Conservatives Obsessed With Mar-a-Lago Raid Got Rolled on Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act

Oops! 

At Politico, "‘We got rolled’: How the conservative grassroots lost the fight with Biden because it was focused on Trump":

The former president’s presence on the political landscape is making it harder to launch a modern day Tea Party movement.

In years past, it would have been a political Waterloo moment for Republicans: President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats racing frantically to finalize sweeping legislation to hike taxes on corporations and spend trillions on climate change and health care subsidies.

But instead of mounting a massive grassroots opposition to tank or tar the Inflation Reduction Act, conservatives and right-wing news outlets spent the past week with their gaze elsewhere: the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Palm Beach mansion.

Hundreds of them gathered instead outside Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in South Florida to protest what they viewed as an egregious example of federal government overreach. Back in Washington, conservative activists did rally against the bill and targeted vulnerable Democrats in ads. But even the main organizers conceded that they had little time to muster the opposition-party gusto of years past.

“Everything was moving so fast, the tax provisions were being debated on the fly, so there was very little time for groups to do that in-depth grassroots pushback like we saw during Obamacare,” said Cesar Ybarra, vice president of policy at conservative grassroots organization FreedomWorks. “To create buzz in this town and for it to penetrate across America, you need more time. So yeah, we got rolled.”

Far from a singular lapse, last week’s split-screen of the Mar-a-Lago search and the passage of the IRA provided a telling portrait of pistons that move modern Republican politics. Whereas conservative activism has, in past cycles, been driven by opposition to Democratic-authored policies or actions — from Obamacare to TARP— the modern version has been fed by culture-war issues and, more often than not, Trump himself.

“I think anytime you have FBI agents setting a new precedent by raiding a former president’s home, that’s going to get a lot of attention, compounded by Liz Cheney getting annihilated in her primary,” said former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who set the prior template for policy-centric midterm catapults with the GOP’s famed Contract with America in 1994.

For Democrats, the current paradigm is a boon, politically. The party hailed the passage of the IRA as a major victory they plan to capitalize on moving into the midterms. They argue that uniform Republican opposition to the bill was hypocrisy — Trump once championed several of its provisions. They view the popularity of the IRA and absence of sustained pushback as a guarantee that this won’t be an electoral albatross like Obamacare was for the party in 2010.

“You’re not having town halls with people screaming about Medicare drug negotiations. It’s very hard to object to a bill that invests a lot of money in clean energy,” said Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at the Democratic centrist think tank Third Way.

Republicans argue that the bill will prove more beneficial to them in November, specifically the provision to hire and retain more IRS agents. And they quibble with the idea that the right wasn’t outraged or organized, arguing that the bill was pared back precisely as a result of activist pushback. Far from being two separate threads, they see the IRA and the Mar-a-Lago search as intertwined.

“The timing of the bill happening the same week as the former president’s residence was raided, and you had the split screen of, well, if they could do that to him, they could do that to you, and here’s this bill with 87,000 IRS agents being funded,” said Jessica Anderson, the executive director of the conservative Heritage Action for America. “I think we’re going to look back and see that it really lit a match for people with the distrust for government at an all-time high.”

Merissa Hamilton, an activist with FreedomWorks, said the increase in funding for the IRS has already been energizing grassroots efforts. Before the bill was passed, Hamilton organized protests with dozens of activists in front of the Phoenix office of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz), one of the most vulnerable Senate Democrats.

“We feel even more detached from our representation than we ever have before because there was no time to get any public input,” said Hamilton. “It’s a big deal when you’re doubling the size of a federal agency. It screams something that’s designed to be punitive against people.”

But others in the party conceded that policy fights are no longer driving activism, at least to the degree they once did. In a Twitter thread, Brian Riedl, an economist with the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, said the right’s more recent apathy on economic policy “is partially a focus on culture & troll wars, partly a post-Trump identity crisis. And a lot of Democrats simply learning to avoid the economic policy prescriptions that most drive conservative rebellions.”

The money flow may tell an even more compelling story about a grassroots movement more geared toward Trump than congressional Republicans.

In the wake of the FBI’s search of Trump’s home, Trump’s Save America PAC reportedly raked in millions in the following days, according to The Washington Post. Elsewhere, meanwhile, the main Republicans running in marquee Senate races have struggled to build small-dollar donor networks, forcing the National Republican Senatorial Committee to slash ad spending and campaigns and operatives to panic.

Ohio Democratic Senate nominee Tim Ryan has brought in more than $9.1 million compared with GOP challenger J.D. Vance’s $1 million. Just over 9 percent of the money Vance raised for his primary campaign account between April and July came from contributions from individuals, and less than a fifth of that amount was from un-itemized small-dollar donors (those who gave less than $200). Of Ryan’s donations, 46 percent came from small-dollar donors.

In Pennsylvania, GOP nominee Mehmet Oz has largely self-funded his campaign, with less than 30 percent of his total receipts last quarter coming from individual contributors. Of that amount, just 18 percent came from small-dollar donors, compared with more than half for Democratic nominee John Fetterman, who brought in more than twice what Oz did.

And in Arizona, donations from individuals made up about 75 percent of GOP nominee Blake Masters’ total haul between April and July, versus 95 percent for Kelly. More importantly, the Democratic incumbent outraised Masters by more than $12 million last month, with 45 percent of the amount he raised from individuals coming in the form of small-dollar donations...

Keep reading. 

The Leak, the Threats, the Violence — Reaction to Roe Is Dark Day for U.S.

From Glenn Reynolds, at the New York Post:

The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson is a victory for the rule of law.

I’m not talking so much about the opinion itself. I’m talking about the Supreme Court majority’s demonstration that it will do what it thinks is right despite unprecedented pressure from the media, from Democrats in Congress, from “activist” groups and even from angry mobs and attempted assassins who show up at their homes.

This is a big deal. When, as reported by Jan Crawford, a coordinated bullying campaign flipped Chief Justice John Roberts’ position in NFIB v. Sebelius, the ObamaCare case from 2012, many observers, especially on the right, lost faith in the court’s independence. And the perception that the court could be bullied, naturally, was a guarantee that people would try bullying it again.

And they did, in spades. Activist groups sent mobs to protest at the homes of justices expected to vote to overturn Roe, even though that sort of pressure on federal judges is a crime. (Unsurprisingly, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice appears to have done nothing.) In an unprecedented breach of confidentiality, an insider at the court — we still don’t know who, for some reason — leaked a draft opinion that became a rallying point for Democrats and the left.

Extremist rhetoric — of the sort that’s called “hate” when it comes from the right and “passion for justice” when it comes from the left — raised the temperature to the point where a would-be assassin actually showed up at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house with a Glock, two magazines and pepper spray. He’s now awaiting trial. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) even threatened Kavanaugh and other conservative justices that they would “pay the price” for overturning Roe.

This deadly threat to a sitting Supreme Court justice drew an extremely muted reaction from pundits and Democratic politicians, though an politically motivated assassination to change a judicial opinion would be enormously destabilizing and destructive. On social media, people were openly wishing for the deaths of conservative justices. But the same people who decried the Jan, 6 protests — where only an unarmed protester was the victim of deadly violence — seemed unfazed by this.

Now leftists are promising a “Night of Rage” in response to Roe being overturned...

 

Democrats Have Problems in Rural America

It's Steve Bullock, the former governor of Minnesota.

I actually disagree with the specifics of how he governed his state over the last decade, before this year, but his larger, "structural" analysis (that is, "systemic," to borrow from the radical left), is fundamentally sound. 

At NYT, "I Was the Governor of Montana. My Fellow Democrats, You Need to Get Out of the City More":

I take no joy in sounding the alarm, but I do so as a proud Democrat who has won three statewide races in a rural, red state — the Democrats are in trouble in rural America, and their struggles there could doom the party in 2022.

The warning signs were already there in 2020 when Democrats fell short in congressional and state races despite electing Joe Biden president. I know because I was on the ballot for U.S. Senate and lost. In the last decade and a half, we’ve seen Senate seats flip red in Arkansas, Indiana, North Dakota, and more. Democrats have lost more than 900 state legislative seats around the country since 2008. And in this year’s governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey, we saw the Democratic vote in rural areas plummet, costing the party one seat and nearly losing us the other. It was even worse for Democrats down ballot, as Democrats lost state legislative, county, and municipal seats.

