Why the 2018 Midterm Elections Matter

In response to my earlier post today, some of my Republican" friends posted laughing emojis on the cross posting on Facebook.   Not surprisingly, these individuals tended to be white, heterosexual males and all from privilege.  I can only assume they lack much, if any, empathy for others and are only concerned with tax cuts and/or protecting their "white privilege."  Protecting the rule of law and maintaining some semblance of morality and decency seems to matter not so much.  It's very disheartening.  Confirming that I am not alone in lamenting what is occurring under the Trump?Pence?GOP misrule, The Economist, a staid British publication not known for hysteria, makes the case of why the 2018 midterm elections are so important and why, at a minimum, Democrats must retake control of the House of Representatives.  Here are article highlights:

Toxic federal politics is America’s great weakness. It prevents action on pressing real issues, from immigration to welfare; it erodes Americans’ faith in their government and its institutions; and it dims the beacon of American democracy abroad. The mid-term elections are a chance to begin stopping the rot—and even to start the arduous task of putting it right.

Mr Trump did not begin this abasement. But he has embraced it as enthusiastically as anyone and carried it to new depths of his own devising. All politicians stretch the truth. Mr Trump lies with abandon—over 5,000 times since he was inaugurated, according to the Washington Post. His deceit is so brazen and effective that many of his supporters take his word above any of his critics’, especially those in the media, and seemingly in the face of all the evidence. That suits Mr Trump because, once nobody is believed, he cannot be held to account. But it is disastrous for America. Once reasoned debate loses its power to win arguments, democracy cannot function.

Mr Trump is also wilfully divisive. All politicians attack their opponents, but presidents see it as their duty to unite the country after a tragedy. Only Mr Trump would think the Tree of Life synagogue shooting a chance to hit back at the media and the Democrats for criticising him (see article). Only he would suggest that, rather than tone down his explosive rhetoric, he might just “tone it up”. Such divisiveness matters because, when your opponents are simply bad people, the compromise that is the foundation of all healthy politics becomes hard within parties and almost impossible between them.

America’s democracy is robust—it was designed to be. However, one by one, its institutions are being infected with toxic polarisation. Congress caught the bug in the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich was Speaker. The media have also fallen victim to partisan scepticism—certainly among audiences, if not also among contributors. Just 11% of strong Trump supporters believe the mainstream media, whereas 91% of them trust Mr Trump, a CBS News poll found in the summer. Among Democrats those beliefs tend to be reversed. Now the Supreme Court is perceived to be partisan, too. Democrats see the recent confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the court as the ramming through of a partisan who has lied, possibly about a sexual assault, and who will be incapable of putting the law above his party. 

A dishonest executive, conniving with a fawning legislature and empowered by a partisan judiciary: were it to come to that, America truly would be in grave trouble.

What is to be done? Just as American politics did not sour overnight, so the route forward is by many small steps, beginning with next week’s elections. And the first of those steps is for the House, at a minimum, to switch to Democratic control.

This matters because Mr Trump should be subject to congressional oversight. He shows contempt for the norms that, to varying degrees, constrained past presidents—whether by refusing to release his tax returns, mixing official and private business, or bullying officials working in, say, the justice department who should be independent. Congress should hold hearings to investigate such behaviour. . . . a continued Republican majority in the House would eventually imperil the rule of law.

For Democrats to win control of the House would, in the long run, benefit both parties. Defeat would encourage some Republicans to start putting forward a conservative alternative to Trumpism. Defeat in the Senate, too, would turbo-charge that effort, though it looks unlikely. The status quo, by contrast, would cement Mr Trump’s takeover of the party.

America will not mend its politics in a single election. At a minimum, progress will take more votes, a renewal of the Republican Party and a different president with a different moral compass. But the right result next week could point the way.

Well said.  A second necessary step is to drive animus motivated, ignorance embracing evangelical Christians back into the political wilderness, hopefully, forever. 

Trump's Homeland Security Dupes Children Into Signing Away Their Rights

Helen, a five-year-old from Honduras, was detained after the Trump Administration announced
that it would halt the separation of immigrant families.

