “The Bidenite glad-hander,” as George Blaustein observed in The New Republic, “offers emotional connection in a society of strangers, and having known sorrow makes Biden the best glad-hander in the business.” The experience of unspeakable grief is what gives Biden’s thirst for friendship its authenticity, freeing it from the tawdriness of mere networking.



Biden is quick to play up his friendships, whether with Barack Obama or Strom Thurmond. On June 8, he tweeted, “Happy #BestFriendsDay to my friend, @BarackObama.” This mawkish tweet was accompanied by a photo of a braided friendship bracelet that read “Joe” and “Barack” along with little emblems of joy (including a star and a happy face).



In a heartfelt eulogy, Biden recalled how Thurmond had defended him from an accusation of plagiarism in law school. “When partisanship was a winning option, he chose friendship,” Biden said.



Biden claims Thurmond underwent a change of heart on racism, a redemption narrative at odds with the evidence. (Biden made the same claim about another racist pal, John C. Stennis.) Thurmond died at the age of 100 without acknowledging that he was the father to an African-American daughter, the product of a relationship he had as a young man with a 16-year-old maid. Whatever private remorse Thurmond or Stennis might have felt does nothing to address the impact of their decades-long advocacy of racism from the commanding heights of American politics.



Politics is defined by a choice of friends and enemies. Bernie Sanders’s foes are the 1 percent. Elizabeth Warren’s nemesis is monopolistic corporations—or the Republican Party. Joe Biden’s target is just one man: Donald Trump. Biden’s theory of political change is a simple one: Get rid of Trump and we can all be friends again. “The thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House,” Biden told donors in early July. “Not a joke. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.”



Biden’s cult of friendship is so heartfelt that it seems churlish to point out that it is also absurd. Even New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who shares much of Biden’s centrist politics, notes that the Obama years provide ample evidence that bipartisan conviviality is not enough. Biden’s bonhomie helped secure a handful of Republican senatorial votes in one key issue (stimulus funding), but was otherwise effective only on minor matters. Biden’s back-slapping geniality was no match for the ferocious partisanship of Mitch McConnell. Partisan polarization and Republican extremism go far beyond Donald Trump, and won’t be solved by gregariousness.



From the outside, what Biden sees as friendship looks more like cliquishness. Strom Thurmond helped his buddy Joe—a smart move in a clubby world. Thurmond was a notorious sexual harasser, who benefited from the old-boys’-club protectiveness of the Senate. But aside from such personal back-scratching, Thurmond prioritized not just partisanship but an ideological commitment to white supremacy. It was that overriding goal of white power that made Thurmond break with the Democrats in 1948 to run as a Dixiecrat and eventually become a Republican in 1964.



Thurmond knew politics wasn’t really about personal loyalty (after all, he betrayed his own party) but about pushing an agenda. This is an insight Joe Biden lacks. The Jim Crow system that Thurmond upheld wasn’t defeated by his change of heart or his friendship with other politicians, but through a mass protest movement that broke the logjam of cozy Washington.



Nor did Biden’s friendship with Thurmond achieve much good. Biden cites their work on the 1991 Thurmond-Biden Crime Bill, one of the building blocks of American mass incarceration. As for James O. Eastland, Biden bonded with him over a shared opposition to school integration. “I want you to know that I very much appreciate your help during this week’s Committee meeting in attempting to bring my antibusing legislation to a vote,” Biden wrote to Eastland in 1977.



Democrats might ask themselves: With friends like Biden and his pals, who needs enemies?"



For Joe Biden, Friendship Is Magic

Border Patrol finds four bodies, including three children, in South Texas

The body of a 20-year-old woman was found together with the children, the sheriff said.

June 24, 2019, 5:23 AM EDT

Border Patrol agents found four bodies, including three children, near the Rio Grande in South Texas on Sunday, Hidalgo County Sheriff Eddie Guerra said.

Two of the children were infants and one was a toddler, Guerra said. The adult was a 20-year-old woman, he said.

The deaths come amid a huge influx of undocumented immigrants at the Southwest border and demonstrate how treacherous it is to journey, often on foot, to the U.S. from Mexico and Central America.

