Month: June 2019

Another 10 Democratic U.S. presidential contenders will debate Thursday night, including a larger number of leading candidates, following a spirited Wednesday night debate in the first major event of the 2020 election campaign.

Thursday’s participants include former Vice President Joe Biden and other top-tier possible choices, including Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Kamala Harris of California; Mayor Pete Buttigieg of the Midwestern city of South Bend, Indiana; along with six others.

All twenty Democratic presidential hopefuls hope to oust Republican President Donald Trump after a single term in the White House.

The immediate focus Wednesday was on Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a progressive lawmaker from the northeastern state of Massachusetts who national surveys show has edged closer to Biden as a Democratic favorite to oppose Trump in the election set for Nov. 3, 2020.

She told a live audience in Miami, Florida, and millions more watching on national television, “I want to return government to the people.” She added, referring to major corporations, “What’s been missing is courage, courage in Washington to take on the giants. I have the courage to go after them.”

Later, Warren said she supports a government-run health care system that could end the private insurance-based health care now used in the U.S. Some Democratic candidates and most Republicans, including Trump, oppose such a change as costly and a mistake for the country.

But Warren, a former Harvard law professor, said, “Health care is a basic human right and I will fight for basic human rights.”

Even with Warren’s strong performance in the two-hour debate, the other candidates had their moments to control it in their attempt to gain a foothold in the unprecedentedly large field of 25 Democratic candidates.

Immigration

Former U.S. housing chief Julian Castro, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and other contenders called for major changes in U.S. immigration policies, voicing numerous objections to the way Trump has tried to block Central American migrants from entering the U.S. to seek asylum.

“We must not criminalize desperation” of migrants to reach the U.S., said Castro, who frequently began his answers in Spanish before repeating them in English. He said this week’s photo of an El Salvadoran father and his 23-month-old daughter drowning in the Rio Grande River on the southern U.S. border with Mexico “is heart-breaking…and should piss us all off.”

Warren was also joined on the debate stage by Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, former Congressman Beto O’Rourke of Texas and five others as they parried each other’s policy planks and aimed verbal shots at Trump and his 29-month White House tenure. “Immigrants do not diminish America,” Klobuchar said at one point in a rejoinder to Trump, even as she added that some border restrictions must be kept to stop human traffickers.

For many Americans, it was the first chance to size up many of the Democratic presidential candidates, to see whether they might like any of them as an alternative to Trump, the country’s surprise winner in the 2016 election.

The crowd in Miami, a Democratic stronghold in a state Trump won in the 2016 election, cheered raucously at verbal swipes at Trump, with Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee perhaps drawing the biggest response when he contended that Trump was the world’s biggest security threat to the U.S., while the other candidates gave more traditional answers to the same question, naming Russia, China, and global warming.

The Democrats are staging a dozen debates over the coming months, well ahead of the first Democratic election contest to eventually pick the party’s presidential nominee: caucus voting in the Midwest farm state of Iowa in the dead of winter next February.

The unwieldy field of candidates, in addition to another five that did not meet the Democratic National Committee’s minimal political standards to merit a spot in the debates, all sense they might have a chance to unseat Trump.

Democratic voters, however, so far seem uncertain of what they are looking for in their party standard-bearer — someone who best represents their political views on such contentious issues as health care, abortion, foreign policy, immigration, taxes and more, or possibly a candidate who has one overriding quality: the best chance of defeating Trump.

…

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is looking forward to a meeting with President Donald Trump to end the escalating crisis over Ankara’s procurement of Russia’s S-400 missile system. The expected meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, is seen as the last chance to avoid a rupture in ties between the NATO allies.

“The [presidents’] meeting is a turning point,” said former senior Turkish diplomat Aydin Selcen who served in Washington. “Why, because we have a deadline, for the first time we have a delivery date by the end of July, and the sanctions from Washington are ready to kick in. They are concrete; they are ready.”

Erdogan is playing down the threat of sanctions. “I don’t know if NATO countries began to impose sanctions on each other. I did not receive this impression during my contact with Trump,” Erdogan said Wednesday to reporters before leaving for Japan.

