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Skilled nursing operators may soon face disastrous Medicare funding cuts, American Health Care Association President and CEO Mark Parkinson warned on Thursday.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is expected to release its latest proposed payment rule for skilled nursing providers in the coming weeks. While the nursing home sector has successfully fought against similar cuts in the past, the head of the nations largest lobbying and trade group indicated that this years effort will be different and even more critical than ever before.

The tea leaves are indicating that weve got a real problem here. So were working as hard as we can to make the best possible case that nursing homes have never been in a worse position and this would not be a good time for a cut, Parkinson told Skilled Nursing News during a virtual event hosted by the news organization on Thursday.

Parkinson pointed to the federal governments comments on possibly recalibrating the industrys relatively new Patient-Driven Payment Model (PDPM) after determining the model increased payments to nursing homes by about 5% in fiscal 2020, for a total gain of $1.7 billion.

Some analysts, including CMS, believe that were being overpaid, Parkinson explained.

Before the end of 2021, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) recommended a 5% cut to the base payment rates for nursing homes in fiscal year 2023.

The recommendation which in part was informed by what MedPAC called rebounded industry transactions was met with groans from providers and leaders in the sector, though it was not entirely unexpected.

Parkinson, in his comments Thursday, hinted that the backlash CMS faced when the $1.7 billion increase was announced could put pressure on the agency to pursue cuts as PDPM was supposed to be budget neutral.

While the nursing home sector has made significant gains in the past two years, its recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic continues to this day.

Prior to the pandemic, nursing home occupancy was at around 80% and at its lowest point in December 2020 the sector fell to 67%, according to Parkinson.

We gained 6% of that back in the first six months of 2021, Parkinson explained. We were making a nice steady recovery and were on a trajectory that looked like we were going to be recovered by the end of 2021 before delta hit.

Following the emergence of the delta variant, the industrys occupancy didnt decline but it also didnt improve much over a seven-month span.

That was really painful to be at 73% for seven months in our recovery, Parkinson admitted. Over the last four weeks weve seen a 1% increase so were at 74% but I would say we have at least another year in order to recover.

With occupancy still down and staffing shortages forcing some facilities to close, Parkinson thinks cuts could spell disaster for the sector, and he plans to press policymakers on that in the coming months.

While Parkinson admitted the MedPAC recommendation was not much of a surprise, he thinks it may be more difficult to talk CMS out of it this time around compared to previous years.

Its not uncommon for MedPAC to propose that we should get a cut and were pretty used to being able to convince CMS policymakers that they shouldnt do that this year its going to be really hard, he explained during the webinar.

MedPAC recommended similar cuts for nursing homes in 2020, but CMS did not follow the recommendation at the time.

While Parkinson does not know what CMS will ultimately propose, he said the industry needs to brace for the very strong possibility that cuts are coming.

A 60-day comment period will follow the proposed payment rule announcement after which CMS will issue a final rule with new payments going into effect in October.

The current situation reminded Parkinson of what happened in 2011, the last time the sector had a sizable change in its payment model following corrections to the former Resource Utilization Group (RUG) system.

That first year we were overpaid by 12%, according to CMS, he said. And they completely cut it the next year.

He described the move as a huge jolt for the sector as publicly traded companies got cut in half and the real estate investment trusts were eviscerated.

It was a really tough time, Parkinson said.

It was during this time that HCR ManorCare which was eventually acquired by ProMedica began to fall behind on its rent payments, eventually leading to it filing for bankruptcy.

We thought as we entered 2020 that were going to have a big battle on our hands over PDPM and whether its budget neutral and then the pandemic occurred, Parkinson explained.

Now fast forward to where we are today and now theyre saying they arent sure they can let it go anymore, Parkinson said.

Parkinson told SNN that hes had multiple positive meetings with several federal government officials throughout this week, including CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, along with several nursing home providers.

They need to hear whats really happening in the buildings from providers, he said

He said providers of various sizes met with Brooks-LaSure specifically to discuss current labor challenges the industry faces, and how that has impacted industry recovery as they remain committed to quality.

Parkinson said the group has a meeting with a top White House official on Friday. Its part of the associations strategy to speak with as many government officials as possible about the struggles the industry faces leading up to AHCAs congressional briefing in June.

Parkinson doubled down on his comments that this years congressional briefing will be among the most important in the sectors history. He also thinks the timing of it is perfect in more ways than one.

