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Gonzales says he wants to make sure border communities, immigration agencies have resources to deal with increased unauthorized migration

by: Julian Resendiz

US Border Patrol vehicles are pictured near the Paso Del Norte International Bridge at the US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, on September 12, 2019. The US Supreme Court on September 11, 2019, allowed asylum restrictions by President Donald Trumps administration to take effect, preventing most Central American migrants from applying at the US border. (Photo by Paul Ratje / AFP) (Photo credit should read PAUL RATJE/AFP via Getty Images)

EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) The 26 Republicans in the House Appropriations Committee are asking their Democratic chair to hold hearings on an immigration problem they say is reaching crisis proportions at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Illegal border crossings have skyrocketed this past month and are set to exceed the record-breaking numbers we saw in 2019, the Republicans said in a letter sent Wednesday to U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Connecticut. In light of these alarming figures we respectfully request the (committee) hold hearings on the ongoing security and humanitarian crisis at our southern border.

The acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection earlier Wednesday released enforcement data showing more undocumented migrants were stopped at the border in February than in any month going back to June 2019.

The Republicans say that on Tuesday alone the Border Patrol and Army National Guard members run into 5,204 migrants, bringing the total for this fiscal year to more than 200,000.

Over the last two years, Congress and the previous administration passed legislation to strengthen our border and provide the resources needed to assist agencies with the surge of migrants. We are eager to continue working together to gather the facts about the current situation on the border and develop solutions to address this crisis, the Republicans said.

U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, who represents a large West Texas district that includes Culberson, Hudspeth and East El Paso County, said he recently visited a shelter for unaccompanied minors in Carrizo Springs and inspected a stretch of border near Eagle Pass.

Every week I see firsthand the problems caused by the lack of resources at the border. Our communities are hurting, and I plan to use my position on the Appropriations Committee to ensure we are utilizing all of our resources to combat the ongoing crisis at our southern border, Gonzales said.

Gonzales, New Mexico Republican Yvette Herrell and Arlingtons U.S. Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, were scheduled to give more details on the proposed hearings during a live teleconference from Washington, D.C.

To watch the 9:30 a.m. (Eastern Time) event, follow this link:https://www.republicanleader.gov/live/

Visit theBorderReport.com homepagefor the latest exclusive stories and breaking news about issues along the United States-Mexico border.

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Republicans want to hold hearings on immigration crisis on the border - KTSM 9 News

And so it begins. A dozen Republican attorneys general have filed a legal challenge apparently the first of many expected group efforts over President Joe Biden's executive order restoring an Obama administration directive that federal agencies estimate the social costs of carbon emissions when devising policies.

Taking such costs into account is just common sense when trying to understand the connections between federal actions and climate change, so of course President Donald Trump ended it. Biden brought it back, and now Republican attorneys general want the courts to rule that doing so somehow violates the separation of powers between Congress and the executive branch.

Maybe if they didn't have their heads so deeply buried in the tar sands they'd recognize that pursuing policies that fail to reduce carbon emissions imperils people in red states just as much as anywhere else.

"Setting the 'social cost' of greenhouse gases is an inherently speculative, policy-laden, and indeterminate task, which involves attempting to predict such unknowable contingencies as future human migrations, international conflicts, and global catastrophes for hundreds of years into the future," the lawsuit argues.

Whether their legal argument has any legs is doubtful.

"My immediate reaction is that these states should have a very hard time convincing a judge that a President asking his agencies to work together, to engage with the public and stakeholders, and then to follow the best available science and economics to evaluate the consequences of their decisions, is somehow illegal," Jason A. Schwartz, legal director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, told Bloomberg Law.

The reality is that global warming is happening, and human activity is driving it. We will spend "hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars" whether we abandon fossil fuels and convert the vast majority of the world's energy production to renewable sources, or if we just shrug our shoulders and forge ahead with emissions that are raising sea levels (which will drown billions of dollars worth of coastal development), increasing both floods and droughts, and feeding bigger, stronger hurricanes and other major storm systems.

Yes, the transition to renewable energy will cost jobs in the oil-and-gas sector but it will also create new ones in the renewable energy sector, something some industry leaders recognize as they try (sometimes under government pressure) to position themselves less as oil-and-gas companies than as energy companies.