The Republican Party that I belonged to years ago, in my view, believed in right and wrong and one of the things that a decent person would never do is harm a small child or deliberately take away a child's legal rights.  But that is not the Republican Party of today with Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer at its head.   Tricking a child so that the child forfeits rights and suffers a cruel family separation is all in a days work for the Trump/Pence regime.  What I find most disturbing is the number of people - including some "friends" who pretend to be decent moral people are just fine and dandy with such ruthless cruelty.  They would never want their own children or grandchildren to be treated this way, but seemingly, if the child in question has black or brown skin, then anything goes. How these people live with themselves is something I cannot grasp (hopefully, I never will).  A piece in The New Yorker looks at the case of "Helen" a five year old from Honduras - the country of my mother's birth - who without any adult advocate was tricked into signing away her rights and who, as a result, ended up separated for many months from family members.  Helen's case is not an exception and some children have yet to be reunited with their families.  You would expect something like this in Nazi Germany or Bolshevik Russia, but not in America.  Here are story highlights: 

Helen—a smart, cheerful five-year-old girl—is an asylum seeker from Honduras. . . . In July, Helen fled Honduras with her grandmother, Noehmi, and several other relatives; gangs had threatened Noehmi’s teen-age son, Christian, and the family no longer felt safe. Helen’s mother, Jeny, had migrated to Texas four years earlier, and Noehmi planned to seek legal refuge there. With Noehmi’s help, Helen travelled thousands of miles, sometimes on foot, and frequently fell behind the group.

When the family reached the scrubland of southern Texas, U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended them and moved them through a series of detention centers. A month earlier, the Trump Administration had announced, amid public outcry over its systemic separation of migrant families at the border, that it would halt the practice. But, at a packed processing hub, Christian was taken from Noehmi and placed in a cage with toddlers. Noehmi remained in a cold holding cell, clutching Helen. Soon, she recalled, a plainclolothes official arrived and informed her that she and Helen would be separated. “No!” Noehmi cried. “The girl is under my care! Please!”

Noehmi said that the official told her, “Don’t make things too difficult,” and pulled Helen from her arms. “The girl will stay here,” he said, “and you’ll be deported.” . . . . the authorities explaining that Helen’s mother would be able to retrieve her, soon, from wherever they were taking her.

Later that day, Noehmi and Christian were reunited. The adults in the family were fitted with electronic ankle bracelets and all were released, pending court dates. They left the detention center and rushed to Jeny’s house, in McAllen, hoping to find Helen there. When they didn’t, Noehmi began to shake, struggling to explain the situation. “Immigration took your daughter,” she told Jeny.

The next day, authorities—likely from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (O.R.R.)—called to say that they were holding Helen at a shelter near Houston; according to Noehmi, they wouldn’t say exactly where. . . . Helen had been brought to Baytown, a shelter run by Baptist Child & Family Services, which the federal government had contracted to house unaccompanied minors.

According to a long-standing legal precedent known as the Flores settlement, which established guidelines for keeping children in immigration detention, Helen had a right to a bond hearing before a judge; that hearing would have likely hastened her release from government custody and her return to her family. At the time of her apprehension, in fact, Helen checked a box on a line that read, “I do request an immigration judge,” asserting her legal right to have her custody reviewed. But, in early August, an unknown official handed Helen a legal document, a “Request for a Flores Bond Hearing,” which described a set of legal proceedings and rights that would have been difficult for Helen to comprehend. (“In a Flores bond hearing, an immigration judge reviews your case to determine whether you pose a danger to the community,” the document began.) On Helen’s form, which was filled out with assistance from officials, there is a checked box next to a line that says, “I withdraw my previous request for a Flores bond hearing.” Beneath that line, the five-year-old signed her name in wobbly letters.

As the summer progressed with no signs of Helen’s return, Noehmi and Jeny contacted LUPE, a nonprofit community union based in the Rio Grande Valley, to ask for help winning Helen’s release. . . . Tania Chavez, a strategy leader for the organization, met with the family to hear their story.

As Chavez saw it, the girl’s seizure by the government showed that the family-separation crisis hadn’t been resolved, as many Americans believed—it had simply evolved.

Now stage three has commenced—one in which separations are done quietly, LUPE’s Tania Chavez asserts, and in which reunifications can be mysteriously stymied. According to recent Department of Justice numbers—released because of an ongoing A.C.L.U. lawsuit challenging family separations—a hundred and thirty-six children who fall within the lawsuit’s scope are still in government custody. An uncounted number of separated children in shelters and foster care fall outside the lawsuit’s current purview—including many like Helen, who arrived with a grandparent or other guardian, rather than with a parent. Many such children have been misclassified, in government paperwork, as “unaccompanied minors,” due to a sloppy process that the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General recently critiqued.