We hope to have 500 to 600 providers in D.C. and they will go up to Capitol Hill to meet with their members of Congress and one of our primary asks will be to weigh in with CMS, HHS and the administration on our payment, so the timing for that whole effort is absolutely perfect, Parkinson explained.

On top of that, the extension of the public health emergency, which Parkinson is hopeful will be extended in the next couple of weeks, would possibly be up for renewal again in mid-June, shortly after the AHCA event.

Parkinson also met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to discuss industry funding, and arguably the most critical issue the sector presently faces: staffing.

He said during the webinar that he indicated AHCA would start pounding away and planting the seeds for more comprehensive immigration reform to bring in additional nursing home workers from overseas.

Immigration reform would be one of the things that could help us more than anything else [when it comes to staffing], Parkinson said. There are millions of people that want to come to the US and work, it would help on so many different levels.

While Parkinson plans to start making noise once again on immigration, he admitted reform likely wont happen given the current partisan divide in Congress.

AHCA pushed for lawmakers to amend the countrys current immigration visa prioritization to consider prioritizing the entry of foreign-trained nurses and health care workers into the U.S. prior to the end of 2021.

We have shifted our focus to the administration and there are things that the administration can do that can speed up people that have already been approved to come over, he said. This doesnt solve the macro problem of being 238,000 short but there are thousands of RNs that havent been able to get their interviews because of COVID.

He said he keeps pounding away to see that process become more streamlined.

Curbing skyrocketing agency costs has been another strategy AHCA has advocated for as a way to help with rising staffing costs, though progress has been slower than expected, Parkinson said.

Im really surprised that as I talked to providers, they havent seen any relief from agencies, Parkinson said. I would have thought that by now we would start to see a decline in these prices but that hasnt happened.

Parkinson remains hopeful that just by bringing attention to it on the federal level will have an impact.

Were not going to get a law passed at the federal level, he said. But I think that there are a handful of states that may pass laws that will restrict how much agencies can charge.

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'We've Got a Real Problem Here': Parkinson Warns SNF Operators Could Face Medicare Funding Cuts - Skilled Nursing News

Angelika Albaladejo| Capital & Main

When Joe Biden ran againstPresident Donald Trump in 2020, he promised to fight back against anti-immigrant policies, including those that punished sanctuary cities and that gave more local authorities power to act as an extra arm of federal immigration enforcement.

More than one year into Bidens presidency, his administration has done little to support so-called sanctuaries cities, counties or states that limit how much they help federal agents to investigate, arrest or detain immigrants.

Biden told voters he would dial back Trumps expansion of cooperation agreements between local police officers and agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Instead, the Biden administration has left such collaborations in place and is even trying to convince local governments that refused to cooperate with ICE under Trump to start doing so now, a Capital & Main review of government documents and speeches shows.

While Trump used the presidential pulpit to drive sanctuary cities, and undocumented immigration more broadly, into a kind of culture war, the Biden White House has made it a lower priority, said Benjamin Gonzalez OBrien, a San Diego State University political science professor who co-wrote a 2019 book about thehistory and politicsof sanctuary policies.

In Congress, deep partisan divisions and internal party disagreements endure, and have caused immigration reform efforts tostall out, as Republicans falsely accuse Biden of overseeing open borders and Democrats fail to pass any of the nearly half-dozen immigration bills introduced so far.

But immigration remains a part of daily life in communities across the country, and local and state governments continue to pass laws and elect officials on one or the other side of the issue. These local decisions on whether or not to collaborate with federal enforcement canaffect public safetyand trust in law enforcement, including by diverting resources or encouraging racial profiling.

Were going to see the battle over sanctuary policies play out [in different localities] until we get some kind of national legislation, said OBrien. There are still millions of people living in a legal gray zone who are afraid of leaving the house and interacting with other members of their community because that threat of deportation hangs over their head.

As a presidential candidate, Biden pledged to end Trumpshistoric expansionof local-federal cooperation on immigration enforcement because the partnerships known as 287(g) agreements undermine trust and cooperation between local law enforcement and the communities they are charged to protect.

But under Biden, the federal government is still relying on local police partnerships as the main engine of the deportation system, said Lena Graber, a senior staff attorney with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco who studies the role of local police in immigration enforcement.

More than 140 local law enforcement agencies are currently signed up to help ICE, including by sharing information with federal agents when they arrest, detain or intend to release an undocumented immigrant.