Also, China already is casting a clearer eye on the future than the U.S., despite Republicans' oft-expressed concerns about maintaining the vitality of American industry and leading the global transition. If the U.S. doesn't get its act together, it will cede the turf to a major economic rival, forgoing the chance to forge a stronger and sustainable energy sector, and economy, while clinging Trumpishly to the energy policies that got us into such straits in the first place.

Of course the Republican attorneys general have every right to turn to the courts to challenge policies they believe violate laws and damage their states and constituencies. Blue states did that very thing, with California Attorney General Xavier Becerra involved in 110 such challenges himself.

But constituents of those Republican attorneys general would be wise to look closely at the risks they are taking, and remember that voters were the ones who elected these would-be saviors in the first place.

The Los Angeles Times

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Martelle: Republicans are still sticking their heads in the tar sands on climate change - Chattanooga Times Free Press

Not a single Republican lawmaker in either chamber voted in favor of President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion economic aid package over the past few weeks, reflecting their fierce opposition to an early Democratic legislative priority.

The House voted 220-211 to approve the relief legislation in mostly party-line vote on Wedensday. The legislation encountered a brick wall of GOP opposition as every House Republican voted against it. Only one Democrat defected Rep. Jared Golden of Maine.

Republicans blasted the plan as a partisan wishlist replete with untargeted spending. "This isn't a rescue bill; it isn't a relief bill; it is a laundry list of left-wing priorities that predate the pandemic and do not meet the needs of American families," House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said during a floor speech Wednesday.

The bill's path through the House and Senate illustrates the widening gulf between Republicans and Democrats in Congress a year into the pandemic. After six emergency spending bills totaling $5 trillion, the economy's trajectory is starting to trend upward, though there are 10 million fewer jobs compared to the onset of the crisis.

But Republicans are pushing to slam the brakes on any further government spending in an echo of recent years. Nearly a decade ago, President Barack Obama pushed through an $800 billion stimulus package aimed at stemming the freefall of the American economy after the financial crisis.

That measure drew some GOP support. Every House Republican voted against the bill in February 2009. However, it eventually garnered the support of three Republican senators in the upper chamber as Democrats at the time pressed to keep the bill's price tag in check over deficit concerns.

Many economists say that step stymied the economic recovery for several years, an experience that Democrats are determined to avoid now. Democrats pushed through the legislation using a maneuver known as budget reconciliation. That allows bills to be approved in the Senate with a simple majority of 51 votes instead of 60.

Right-leaning experts argue Democrats cut out Republicans from the drafting process. Biden rejected a $618 billion stimulus counteroffer put forward by a group of 10 Senate Republicans in February. That drastically smaller aid plan ultimately went nowhere.

"They were completely ignored," Brian Riedl, a budget expert at the libertarian-leaning Manhattan Institute, said in an interview. "Democrats put out a $1.9 trillion bill, barely moved an inch and there was no attempt at compromise."

He added: "Republicans are more concerned about drawing a line in the sand, and spending money more smartly in a recession ."

Others on the left, however, say that Republicans are less willing to negotiate a middle ground with Democrats.

"It's the latest indication of how polarized the Republican Party has become, despite the fact it's overwhelmingly popular with the American people," Jim Manley, a former senior Democratic aide, told Insider. "They were prepared to vote no."

That hasn't prevented some Republicans from attempting to take credit of components of the massive rescue legislation. Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississsippi tweeted in support of a provision that would provide $28.6 billion in "targeted relief" to restaurants. It triggered criticism from Democrats who pointed out he rejected the stimulus bill.

"I'm not going to vote for $1.9 trillion just because it has a couple of good provisions," Wicker told reporters afterwards.

Read more here:
Not a single Republican in either chamber of Congress voted for Biden's $1.9 trillion stimulus package - Business Insider

Donald Trump had a weird habit of bragging about having eliminated the estate tax, to the point that he actually seemed to believe it. That was unfortunate: the Republicans' regressive tax plan in 2017 narrowed the eligibility of who would be affected by the estate tax, but the GOP did not scrap it altogether.