The core problem is a familiar one — Democrats are out of touch with the needs of the ordinary voter. In 2021, voters watched Congress debate for months the cost of an infrastructure bill while holding a social spending bill hostage. Both measures contain policies that address the challenges Americans across the country face. Yet to anyone outside the Beltway, the infighting and procedural brinkmanship haven’t done a lick to meet their needs at a moment of health challenges, inflation and economic struggles. You had Democrats fighting Democrats, letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and desperately needed progress was delayed. It’s no wonder rural voters think Democrats are not focused on helping them.

I was re-elected as Montana’s governor in 2016 at the same time Donald Trump took our state by more than 20 points. It’s never easy for Democrats to get elected in Montana, because Democrats here are running against not only the opponent on the ballot, but also against conservative media’s (and at times our own) typecast of the national Democratic brand: coastal, overly educated, elitist, judgmental, socialist — a bundle of identity groups and interests lacking any shared principles. The problem isn’t the candidates we nominate. It’s the perception of the party we belong to.

To overcome these obstacles, Democrats need to show up, listen, and respect voters in rural America by finding common ground instead of talking down to them. Eliminating student loans isn’t a top-of-mind matter for the two-thirds of Americans lacking a college degree. Being told that climate change is the most critical issue our nation faces rings hollow if you’re struggling to make it to the end of the month. And the most insulting thing is being told what your self-interest should be.

Get out of the cities and you will learn we have a libertarian streak, with a healthy distrust of government. We listen when folks talk about opportunity and fairness, not entitlements. We expect government to play a role in our having a fair shot at a better life, not solve all our problems.

We need to frame our policies, not in terms of grand ideological narratives, but around the material concerns of voters. Despite our differences and no matter where we live, we generally all want the same things: a decent job, a safe place to call home, good schools, clean air and water, and the promise of a better life for our kids and grandkids.

For me, that meant talking about Obamacare not as an entitlement, but as a way to save rural hospitals and keep local communities and small businesses afloat. It meant talking about expanding apprenticeships, not just lowering the costs of college. It meant framing public lands as a great equalizer and as a driver for small business. It meant talking about universal pre-K not as an abstract policy goal, but being essential for our children and for keeping parents in the work force. It meant talking about climate change not just as a crisis, but as an opportunity to create good jobs, preserve our outdoor heritage, and as a promise not to leave communities behind.

These lessons apply broadly, not just to swing states. We need to do the hard work of convincing voters that we are fighting for every American, regardless of party or where they live, or it’ll only get worse for us in the 2022 midterms and beyond...

Still more.

 

House Democrats Pass Build Back Better (VIDEO)

Straight party line vote, just like Obamacare. Most of the bill's big spending is temporary, thus a Republican Congress will surely refuse to reauthorize the law's gargantuan social policy giveaways --- and that's if it passes the Senate, which is no sure thing. Not a single Democrat can defect. 

At USA Today, "House passes Biden’s Build Back Better bill, sending measure with free preschool, climate initiatives to the Senate."

And the New York Times, "Kevin McCarthy Speaks for More Than Eight Hours to Delay a House Vote."

More here, "House Narrowly Passes Biden’s Social Safety Net and Climate Bill":

WASHINGTON — The House on Friday narrowly passed the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda, approving $2 trillion in spending over the next decade to battle climate change, expand health care and reweave the nation’s social safety net, over the unanimous opposition of Republicans. The bill’s passage, 220 to 213, came after weeks of cajoling, arm-twisting and legislative legerdemain by Democrats. It was capped off by an exhausting, circuitous and record-breaking speech of more than eight hours by the House Republican leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, that pushed a planned Thursday vote past midnight, then delayed it to Friday morning — but did nothing to dent Democratic unity.

Groggy lawmakers reassembled at 8 a.m., three hours after Mr. McCarthy finally abandoned the floor, to begin the final series of votes to send one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in half a century to the Senate.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi opened the final push with what she called “a courtesy to” her colleagues: “I will be brief.” She then put the House’s actions in lofty terms.

“Under this dome, for centuries, members of Congress have stood exactly where we stand to pass legislation of extraordinary consequence in our nation’s history and for our nation’s future,” she said, adding, the act “will be the pillar of health and financial security in America.

The bill still has a long and difficult road ahead. Democratic leaders must coax it through the 50-50 Senate and navigate a tortuous budget process that is almost certain to reshape the measure and force it back to the House — if it passes at all.

But even pared back from the $3.5 trillion plan that Mr. Biden originally sought, the legislation could prove as transformative as any since the Great Society and War on Poverty in the 1960s, especially for young families and older Americans. The Congressional Budget Office published an official cost estimate on Thursday afternoon that found the package would increase the federal budget deficit by $160 billion over 10 years.

The assessment indicated that the package overall would cost slightly more than Mr. Biden’s latest proposal — $2.1 trillion rather than $1.85 trillion.

It offers universal prekindergarten, generous subsidies for child care that extend well into the middle class, expanded financial aid for college, hundreds of billions of dollars in housing support, home and community care for older Americans, a new hearing benefit for Medicare and price controls for prescription drugs.

More than half a trillion dollars would go toward shifting the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels to renewable energy and electric cars, the largest investment ever to slow the warming of the planet. The package would largely be paid for with tax increases on high earners and corporations, estimated to bring in nearly $1.5 trillion over 10 years.

Savings in government spending on prescription drugs were projected to bring in another $260 billion, though a scaled-back measure to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices for some medications was estimated to save only $79 billion, far less than the Democrats’ original $456 billion proposal would have.

“This bill will be transformational, and it will be measured in the deeper sense of hope that Americans will have when they see their economy working for them instead of holding them back,” Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the House majority leader, said Thursday during what was supposed to the closing debate.

The fact that the bill could slightly add to the federal deficit did not dissuade House Democrats from proceeding to vote for it, in part because the analysis boiled down to a dispute over a single line item: how much the I.R.S. would collect by cracking down on people and companies that dodge large tax bills.

The budget office predicted that beefing up the I.R.S. with an additional $80 billion of funding would bring in just $127 billion over 10 years on net. That is far less than the $400 billion the White House estimates it would bring in over a decade, both through enforcement actions and by essentially scaring tax cheats into paying what they owe.

The legislation is moving through Congress under special rules known as reconciliation that shield it from a filibuster, allowing Democrats to push it through over unified Republican opposition in the Senate...

 

Tax the Rich? Okay, But How Much is 'Rich'?

Following-up, "House Democrats Consider 26.5% Corporate Tax Rate (VIDEO)."

One of these days Democrats will describe my income, as a college professor, as "rich." 

Seems like "rich" has been defined down consistently over the last two decades. Four-hundred thousand annually is usually the number you hear, but inflation's never figured into Democrat numbers, so people just making good money, but by no means wealthy (which in my opinion are folks with wealth in the tens of millions, at least), are always caught in the trap, as the clutches of government reach down farther and farther as time goes on.

At NYT, "Proposed Tax Changes Focus on the Wealthy":

So how do you define who’s wealthy?

The latest proposed tax changes from the House Ways and Means Committee essentially say a wealthy individual is someone who earns $400,000 a year or a couple with $450,000 in annual income.

“Rich is just the term we use to describe people who have more than us when we don’t think they deserve it,” said Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist in Boulder, Colo. “The definition of rich is entirely subjective,” adding that “$400,000 is just an arbitrary number — it might make you ‘rich’ in Middle America but middle class on the coasts.”

Four years ago, when the last changes to the Internal Revenue Code were made, the emphasis was on a lower tax rate for corporations and for super-wealthy individuals, particularly those who owned real estate and could profit from a very specific tax-deferral strategy on property.

This time around, corporations aren’t going to be paying significantly higher taxes, at least not as high as some progressives wanted. Instead, the tax legislation focuses on raising revenue from the wealthy.

“All of this legislation is focused on the individual and upping the ante for the wealthy,” said Michael Kosnitzky, a partner at the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. “Increasing the corporate tax rate does not get at the wealthy because corporate taxes are paid by the shareholders, who get less dividends, the employees who get less salary, and the consumer, who pays more for goods and services. These proposals get at personal income tax.”

The proposed top income tax rate of 39.6 percent looks like the old top rate of 39.6 percent from 2017. It kicks in at $400,000 of income for an individual and $450,000 for a couple, which is slightly lower than the income level in 2017. Currently, the highest income tax bracket, at 37 percent, starts at $523,600 for an individual and $628,300 for a couple.