Erdogan is expecting a breakthrough with Trump. “I believe my meeting with U.S. President Trump during the G-20 summit will be important for eliminating the deadlock in our bilateral relations and strengthening our cooperation,” Erdogan told the Nikkei Asian Review, in an interview published Wednesday.

Washington says the advanced S-400 missile system threatens to compromise NATO defense systems, especially the United States’ latest F-35 fighter jet. Ankara faces exclusion from the consortium building the F-35 along with the purchasing of the plane.

The first step in U.S. sanctions over the S-400 system saw Turkish pilots removed this month from training on the advanced jet.

Erdogan is banking on his relationship with Trump to end the impasse. “Yes, Mr. Erdogan is reportedly one of Mr. Trump’s favorite leaders around the world,” said Selcen, who is now a regional analyst. “But then on various issues what Mr. Trump says on the phone or bilateral talks, does not necessarily coincide with what happens on the ground,” he added.

However, Wednesday acting U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper warned his Turkish counterpart, Hulusi Akar, of the consequences of the S-400 purchase.

 “If they accept the S-400 they should accept ramifications not only to the F-35 program but also to their economic situation,” a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity after a defense ministers meeting on the sidelines of a NATO gathering in Brussels.

The U.S. Congress is threatening to hit Turkey with wide-ranging economic sanctions under the Counter-Anti-American Trade Sanctions Act (CAATSA.)

Trump does have the power to block some of the sanctions, but International relations expert Soli Ozel of Istanbul’s Kadir Has University questions whether Trump would be prepared to use precious political capital defending Ankara.

“Yes, he (Trump) does defy Congress,” said Ozel, “but that usually happens when the Republican party is solidly behind him.  However, when it comes to Turkey the S-400 and F-35, the Republicans in Congress are not at all with him, nor the Pentagon.”

Erdogan is also due to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit. The meeting could be an opportunity for the Turkish president to seek a way out of the S-400 purchase without damaging ties with Moscow. With the two countries sharing a wide range of interests economically and regionally, analysts say there is room for a possible deal.

“Putin is key to a solution. The S-400 deal is a marriage of sorts only he can free Erdogan from,” said international relations professor Huseyin Bagci of Ankara’s Middle East Technical University.

However, Turkish domestic politics could be a new obstacle leading to Erdogan backing down. The Turkish president is reeling from a landslide defeat of his candidate in Sunday’s crucial Istanbul mayoral election.

“Due to the heavy loss in the mayoral election Erdogan may try and consolidate his base,” said Selcen. “If there is more catering to the nationalist and Islamist base, then yes, the S-400 can become part of domestic politics. Then it will be harder to solve.”

In Erdogan’s first speech since his bruising Istanbul defeat, he played the nationalist card, underlining that the missile purchase was more than just a defense matter. “The issue of the S-400 is an issue directly related to our sovereignty, and we will not backtrack from that,” he said to his parliamentary deputies.

Erdogan’s parliamentary coalition partner backed his position. “Turkey is at a crossroads. Either we submit to these threats, lose our honor, or get the S-400s and deploy them to the designated homeland,” said MHP leader Devlet Bahceli, Wednesday.
 
“I fear that this has become a matter of honor for both (Turkey and the U.S.) sides, making compromise difficult,” said Bagci “At the end of the day there will be no winner. Turkey will have economic problems, militarily problems, and that is a price Turkey is ready to pay. Turkish psychology is important to understand; this is a country with an imperial past and won’t be dictated to.”

…

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that President Donald Trump’s administration did not give an adequate explanation for its plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, delivering a victory to New York state and others challenging the proposal.

The justices partly upheld a federal judge’s decision barring the question in a win for a group of states and immigrant rights organizations that challenged the plan. The mixed ruling does not definitively decide whether the question could be added at some point.

The Republican president’s administration had appealed to the Supreme Court after lower courts blocked the inclusion of the census question.

A group of states including New York and immigrant rights organizations sued to prevent the citizenship question from being included in the decennial population count. Opponents have said the question would instill fear in immigrant households that the information would be shared with law enforcement, deterring them from taking part.