That said, the party still wants to. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) issued this press release yesterday about a re-introduced Republican bill.

Sens. John Kennedy (R-La.) and John Thune (R-S.D.) and fellow lawmakers today reintroduced the Death Tax Repeal Act of 2021 to permanently repeal the federal estate tax, commonly known as the "death tax." The Death Tax Repeal Act would finally end a punitive tax that has the potential to hit family-run farms, ranches and businesses upon the owner's death.

According to the press statement, the new legislation is co-sponsored by half of the Senate Republican conference. It also includes the support of the entirety of the Senate GOP leadership: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is on board, as is Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.C.), who tweeted about the bill late yesteday.

The good news is, Senate Republicans have finally found a policy idea they're eager to work on. The bad news, their policy idea is to give more tax breaks to the wealthiest of the wealthy.

Obviously, given the political circumstances -- Democrats control both the White House and Congress -- this legislation will not succeed. In fact, it won't get a hearing or a vote, either. Republicans know this, but they're eager to champion the proposal anyway.

And that, in and of itself, is extraordinary. As regular readers may recall, the estate tax currently only applies to estates worth more than $22 million. By most estimates, we're talking about a few thousand Americans -- each of whom is among the wealthiest of the wealthy -- who might actually be affected by the tax.

But Senate Republicans are eager to champion the cause of these millionaires and billionaires, even if the bill won't pass.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) declared a couple of weeks ago, "The Republican Party is not just the party of country clubs. The Republican Party is the party of steel workers, construction workers, pipeline workers, police officers, firefighters, waiters, and waitresses."

That's nice rhetoric, I suppose, but while Republican senators oppose minimum-wage increases for those waiters and waitresses, they also have no qualms about giving yet another tax break to the country-club crowd.

Complicating matters further is the context: literally today, congressional Democrats are going to pass an ambitious COVID relief package that focuses most of its benefits on low-income and working-class Americans. The New York Times explained over the weekend that the Democrats' American Rescue Plan "would overwhelmingly help low earners and the middle class, with little direct aid for the high earners who have largely kept their jobs and padded their savings over the past year."

A Washington Post report added that the American Rescue Plan "represents one of the most generous expansions of aid to the poor in recent history."

It's against this backdrop that 25 Republican senators decided the time to introduce a bill to give a tax cut to millionaires and billionaires is ... right now? If the GOP is lucky, voters won't notice.

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Even now, Senate Republicans seek another tax break for the wealthy - MSNBC

As the election returns rolled in showing President Donald J. Trump winning strong support from blue-collar voters in November while suffering historic losses in suburbs across the country, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Republican, declared on Twitter: We are a working class party now. Thats the future.

And with further results revealing that Mr. Trump had carried 40 percent of union households and made unexpected inroads with Latinos, other Republican leaders, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, trumpeted a political realignment. Republicans, they said, were accelerating their transformation into the party of Sams Club rather than the country club.

But since then, Republicans have offered very little to advance the economic interests of blue-collar workers. Two major opportunities for party leaders to showcase their priorities have unfolded recently without a nod to working Americans.

In Washington, where Democrats won a vote on Thursday to advance a nearly $2 trillion economic stimulus bill to the Senate floor, they were facing universal opposition from congressional Republicans to the package, which is chock-full of measures to benefit struggling workers a full year into the coronavirus pandemic. The bill includes $1,400 checks to middle-income Americans and extended unemployment benefits, which are set to lapse on March 14.

And at a high-profile, high-decibel gathering of conservatives in Florida last weekend, potential 2024 presidential candidates, including Mr. Hawley and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, scarcely mentioned a blue-collar agenda. They used their turns in the national spotlight to fan grievances about cancel culture, to bash the tech industry and to reinforce Mr. Trumps false claims of a stolen election.

Inside and outside the party, critics see a familiar pattern: Republican officials, following Mr. Trumps own example, are exploiting the cultural anger and racial resentment of a sizable segment of the white working class, but have not made a concerted effort to help these Americans economically.