The bodies were found southeast of Anzalduas Park in the Las Paloma Wildlife Management Area, just north of Reynosa, Mexico, and south of McAllen, Texas, Guerra said.

He said deputies were awaiting FBI agents to lead the investigation.

More than 132,000 people were stopped while crossing the border illegally or presenting themselves at legal ports of entry in the month of May — the most in 13 years, U.S. Customs and Border Protections officials said.

At least seven children are known to have died at the border since last year, though they were in CBP custody at the time. The most recent death, of 16-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez, occurred last month after the teen was diagnosed with the flu."

Border Patrol finds four bodies, including three children, in South Texas

Ilhan Omar Wants You to Rethink Immigration | Opinions | NowThis

Ilhan Omar Nails the Religious Double Standard in Abortion Bans | NowThis

Republican Hypocrisy Exposed by Rep. Ilhan Omar | NowThis

Taking Migrant Children From Parents Is Illegal, U.N. Tells U.S. - The New York Times

Blame those cowards who fear impeachment for what is happening to these children. Trump continues to break the law and immoral people refuse to due their Constitutional duty to impeach him or constituents impose impeachment for political reasons.



"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.



Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.



Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.



Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me." Martin Niemöller



Taking Migrant Children From Parents Is Illegal, U.N. Tells U.S. - The New York Times

A Judge Releases Private Texts Between Sean Hannity And Paul Manafort | ...

Cory Booker discusses his phone call with Joe Biden

Cory Booker discusses his phone call with Joe Biden

Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates Makes the Case for Reparations at Historic Congr...

Opinion | Reparations: Reasonable and Right - The New York Times

"By Charles M. Blow nytimes.com



It is America’s responsibility to undo the trauma it has inflicted upon black people for hundreds of years.



Opinion Columnist



Carolyn Smith, a descendant of a slave, gestures toward gravestones of other descendants of enslaved people in Houma, La.

This week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was asked his opinion on the paying of reparations to the descendants of slavery in America, and he came down solidly on the side of “no” and on the side of being intentionally obtuse.



Here is his answer in full:



“I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago, for whom none of us currently are responsible, is a good idea. We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We’ve elected an African-American president. I think we’re always a work in progress in this country, but no one currently alive was responsible for that.



“And, I don’t think we should be trying to figure out how to compensate for it. First of all, it would be pretty hard to figure out who to compensate. We’ve had waves of immigrants as well who come to the country and experienced dramatic discrimination of one kind or another. So no, I don’t think reparations are a good idea.”



Everything McConnell said was fundamentally wrong — factually and morally.



Let’s start at the beginning: Chattel slavery in America is not merely “something that happened” 150 years ago. This year happens to be the 400th anniversary of when the first enslaved African arrived on our shores, and slavery became an indescribably horrific institution that thrived for nearly 250 years.



And the unpaid, unrewarded labor of those enslaved Africans is in large part what made America an economic powerhouse, and now one of the wealthiest countries in the world. And yet, the enslaved reaped none of the benefits of the wealth they created.



Does that sound fair or right?



Here it is important to point out that reparations are not only about the institution of slavery, but also about the century of oppression, a form of semi-slavery that came in its wake through racial terror, black codes and Jim Crow.



From the very beginning, emancipation wasn’t whole. During slavery, the enslaved were not counted as fully human — they were to be counted as three-fifths of a person as set forth in the Constitution — but the Supreme Court’s horrendous decision in the Dred Scott v. Sanford case confirmed that black people were not and could not become citizens of this country.



In the introduction to what remains a jaw-dropping decision, the author writes:



“The doctrine of 1776, that all (white) men ‘are created free and equal,’ is universally accepted and made the basis of all our institutions, State and National, and the relations of citizenship — the rights of the individual — in short, the status of the dominant race, is thus defined and fixed for ever.”