White House Asserts Executive Privilege in Census Fight

Justice Department says Trump is asserting executive privilege over documents in fight over census question

The census, required by the U.S. Constitution, is used to allot seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and distribute some $800 billion in federal funds. The intent of the citizenship question, opponents said, is to manufacture a deliberate undercount of areas with high immigrant and Latino populations, costing Democratic-leaning regions seats in the House, benefiting Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.

The administration argued that adding a question requiring people taking part in the census to declare whether they are a citizen was needed to better enforce a voting rights law, a rationale that opponents called a pretext for a political motive.

Manhattan-based U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman ruled on Jan. 15 that the Commerce Department’s decision to add the question violated a federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act. Federal judges in Maryland and California also have issued rulings to block the question’s inclusion, saying it would violate the Constitution’s mandate to enumerate the population every 10 years.

Furman said the evidence showed that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross concealed his true motives for adding the question and that he and his aides had convinced the Justice Department to request a citizenship question.

Businesses also rely on census data to make critical strategic decisions, including where to invest capital.

Citizenship has not been asked of all households since the 1950 census, featuring since then only on questionnaires sent to a smaller subset of the population.

The Census Bureau’s own experts estimated that households corresponding to 6.5 million people would not respond to the census if the citizenship question were asked.

While only U.S. citizens can vote, non-citizens comprise an estimated 7 percent of the population.

Evidence surfaced in May that the challengers said showed that the administration’s plan to add a citizenship question was intended to discriminate against racial minorities.

Documents created by Republican strategist Thomas Hofeller, who died last year, showed that he was instrumental behind the scenes in instigating the addition of the citizenship question.

He was an expert in drawing electoral district boundaries that maximize Republican chances of winning congressional elections.

Hofeller concluded in a 2015 study that asking census respondents whether they are American citizens “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” in redrawing electoral districts based on census data.

Hofeller suggested the voting rights rationale in the newly disclosed documents.

The Trump administration called the newly surfaced evidence “conspiracy theory.”

A federal judge in Maryland is reviewing the Hofeller evidence.

Most people living in the United States will be asked to fill out the census, whether online or on paper, by March 2020.

…

It is more than 16 months until the next U.S. presidential election in late 2020, but 20 Democratic presidential contenders are set to debate each other Wednesday and Thursday nights to give Democratic voters a first look at whom they might want to pick as the party’s nominee to try to oust Republican President Donald Trump.

Ten of the Democratic candidates, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, one of the current front-runners for the party nomination; Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; and former Congressman Beto O’Rourke of Texas, are set to spar tonight for two hours. They will appear before a live audience in Miami, with millions more watching on national television.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the leader for the nomination in national surveys, is joining other top-tier possible choices on the debate stage Thursday night, including Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Kamala Harris of California; Mayor Pete Buttigieg of the Midwestern city of South Bend, Indiana; along with six others.

The unwieldy field of candidates, in addition to another five that did not meet the Democratic National Committee’s minimal political standards to merit a spot in the debates, all sense they might have a chance to unseat Trump after a single term in the White House.

Political issues, electability

Democratic voters, however, so far seem uncertain of what they are looking for in their party standard-bearer in the Nov. 3, 2020, election — someone who best represents their political views on such contentious issues as health care, abortion, foreign policy, immigration, taxes and more, or possibly a candidate who has one overriding quality: the best chance of defeating Trump.

On the streets of Miami, Florida voter Dawn Schonwetter looked forward to the Democratic debates and stressed the importance of the state in the upcoming presidential election.

“We’re a big state. We have a lot of electoral votes, so I think it is a major battleground state – that makes it very exciting here for us at election time,” she said.

Another Florida voter, Republican-turned-progressive Democrat Eduardo De La Vega, said he intends to choose the candidate with the best plans for health care and education.

“This is why I’m here – to see who is the right person. It’s going to be really exciting because if a Democrat wins the state, it’s over for the Republicans,” he said.

Trump, as he left Washington for the Group of 20 economic meetings in Japan, said he would watch the Wednesday debate from Air Force One and taunted Biden — who won’t be on the stage until Thursday.

“It just seems very boring, but I’m going to watch it,” he told Fox News.

“Biden is a lost soul,” Trump claimed. “He doesn’t know where he is.”

A key unknown ahead of the debates is whether the Democratic challengers will spend more of their time attacking each other for their differences over policy issues or chiefly aim their political barbs at Trump.