[M]any kids have largely disappeared from public view, and from official statistics, with the federal government showing little urgency to hasten reunifications. (O.R.R. and U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to requests for comment.)

Noehmi and Jeny connected with LUPE’s newly hired attorney, Eugene Delgado. . . . He agreed to represent Noehmi and her family, and at the summer’s end he went with them to court to represent them in removal proceedings. There, a judge granted Noehmi and her relatives more time to apply for asylum. Toward the end of the hearing, Delgado brought up Helen.

“Judge, this case doesn’t stop here,” Delgado said. “What about the little child lost in the system?” The judge looked confused. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Well, where is Helen, the five-year-old?”

The judge, Delgado recalled, seemed startled. Both he and the government prosecutor had no idea that Helen existed, let alone where she was being held. “I could give you a couple of phone numbers to call?” the prosecutor offered.

Delgado began the search. “It was just a complete maze, trying to trace the girl down,” he recalled. “I talked to at least ten people—case workers, social workers.” Eventually, he learned of Helen’s placement in Baytown, the Houston shelter. After that, Noehmi and Jeny were allowed two ten-minute calls with Helen per week, during which the girl often pleaded, “Come get me, Grandma!” The government collected fingerprints and other information from Noehmi and Jeny, to determine whether they were Helen’s rightful guardians; the Office of Refugee Resettlement soon deemed Jeny a fit sponsor, Delgado told me, but the completion of Noehmi’s background check was delayed for unexplained reasons.

On August 17th, Helen was transferred to a foster home in San Antonio. “I feared, did they give Helen away?” Noehmi told me; she worried about the prospect of adoption.

Chavez had found, in these cases, that authorities sometimes responded to public pressure; she’d never tried this in family-separation cases, but it seemed worth a shot. Chavez reached out to Alida Garcia, the vice-president of advocacy for the group FWD.us, and Jess Morales Rocketto, the chair of an alliance known as Families Belong Together. These teams worked together to craft a national social-media campaign, using Helen’s O.R.R. case-file photograph: an image that eerily resembled a cherub-cheeked mug shot. On August 31st, they began to circulate a petition addressing the O.R.R. official in charge of Helen’s case. “By that Friday, we already had six hundred signatures,” Chavez said. Right away, they began receiving calls from O.R.R., promising that Helen would be returned to her family as soon as possible.

On September 7th, LUPE was told that Helen would finally be released, nearly two months after she was taken from Noehmi.

Soon after, the shelter sent a small black backpack that Helen had left behind. It held Helen’s legal paperwork, including the document that the five-year-old had been told to sign, withdrawing her request to see a judge. The backpack also held Helen’s colored sketch of Lady Liberty. Beneath the statue’s image, a lesson summary, in Spanish, read, “Objective: That the students draw one of the most representative symbols of the United States.”

Last Thursday, Helen’s family held another party, with cake and more princess gear, to celebrate the reunion and to thank the advocacy groups that helped make it happen.

“One of the things Helen’s story really showed us is that the Trump Administration never stopped separating children from their families,” Morales Rocketto said. “In fact, they’ve doubled down, but it’s even more insidious now, because they are doing it in the cover of night.” She added, “We believe that there are more kids like Helen. We have learned we cannot take this Administration at their word.”

Read the full piece for more details.  Ask yourself if you'd want your child or grandchild treated this way?  Frankly, I wouldn't treat a dog this way much less a small child. If this story disturbs you, take the first step in ending such stories: vote Democrat on November 6, 2018, for every office possible.  If this story doesn't disturb you, then do the rest of us a favor and stop pretending that you are a good Christian because you clearly are not.

New Studies: Swing Trump Voters Motivated By Racism and Religious Bigotry

I have taken a lot of abuse by "conservatives" and Republican friends/acquaintances for my continued position that racism and its first cousin, religious based bigotry, were the key components in Trump's Electoral College win, despite his almost 3 million loss in the popular vote.  Trump as seemingly been a racist for most of his life going back decades ago here in Norfolk, Virginia when the Trump companies were sued by the Justice Department for anti-black housing discrimination.  Thus, who better than Trump to play to closet racists who had voted for Barack Obama because of their economic concerns which overrode their racism and religious bigotry.  Two new studies indicate that - as I have consistently argued - Trump/the GOP played their cards to appeal to these voters' racism/religious animus to swing a critical number of Obama voters to Trump.  Specifically, Trump lies to these voters on what he intended to do on healthcare and other issues when, based on what the GOP has attempted to date, these promises were never going to be realized.  A piece  in Slate looks at the study findings:

. . . . .[v]oters who supported Barack Obama in 2012 only to back Trump in 2016. Its lessons have far-ranging implications not only for diagnosing Trump’s specific appeal but for whether such an appeal would hold in 2020.