But those affected by the new rate would also pay more because there are fewer deductions than there were in the tax code before the 2017 changes.

“You have to look at the effective rate,” said Pam Lucina, chief fiduciary officer and head of trust and advisory services at the financial services firm Northern Trust. “We have far fewer deductions, so that 39.6 percent rate is a much higher rate.”

The one that affected many people was the loss of the full deduction for state and local taxes, or SALT. In the 2017 changes, the deduction was limited to $10,000 and primarily affected people who lived in Democratic-controlled states in the Northeast and on the West Coast, where state income and property taxes are high.

Limiting it brought the U.S. Treasury more money. In 2017, the unlimited deduction cost the federal government an estimated $122.5 billion; the cap brought that number down to $24.4 billion the next year.

The details of the tax proposal are still being negotiated, and lawmakers representing the states affected said they hoped that they could reinstate more of the SALT deduction. One proposal would double the deduction to $20,000, not a wholesale return to what it had been.

The tax that has defined this year’s discussion has been capital gains. The proposal in the legislation — raising the rate to 25 percent, from 20 percent, for people earning over $400,000 — came as a relief to two sets of taxpayers: the very wealthy and anyone who might inherit property.

The Biden administration began the year talking about raising the capital gains rate to the ordinary income tax rate for high earners and disallowing a provision that enables people to inherit property free of capital gains.

The administration’s original proposal talked about having a top capital gains rate of 43.4 percent — the top income tax rate plus the 3.8 percent surtax on investment income that pays for Obamacare — for people earning above $1 million. But most of the attention was drawn to President Biden’s proposal to end the so-called step-up in basis at death — which erases all the taxable gains in assets that are passed on to heirs. Repealing that would have brought in an extra $11 billion in tax revenue annually.

That proposal has since been dropped.

“No loss of the step-up in basis is a big win for wealthy families,” said Edward Renn, a partner in the private client and tax group at law firm Withersworldwide.

But that change wasn’t made to save wealthy families. It was done because the change could hurt families of more modest means who had assets to pass on to their children.

“The provision benefits very wealthy people who have built businesses,” said Justin Miller, the national director of wealth planning at Evercore Wealth Management. “But it also benefits any person who is inheriting a home from their parents and grandparents that could have hundreds of thousands of dollars that could be subject to capital gains tax. It would have impacted a lot of people, not just the top 1 percent or the top 0.1 percent. It would not have been a popular strategy.”

Taxes affecting estates and large gifts have long been ripe for tax changes. One change would bring the estate tax exemption back to the level it was at in the Obama administration. But that isn’t likely to raise more revenue from megamillionaires and billionaires. While the proposed exemption would fall to about $6 million a person from $11.7 million, the estate tax rate would remain at 40 percent. That’s what matters to the largest estates...

 

A Last Look at a Remarkable Presidency

At Issues & Insights, "Trump’s Top-10 Triumphs":

President Donald Trump became an ex-president on Wednesday, as Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States. We wish him nothing but the best. But before we let Trump go, we thought we’d review some of his biggest accomplishments while in office. We call them “triumphs,” because they were all big achievements executed against great odds.

More than any other president of recent memory, Trump fought hard for average working Americans. And contrary to the epithets thrown at him by his far-left detractors in the Democratic Party, his policies helped low-income and minority Americans most of all.

We believe – we hope – that Trump’s post-presidential career and reputation will resemble President Ronald Reagan’s. For those old enough to remember, Reagan also was called every vile name in the book, from “senile” to “fascist” and everything between. Yet, today, in retrospect, his presidency shines as a beacon in our nation’s history.

Given the at-times unhinged nature of the criticism directed at Trump’s presidency by the left and Republican “never-Trumpers,” Trump’s performance in just four years was nothing short of remarkable. He promulgated dozens, if not hundreds, of successful policies that other presidents talked about, but never secured.

He reached so many we can’t highlight all of them. But here are 10 that we believe stand out — and that future presidents (are you listening, Joe Biden?) would be foolish to reverse or overturn:

1. Slashed taxes on individuals and businesses. As an earlier administration said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” As much as anything, Trump’s growth-boosting $1.9 trillion in tax cuts and doubling of the child tax credit led to the bottom-up growth of our economy, as unemployment rates plunged for African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and women, and poverty rates plummeted to an all-time low in 2019, before COVID-19 struck. The bottom 20% of incomes posted a 16%-plus rise, the largest ever for those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.Yes, Wall Street and Silicon Valley moguls made out well as stocks boomed. But so did average Americans, especially the middle class. More than half of all Americans now own stock, a fact that’s lost on those who curse the stock market and “tax cuts for the rich.” By the way, the top income earners were the only group to pay more to Uncle Sam under the Trump tax cuts. And income inequality under Trump fell, after rising during Obama’s eight years in office.

2. Forged peace in the Mideast. The big media have tried to pretend that Trump’s unorthodox but astoundingly successful peace deals don’t exist. But it’s no accident that Trump has already been nominated — twice — for the Nobel Peace Prize. He deserves it. This year, thanks almost entirely to Trump’s efforts under the “Abraham Accords,” Israel has normalized diplomatic ties with four Arab League members: Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan and Morocco. Jordan and Egypt already have ties. Terrorist sponsor Iran, meanwhile, has never been more isolated and on the defensive than it is now, thanks to Trump’s pulling out of President Barack Obama’s phony “nuclear deal” with Tehran’s mullahs. And while the terrorist group ISIS still exists, it has effectively been neutered, a shell of its former self, pushed out of nearly all its strongholds in Syria and Iraq.

3. Created Operation Warp Speed. The Chinese virus hit the U.S. hard. It’s now clear that China’s communist regime downplayed the deadly virus outbreak early, leading to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus that official data show has killed 400,000 Americans. Trump was ridiculed and berated for daring to think he could push the creation of a new, effective vaccine within the remaining months of his term. Yet, as Bloomberg noted on Wednesday, “Vaccinations in the U.S. began Dec. 14 with health care workers, and so far 16.3 million shots have been given, according to a state-by-state tally … In the last week, an average of 806,716 doses per day were administered.” The vaccine critics were dead wrong, and Trump’s push may well end up saving hundreds of thousands of lives in coming years.

4. Deregulated the nation’s economy. It’s not sexy. But Trump promised to cut two regulations for every new one proposed. He beat even that estimate, cutting eight regulations for every one added. If you think that doesn’t matter, consider this: Regulations currently cost the economy nearly $2 trillion a year, or about $14,000 a year for every U.S. household. Trump’s rule-cutting saved the average American household an average of $3,100 a year.

5. Got rid of Obamacare’s “individual mandate”. By far the most odious element of Obama’s first step toward socialized medicine was its requirement that all Americans must buy health insurance. For the first time ever, the U.S. government forced its citizens to purchase something, whether they wanted it or not. This part of the 2010 bill was clearly unconstitutional, as a federal appeals court ruled late last year. Americans are, for now, safe from being forced to buy insurance policies they don’t want. At least, that is, until the new Democratic administration begins its push for Medicare for All, or some other nationalized health care scheme.

6. Restored Supreme Court balance. By naming three new justices, Trump assured Americans that the court’s days of rulings based on politics and ideology, not the Constitution, are over. At least for the foreseeable future. Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, are all strong constitutionalists who have sterling reputations for fairness and non-political legal decision making. “A judge must apply the law as written. Judges are not policymakers,” Barrett said during her nomination hearings in the Senate, a fitting description for all Trump’s choices. That includes the more than 230 judges he appointed to the federal bench.

7. Forced NATO to reform. Trump pushed NATO members to live up to their commitments to spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense, part of a 2014 deal that came after years of NATO countries shirking their duty to pull their own weight in the military alliance. In Trump’s first year in office, just four of the 30 NATO members met the 2% floor. Today, 10 do, and more will increase spending by $400 billion by 2024. By demanding NATO to keep its promises, Trump likely saved the West’s main military alliance.

8. Encouraged U.S. energy independence. By encouraging fracking and approving the Keystone XL pipeline, Trump set off an energy boom. And he did something that no one thought possible just four years ago: He made the U.S. energy independent for the first time in 70 years, meaning we would no longer be held hostage to unstable petro-powers and the vagaries of foreign energy supplies. Fracking enabled the U.S. to boost its output of natural gas, with many major utilities now using the cheap, clean source of energy instead of coal and other major sources of carbon dioxide emissions. The result: the U.S. is one of the only major countries whose CO2 emissions are plunging, with output now at the lowest levels since 1985.