Embed

Copy

Crowded Democratic Presidential Field Ready for First Debate video player.

Already, some of the Democrats are trying to diminish Biden’s nomination chances, attacking him for his recent recollection that 40 years ago when he was a young U.S. senator, he had working relationships in the Senate with segregationists adamantly opposed to the equality of blacks and whites.

Although the candidates have been campaigning for months in the early states where Democrats next year will hold presidential party nominating contests — including Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — for millions of Americans watching on television, it will be their first chance to size up the candidates and see whether they find someone they might favor over Trump.

No shoo-in

Despite a robust U.S. economy — a normal election-year barometer favoring an incumbent U.S. president’s re-election — Trump is by no means a shoo-in for a second four-year term.

Polling shows the one-time New York real estate magnate, a surprise winner in 2016, has yet to win over many voters beyond the hard core of populist and Republican voters that has supported him through his 29-month presidency. More voters than not, surveys repeatedly show, disapprove of his performance in office.

U.S. political pundits dismissed Trump’s chances of a victory three years ago, but he could win again.

At the moment, however, surveys show several Democrats leading the 73-year-old Trump. Biden, who is 76 and was President Barack Obama’s two-term vice president, holds the biggest edge of more than 10 percentage points over Trump. But polls this far ahead of the election are not necessarily predictive and may be just a snapshot of a moment in time.

In all, a dozen Democratic presidential debates are planned between now and the first months of 2020, although the number of candidates appearing in them will diminish over time as contenders drop out for lack of voter support and campaign funds. The first voting in Democratic primaries and caucuses to decide the presidential nomination starts February 3 in the Midwest farm state of Iowa.

All of the Democratic presidential candidates, to one degree or another, have staked out positions on key issues they think are important to reshape policy debates in Washington, while at the same time attacking Trump for his views about domestic issues and international relations during his unprecedented presidency.

The Democrats running for the U.S. presidency have broadly adopted a much more expansive liberal role for the federal government than either the more conservative Trump or Republicans who control the Senate. Democrats, in philosophical political agreement with many of their presidential candidates, took control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 congressional elections.

Political differences

The Democratic presidential candidates do have policy differences among themselves and often have emphasized a variety of issues they think might help them connect with voters when there is such a large field of candidates.

Warren and Sanders, neck and neck in second place behind Biden in nomination surveys, are both pushing for far-reaching changes to the country’s economic policies to help middle-class families, paid for with higher taxes on wealthy people. Warren wants new taxes on people with more than $50 million in assets, while Sanders called this week for wiping out all $1.6 trillion in student college debt.

O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman, has called for a $5 trillion plan to combat climate change, an issue that resonates with many Democrats after Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

Senators Booker and Klobuchar have advanced more moderate proposals on several issues in hopes of capturing the mass of voters not willing to go as far to the left politically as some of the other Democrats have.

Biden, to a large degree, has stayed above the fray of debate over policy issues, preferring to present himself as the voice of American stability, a correction to Trump’s unpredictable, tweet-filled presidency.

Mocking Trump’s long-standing political slogan, “Make America Great Again,” Biden recently told voters, “Let’s make America America again.”

But appearing on the same stage with other Democrats may force him to explain and account for his four decades as a Washington political figure and twice-failed presidential campaigns.

The candidates

The other candidates debating Wednesday include Washington state Governor Jay Inslee, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan and former Maryland Rep. John Delaney.

Thursday’s list of candidates also includes New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, California Rep. Eric Swalwell, entrepreneur Andrew Yang and self-help author Marianne Williamson.

…

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner said Wednesday that Palestinians would have a chance to help refine a multibillion-dollar economic plan for the West Bank and Gaza in the hope that the plan could lead to peace with Israel. 
 
Palestinians have already rejected Kushner’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan because they say it ignores their political aspirations. 
 
“It was important to bring out the economic vision before the political vision … because we need people to see what the future can look like,” Kushner said at an economic workshop in Bahrain aimed at getting his plan off the ground. 
 
The plan would create more than 1 million Palestinian jobs through $50 billion in investment in infrastructure, tourism and schools in the Palestinian territories and other Arab nations, including Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon.  
 