This is the identity conundrum that Republicans have, said Carlos Curbelo, a Republican former congressman from Florida, pointing to the universal opposition by House Republicans to the stimulus drawn up by President Biden and congressional Democrats. This is a package that Donald Trump would have very likely supported as president.

Here is the question for the Rubios and the Hawleys and the Cruzes and anyone else who wants to capitalize on this potential new Republican coalition, Mr. Curbelo added. Eventually, if you dont take action to improve peoples quality of life, they will abandon you.

Some Republicans have sought to address the strategic problem. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah put forward one of the most ambitious G.O.P. initiatives aimed at struggling Americans, a measure to fight child poverty by sending parents up to $350 a month per child. But fellow Republicans rebuffed the plan as welfare. Mr. Hawley has matched a Democratic proposal for a $15 minimum wage, but with the caveat that it applies only to businesses with annual revenues above $1 billion.

Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster whose clients have included Mr. Rubio, was critical of Democrats for not seeking a compromise on the stimulus after a group of G.O.P. senators offered a smaller package. Seven Republican senators voted to convict a president of their own party, he said, referring to Mr. Trumps impeachment. If you cant get any of them on a Covid program, youre not trying real hard.

As the Covid-19 relief package, which every House Republican voted down, makes its way through the Senate this week, Republicans are expected to offer further proposals aimed at struggling Americans.

Mr. Ayres said that the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla., last weekend, the first major party gathering since Mr. Trump left office, had been a spectacularly missed opportunity in its failure to include meaningful discussion of policies for blue-collar voters. Instead, the former president advanced an intraparty civil war by naming in his speech on Sunday a hit list of every Republican who voted to impeach him.

Youd better be spending a lot more time developing an economic agenda that benefits working people than re-litigating a lost presidential election, Mr. Ayres said. The question is, how long will it take the Republicans to figure out that driving out heretics rather than winning new converts is a losing strategy right now?

Separately, one of the highest-profile efforts to lift blue-collar workers in the country was underway this week in Alabama, where nearly 6,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse are voting on whether to unionize. On Sunday, the pro-union workers got a boost in a video from Mr. Biden. Representatives for Mr. Hawley who has been one of the leading Republican champions of a working-class realignment did not respond to a request for comment about where he stands on the issue.

Its possible that Republicans who are not prioritizing economic issues are accurately reading their base. A survey last month by the G.O.P. pollster Echelon Insights found that the top concerns of Republican voters were mainly cultural ones: illegal immigration, lack of support for the police, high taxes and liberal bias in mainstream media.

The 2020 election continued a long-term trend in which the parties have essentially swapped voters, with Republicans gaining with white blue-collar workers, while white suburbanites with college degrees moved toward the Democrats. The idea of Sams Club conservatives, which was floated about 15 years ago by former Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, recognized a constituency of populist Republicans who favored a higher minimum wage and government help for struggling families.

Mr. Trump turned out historic levels of support for a Republican among white working-class voters. But once in office, his biggest legislative achievement was a tax cut in which most benefits went to corporations and the wealthy.

Oceans of ink have been spilled over whether the white working classs devotion to Mr. Trump had more to do with economic anxiety or with anger toward elites and racial minorities, especially immigrants. For many analysts, the answer is that it had to do with both.

His advancement of policies to benefit working-class Americans was frequently chaotic and left unresolved. Manufacturing jobs, which had continued their slow recovery since the 2009 financial crisis, flatlined under Mr. Trump in the year before the pandemic hit. The former presidents bellicose trade war with China hit American farmers so hard economically that they received large bailouts from taxpayers.

Thestimuluspayments would be $1,400 for most recipients. Those who are eligible would also receive an identical payment for each of their children. To qualify for the full $1,400, a single person would need an adjusted gross income of $75,000 or below. For heads of household, adjusted gross income would need to be $112,500 or below, and for married couples filing jointly that number would need to be $150,000 or below. To be eligible for a payment, a person must have a Social Security number. Read more.