A Capital & Main analysis of ICE data shows that under Trump, 111 sheriffs departments began partnering with ICE for the first time through the 287(g) program. Nearly half of all local agencies that did so were in Florida and Texas. Some pro-immigrant advocates, policy analysts and civil rights groups say Trumps aggressive recruitment of local sheriffs facilitateddiscriminatory policing, such as racial profiling, that has separated families and created legal and financial challenges for people otherwise living quietly in the community.

Under Biden, ICE has only ended its collaboration with one sheriffs office, Bristol County in Massachusetts, after guards responded to immigrant detainees protesting conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic byshooting pepper ballsand siccing dogs on them.

The Biden administration has the authority to order ICE to cancel such partnerships at any time, Graber said. Its the easiest policy thing for them to do.

Instead, contrary to campaign promises, the administration intends to expand local cooperation. Alejandro Mayorkas, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, recently sought toconvince mayorsthat they should resume collaborating with federal immigration authorities because the agency of today, and what it is focused upon, and what it is doing, is not the agency of the past.

But the mayors of several cities including Berkeley, Philadelphia and New York have already said through spokespeople that theydont intendto expand cooperation with ICE.

Prominent immigrant legal services groups called Mayorkas pitch abetrayalof the presidents commitments and warned in a public statement directed to him that such partnerships co-opt local resources into questionable, racially discriminatory purposes, and strip communities of safety and public trust.

Bidens pick to run ICE, Ed Gonzalez, haspromisedto continue such local cooperation if he is confirmed by Congress, despite the fact that as sheriff of Harris County, Texas most populous, hecanceledhis departments 287(g) agreement. During Trumps final year in office, Gonzalezcriticized the tactic, tweeting that Diverting valuable law enforcement resources away from public safety threats would drive undocumented families further into the shadows & damage our community safety.

When it comes to supporting sanctuaries, the Biden administration has taken some steps.

Bidens administration hasrepealeda Trump-era ban thatbarredsanctuary cities like New York from receiving some federal grants. Under Biden, ICE haslimitedthe scope of who its agents should arrest and detain, has committed toending worksite raidsand is now arresting and detainingfewer peoplewithin the United States than under Trump.

But the biggest change so far has been in how the administration talks about undocumented people, said Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia Hernandez, an Ohio State University law professor who specializes in the intersection of criminal and immigration law.

In contrast with Trump, we dont see the kind of racist, abrasive, offensive language coming from the president, Garcia Hernandez said. But the Biden administration is still struggling to find its footing when it comes to differentiating its actual immigration policies.

Garcia Hernandez said that city, county and state governments still have a good amount of wiggle room when it comes to making life easier or harder for immigrants to live in their communities.

The direction in which local authorities go is not so much a matter of law, but of their politics, he said.

In the years since Trump turned up the pressure on immigrant sanctuaries, some state legislatures across the country have passed laws pushing in opposite directions, with some enacting sanctuary-style policies and others banning them.

Within the last year, states likeIllinoisandNew Jerseypassed laws limiting the ways their police departments and jails can cooperate with immigration enforcement, including by banning them from entering any new contracts to detain immigrants for ICE.

Some states have strengthened long-standing protections for undocumented immigrants. Oregon, the nations oldest sanctuary state, faced pushback from conservative state legislators over such policies during the Trump administration, and responded last summer. The states Democratic lawmakers passed a sanctuary promise law intended to reinforce immigrant access to social services and block local police from sharing information with ICE or detaining immigrants.

Some local agencies have pushed back against such efforts, including the counties of Kankakee and McHenry, outside of Chicago. They sued Illinois, saying the state couldnt stop them from getting paid tens of millions of dollars per year to detain immigrants for ICE. But a federal judge recentlyruledthat the state does have the constitutional power to ban its counties from doing so.

At the same time, some states are going in the opposite direction by requiring their local agencies to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. Texas, Florida and South Carolina are among at least 10 states that passed laws during Trumps presidency blocking their cities and counties from engaging in sanctuary practices. A federal judge ruled that Floridas ban isunconstitutionalbecause it was adopted with discriminatory motives. A federal appeals court upheld most ofTexas 2017 law, but legal challenges are pending.

No matter which way states go, immigration enforcement agencies still have the power to investigate, arrest and detain people anywhere in the country, including in sanctuaries.

To do so, ICE relies heavily on its expansive and long-standing partnership networks with local and state authorities. Some are so deeply embedded that they remain in place irrespective of whether or not a community is a so-called sanctuary jurisdiction, said Jorge Loweree, policy director of the American Immigration Council.