9. Reformed immigration and built the border wall. Despite being called a “racist” and “fascist” and “anti-immigrant,” Trump has now built more than 450 miles of wall to restore control of our nation’s borders against illegal entrants into the U.S., including gang members, smugglers and drug dealers. As journalist Deroy Murdock recently noted, “federal apprehensions and encounters on the U.S.-Mexico border have plunged from 977,509 in fiscal year 2019 to 458,088 in fiscal year 2020 — down 53.1%.” A blow to Mexico? Not according to a recent Reuters headline: “Mexico’s Lopez Obrador says Trump helped Mexico.“

10. Withdrew from the Paris Climate Deal. The U.S. is the only major country actually living up to the Paris Climate Accords’ steep cuts in CO2 emissions. But the deal is still a bad one, since it commits the U.S. and other major industrial nations to shrink their economies over the long run to meet arbitrary CO2 limits in the future. Meanwhile, fast-growing countries such as China and India have few binding requirements on their emissions. The result: Those two countries, with more than a third of the world’s population, continue to spew CO2. This year China’s coal use surged above 2015 levels, “undercutting climate pledges,” according to a news report out this week. Biden’s plan to rejoin the Paris deal will only bolster China and hamstring the U.S. going forward. It’s a climate-based “America last” policy...

Still more.

 

After 2020 Losses, Some Democrats Question Party’s Health-Care Focus

Didn't some former (infamous) political advisor proclaim, "It's the economy, stupid"? 

Well, that infamous person then was a Democrat and the stupid thing now is the Biden 2020 campaign (and all the stupid Squad-type associated losers).

At WSJ, "Some former candidates and strategists say Democrats should have focused more on people who were losing their jobs and struggling to pay rent":

After suffering losses in congressional races across the country, some Democrats are pushing the party to re-evaluate its focus on health care and prioritize the economy ahead of two key Senate races in Georgia.

Health care was the most-mentioned issue across all Democratic presidential and Senate television ads, airing nearly 1.5 million times, in the 2020 election cycle, according to data from political ad tracker Kantar/CMAG. Democrats made defending the Affordable Care Act a top issue in Supreme Court confirmation hearings weeks before the election and promised repeatedly on the campaign trail to protect the law.

Democrats took the House majority in 2018 after centering their campaigns on the Trump administration’s efforts to chip away at the health law. But after the party lost multiple House seats and underperformed in several Senate races this year, some former candidates and strategists who worked on 2020 campaigns say Democrats should have focused more on people who were losing their jobs and struggling to pay rent during the pandemic.

“I think that the message needs to shift more towards the economy,” said Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who lost her race in November in a Miami-Dade County district that swung toward President Trump after voting overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“There’s a lot of fear that many people here will not be able to get back to work, that they don’t know where they’re going to be able to find their next paycheck,” she said.

Following the election, Ms. Mucarsel-Powell wrote an opinion column that in part argued Democrats need to focus on the economy to win back support among Florida Latinos. Democratic lawmakers have also squabbled in private calls over what policies to run on.

President-elect Joe Biden won after campaigning heavily against what he described as Mr. Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic, which has killed more than 276,000 people in the U.S. Mr. Biden said getting the virus under control was necessary for businesses and schools to get back to normal operations and to rebuild the economy. He made other economic promises, such as raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and forgiving some student-loan debt, but they were not as prominent in the general-election campaign.

Chris Meagher, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said the party’s messaging was successful: “We took back the House in 2018, we continue to have the majority in 2020 and we beat an incumbent president on that message.”

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll the month before the election found the economy was the most important issue to voters, followed by the coronavirus and health care. Voters said they trusted Republicans most to deal with the economy, while they gave Democrats the lead on health care. In Georgia, where two runoff races will decide the majority in the Senate, Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock have brought up the virus repeatedly in their ads in recent weeks and tried to address both health care and economic concerns related to the pandemic.

Representatives for their campaigns said they are trying to balance both messages.

“Especially in the throes of this pandemic, you really can’t shortchange either one of those ideas,” said Howard Franklin, an Atlanta-based Democratic strategist, who said more Democrats need to intertwine the health-care and economic messages.

Brad Woodhouse, executive director of the health-care-focused Protect Our Care, said his group’s surveys have shown coronavirus relief as the top issue for voters. He said protecting people with pre-existing conditions and the Affordable Care Act are “not as resonant at this very minute,” though he said Democrats can still link those issues to their response to the pandemic.

In addition to the pandemic, Democrats campaigned on a lawsuit from GOP-led states seeking to invalidate the 2010 health law. The Supreme Court heard arguments Nov. 10 and a decision is expected before June. After health care and coronavirus, jobs and unemployment was the No. 3 issue in Democratic ads, while it was the second-most-mentioned issue in Republican ads.

Health care was the top issue mentioned in Republican ads as well, as they criticized Democratic candidates for a push in the progressive wing of the party to end private insurance and extend Medicare to all Americans. Mr. Biden and many other Democrats didn’t support that, instead backing an expansion of Obamacare by adding a public-insurance option.

Kansas state Sen. Barbara Bollier, a former anesthesiologist who lost her race for the U.S. Senate, said it didn’t matter that she opposes Medicare for All—people said she supported it anyway...

Still more.

Democrats Put Private Health Insurance Up for 'Debate'

Really, I hope Dems talk about obliterating private and employer-based health insurance right up to November 2020. It's going to be too easy, dang.

At LAT, "News Analysis: Democrats ask if Americans are ready to give up job-based health coverage":

Voters have repeatedly punished both Democrats and Republicans who've threatened to take away their health coverage, no matter how flawed it is. Are Dems ready to risk trying again? https://t.co/thjrXEdzsB

— Noam Levey (@NoamLevey) August 2, 2019

WASHINGTON —  Sharp disagreements among the presidential hopefuls at this week’s debates have crystallized a critical and explosive political question: Are Democrats willing to upend health coverage for tens of millions of their fellow Americans?
The party is closer than it’s been in decades to embracing a healthcare platform that would move all Americans out of their current insurance and into a single government-run plan.

Plans pushed by three of the four leading candidates — Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kamala Harris of California — differ in their particulars but would all end the job-based system that provides coverage to more than 150 million people.

That’s a hugely risky strategy, as more-centrist rivals reminded the three senators during the two nights of heated, sometimes confusing, debates.

Sweeping healthcare plans have never fared well in American politics.

For decades, voters repeatedly have punished presidents and Congresses — Democratic and Republican alike — who have threatened to take away existing health plans, no matter how flawed.

Just last year, the GOP suffered historic losses in the House of Representatives after the party’s unsuccessful effort to roll back the 2010 Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

But at a time when rising insurance deductibles and medical bills are crippling growing numbers of American families, many Democrats on the party’s left believe public discontent with the current system has changed that dynamic.

“It’s time that we separate employers from the kind of healthcare people get,” Harris said Wednesday night, acknowledging that her “Medicare for all” plan would, after a lengthy phase-in period, end job-based insurance.

Harris, Sanders and Warren have made Medicare for all a central plank of their campaigns, riding a wave of discontent over rising medical costs to call for a historic expansion of government insurance.

Their more-moderate rivals say the three have misjudged the public mood and that by overreaching, they would squander an opportunity to enact significant, if incremental, reforms.

A survey earlier this year by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation found that support for a single government plan fell from 56% to 37% when respondents were told that it might involve eliminating private insurance companies or requiring more taxes.

“It doesn’t make sense for us to take away insurance from half the people in this room,” warned Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, who is among many Democratic presidential candidates, including former Vice President Joe Biden, who back more limited approaches.

The more-centrist Democrats would preserve the current employer-based system, as well as state Medicaid programs and the insurance marketplaces created by the 2010 healthcare law.

They would add an additional choice to allow Americans to buy into a Medicare-like government plan, often called a “public option.”

“Every single person in America would be able to buy into that option if they didn’t like their employer plan,” Biden said Wednesday.

Critics on the left say that approach would ultimately cost more and would preserve an outsized role for private insurance companies.

“We have tried this experiment with the insurance companies,” Warren said from the debate stage Tuesday. “And what they’ve done is they’ve sucked billions of dollars out of our healthcare system. And they force people to have to fight to try to get the healthcare coverage that their doctors and nurses say that they need.”