President Donald Trump calls it the “Deal of the Century” and the White House describes it as “the most ambitious and comprehensive international effort for the Palestinian people to date.” 
 
Investors and donor nations are invited to pledge their support and their dollars. 
 
But the Palestinian Authority boycotted Wednesday’s conference in Bahrain, calling the plan an “insult to our intelligence” and “totally divorced from reality.” 
 
“The economic peace, which has been presented before repeatedly and which has failed to materialize because it does not deal with the real components of peace, is being presented once again, recycled once again,” top Palestinian official Hanan Ashwari said. She noted that the question of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories was not mentioned once in Bahrain.  

Thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and a smaller number in the West Bank protested the U.S. initiative Wednesday. Some burned effigies of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while others chanted, “Palestine is not for sale.” 
 
Kushner said the “door is open” to the Palestinian Authority if it wants to participate in the plan. 
 
“If they actually want to make their people’s lives better, we have now laid out a great framework in which they can engage and try to achieve it. We’re going to stay optimistic,” he said.   
 
No one from Israel was at the Bahrain talks, but Netanyahu said the Palestinian rejection of the plan was “not the way to proceed.” 
 
About 2 million people live in poverty the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, where the unemployment rate is 52%, educational opportunities are sparse, and neighborhoods remain full of burned out buildings and rubble from retaliatory Israeli airstrikes.

…

The National Security Agency again improperly collected records of American phone calls and texts last year, according to documents made public Wednesday.

It was the second time the U.S. security agency has gathered unauthorized and inaccurate data in a program that violates federal law.

The error occurred between Oct. 3 and Oct. 12, 2018, according to documents obtained and released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

It comes months after the NSA said it had destroyed millions of records it had collected since 2015 due to a separate error. 

“These documents further confirm that this surveillance program is beyond redemption and a privacy and civil liberties disaster,” Patrick Toomey, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, said in a statement. “The NSA’s collection of Americans’ call records is too sweeping, the compliance problems too many, and evidence of the program’s value all but nonexistent. There is no justification for leaving this surveillance power in the NSA’s hands.”

The ACLU says the information about the latest violation shows it had a “significant impact” on privacy and civil rights, but that the Americans affected were not told of the breach. 

NSA’s phone data collection program began in secret after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Several major phone companies began providing the NSA with daily records of their domestic landline calls.

The existence of the program came to light when renegade NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked information on U.S. surveillance techniques. It was greatly scaled down by the passage of the USA Freedom Act, which requires the government to make a request to the relevant telephone company for data based on a specific person, account, address or device. 
 

…

A father and daughter from El Salvador were found dead Monday after they tried to cross the Rio Grande River from Mexico into the United States.

A photo of their bodies published first by the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, has become widely circulated by news organizations and on social media, boosting attention on the circumstances of migrants who face long wait times for adjudication of asylum cases at the border.

It also sparked debate about whether it is appropriate to share such sensitive images.

According to reports from La Jornada and the Associated Press, Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez was frustrated and tired of waiting for an opportunity to request U.S. asylum and made the decision Sunday night to try to cross the river with his wife and daughter.

Ramirez was able to get the 23-month-old girl to the other side of the river, but when he went back across to help his wife, the girl went into the water. He tried to save her but both were swept away by the river’s strong currents.

El Salvador’s Foreign Minister Alexandra Hill said the government was working to help the family, and she cautioned other migrants to not risk their lives as they travel.

U.S. authorities reported 283 migrant deaths last year.

U.S. Border Patrol said Tuesday its agents had rescued a father and small child from Honduras who were struggling in the same river farther to the west.

Guatemala’s government also confirmed Tuesday that a mother and three children found dead in southern Texas from dehydration and exposure to high temperatures after also crossing the Rio Grand are Guatemalan nationals.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to reduce the number of migrants arriving at the U.S. southern border, many of them from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, including discussing with Guatemala an agreement that would require migrants to apply for asylum there instead of traveling on to the United States.