For example, California has passedseverallawsover the years intended to stop state and local police from sharing information with ICE or transferring people into ICE custody. But despite these protections, some sheriffs offices haveworked with ICEanyway. At times, these partnerships have led to potentially illegal practices, such as when Californias prison system transferred a U.S. citizen into ICE custody in 2020. The man wasdetainedfor a month by immigration authorities during the pandemic, until a judge finally ordered him released. In Seattle, also a longtime sanctuary, ICE similarly detainedanother U.S. citizenin 2019.

ICE also has access to a wide range of databases created by police agencies and information companies, such as the data mining corporation LexisNexis and the software creator Palantir, which was co-founded by the Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel. Some immigrant rights advocates told Capital & Main these databases can help immigration officersobtain informationthat local agencies decline to provide.

Nonetheless, since Trump made anti-immigrant policies a centerpiece of his presidency and both campaign runs, some pro-immigrant activists have pushed back through local elections.

Max Rose, who directs the North Carolina-based Sheriffs for Trusting Communities, said his group works with local organizers across the country to elect more progressive sheriffs to replace those who have fueled mass deportation, doubled down on over-policing in communities of color, and built jails that prioritize expansion rather than treatment and reentry.

Rose said the communities he works with are pretty tired of law enforcement demonizing immigrant families, and doing so at the expense of doing their job. As a result, some sheriffs with a history of cooperating with ICE paid an electoral price in 2020, particularly in progressive pockets of the South. Democratic sheriffs ran and won on promises tocut such ties, including in Georgia's populous Gwinnett and Cobb counties, where advocates claim community safety and relations have sinceimproved.

The immigrant-friendly sheriffs showed theres a winning message on immigration, Rose said. Its a line that the Democrats are trying to walk around the country. But I think theres a path that was cleared in 2020.

Some hardline sheriffs who had close relationships with the Trump administration are also expected to face challengers in elections later this year. Among them isSheriff Thomas Hodgsonin Bristol, the only county to have its ICE partnershipterminatedby the Biden administration.

Rose said that because Trump so polarized immigration enforcement and cooperation with local police, its no longer politically palatable for Biden to continue those same policies.

While some sheriffs continue demonizing and scapegoating immigrants in their community, Rose said, we know it should no longer be acceptable for any sheriff to abuse that power, and to play the role of federal immigration enforcement.

Continue reading here:
Biden Promised to Protect Sanctuary Cities. So Why is ICE Still Partnering With Local Cops? - VC Star

TOPEKA, Kan. (KSNW) The Kansas Senate passed a measure aimed at addressing immigration laws and sanctuary cities in the state.

The Senate voted 29-10 to pass House Bill 2717 on Wednesday after it recently passed the House last week.

The measure now heads to the governors desk.

The bill was firstintroduced on Feb. 22at the request of Attorney General Derek Schmidt in reaction toWyandotte County passing the Safe and Welcoming ordinanceon Feb. 10. Wyandotte Countys ordinance would make it illegal for the Unified Government to collect immigration data unless required by state or federal law and would issue municipal ID cards to those who were recently in prison, homeless or undocumented.

It was mostly Democrats who voted against the bill in the Senate. Some also spoke out against the plan when brought to the House floor.

Like other lawmakers, Rep. Pam Curtis, D-Kansas City, pointed to the federal government for lack of action on immigration reform.

That leaves municipalities, like KCK, with large immigrant communities to deal with this as best they can, Curtis said.

Curtis also expressed concerns for people with mixed status. In hearings, people testifying against the bill explained that many worry about interactions with law enforcement or going about their daily routine. Curtis said many people take the ability to have an ID for granted, arguing that its hard for people to access services without identification.

From borrowing books to enrolling their child in school to renting an apartment or a home, Curtis said.

HB 2717 would make any municipal identification card used in lieu of state ID to be invalid, including for voter ID purposes. Both the ordinance and the legislation to undo it have sparked discussion across the state regarding immigration laws and haveraised concerns for many immigrants living in Kansas. Other lawmakers argued that the government shouldnt interfere with the states long-held standard of local control.

Were here today considering a bill demanding that our cities and counties enforce the laws of the tyrannical and out-of-control federal government, said Rep. Dennis Highberger, D-Lawrence.

Attorney General Derek Schmidt spoke about the bill at theKansas GOP conventionthis month, voicing his concerns over the ordinance.

That instructs their police officers not to cooperate and communicate with federal enforcement authorities and says theyre going to start issuing local governmental IDs, Schmidt said. Thats a problem, and it ought to be unlawful.