Black people would not be considered citizens until the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, but the 13th Amendment, ratified three years earlier, the year the Civil War ended, had already left a backdoor for quasi reimposition of slavery, stating, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”



That exception was just the backdoor that many in power needed, leading to further abominations, like convict leasing. As the Equal Justice Initiative has explained:



“After the Civil War, slavery persisted in the form of convict leasing, a system in which Southern states leased prisoners to private railways, mines and large plantations. While states profited, prisoners earned no pay and faced inhumane, dangerous and often deadly work conditions. Thousands of black people were forced into what authors have termed ‘slavery by another name’ until the 1930s.”



Does that sound fair or right?



When slavery ended, many slaves thought that they would receive 40 acres and a mule; instead, they got pestilence and starvation. In the eyes of America, all their labor had earned them nothing.



The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. touched on this gross failure of America in speeches just before he died and in advance of his planned Poor People’s Campaign, saying:



“At the same time that America refused to give the Negro any land, through an act of Congress, our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and Midwest, which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor. But not only did they give the land, they built land grant colleges, with government money, to teach them how to farm. Not only that, they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming. Not only that, they provided low interest rates in order that they could mechanize their farms. Not only that, today many of these people are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies, not to farm and they are the very people telling the black man that he ought to lift himself by his own boot straps.”



King finished:



“Now, when we come to Washington, in this campaign, we’re coming to get our check.”



The enslaved were freed into an epidemic of sickness and death.



The historian Jim Downs estimates that “at least one quarter of the four million former slaves got sick or died between 1862 and 1870,” as The New York Times pointed out when his book, “Sick From Freedom,” was released in 2012.



There was no medical infrastructure — or educational or financial, for that matter — to support them. The federal government said it was the states’ responsibility, and the states shirked it, saying, in part, that they had enough to handle, with thousands of wounded soldiers returning. So, the bodies fell and the tombstones sprouted.



Does any of this sound fair or right to you?



In an 1888 speech, Frederick Douglass would blast America’s faux emancipation of black people, saying:



“I admit that the Negro, and especially the plantation Negro, the tiller of the soil, has made little progress from barbarism to civilization, and that he is in a deplorable condition since his emancipation. That he is worse off, in many respects, than when he was a slave, I am compelled to admit, but I contend that the fault is not his, but that of his heartless accusers. He is the victim of a cunningly devised swindle, one which paralyzes his energies, suppresses his ambition, and blasts all his hopes; and though he is nominally free he is actually a slave. I here and now denounce his so-called emancipation as a stupendous fraud — a fraud upon him, a fraud upon the world.”



During Reconstruction, not only was the Freedmen’s Bureau established, so was the Freedman’s Bank, in part because white banks wouldn’t do business with black people. After the bank had been run into the ground by mismanagement, Douglass was brought in as president to save it. But it was too late. Just three months later the bank was allowed to fail.



As the National Archives put it:



“The closure of Freedman’s Bank devastated the African-American community. An idea that began as a well-meaning experiment in philanthropy had turned into an economic nightmare for tens of thousands African Americans who had entrusted their hard-earned money to the bank. Contrary to what many of its depositors were led to believe, the bank’s assets were not protected by the federal government. Perhaps more far-reaching than the immediate lost of their tiny deposits, was the deadening effect the bank’s closure had on many of the depositors’ hopes and dreams for a brighter future. The bank’s demise left bitter feelings of betrayal, abandonment, and distrust of the American banking system that would remain in the African-American community for many years. While half of the depositors eventually received about three-fifths of the value of their accounts, others received nothing. Some depositors and their descendants spent more than thirty years petitioning Congress for reimbursement for losses.”



Was this bank not too big to fail?



Then, with the Compromise of 1877, Reconstruction itself was allowed to fail as politicians worked out a scheme to resolve the disputed election of 1876: Rutherford B. Hayes could have the presidency if the federal government finished withdrawing the troops from the South who had helped protect black interests there.



Everyone knew where this would lead, and that is precisely where it led: States across the South, where 90 percent of black people lived, began to call constitutional conventions, beginning with Mississippi in 1890, to enshrine white supremacy into the DNA of those states.



As the historian Jim Loewen has written, one delegate at the convention said: “Let’s tell the truth if it bursts the bottom of the universe. We came here to exclude the Negro. Nothing short of this will answer.”