…

It took last-minute changes and a full-court press by top Democratic leaders, but the House passed with relative ease Tuesday a $4.5 billion emergency border aid package to care for thousands of migrant families and unaccompanied children detained after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
 
The bill passed along party lines after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quelled a mini-revolt by progressives and Hispanic lawmakers who sought significant changes to the legislation. New provisions added to the bill Tuesday were more modest than what those lawmakers had sought, but the urgent need for the funding — to prevent the humanitarian emergency on the border from turning into a debacle — appeared to outweigh any lingering concerns.
 
The 230-195 vote sets up a showdown with the Republican-led Senate, which may try instead to force Democrats to send Trump a different, and broadly bipartisan, companion measure in coming days as the chambers race to wrap up the must-do legislation by the end of the week.
 
 “The Senate has a good bill. Our bill is much better,” Pelosi, D-Calif., told her Democratic colleagues in a meeting Tuesday morning, according to a senior Democratic aide who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the private session.
 
“We are ensuring that children have food, clothing, sanitary items, shelter and medical care. We are providing access to legal assistance. And we are protecting families because families belong together,” Pelosi said in a subsequent floor speech.
 
The bill contains more than $1 billion to shelter and feed migrants detained by the border patrol and almost $3 billion to care for unaccompanied migrant children who are turned over the Department of Health and Human Services. It seeks to mandate improved standards of care at HHS “influx shelters” that house children waiting to be placed with sponsors such as family members in the U.S.
 
Both House and Senate bills ensure funding could not be shifted to Trump’s border wall and would block information on sponsors of immigrant children from being used to deport them. Trump would be denied additional funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention beds.
 
“The President’s cruel immigration policies that tear apart families and terrorize communities demand the stringent safeguards in this bill to ensure these funds are used for humanitarian needs only — not for immigration raids, not detention beds, not a border wall,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey, D-N.Y.
 
Three moderates were the only House Republicans to back the measure. The only four Democratic “no” votes came from some of the party’s best-known freshmen: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ihan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
 
The White House has threatened to veto the House bill, saying it would hamstring the administration’s border security efforts, and the Senate’s top Republican suggested Tuesday that the House should simply accept the Senate measure — which received only a single “nay” vote during a committee vote last week.
 
“The idea here is to get a (presidential) signature, so I think once we can get that out of the Senate, hopefully on a vote similar to the one in the Appropriations Committee, I’m hoping that the House will conclude that’s the best way to get the problem solved, which can only happen with a signature,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
 
A handful of GOP conservatives went to the White House to try to persuade Trump to reject the Senate bill and demand additional funding for immigration enforcement such as overtime for border agents and detention facilities run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to a top GOP lawmaker who demanded anonymity to discuss a private meeting. Trump was expected to reject the advice.
 
House Democrats seeking the changes met late Monday with Pelosi, and lawmakers emerging from the Tuesday morning caucus meeting were generally supportive of the legislation.
 
Congress plans to leave Washington in a few days for a weeklong July 4 recess, and pressure is intense to wrap up the legislation before then. Agencies are about to run out of money and failure to act could bring a swift political rebuke and accusations of ignoring the plight of innocent immigrant children.
 
Longtime GOP Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma said Democrats were simply “pushing partisan bills to score political points and avoiding doing the hard work of actually making law,” warning them that “passing a partisan bill through this chamber won’t solve the problem.”
 
Lawmakers’ sense of urgency to provide humanitarian aid was amplified by recent reports of gruesome conditions in a windowless Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas, where more than 300 infants and children were being housed. Many were kept there for weeks and were caring for each other in conditions that included inadequate food, water and sanitation.
 
By Tuesday, most had been sent elsewhere. The incident was only an extreme example of the dire conditions reported at numerous locations where detainees have been held, and several children have died in U.S. custody.
 
The Border Patrol reported apprehending nearly 133,000 people last month — including many Central American families — as monthly totals have begun topping 100,000 for the first time since 2007. Federal agencies involved in immigration have reported being overwhelmed, depleting their budgets and housing large numbers of detainees in structures meant for handfuls of people.
 
Changes unveiled Tuesday would require the Department of Homeland Security to establish new standards for care of unaccompanied immigrant children and a plan for ensuring adequate translators to assist migrants in their dealings with law enforcement. The government would have to replace contractors who provide inadequate care.
 