Two reports from the Voter Study Group, which conducted the survey, give a detailed look at these vote switchers. . . . . One, from George Washington University political scientist John Sides, looks at racial, religious, and cultural divides and how they shaped the 2016 election. The other, from political scientist Lee Drutman, takes a detailed look at those divides and places them in the context of the Democratic and Republican parties. Starting in different places, both Sides and Drutman conclude that questions of race, religion, and American identity were critical to the 2016 outcome, especially among Obama-to-Trump voters.

Whether or not they identified with a party, most people who voted in the 2016 election were partisans. “Approximately 83 percent of voters were ‘consistent partisans,’ ” writes Sides. In other words, they voted for the same major party in both 2012 and 2016. This is the typical case. But about 9 percent of Donald Trump’s voters had backed Obama in the previous election, equivalent to roughly 4 percent of the electorate. Why? The popular answer, or at least the current conventional wisdom, is economic dislocation. But Sides is skeptical. He concludes that economic issues mattered, but no more or less than they did in the 2012 election. The same goes for views on entitlement programs, on trade, and on the state of the economy in general.

What changed was the importance of identity. Attitudes toward immigration, toward black Americans, and toward Muslims were more correlated with voting Republican in 2016 than in 2012. Put a little differently, Barack Obama won re-election with the support of voters who held negative views toward blacks, Muslims, and immigrants. Sides notes that “37 percent of white Obama voters had a less favorable attitude toward Muslims” while 33 percent said “illegal immigrants” were “mostly a drain.”

Nonetheless, writes Sides, “the political consequences in 2016 were the same: a segment of white Democrats with less favorable attitudes toward these ethnic and religious minorities were potential or actual Trump voters.”

Drutman plots the electorate across two axes—one measuring economic views, the other measuring views on identity—to build a political typology with four categories: liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and populists. Liberals, the largest single group, hold left or left-leaning views on economics and identity. Libertarians, the smallest group, hold right-leaning views on economics but leftward beliefs on identity. Conservatives are third largest, with right-leaning views on both indices, while populists—the second largest group—are the inverse of libertarians, holding liberal economic views and conservative beliefs on identity.

Most populists, according to Drutman, were already Republican voters in the 2012 election, prizing their conservative views on identity over liberal economic policies. A minority, about 28 percent, backed Obama. But four years later, Clinton could only hold on to 6 in 10 of those populist voters who had voted for Obama. Most Democratic defectors were populists, and their views reflect it: They hold strong positive feelings toward Social Security and Medicare, like Obama voters, but are negative toward black people and Muslims, and see themselves as “in decline.”

This is a portrait of the most common Obama-to-Trump voter: a white American who wants government intervention in the economy but holds negative, even prejudiced, views toward racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. In 2012, these voters seemed to value economic liberalism over a white, Christian identity and backed Obama over Romney. By 2016, the reverse was true. . . .

[T]here’s another way to read the data. Usually, voters in the political crosscurrents, like Drutman’s populists, have to prioritize one of their chief concerns. That’s what happened in 2008 and 2012. Yes, they held negative views toward nonwhites and other groups, but neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney ran on explicit prejudice. Instead, it was a standard left vs. right ideological contest, and a substantial minority of populists sided with Obama because of the economy. That wasn’t true of the race with Trump. He tied his racial demagoguery to a liberal-sounding economic message, activating racial resentment while promising jobs, entitlements, and assistance.

The good news for Democrats—and the even better news for the populist left—is that unless Trump makes a swift break with the Republican Party, his combined economic and identity-based appeal was a one-time affair. In 2020, if he runs for re-election, Trump will just be a Republican, and while he’s certain to prime racial resentment, he’ll also have a conservative economic record to defend. In other words, it will be harder to muddy the waters. And if it’s harder to muddy the waters, then it’s easier for Democrats—and especially a Democratic populist—to draw the distinctions that win votes.

The bottom line?  If you want to see a likely racist and religious bigot, look a Trump voter in the face. Don't be fooled by their feign religiosity or  adherence to "Christian values." The truth is that they are morally bankrupt.