To read HB 2717 in full, click here.

Read more here:
Kansas Sanctuary City ban passes Senate, heads to governor - KSN-TV

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Editors note:This essay by David Corn first appeared in his newsletter,Our Land.But we wanted to make sure as many readers as possible have a chance to see it.Our Landis written by David twice a week and provides behind-the-scenes stories about politics and media; his unvarnished take on the events of the day; film, book, television, podcast, and music recommendations; interactive audience features; and more. Subscribing costs just $5 a monthbut you can sign up for a free 30-day trial ofOur Landhere. Please check it out.

Imagine a Supreme Court justice influenced by QAnon. Were not there yetas far as we knowbut the recent revelations about Virginia Ginni Thomas, notable far-right agitator, tea partier, and spouse of Justice Clarence Thomas, do render that possibility not too far a stretch.

Last week, theWashington Postand CBS News publishedtext messagesexchanged between Ginni Thomas and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the wake of the November 2020 election, in which Thomas fervently urged Meadows to overturn the results to keep Donald Trump in power. The disclosure of these texts has revived a long-running debate over Justice Thomas potential conflicts of interest related to his wifes political work and his steadfast refusal to recuse himself from cases to which she might possess a connection. One recent example: in January Clarence Thomas was the only justice to dissent in a case in which the Supreme Court declined to support Donald Trumps effort to block the House committee investigating the January 6 assault from obtaining White House documents related to his attempt to undermine the election. Given his wifes role in the so-called Stop the Steal movement and her communications with the Trump White House about this matter, Justice Thomas might not have been an impartial arbiter in this dispute. Legal ethics experts haveplenty to dissect here. But as serious as that topic is, the texts raise another troubling prospect: Ginni Thomas is absolutely bonkers.

The texts show that she was a true-blue believer in Trumps Big Lie conspiracy theory about the election. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History, she texted Meadows a few days after the election, when there was no proof of any such theft (as there would never be) and when no opinion polls showed most Americans concluding the election had been rigged against Trump. In another text, she claimed the dispute over the election (which Trump and his cult had ginned up) was a a fight of good versus evil. Her texts indicated she believed the nonsense grifter-attorney Sidney Powell was peddling about foreign states (China! Venezuela!) manipulating voting machines to change the vote count.

One Thomas text to Meadows shared a video promoting a QAnonish conspiracy theory claiming watermarks on ballots would show that Biden received millions of fraudulently cast votes. This baseless assertion wasbeing pushedon InfoWars, the conspiracy theory site of blowhard nutter Alex Jones, by a fellow named Steve Pieczenik, a longtime disinformation purveyor who claimed the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, was a staged false flag operation. Related to this particular BS, Thomas texted Meadows a quote she had pulled off a right-wing website: Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition. Uh, no.

Ginni Thomas has long been one of the leaders of the right, and it turns out shes a loon. This is not entirely a newsflash. Nine years ago, Irevealed the existenceof a new and secretive conservative outfit that Thomas had helped pull together. Called Groundswell, it assembled a collection of right-wingers in Washington, DC, for weekly meetings to concoct talking points, coordinate messaging, and hatch plans for a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation, according to a trove of its documents I obtained. The group included a host of far-right extremists, including Frank Gaffney (who had claimed Barack Obama was a secret Muslim); Ken Blackwell and Jerry Boykin of the Family Research Council; Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch; tea party fanatic Allen West, a former member of Congress; Steve Bannon, then the executive chairman of Breitbart News Network; Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who would become a Fox News presence; Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the influential Federalist Society; a handful of conservative journalists; and others. A top aide to Sen. Ted Cruz was a Groundsweller.

Groundswell appeared to be set up as competition to the well-known Wednesday morning gatherings of conservative advocates hosted by Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform. That collective included a broad spectrum of Republicans, including conservatives opposed to gay rights and abortion rights and those who favor them, as well as GOPers on different sides of the immigration reform debate. Groundswell, which met at the same time as Norquists group, was a more ideologically pure and extreme version of the Norquist confab. The group devised strategies for killing immigration reform, hyping the Benghazi controversy, and countering the impression that the GOP exploits racism. On a Google group page, Groundswellers often griped that the GOPs inside-the-Beltway crowd was trying to marginalize the conservative die-hards and recruit, promote, and support political candidates deemed less strident and more electable. Their Number One enemy in this regard was Republican strategist Karl Rove, and Groundswellmounted an effortto discredit him.

