Trump déjà vu: It's always about him

January 31, 2024

Remember that time—during Trump's presidency—when every proposed action by the US government was evaluated by a single criterion: Does the action advance Trump's personal interests? Although Trump is not president, House Republicans are giving us a reminder of what it was like when Trump was president. The text of the proposed immigration bill has yet to be released, but House Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly told his GOP colleagues on Tuesday that the bill is “dead on arrival” in the House. Why? Because Trump told him so—in order to advance Trump’s election prospects.

The situation is even more maddening than it appears at first blush. The House will likely vote on vague impeachment articles against Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas. One of the grounds for impeachment is that Mayorkas has lost “operational control of the border”—a fact that is unassailably true because Texas is blocking federal access to portions of the border!

There are other stories that deserve attention, but immigration is the lead issue. We should know by Friday if Trump will kill an immigration compromise that has been months in the making and whether the House will impeach a Cabinet secretary for the first time in 150 years.

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President Biden says he has determined a course of action against Iran-backed militias

In comments given to White House reporters, President Biden answered “Yes,” to the question of whether he has decided on a course of action against Iran-backed militias that killed US troops stationed in Jordan.

Biden went on to say,

I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East. That’s not what I’m looking for.

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby elaborated, saying,

The president will do what he has to do to protect our troops and our facilities and to look after our national security ... interests in the region,” [adding] that Biden’s order will be a “tiered approach” encompassing “potentially multiple actions.”

See Voice of America News, US Preparing 'Multiple Actions' to Deter Iran Proxies.

Biden’s apparent measured approach—multiple “tiered” actions—angered congressional Republicans. Senator Tom Cotton said that Biden is a “coward” if he does not unleash a “devastating military response.”

It is, of course, cheap and easy for Cotton to make rash statements when he is not responsible for preventing local conflicts from turning into a regional war and is not responsible for the lives of US troops that would be endangered in a “devastating” military response.

Tellingly, when Trump called off a retaliatory strike against Iran in 2019 because Trump feared the strike would cause a large number of deaths, Cotton made no criticisms of Trump's last-minute cancellation of an in-progress retaliatory strike against Iran. Gosh! It's almost as if Cotton changes his stance on US military action depending on who is president! Hypocrite!

For a more balanced view of the challenges that Biden faces, see CNN op-ed by Stephen Collinson, Analysis: Joe Biden has to deal with a second war he didn’t want. His task is to contain it.

Collinson writes,

Biden has now arrived at the unenviable position that presidents often face when all potential options before them are bad and the very task of seeking to slow a deepening crisis may end up exacerbating it.

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Speaker Johnson tells members in private meeting that border deal is “dead on arrival”

According to the unimpeachable source Marjorie Taylor Greene, Speaker Johnson told the GOP House caucus that the Senate immigration bill would be “dead on arrival” in the House. Why? Johnson told reporters that he has spoken to Trump “at length” about the proposed bill. Johnson tried to pretend that Trump was not interfering in passage of the bill for personal partisan advantage, saying that it was “absurd” that House Republicans would oppose the bill to benefit Trump in the 2024 general election. See The Hill, Speaker Johnson not dismissing border deal to help Trump: ‘That’s absurd’.

Johnson said at a press conference that

“Our duty is to do right by the American people, to protect the people. The first and most important job of the federal government is protecting citizens. We’re not doing that under President Biden.”

Of course, NOT passing immigration reform and authorizing more border security is the opposite of protecting the American people—a detail that Johnson deftly avoided. I have to hand it to the man—he looks you straight in the eye and lies to your face without batting an eyelash.

But no one is being fooled. President Biden has been vocal about the hypocrisy of Republicans who demand stricter control at the border but refuse to provide funding to increase federal resources. Biden needs to keep up the pressure. If the immigration bill fails because it does not serve the political interests of Trump, that should give President Biden purchase to push back against Trump's false “open order” narrative.

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The House GOP prepares to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas

It appears that the House will issue articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas this week. Here is what you need to know: The impeachment is a sham designed to distract from the GOP’s abject failure to address immigration reform in decades. For a lengthier and more detailed explanation, see WaPo, The Republican effort to impeach Mayorkas, explained. (Accessible to all.)