Buying insurance through the government program known as COBRA would temporarily become a lot cheaper. COBRA, for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, generally lets someone who loses a job buy coverage via the former employer. But its expensive: Under normal circumstances, a person may have to pay at least 102 percent of the cost of the premium. Under the relief bill, the government would pay the entire COBRA premium from April 1 through Sept. 30. A person who qualified for new, employer-based health insurance someplace else before Sept. 30 would lose eligibility for the no-cost coverage. And someone who left a job voluntarily would not be eligible, either. Read more

This credit, which helps working families offset the cost of care for children under 13 and other dependents, would be significantly expanded for a single year. More people would be eligible, and many recipients would get a bigger break. The bill would also make the credit fully refundable, which means you could collect the money as a refund even if your tax bill was zero. That will be helpful to people at the lower end of the income scale, said Mark Luscombe, principal federal tax analyst at Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting. Read more.

There would be a big one for people who already have debt. You wouldnt have to pay income taxes on forgiven debt if you qualify for loan forgiveness or cancellation for example, if youve been in an income-driven repayment plan for the requisite number of years, if your school defrauded you or if Congress or the president wipes away $10,000 of debt for large numbers of people. This would be the case for debt forgiven between Jan. 1, 2021, and the end of 2025. Read more.

The bill would provide billions of dollars in rental and utility assistance to people who are struggling and in danger of being evicted from their homes. About $27 billion would go toward emergency rental assistance. The vast majority of it would replenish the so-called Coronavirus Relief Fund, created by the CARES Act and distributed through state, local and tribal governments,accordingto the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Thats on top of the $25 billion in assistance provided by the relief package passed in December. To receive financial assistance which could be used for rent, utilities and other housing expenses households would have to meet severalconditions. Household income could not exceed 80 percent of the area median income, at least one household member must be at risk of homelessness or housing instability, and individuals would have to qualify for unemployment benefits or have experienced financial hardship (directly or indirectly) because of the pandemic. Assistance could be provided for up to 18 months,accordingto the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Lower-income families that have been unemployed for three months or more would be given priority for assistance. Read more.

There was never a program to deal with the types of displacements going on, said John Russo, a former co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio.

He projects that once the economy snaps back to pre-pandemic levels, blue-collar Americans will be worse off, because employers will have accelerated automation and will continue work-force reductions adopted during the pandemic. Neither party is talking about that, Mr. Russo said. I think that by 2024, thats going to be a key issue.

Despite Mr. Bidens campaign framing him as middle-class Joe from Scranton, Pa., as a candidate he made only slight inroads into Mr. Trumps support with white voters without college degrees, which disappointed Democratic strategists and party activists. In exit polls, these voters preferred Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden by 35 percentage points.

Among voters of color without a college degree, Mr. Trump won one out of four votes, an improvement from 2016, when he won one in five of their votes.

His inroads with Latinos in South Florida and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas especially shocked many Democrats, and it spurred Mr. Rubio to tweet that the future of the G.O.P. was a party built on a multi-ethnic multi-racial coalition of working AMERICANS.

After the Trump presidency, it is an open question whether any other Republican candidates can win the same intensity of blue-collar support. Whatever your criticisms are of Trump and I have a lot clearly he was able to connect to those people and they voted for him, said Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, a Democrat from the Youngstown area.

Mr. Ryan is gearing up to run in 2022 for an open Senate seat in Ohio. He agrees with Mr. Trump about taking on China, but faults him for not following up his tough language with sustained policies. I think theres an opportunity to have a similar message but a real agenda, he said.

As for Republican presidential candidates aspiring to inherit Mr. Trumps working-class followers, Mr. Ryan saw only dim prospects for them, especially if they continued to reject the Biden stimulus package, which passed the House and is now before the Senate.

The Covid-19 relief bill was directly aimed at the struggles of working-class people, Mr. Ryan said, adding that Republicans voting against the package were in for a rude awakening.

Perhaps. A Monmouth University poll on Wednesday found that six in 10 Americans supported the $1.9 trillion package in its current form, especially the $1,400 checks to people at certain income levels.

But Republicans who vote it down may not pay a political price, said Patrick Murray, the polls director. They know that the checks will reach their base regardless, and they can continue to rail against Democratic excesses, he said.

There would only be a problem if they somehow managed to sink the bill, he added.

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Republicans Won Blue-Collar Votes. Theyre Not Offering Much in Return. - The New York Times