Many children detained entering the U.S. from Mexico have been held under harsh conditions, and Customs and Border Protection Chief Operating Officer John Sanders told The Associated Press last week that children have died after being in the agency’s care. He said Border Patrol stations are holding 15,000 people — more than triple their maximum capacity of 4,000.
 
Sanders announced Tuesday that he’s stepping down next month amid outrage over his agency’s treatment of detained migrant children.
 
In a letter Monday threatening the veto, White House officials told lawmakers they objected that the House package lacked money for beds the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency needs to let it detain more migrants. Officials also complained in the letter that the bill had no money to toughen border security, including funds for building Trump’s proposed border wall.

…

San Francisco has become the first U.S. city to ban the sale of electronic cigarettes until their effects on human health are clearer.

The city’s legislature on Tuesday unanimously approved the ban on sales of the vaporizers, which deliver nicotine in an inhalable form, until the products are approved by federal health authorities. 

Backers of the ban say it is necessary because of the “significant public health consequences” of a “dramatic surge” in vaping among youths.

But critics claim the ordinance will only make things more difficult for adults seeking an alternative to traditional tobacco products. 

The city in Northern California is home to Juul Labs, the most popular e-cigarette producer in the U.S.  The company said the ban would only drive smokers back to cigarettes and “create a thriving black market”.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has said that the use of e-cigarettes among American teens has hit “epidemic proportions.” 

E-cigarettes have been promoted as a powerful tool to help adults break their habit of conventional tobacco products. But research has found little evidence that this is the case. 

According to the data cited by the FDA, in 2017 more than 2 million middle school and high school students used the devices.

…

The number of Mexican immigrants in the U.S. illegally has declined so sharply over the past decade that for the first time, they no longer make up the majority of that category, according to an estimate by the Pew Research Center Wednesday.

 But the number of Central Americans in the country illegally is increasing _ from 1.5 million in 2007 to 1.9 million in 2017, the study found.

 The numbers reflect the conundrum the U.S. is facing at the southern border: The number of Central American migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border is rising dramatically, and they are not easily returned over the border — unlike in previous years when the majority of the border crossers were single men from Mexico.

 Curbing immigration is President Donald Trump’s signature political issue, but his hard-line and chaotic border policies have failed to stem the tide, and in fact, the numbers have increased since he took office.

 There were about 4.9 million Mexicans in the U.S. illegally in 2017, down 2 million from 2007. The decrease was the major driver in bringing down the overall population of immigrants in the country illegally. In 2017 it was about 10.5 million _ the lowest since 2004. The research group found the peak was in 2007 at about 12.2 million. Previously, Mexican nationals made up most of that population. Now, it’s a combination, with Central America having the second-largest, and Asia following with 1.4 million.

 Pew based the estimates on government data and used a so-called “residual” method to determine the estimate. The method is similar to those used by Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics and other groups that track immigration, like the Migration Policy Institute and Center for Migration Studies.

…

President Donald Trump’s aggressive and unpredictable use of tariffs is spooking American business groups, which have long formed a potent force in his Republican Party.

Corporate America was blindsided last week when Trump threatened to impose crippling taxes on Mexican imports in a push to stop the flow of Central American migrants into the United States. 
 
The two sides reached a truce Friday after Mexico agreed to do more to stop the migrants. But by Monday, Trump was again threatening the tariffs if Mexico didn’t abide by an unspecified commitment, to “be revealed in the not too distant future.”

Such whipsawing is now a hallmark of Trump’s trade policy. The president repeatedly threatens tariffs, sometimes imposes them, sometimes suspends them, sometimes threatens them again. Or drops them.

Business groups, already uncomfortable with Trump’s attempts to stem immigration, are struggling to figure out where to stand in the fast-shifting political climate. They have happily supported Trump’s corporate tax cuts and moves to loosen environmental and other regulations. But the capriciousness of Trump’s use of tariffs has proved alarming. 

“Business is losing,” said Rick Tyler, a Republican strategist and frequent Trump critic. “He calls himself ‘Mr. Tariff man.’ He’s proud of it. … It’s bad news for the party. It’s bad news for the free market.”

“It was a good wakeup call for business,” James Jones, chairman of Monarch Global Strategies and a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, said of Trump’s abrupt move to threaten to tax Mexican goods.