But threatening Americans’ current health coverage has proved disastrous for previous Democratic efforts to expand protections, including President Clinton’s doomed initiative in the early 1990s.

The 2010 healthcare law was almost sunk by labor unions angry about a new tax on the kind of generous health plans many of their members enjoy.

And even though the law was designed to have minimal impact on the existing insurance system, President Obama faced a firestorm when a few million people found their health plans canceled after new rules took effect requiring plans to offer more-comprehensive benefits.

“Traditionally, fear of losing benefits — however flawed they may be — trumps hope of getting something better,” said Chris Jennings, an influential Washington health policy advisor who worked for Clinton and Obama...

Still more.

Partisan Realignment After the 2016 Election

This is the best piece I've read on our current crisis of political polarization.

It's not a crisis of governmental institutions. It's a crisis of the party system. What a great read.

From Stanford political scientists David Brady and Bruce Cain, at National Affairs, "Are Our Parties Realigning?":

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE GOP

The election of Donald Trump was even more of a blow to any expectations of a new equilibrium than the back-and-forth elections of the prior decades. Not only was he not a standard Republican on free trade, taxes, entitlements, and so on, but the Republicans in Congress did not expect him to win. Their reaction to his victory was to try to pull together and pass the legislation they thought mandated by their 2010 wins six years earlier: end Obamacare, reform taxes, cut regulation, and increase energy production, among other longstanding Republican agenda items.

But the narrow Senate margin and Trump's lack of policy knowledge and legislative skill left Republicans with only a tax-bill victory. Obamacare is still the law of the land; immigration reform and budget policy remain problematic; and Trump is a more divisive president than either Bush or Obama. Thus our system — already burdened by partisan divisiveness, close elections, and few incentives for parties to cooperate on public policy — is saddled with an inexperienced, chaotic president and a governing party with no clear sense of what it wants or what voters want.

One result has been a struggle to define the GOP, which has sometimes seemed like a fight between the party's longstanding priorities and some of President Trump's particular emphases. But the battle lines have not been very clear — especially since neither the practical and contemporary meaning of the party's longstanding priorities nor Trump's beliefs are actually all that clear at this point, and since disputes about the president's character often overshadow internal policy debates.

If Republicans lose one or both houses of Congress in 2018, then the battle lines could be drawn more clearly, because those congressional Republicans who have held back criticism of Trump in order to pass legislation will no longer need to restrain themselves in the battle for the party. The 2018 and 2020 election cycles will, by and large, shape what Republicans become post-Trump. Republican incumbents might buy into Trump's views on immigration, deficits, trade, and so on to appease the Trump base, and thus change the party. Or the battle between Trump-like candidates and traditional Republicans could yield a new set of internal divisions and patterns. Or traditional Republican views might come to be reaffirmed.

The dimensions of the battle are revealed in survey data that YouGov has collected over the past few years. Starting in May 2015, they interviewed a panel of 5,000 Americans 17 times, with more interviews scheduled prior to the 2018 elections. The results have shown that Trump voters, compared to those Republicans who voted in the primaries for other candidates, are older, whiter, less well-educated, have lower incomes, and are disproportionately from the Southern, border, and Midwestern states. They are also, on average, angrier about politics, more likely to believe that many in the government are crooks, and  more dissatisfied with government. They are very anti-trade and anti-immigration and favor taxing the rich (those making over $250,000).

When asked about illegal immigrants living in the U.S. now, 70% of Trump supporters said they should be required to leave, while less than 35% of other Republicans agreed. In fact, a slight majority of other Republicans thought that they should be allowed to stay and acquire citizenship. On social issues such as gay marriage and the death penalty, Trump supporters were much more conservative than their fellow Republicans; in fact, a majority of other Republicans opposed the death penalty. In the post-election surveys, by a two-to-one margin, Trump Republicans favored a Muslim ban, while other Republicans opposed the ban. The battle for the heart and soul of the party is underway.

While these issues will be important, perhaps even more important is the extent to which Trump Republicans and other Republicans differ regarding the president. The August 2017 YouGov re-contact survey showed that 92% of early Trump supporters liked him, with 72% liking him a lot; Republicans who weren't early supporters, however, liked him less, with only 29% liking him a lot. The president's ability to retain the support of his base means those Republicans running for Congress must face the delicate task of appealing to that base in both the primary and general elections. Ed Gillespie's run for governor of Virginia in 2017 was an excellent example of such balancing. As one Washington Post article put it a few days before the election, "Gillespie is at the center of a civil war that is dividing his party, one pitting the Republican establishment he personifies with his four-star credentials against the anti-Washington forces that propelled President Trump's rise."

The battle between the Trump wing and other Republicans will play out numerous times over the next two election cycles, and the future of the party hangs on who wins. Crucial to Republican success will be suburban independents and Republican women who chose Trump over Hillary but today do not like the president. Off-year election turnout numbers in Virginia and Alabama confirm the importance of these voters.

THE RACE TO REALIGNMENT

In American political science, the standard party-change model has focused on "realigning elections," wherein one party achieves dominance that lasts long enough to resolve the key issues generated by the instability of the era. Those issues, in our time, appear to be challenges like immigration, inequality, family and social breakdown, worker insecurity, automation, trade, America's role in the world, and environmental challenges, among others.

Some observers suggest that Democrats have the best chance to arrive at a formula that captures a durable majority on most of these issues. As of this writing, the 2018 generic congressional poll favors Democrats by seven points (according to the RealClearPolitics average), and Trump's popularity is low. Historically, presidents in their first term often lose seats at the midterm election. And winning the House, the Senate, or both in 2018 would be seen as a harbinger of winning control of the government in 2020.

Control of all the elected branches would give Democrats a base of support from which to reduce inequality, reform the immigration system, and restore American leadership in the economic realm, on the environment, and in other respects. Nice scenario, if you ask any progressive. But there are many reasons why the Democrats are likely to fail in their efforts to create a new stable majority. The first and most obvious is that Democrats, like Republicans, are badly split on how the party should respond to both the Trump presidency and the dominant issues of our time. The result is that the number of Democrats running for president in 2020 may well be in the double digits, creating divisions that resemble those the Republicans faced in 2016.

Second, potential candidates are already favoring policies, like Medicare for all and free tuition, that even Californians know are not affordable. These views don't actually represent today's Democratic coalition all that well. In YouGov surveys, Democrats, by over two-to-one, favor cutting spending over raising taxes to balance the budget, and by almost two-to-one, they believe that quite a few in government do not know what they are doing. In regard to free tuition, 40% of Democratic voters are either against it or are not sure that it would work. Thus, the Democrats have not achieved agreement within their party regarding policies that deal with today's core challenges, and a multi-candidate presidential primary is not likely to resolve the issues and create a stable majority. That leaves the Democrats, like the Republicans, divided and not unified, and, just as with the GOP, the necessary changes seem more likely to occur in primary and general-election contests over the next few electoral cycles. The Democratic Party does not look ready to step up; the Republicans don't either.

Here again, a student of history would be reminded of the closing decades of the 19th century, when there were pro-silver Republicans and pro-gold Democrats (like President Cleveland) and the same intra-party mix on tariffs and immigration and many other prominent issues. Control of the government shifted back and forth between these unsteady parties over and over again. But by 1896, the sorting of the parties had occurred, and Republicans were pro-gold, pro-tariffs, and so on, while the Democrats under William Jennings Bryan were the opposite. The electorate, in that case, chose Republicans, and the ensuing stability gave rise to economic growth and a period of prosperity.

A broadly similar transformation is very likely in our future. The sorting process in the Republican Party has begun, with the Democrats to follow in 2020. This time the sorting will not be conservatives to the GOP and liberals to the Democrats, since that has already occurred and has defined the very order that is growing exhausted. Rather, the coming era will be defined by questions like what do conservatism and liberalism mean to Republicans and Democrats, and which vision will the American people support? Whichever way it turns out, the parties have finally begun the process of adjusting to the realities of the new global economy.

The shapes our parties are likely to take might be easier to see if we consider their most extreme possible forms — which aren't where we will end up but can show us the contours of possibility. For Republicans, these are the possible alternatives on either pole: a Trump-like Republican Party that is anti-immigrant, protectionist, anti-gay marriage, dependent on entitlements, white, old, not well-educated, and concentrated in the southern and central United States; or a party that favors markets and smaller government, and is not anti-immigration per se but is, rather, more libertarian and diverse in membership.