WaPo interviewed an expert on immigration policy, Frank O. Bowman III, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Law, who summarized the proposed articles of impeachment as follows:

The first article is essentially a claim that the various policy decisions of the secretary, with which they happen to disagree, are ‘violations of law,’ which have produced, in their view, a whole bunch of bad consequences,” Bowman said. “Their claims that he has violated the law [are] wrong because virtually every one of them is an argument about the way in which the secretary has interpreted the frankly contradictory provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act and other immigration legislation.”

Moreover, even if Mayorkas were convicted and removed by the Senate (which won’t happen), President Biden could simply appoint another Homeland Security Secretary to implement the same policies that are angering Republicans. In other words, the entire proceeding is pointless and ineffectual.

Meanwhile, Congress is not acting to pass an immigration bill. And, by the way, Mike Johnson, how much progress have you made on eleven budget bills that must pass to avoid a government shutdown in March? Wasting time on a show-trial impeachment is the last thing that Republicans should be doing.

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Important decision by Pennsylvania Supreme Court on reproductive liberty

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern have written an essay about an important decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that stands as a firm rebuke to the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs. The decision points the path forward for other states. See Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern in Slate, Pennsylvania Supreme Court rebukes Dobbs, Sam Alito's abortion views.

As explained by Lithwick and Stern, Pennsylvania has a state constitutional “equal rights amendment”, adopted in 1971, which bars the denial or abridgment of “equality of rights” because of “the sex of the individual.” Based on that provision, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that “abortion restrictions do amount to sex-based discrimination.”  

Lithwick and Stern explain:

On Monday, the court issued a landmark opinion declaring that abortion restrictions do amount to sex-based discrimination and therefore are “presumptively unconstitutional” under the state constitution’s equal rights amendment.

The majority vehemently rejected Dobbs’ history-only analysis, noting that, until recently, “those interpreting the law” saw women “as not only having fewer legal rights than men but also as lesser human beings by design.”

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision thus spurned Dobbs in two ways. First, the majority held that laws regulating a woman’s body do discriminate on the basis of sex, a truth that has been widely understood by legal scholars for decades.

And second, the majority explained that rooting women’s rights in the past is, itself, a form of sex discrimination, perpetuating misogynistic beliefs about gender inequality by judicial decree.

The decision in Pennsylvania points the way forward for other states until we can expand the Court and undo the travesty of Dobbs.

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Recalling Trump's damage to the environment

On June 1, 2017, five months into Trump's term, he gave notice that the US was withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords. On the first day of Joe Biden’s presidency, January 20, 2021, Biden issued an order rescinding the notice of withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords. It you are having doubts or hesitations about which candidate will fight the climate crisis, burn those dates into your memory.

Many environmental activists are unhappy with Biden—despite his accomplishments in promoting green energy, reducing reliance on coal, and rejoining the global effort to fight climate change. Saeed Khan of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding addresses the environmental records of the two presidential candidates in an op-ed in Newsweek, A Vote for Trump Is a Vote for an Environmental Apocalypse

Khan says, “President Biden himself is hardly the perfect candidate. Under the Biden Administration, America massively expanded fossil fuel production to unprecedented levels.” But despite reservations about Biden, Khan goes on to say the following about Trump:

For instance, during his disastrous tenure as president, the United States withdrew from the Paris Agreement, appointed climate skeptics to dismantle existing environmental regulations, repealed the Clean Power Plan, promoted coal production and offshore drilling, and rolled back restrictions on methane emissions.

Trump, who calls climate change a "hoax," would be a disaster for U.S. climate policy if he wins in November. He would further slash regulation and accelerate U.S. fossil fuel consumption to never-before-seen levels, dragging us all to oblivion. [¶]

After securing a crushing victory in Iowa, Trump declared that he would terminate Biden's "Green New Scam" and "drill, baby, drill." [¶]

Even during Christmas, Trump wished electric car users "rot in hell".

I’ll bet you have forgotten half the stuff that Trump has said and to set back the cause of environmental protection. Khan is right. Joe Biden is not the perfect candidate. But he is the only candidate who has passed historic legislation to protect the climate and will continue to work to protect the environment in the next presidential term. The choice is clear; indeed, it is not even close.

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Concluding Thoughts.

I exhausted myself writing yesterday’s Concluding Thoughts. I write so much content that I don’t always recognize when I say something worth remembering. In the Comments section on Tuesday, readers quoted my statement from yesterday that “Biden is the surrogate for democracy” on the November 2024 ballot. While that phrase may not sell on a t-shirt, it captures the essence of the choice we face in November 2024: democracy or tyranny, Biden or Trump.

Talk to you tomorrow!