Creating distance from Trump

Just last week, the sprawling network led by the billionaire industrialist Charles Koch announced the creation of several political action committees focused on policy — including one devoted to free trade — to back Republicans or Democrats who break with Trump’s trade policies. A powerful force in Republican politics, the network is already a year into a “multi-year multi-million dollar” campaign to promote the dangers of tariff and protectionist trade policies.

The Chamber of Commerce, too, is in the early phases of disentangling itself from the Republican Party after decades of loyalty. The Chamber, which spent at least $29 million largely to help Republicans in the 2016 election, announced earlier this year that it would devote more time and attention to Democrats on Capitol Hill while raising the possibility of supporting Democrats in 2020.

Few expect the Chamber or business-backed groups like the Koch network to suddenly embrace Democrats in a significant way. But even a subtle shift to withhold support from vulnerable Republican candidates could make a difference in 2020.

Trump’s boundless enthusiasm for tariffs has upended decades of Republican trade policy that favored free trade. It has left the party’s traditional allies in the business world struggling to maintain political relevance in the Trump era.

Uncertainty for businesses

Trump’s tariffs are taxes paid by American importers and are typically passed along to their customers. They can provoke retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports. And they can paralyze businesses, uncertain about where they should buy supplies or situate factories. 

“Knowing the rules helps us plan for the future,” said Jeff Schwager, president of Sartori, a cheese company that has had to contend with retaliatory tariffs in Mexico in an earlier dispute.

Trump seems unfazed. 
 
Myron Brilliant, head of international affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, went on CNBC on Monday to decry “the weaponization of tariffs” as a threat to the U.S. economy and to relations with trading partners. 
 
Trump responded by phoning in to the network to declare “I guess he’s not so brilliant” and defend his trade policies.

“Tariffs,” he said, “are a beautiful thing.”

Trump can afford to be confident about his grip over the party: Roughly nine in 10 rank-and-file Republicans support his performance as president, according to the latest Gallup polling. So Republicans in Congress have been reluctant to tangle with him.

But last week’s flareup over the Mexico tariffs may prove to be a pivotal juncture. The spat was especially alarming to businesses because it came seemingly out of nowhere. Less than two weeks earlier, Trump had lifted tariffs on Mexican and Canadian steel and aluminum — action that seemed to signal warmer commercial ties between the United States and its neighbors.

“This really came out of left field,” said Daniel Ujczo, a trade lawyer at Dickinson Wright. “It was something we thought we had settled, and we hadn’t.”

Weighing legislation

Congress was already showing signs of wariness, especially over Trump’s decision to dust off a little-used provision of trade law to slap tariffs on trading partners. Section 232 of the Trade Expansion of 1962 lets the president impose sanctions on imports that he deems a threat to national security. 
 
Trump has deployed that provision to tax imported steel and aluminum. And he’s threatening to impose Section 232 tariffs on auto imports, a chilling threat to American allies Japan and the European Union.

Congress is considering bipartisan legislation to weaken the president’s authority to declare national-security tariffs. In doing so, lawmakers would be reasserting Congress’ authority over trade policy, established by the Constitution but ceded over the years to the White House. 

The legislation has stalled in Congress this spring. But on Tuesday, Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said the bill would be ready “pretty soon.” Given “how the president feels about tariffs,” Grassley said, “he may not look favorably on this. So I want a very strong vote in my committee and then, in turn, a very strong vote on the floor of the Senate.”

Congressional reluctance to challenge Trump could be tested in coming months. Lawmakers may balk if he proceeds with plans to tax $300 billion worth of Chinese goods that he hasn’t already targeted with tariffs — a move that would jack up what consumers pay for everything from bicycles to burglar.

Likewise, taxing auto imports — an idea that has virtually no support outside the White House — would likely meet furious resistance. So would any move to abandon a trade pact with Mexico and Canada. Trump has threatened to withdraw from the 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement if Congress won’t ratify a revamped version he negotiated last year.

For all their disenchantment with Trump, the Chamber of Commerce may yet find it hard to break its ties to the party. Though the chamber says it’s weighing a more bipartisan approach, it recently featured a sign on its front steps: It likened Trump to Republican icons Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower. 
 

…