The Democrats, likewise, face a similar polar choice: a Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren Party that pushes socialist-leaning policies (Medicare for all, free tuition, a smaller military, higher taxes, and more regulation) joined to an identity politics that excludes moderates from swing states; or a Democratic Party more like that envisioned by the Clinton-era Democratic Leadership Council, which is center-left on economic policy, inclusive on social issues, relatively moderate on defense and immigration, and somewhat resistant to identity politics.

The battles between these alternatives have already begun in some primaries. And the likely outcome is not any of the polar opposites, but a shuffling of the issues that gives shape to complex coalitions...

RTWT, at the link.

There's No Such Thing as a Moderate Democrat in 2018

From Mollie Hemingway, at the Federalist, "Tennessee Senate Race Shows There's No Such Thing as a Moderate Democrat in 2018":

In 2018, There Is No Such Thing As A Moderate Democrat - The Federalist https://t.co/STEYIgNPPS

— The Federalist (@FDRLST) October 12, 2018

While the national media encourage the radicalization of the Democratic Party and highlight how that radicalization excites its base in liberal states, the result is the crushing of moderate Democratic pols.

Donald Trump was elected president despite low popularity ratings in 2016. While both Hillary Clinton and Trump were viewed unfavorably by a majority of Americans polled, Trump set the record, with 61 percent viewing him in a negative light, according to Gallup.

For millions of Americans, disliking Trump was not a barrier to voting for him. In some cases people voted for him enthusiastically despite not particularly liking him.

Tennessee has a smaller version of the opposite issue. Volunteer State voters like the Democratic candidate Phil Bredesen. A popular former governor and mayor of Nashville, his entrance into the race made the open seat competitive despite the state’s Republican leanings. Cook Political report rates it as a toss-up. The Real Clear Politics average has Republican candidate Marsha Blackburn up by less than three points.

Bredesen is certainly a standard Democrat in his politics, but he’s downplaying that fact and is willing to buck his party. He opposed the manner in which Obamacare was implemented and occasionally criticizes his party for its extremism.His approach is persuasive to some, including the Washington Post opinion journalist Radley Balko.

He notes that Blackburn’s approach is more politically savvy. But it’s worth thinking about why. As the recent Kavanaugh debacle showed, at best the Senate has a grand total of one Democrat who can be labeled moderate: Joe Manchin. Even Democratic senators from all the other states that desired a Kavanaugh confirmation voted against him.

More important than the ultimate vote, though, were the Democratic leaders responsible for the debacle. Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) stage-managed the accusations against Kavanaugh for maximum political effect. After hearings were reopened, she read the outlandish Michael Avenatti gang rape cartel allegations into the record. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-New York) kept Democratic votes in line and told them to disregard the principle of presumed innocence.

Looked at this way, Blackburn’s focus isn’t just a cynical ploy but an understanding of how the current Senate’s party control has a far greater effect on the average voter than any individual senator does. Blackburn likely emphasized it because it’s a message that resonates with voters more than the one where a politician claims he or she will be one way when they frequently abandon their commitments when in Washington.

How many times have politicians claimed they wouldn’t vote for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) or Schumer only to do just that or otherwise fail to put other Democrats in power? Bredesen claimed he wouldn’t vote for Schumer for leader, but voters likely understand that his no vote would have no effect on Schumer’s success. It is perhaps worth noting that new undercover video from James O’Keefe casts Bredesen’s moderation pledges in a questionable new light.

A new National Republican Senatorial Committee ad dealing with the race understands this issue well...

There's still more, including all the linked tweets and embedded videos at the piece.

The Circus of Resistance

From VDH, at American Greatness:

The Circus of Resistance https://t.co/nQzNqcfkou pic.twitter.com/iIVABXq5Uo

— American Greatness (@theamgreatness) September 10, 2018

The resistance to Donald Trump was warring on all fronts last week.

Democratic senators vied with pop-up protestors in the U.S. Senate gallery to disrupt and, if possible, to derail the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) played Spartacus, but could not even get the script right as he claimed to be bravely releasing classified information that was already declassified. I cannot remember another example of a senator who wanted to break the law but could not figure out how to do it.

Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), former Harvard Law Professor who still insists she is of Native American heritage, called for the president to be removed by invoking the 25th Amendment. Apparently fabricating an ethnic identity is sane, and getting out of the Iran deal or the Paris Climate Accord is insanity and grounds for removal.

Barack Obama decided that ex-presidents should attack current presidents, and thereby reminded the country why Trump was elected. The author of the Russian “reset” and the hot-mic collusionary offer criticized Trump for being soft on Putin. The president who never achieved annualized 3 percent GDP growth (and is the first president since 1933 who can claim this “distinction”) also claimed Trump’s roaring economy was due to Obama-era policies (e.g., raising taxes, Obamacare, more regulations, and “you didn’t build that” commentaries). Fresh from trashing his successor in a funeral speech, the ever audacious Obama called for more decorum.

Bruce Ohr, once number four at the Department of Justice, and whose wife was working with Christopher Steele on the Fusion GPS file (a fact he has never disclosed willingly), now more or less has made a mockery of the FBI narrative of when, why, and how it began surveilling American citizens and infiltrating the Trump campaign. Ohr apparently has testified that well before the election, and well before the application of FISA warrants, he was working with the FBI, the already discredited Christopher Steele, and a Russian oligarch either to smear candidate Trump, or to facilitate the entry into the United States of a once barred and questionable Russian grandee, or both.

Nike hired NFL renegade Colin Kaepernick to peddle its sports products. For all its billion-dollar market research, it apparently did not know what Donald Trump’s animal cunning had almost immediately surmised: a majority of Americans do not appreciate the pampered multimillionaire Kaepernick sanctioning violence against the police by wearing “pig” socks, or mocking the National Anthem by taking a knee. Nike could just as well have hired Bowe Bergdahl to push its sneakers.

The Deep State Emerges

Then we come to an insurrectionary “resistance” op-ed in the New York Times, an insider scoop about a collective “undercover” effort to nullify the current presidency...

Keep reading.

New Focus on Denaturalization

Well, this is new ---- and great!

At LAT, "Under Trump, the rare act of denaturalizing U.S. citizens on the rise":

Working a Saturday shift in the stuffy Immigration and Naturalization Service office in downtown Los Angeles in the 1970s, Carl Shusterman came across a rap sheet.

A man recently sworn in as a United States citizen had failed to disclose on his naturalization application that he had been arrested, but not convicted, in California on rape and theft charges.

Shusterman, then a naturalization attorney, embarked on a months-long effort to do something that rarely happened: strip someone of their American citizenship.

“We had to look it up to find out how to do this,” he said. “We’d never even heard of it.”

Forty years later, denaturalization — a complex process once primarily reserved for Nazi war criminals and human rights violators — is on the rise under the Trump administration.

A United States Citizenship and Immigration Services team in Los Angeles has been reviewing more than 2,500 naturalization files for possible denaturalization, focusing on identity fraud and willful misrepresentation. More than 100 cases have been referred to the Department of Justice for possible action.

“We’re receiving cases where [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] believes there is fraud, where our systems have identified that individuals used more than one identity, sometimes more than two or three identities,” said Dan Renaud, the associate director for field operations at the citizenship agency. “Those are the cases we’re pursuing.”

The move comes at a time when Trump and top advisors have made it clear that they want to dramatically reduce immigration, both illegal and legal.

The administration granted fewer visas and accepted fewer refugees in 2017 than in previous years.

Recently, the federal government moved to block victims of gang violence and domestic abuse from claiming asylum. White House senior advisor Stephen Miller — an immigration hawk — is pushing a policy that could make it more difficult for those who have received public benefits, including Obamacare, to become citizens or green card holders, according to multiple news outlets.

Shusterman, now a private immigration attorney in L.A., said he’s concerned denaturalization could be used as another tool to achieve the president’s goals.

“I think they’ll … find people with very minor transgressions,” he said, “and they’ll take away their citizenship.”

Dozens of U.S. mayors, including L.A.’s Eric Garcetti, signed a letter sent to the citizenship agency’s director in late July, criticizing a backlog in naturalization applications and the agency’s commitment of resources to “stripping citizenship from naturalized Americans.”