The documents indicated that Ginni Thomas was a guiding force for Groundswell, setting agendas for its meetings and actively coordinating messaging among its participants, and that the group had a dark, paranoid, and Manichean view of American politics. One Groundswell memo stated that an active radical left is dedicated to destroy [sic] those who oppose them with vicious and unprecedented tactics. We are in a real war; most conservatives are not prepared to fight. At one meeting a participant claimed that many government agencies (the State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon, the EPA, and others) were conspiring with far left wing groups to undermine conservatives in the media.

In a post on a Google group page, Ginni Thomas encouraged Groundswell members to watchAgenda: Grinding America Down, a purporteddocumentarythat claims progressives (including Obama) seek a brave new world based on the failed policies and ideologies of communism and that an evil left is purposefully destroying the greatest country in all of world history.This film could have been produced by the John Birch Society. Dredging up the Alger Hiss and Rosenberg atomic spying cases, it compares liberalism to communism and Hitlers Nazism. The film alleges that the left is deliberately seeking to impose communism on the United States and to eradicate the American family. Its that old bugaboo of the subversive foe within: America has an enemy that is getting very close to accomplishing its plan of destroying the greatest country in all world history. Thewebsite for the film features a wire diagram of the leftist conspiracy to exterminate the United States that is worthy of a tinfoil hat award.

Ginni Thomas was endorsing this claptrap. To see this film as an accurate depiction of reality, one would have to be a paranoid nutcase incapable of effectively and somberly evaluating the world. And theres this: a person who believes that such a sinister plot is afoot could likely justify almost anything. As that one Groundswell memo suggests, this is a war, yet only Groundswellers are prepared for this battle.In such circumstancesif you were combatting an evil force bent on annihilating the land you lovewould you really care about such niceties as avoiding judicial conflicts of interest?

In one of her texts to Meadows, Thomas sent a dire message: the most important thing you can realize right now is that there are no rules in war. That text also said, This war is psychological. PSYOP. That means that the fight is over defining realitysomething to which Ginni Thomas is not strongly tetheredand that in this clash she feels no need to abide by rules or, perhaps, even laws.

Theres much to the Ginni Thomas story. The House 1/6 committee hasrequested she come by for a chat. And for so many years now, she and her husband have created the appearance of a serious conflict of interest. (A decade ago she was lobbying against Obamacarewhen her spouse was clearly going to have to rule on the constitutionality of the healthcare law.) But she has now certainly demonstrated shes a conspiratorial crackpot. What does it say about the tea party and the far right that they have been steered by a zealous lunatic? No doubt, many Stop-the-Stealers do not drink Trumps Kool-Aid. They use the false claims of a fraudulent election as a cudgel against Joe Biden and the libs. Or perhaps they suspect there was some chicanery, but they do not buy the full My Pillow Guy nuttiness. (The CIA used Italian military satellites to swipe votes from Tump!) Ginni Thomas, though, is all in. She is unhinged. Though it may be unfair to judge a judge by his or her spouse, it is hardly reassuring that a Supreme Court justice is literally in bed with a quasi-QAnon conspiracistand ruling on cases related to her passions.

We are living through what feels like the end of America, Thomas texted Meadows. In the Thomas household, its more like the end of rationality.

Originally posted here:
Why You Should Care That Ginni Thomas Is Bonkers Mother Jones - Mother Jones

By TCR Staff | March 14, 2022

Despite promising to overhaul the draconian immigration policies enacted by President Donald J. Trump, President Biden and his lawyers have fought to uphold a Trump-era public health rule allowing the United States to turn away migrants without providing them an opportunity to ask for asylum, sought to defend the Biden administration and former Trump administration officials against lawsuits from parents who were separated from their children at the border, and delay the processing of green cards for winners of a visa lottery, including those increasingly at risk in Ukraine, reports the New York Times.

Democrats in Congress say the administration is not only moving too slowly on promised reforms, but also is far too willing to use and defend Trump-era policies in the meantime. Senior White House officials have raised concerns that unwinding the Trump-era border restrictions would open the United States to an increase in illegal crossings and bolster attacks from Republicans accusing Biden of being too lenient. Biden has taken nearly 300 executive actions on immigration, according to the Migration Policy Institute, roughly 90 of which intended to roll back technical rules within Trump administration policies. The president has also rolled back sweeping bans on Muslim-majority countries, a rule allowing officials to deny green cards to immigrants in need of public assistance, and allowed minors to cross the border.

Original post:
Biden 'Moving Too Slowly' on Immigration Reform: Dem Critics - Crime Report