As Loewen put it, Confederates might have lost the Civil War in 1865, but they “won the Civil War in 1890.”



These new constitutions laid the groundwork for another 75 years or so of legal racial oppression under Jim Crow in which black people were regularly terrorized, excluded and oppressed. And this says nothing of mass incarceration, which sprung up when Jim Crow fell.



None of this is fair or right!



For a vast majority of black people’s time in this country, they have been suffering under an oppression operating on all levels of government — local, state and federal.



It is absolutely a good idea for America to think about how to make that right, to think about how to repair the damage it did, to think about how to do what is morally just.



And the idea that too much time has passed makes a mockery of morality. You can’t use having not done something at a better time as an argument that a later time can never be the right time.



Furthermore, this is not about individual guilt or shame but rather about collective responsibility and redemption. America needs to set its soul right.



The paying of reparations isn’t at all an outlandish idea. To the contrary, it’s an exceedingly reasonable proposition. Most of all, it’s right."



Opinion | Reparations: Reasonable and Right - The New York Times

AOC was right to compare Trump's border internment camps to concentration camps

"We're debating the description of forced extrajudicial detainment of a rhetorically demonized racial minority in harsh, punitive conditions.





Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, during a House Oversight and Reform Committee markup on June 12, 2019.

Oregon became the 11th state in the nation to mandate that public schools teach students about the Holocaust and other genocides, just last month. As an American Jew who attended public school in the late 1970s and 1980s, I was surprised to hear that learning about a defining piece of world history apparently requires specific legislation. As a resident of Oregon — a state founded as a white utopia, with both a history of structural racism and an all-too-current glut of emboldened white nationalists — I was fascinated to read that the bill was a collaboration between a nonagenarian Holocaust survivor and a 14-year-old public school student.



As a person who has witnessed the sharp rise of American anti-Semitism in the past decade, I worry that the bill is too little and too late.



Yesterday, the absurdist game of Mad Libs that is the national news brought us a Twitter faceoff between Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., sparked by the former’s assertion that the Trump administration’s detention facilities at the U.S.-Mexico border are “exactly like concentration camps” and the latter’s subsequent finger-wagging reprimand of Ocasio-Cortez that the comparison trivialized the 6 million Jews who died in such camps.



Before you could ask “war profiteer’s daughter says what?” Twitter had become a pedantic Hydra of arguments that were less about the actual existence of such camps than about what we should be calling them. (For the record, concentration-camp historians agree that using the general term “concentration camp” to describe conditions at the border is accurate.)



Since Cheney mentioned it, though, there’s a reason that people — mostly, but not exclusively, Jewish people — say “Never again” when referring to the Holocaust. The phrase is one that binds Jewish people as a community in remembrance of those who were gassed, starved, shot and worked to death in places such as Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald, which were but some of the 938 camps and subcamps in the Nazis' concentration camp system.



But it’s also a shibboleth against complacency, a reminder that what happened in those camps didn’t happen overnight, but were the yield of an ideological campaign involving the active persecution of groups deemed inferior — not only Jews, but also Roma people, Polish and Slavic people, people with disabilities, LGBT people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, clergy and community leaders and more — that was built over years, its language of dehumanization building to a horrific crescendo of genocide.



Hannah Arendt’s famous assessment of Adolf Eichmann, one of the Holocaust’s chief architects, was that he “did not need to 'close his ears to the voice of conscience'.... not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a 'respectable voice,' with the voice of respectable society around him.” The Trump administration has turned today’s respectable voices into a constant, credulous blare of redirections and assurances: He’ll pivot. He isn’t really serious about a Muslim ban. Of course he doesn’t think all Mexicans are rapists. No, he never said that. Well, he did say it, but he won’t follow through. They’re the media voices that, wary of risking their access, devise increasingly baroque ways to avoid calling a lie "a lie"; they’re the political voices on both sides of the aisle promising to take all of this very seriously.