“The new measure to investigate thousands of cases from almost 30 years ago, under the pretext of the incredibly minimal problem of fraud in citizenship applications, instead of managing resources in a manner that processes the backlogs before them, suggests that the agency is more interested in following an aggressive political agenda rather than its own mission,” the letter stated.

But Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports tighter controls, said “denaturalization, like deportation, is an essential tool to use against those who break the rules.”

“It’s for people who are fraudsters, liars,” he said. “We’ve been lax about this for a long time, and this unit that’s been developed is really just a question of taking the law seriously.”

From 2009 to 2016, an average of 16 civil denaturalization cases were filed each year, Department of Justice data show. Last year, more than 25 cases were filed. Through mid-July of this year, the Justice Department has filed 20 more.

Separately, ICE has a pending budget request for $207.6 million to hire 300 agents to help root out citizenship fraud, as well as to “complement work site enforcement, visa overstay investigations, forensic document examination, outreach programs and other activities,” according to the agency...

More.

Kavanaugh Coverage at the Other McCain

From Robert Stacy McCain, "Rhetorical Escalation":

After President Trump announced Brett Kavanaugh as his nominee to the Supreme Court on Monday, Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) spent all day Tuesday engaged in a competition to demonize Kavanaugh. If you believe what Democrats tell you, Kavanaugh is the most extreme extremist in the history of extremism. How extreme is he? Extremely extreme! He’s not just a right-winger, he’s “far-right.” How far? Extremely far! He’s so extremely far right as to “threaten the lives of millions of Americans for decades,” to quote Clinton crony and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe. (Hat-tip: Hogewash.)

The reader who isn’t tuned into the CNN/MSNBC/Democrat hysteria may wonder, how does a federal judge threaten millions of lives? On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Chuck Schumer said: “I will oppose this nomination with everything I’ve got. . . . This man should not be on the bench. . . . I believe he is far, far right on so many issues.” Schumer repeatedly asserted that the Kavanaugh nomination is somehow a threat to ObamaCare. Exactly how the Supreme Court affects healthcare legislation, Schumer didn’t specify, but he said that coverage for “pre-existing conditions,” which he described as “very popular” with the Democrat Party’s base, would be jeopardized if Kavanaugh is confirmed.

Because I don’t pay much attention to the paranoid fears of Democrats, it’s possible that Schumer is actually right about this. For all I know, there are cases pending in lower courts challenging elements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) which Democrats rammed through Congress on a party-line vote just a few months before they lost their majority in the 2010 midterm elections. The ACA’s mandate of coverage for “pre-existing conditions” was one of the worst job-killers in the bill. Requiring employers to provide insurance that covered whatever health problems the employee might have had before being hired meant that a lot of people simply couldn’t get hired, and this measure also sent health insurance rates skyrocketing, as insurers sought to compensate for the (often very expensive) treatments they were now required to cover.

One reason the economy started booming — and unemployment started declining — as soon as Trump was elected was that he promised to repeal ObamaCare and, by executive action, was able to limit the job-killing impact of this badly constructed legislation. If somehow the Supreme Court could render the entirety of ObamaCare null and void, good, although as I say, I’m not aware that this is likely, or even possible...

More.

Also at the Other McCain, "Democrats Use Kavanaugh Nomination in Congressional Fundraising Efforts."

Don't know about you, but I don't expect Kavanaugh to have a tough confirmation. Pro-choice Republicans (I know, oxymoron) Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have signaled their support for the nominee, and most of those red-state Democrats facing reelection this year are likely to fall in line (see the interesting Survey Monkey poll at Axios, "Democrats' Senate dream slips away.")

Kavanaugh will be borked, of course. But he's a decent family man and Democrat opposition to him is going to put the party on the wrong side of the American people, which is where the Democrats are most of the time anyway nowadays (*eye-roll*).

This is What the Democratic Party Has Become

From Ann Coulter, "Democrats Boo America":

NEW COLUMN IS POSTED! DEMOCRATS BOO AMERICA https://t.co/gFCVYctd19

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 31, 2018

Democrats Boo America https://t.co/qqlc2S5PVH

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) February 1, 2018

Unlike the president, I don't call everything "incredible," but Trump's State of the Union address was incredible, beautifully delivered. (This guy could have a future in television!)

As proof, I cite every single media outlet bitterly complaining after the speech that, as MSNBC's chyron put it: "TRUMP FAILS TO MENTION RUSSIA'S ELECTION MEDDLING IN STATE OF THE UNION."

He did not address the elephant in the room!

A lot of people don't like Trump, but no one was thinking that. It's only an elephant in your room, media. This is the very definition of solipsistic.

What did they want him to say? "I confess!"? Then they would have complained that the speech was all about him. There would be five Mueller deputies going over the speech, line by line.

If that's all they got, it was a great speech.

The media claimed that Trump tricked them into reporting that his address was going to be bipartisan -- and then double-crossed them by delivering a "divisive" speech.


To be sure, there were a few partisan flourishes, galling to both sides.

Points Liberals Hate:

-- "Beautiful clean coal";

-- The end of Obamacare's individual mandate;

-- Keeping Guantanamo open; and

-- Firing useless government employees working for the Veterans Administration.

Points Conservatives Hate:

-- Amnesty;

-- Pointless wars; and

-- Any policy Trump mentioned when the camera flashed to Ivanka.

Altogether, these partisan remarks consumed about seven minutes of an 80-minute speech.

The bulk of Trump's address celebrated:

-- A booming economy;


-- Companies bringing jobs home;

-- Low black unemployment;

-- The flag;

-- The national motto;

-- God;

-- Rebuilding roads and bridges;

-- Law enforcement;

-- The life of a child born to an opioid addict;

-- The military;

-- Veterans; and

-- Getting the best immigrants we can.

I'm trying to imagine FDR opposing any of that. But according to today's Democrats, those issues are "divisive." (Calling the president a "racist" 2 million times a day -- that's not particularly divisive.)

Democrats have apparently decided that the magic of immigration-created demographic transformation means the future is theirs! They no longer have to worry about middle-of-the-road voters, independents, undecideds -- or really any Americans at all.

The entire party has embraced Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet's advice (offered back when he thought Trump was going to lose): "The culture wars are over; they lost, we won. ... F*ck Anthony Kennedy." (No asterisk in the original.)

Drawing on his family's mystique, Rep. Joseph Kennedy III delivered the Democratic rebuttal while standing in an auto body shop in front of a broken-down car. The only thing missing was a wet girl in the back seat, seaweed in her hair, desperately scratching at the windshield.

To drive home the point that the Democratic Party is not a moribund carcass with nothing but memories, next year Chelsea Clinton should give the response. Then Hillary, followed by Amy Carter.

Kennedy began by unironically denouncing privilege and celebrity. (As everyone knows, Democrats cannot STAND celebrity!) He then devoted the lion's share of his speech to the Democrats' pet issues: transgenders and foreigners. This is a party so completely insulated from the concerns of normal people that it is now dedicating itself to exotic micro-issues...

More.

Aminatou Sow is Mad Because She Had to Pay Her Insurance Deductible Up Front, Before Her Scheduled Surgery

Um, that's how it works?

Leftists are so fucking stupid. Just stop. Fine. You want single payer. Push for it. But don't blame the insurance policy that you purchased. Buy a policy with an affordable deductible or quit bitching. That, or go on Medicaid. There's coverage available. Or, oh, you mean to tell me ObamaCare isn't that great after all? Who knew?

Seen on Twitter (make sure you read the whole thread; it's comedy gold):

Money really is at the heart of everything that is fucked up with our healthcare. Case in point: I’m scheduled for surgery tomorrow morning. It’s been on the books for weeks. I’ve gone through extensive pre-testing and have followed up with the hospital every step of the way

— Aminatou Sow (@aminatou) January 22, 2018

Trump's Sneakily Successful First Year

From Rachel Alexander, at Town Hall:

Trump's Sneakily Successful First Year https://t.co/jVO3259HGf

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) January 1, 2018

While the left complained nonstop about Trump’s tweeting and boisterous language, Trump buckled down and accomplished an incredible amount during his first year as president. The Washington Examiner counted an impressive 81 major achievements and another 100 minor achievements. Some of the largest include substantial tax cuts, increasing U.S. energy production and getting Neil Gorsuch confirmed to the Supreme Court. Other notable accomplishments include appointing more judges to the federal appellate courts than any other president during their first year and reducing illegal immigration. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports a 23 percent decline over the previous fiscal year.

The left is excitedly churning out articles gloating about a handful of items Trump was unable to accomplish, such as repealing Obamacare and getting Congressional funding for a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. One Green Party candidate actually said, “Trump is a failure his first year.” These armchair critics conveniently ignore Trump’s long list of accomplishments – as if they don’t exist. Some even claim that the economy isn’t doing any better. But GDP has increased above 3 percent and 1.7 new jobs have been created, reducing unemployment to 4.1 percent. 

The left can claim all it wants that Trump has had a bad year, but people see the results and feel them in their pocketbooks. Trump may not be very likable in this ultra-politically correct era, but he doesn’t have to be likable to get things done. Three of our greatest presidents have been characterized as having only average charisma: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. James Madison was described as “noticeably below average.”

Call Trump names but it’s not going to change anything. Most Americans are probably sick of the media blasting Trump constantly. Only five percent of the media’s coverage of Trump is positive, three times more negative than for President Obama. Maybe this explains why Trump’s approval rating at the end of his first year in office is almost the same as Obama’s was at the end of his first year. Rasmussen Reports found that Trump has 46 percent approval and 53 percent disapproval among likely voters; Obama had 47 percent approval and 52 percent disapproval. Americans see through the media spin and find it unfair.

No reasonable person believes that Trump is an “idiot” or whatever other choice words the left uses to describe Trump’s intelligence. He wouldn’t be where he is now, accomplishing a vast amount his first year in office, if he was really stupid. When the left can’t think of a substantive argument, they resort to 4th-grade name calling. Since they can’t refute his presidential success, they ridicule his personality. But Trump’s crude style may be a product of the left. He was a Democrat from 2001 to 2009. He produced and hosted The Apprentice, a reality TV show, from 2003 to 2015. He was enmeshed in the crudeness of Hollywood at the peak of his Democratic affiliation. The left dominates Hollywood, which is known for its lack of moral values. So it’s a little hypocritical for the left to attack Trump for vulgarity now. Trump’s comment he made about inappropriately grabbing women? He said that during a 2005 interview – after he’d been a Democrat for four years.

No matter how much the left calls Trump names, they can’t hide the fact he’s accomplished an incredible amount this past year. Once they wise up, they’re going to start seriously looking into removing him from office, whether by impeachment or the 25th Amendment. This means they are going to double down on their efforts to taint him criminally. Since they can’t beat him fair and square, they will try and take him out illegitimately through bogus accusations.

More.

Actually, it's not even sneaky. The economy is surging, and economists expect even bigger gains in 2018.

Yep, Trump's actually making America great again.

Christmas Is the Perfect Time to Mock Leftists

It is. Indeed, it is.

From Kurt Schlichter, at Town Hall, "Christmas Is the Perfect Time to Mock Liberals, and Other Random Thoughts":

Ho ho ho, jerks!
|| Christmas Is the Perfect Time to Mock Liberals, and Other Random Thoughts https://t.co/YQUPRqmayD

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) December 25, 2017

When we gather together this Christmas, it’s going to be super-awkward since everybody is dead because Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Scam, repealed net neutrality, and cut taxes. The depredations of Genghis Khan, the Black Plague, and the repeal of the Obamacare mandate – these are pretty much the same thing. Santa Claus and all of our dreams are dead too.

On the plus side, since we are all dead there’s no one to make egg nog, which is the worst of all possible nogs.

No. Whoever invented egg nog is the second grossest human being ever who is not Lena Dunham, exceeded in grossness only by the first person being who thought, “Look, an oyster! I know. I’ll put that slimy thing in my mouth.”

The Democrats are the egg nog of American politics. Discuss...

Keep reading.

Radicalism on the Rise in American Politics

From Joel Kotkin, at the Orange County Register:

The Republican Party’s road to the 2018 mid-terms looks increasingly like Pickett’s Charge, the Confederate assault on fixed Union positions that marked the high-water mark for the southern cause. After achieving its greatest domination of elective office in 80 years, the GOP seems likely to get slaughtered.

As at Gettysburg, bad generalship, an unpopular, clumsy Donald Trump, constitutes one cause for the imminent Republican decline. But the officer corps is also failing, as the congressional delegation seems determined to screw its middle class base in favor the remnant of those corporate plutocrats who finance their campaigns and the Goldman Sachs crowd to whom Trump has outsourced his economic policy. Steve Bannon’s support for demagogues like Roy Moore can only further weaken the party’s appeal, rapidly turning much of the business community, out of sheer embarrassment, into de facto Democrats.

Only one thing can save the Republicans from themselves: the Democrats. Although they have shown remarkable unity as part of the anti-Trump resistance, the Democrats themselves suffer deep-seated divisions. Most critically they are moving left at a time when more voters seek something more in the middle. Certainly this progressive tilt has done little to reverse their own declining popularity; public approval of the party has sunk to the lowest levels in a quarter century.

The rise of the radical base

“Who the goods wish to destroy, they first drive mad.” Today this old Greek adage seems particularly applicable to the Democrats. In the past the party produced leaders, and endorsed positions, that appealed across a broad swath of the population. With the Republicans forced to defend Trump, and ally with the marginalized far-right, a more centrist approach seems almost guaranteed to create success, as we saw recently in the Virginia elections.

But, sadly, the much heralded “resistance” to Trump has radicalized the party’s grassroots, giving enhanced power to militant groups like Black Lives Matter, as well as the most extreme green and gender fundamentalists. Clustered increasingly in large urban centers, Democrats are moving more quickly to progressive extremes than the GOP is shifting to the right; the percentage of Democratic voters tilting left since 1994 has grown from 30 percent to 73 percent. Moderates in the party, argues Wall Street investor Steven Ratner, face a “freight train coming at us from the left.”

The centrist approach used in Virginia should show the way, and succeeded largely by winning moderate voters from the affluent D.C. suburbs. But in California or New York rank and file, suburban Democrats have little voice against the organized and strident habitués of the core cities. The various cultural imperatives of the media, the universities, the progressive non-profit and well-funded community groups wash out all other voices.

Positions that threaten a Democratic resurgence

Three critical positions threaten a national Democratic resurgence. The first, and the most divisive, is immigration policy. Most Americans do not embrace the xenophobia of the Trump base, but they also do not favor such things as sanctuary cities, even here in California. They are not likely to celebrate immigrant law-breaking as does state Senate Leader Kevin de León, now challenging the more centrist Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s bid for re-election.

The second vulnerability revolves around a strong move to a single-payer federal system, a position endorsed by increasingly powerful groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and New York’s Working Families Party. To be sure, this may be more attractive to most Americans than GOP attempts to scuttle the current Obamacare system, but it would require a massive tax increase that would alienate moderate, middle-income voters. A plan to impose this system on California was deemed so expensive — essentially more than doubling the state budget — that Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon had to table it to the chagrin of the progressive lobby.

The third, and perhaps most critical, policy area relates more broadly to culture. Just as the antediluvian stances of a Roy Moore may make middle-of-the-road voters gag, many Americans also would have a hard time embracing such things as reparations, race and gender quotas, transgender issues, campus speech codes and even football protests celebrated by progressives. This aversion to identity politics appears particularly true for the middle American voters who swung in 2016 to Trump and the GOP.

We live in interesting times, that's for sure.

Still more.

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Whoa!

Family in NC received this letter from Blue Cross. Next time someone says #Obamacare is helping the middle class, tell them they’re lying. pic.twitter.com/AoJhOusNdm

— Alex Vargo (@alexandervargo) November 7, 2017

President Trump Bringing Most Conservative Agenda in a Generation

Even more conservative than President Ronald Reagan, argues Steven Hayward, at LAT, via Instapundit, "WEIRD HOW BILL KRISTOL STILL SEEMS SO CHAFED: Despite the chaos, Trump has managed to push the most conservative agenda in a generation.

“This hitherto ideologically unmoored man has set in motion an administration arguably more conservative than Ronald Reagan’s. While the Congress controlled by his adopted party remains gridlocked, Trump is rolling back regulations and a number of the Obama administration’s most controversial achievements, including the internal structure of Obamacare and the Clean Power Plan. His foreign policy resets look increasingly sure-footed. His judicial nominees are uniformly conservative. It is inconceivable that any of the other leading Republican candidates from the 2016 cycle would have governed as boldly as Trump has.”