Thus, it’s not that surprising to see American politicians and pundits grasp at small semantic differences in terminology that describes forced extrajudicial detainment of a rhetorically demonized racial minority in harsh, punitive conditions. Whatever students are or are not taught about Germany's and Austria’s concentration camps in their history classes, they very likely hear far less about the Japanese Americans who were rounded up and held in internment camps following the attack on Pearl Harbor, or the millions of Native Americans killed by Europeans who decided that America belonged to them. If Americans confirm with one voice that, yes, there are concentration camps at the U.S.-Mexico border, we confirm the continuation of an ugly history we have yet to fully acknowledge — and the reality that it’s not behind us.



Unlike Germany, which after the end of World War II recognized the importance of confronting the atrocities that unfolded within its borders and making amends, the United States has yet to intentionally reckon with, much less make amends for, its own campaigns of dehumanization.



The national belief in exceptionalism and the corporate media’s thirst for access, scoops and clicks has given our border zone concentration camps that most American of things: A rebrand. We are, after all, the country where “Kentucky Fried Chicken” became “KFC” to make us forget our fried chicken is fried, where “torture” was given the friendlier gloss of “enhanced interrogation,” and where we are trying to make something called “freedom gas” (i.e., natural gas) a thing. Of course we'll call child internment camps anything but concentration camps.



Five migrant children have died since December in detention facilities described by politicians, legal advocates and human rights organizations as being overcrowded and unsanitary, with meager food and extreme temperatures. Those who spend time parsing whether conditions in these places — which are, it’s worth repeating, for civil rather than criminal custody — are bad enough to qualify as concentration camps and berating anyone who dares to describe them accurately, are more concerned with sparing the feelings of those perpetuating the acts in question than they seem to be with the acts themselves.



Liz Cheney and others who have denounced Ocasio-Cortez’s word choice claim concern for “real” victims of history’s abominable acts have been curiously quiet in the past several years as Jews rang the alarm about an increase in anti-Semitic rhetoric and actions, as we were harassed online with photos of ovens and worse, and as bomb threats were called into Jewish community centers.



One of the internet age’s most specious paradoxes is that if you have a personal connection to an atrocity — rape, police brutality, mass genocide — you therefore have too much skin in the game to be a reliable witness to or expert on that thing. In a time in which anti-Semitic rhetoric and attacks, including the 2018 massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue and this April’s attack on a San Diego-area synagogue, are on the rise, determining whether the words used to describe the violence of intolerance goes too far is akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic: We’re going down fast, but at least we look respectable doing it.



“Never again” was coined for the Holocaust, but its message is one that speaks to a broader history of the ease with which semantic arguments and nimble euphemisms let intolerance for and dehumanization flourish. We can teach this history in schools — but we must also take moments like these as a reminder that not repeating it demands using accurate words to describe what is happening right in front of us."



AOC was right to compare Trump's border internment camps to concentration camps

2020 candidates weigh in on prosecuting Trump. This video hits on one of the main legal and Constitutional reasons that impeachment is necessary right now.

Impeachment: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

School Segregation: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Chris Cuomo ENDS Conway's CAREER before She Handcuffed for Violating Fed...

Fox hosts give Trump chilling news about his open collusion invitation

I can't believe I am sharing a Fox News, Post.  It is not collusion. It is accepting something of value from a non-American or permanent resident. 



"52 U.S. Code § 30121 - Contributions and donations by foreign nationals

U.S. Code

Notes

Authorities (CFR)

prev | next

(a) ProhibitionIt shall be unlawful for—

(1) a foreign national, directly or indirectly, to make—

(A) a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State, or local election;

(B) a contribution or donation to a committee of a political party; or

(C) an expenditure, independent expenditure, or disbursement for an electioneering communication (within the meaning of section 30104(f)(3) of this title); or

(2) a person to solicit, accept, or receive a contribution or donation described in subparagraph (A) or (B) of paragraph (1) from a foreign national.

(b) “Foreign national” definedAs used in this section, the term “foreign national” means—

(1) a foreign principal, as such term is defined by section 611(b) of title 22, except that the term “foreign national” shall not include any individual who is a citizen of the United States; or

(2) an individual who is not a citizen of the United States or a national of the United States (as defined in section 1101(a)(22) of title 8) and who is not lawfully admitted for permanent residence, as defined by section 1101(a)(20) of title 8."