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This New Bill Could Make Trump and Cruz’s Anti-Refugee Dreams a Reality

by JeannetteHuddle Posted on March 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Following the terrorist attacks at a subway station and airport in Brussels on Tuesday morning, GOP presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz renewed their calls for Syrian refugees and other immigrants to be banned from entering the United States.

“We need to immediately halt the president’s ill-advised plan to bring in tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees,” Cruz said during a Tuesday press conference in Washington, DC. “Our vetting programs are woefully insufficient.”

“I would close up our borders,” Trump said on Fox News. “Look at Brussels, look at Paris.”

This time, they may have some backing in Congress. After the terrorist attacks in Paris last November, more than 30 states mounted efforts to ban the resettlement of Syrian refugees in their communities—issuing executive orders, proposing state-level legislation, and even filing lawsuits. These efforts failed because the Constitution mandates that immigration policy be set by the federal government. Now Congress is considering a bill that would tweak federal law to make this sort of refugee obstructionism a whole lot easier.

Last week, the House Judiciary Committee approved the Refugee Program Integrity Restoration Act, paving the way for a vote on the House floor. The bill, co-authored by Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) and Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), would give state and local governments the opportunity to reject the resettlement of refugees in their communities—as was proposed by more than half of states after Paris—and it would shift the responsibility from the president to Congress of setting an annual ceiling on the number of refugees. The ceiling is currently at 85,000 refugees, after a September 2015 order from President Barack Obama, but Congress could set it as low as 60,000 refugees and block the president from raising it without congressional approval. In September 2015, Obama pledged that the United States would take in at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in 2016.

The measure would also allow “recurrent background security checks” of US refugees, a provision that critics say amounts to “continual surveillance” of refugees. It would also delay how soon refugees can obtain their permanent green cards—changing it from one year after their arrival to three years. The bill also requires that the Department of Homeland Security prioritize claims from refugees who fear persecution based on their religion, as opposed to those who face persecution due to other circumstances, like their race, nationality, or membership in a particular social group. Religious persecution would be an unlikely claim for most Syrian refugees coming to the United States: the vast majority of them are Muslim, and Sunni Muslims are Syria’s religious majority. This is one way the bill “clearly discriminates against Muslims as the intended target,” said the Rev. John McCullough, president of the Church World Service, on a press call with reporters last week.

In advance of the House Judiciary Committee vote last week, 234 organizations—including the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants and the American Immigration Lawyers Association—sent a letter to Congress opposing the legislation. They noted “the current vetting process for refugees is incredibly rigorous and includes screening by U.S. federal law enforcement and national security agencies.” Giving state and local governments a veto on refugee resettlement, they wrote, wouldn’t enhance security and would instead “codify discrimination against refugees.” They concluded: “It is simply un-American to treat persecuted individuals, who want nothing more than to start a new life in safe and welcoming communities, as criminals.”

The bill’s chief sponsor, Rep. Labrador, a former immigration lawyer, is convinced that current vetting processes aren’t sufficient for screening refugees from Syria. “Compared to countries where US intelligence has strong footing, many current refugees are coming from failed states such as Syria, where there is very little US intelligence presence,” he said when introducing the bill before the House Judiciary Committee last week. “The simple fact is that we do not know who these people truly are.”

If the bill reaches the Senate, it will face an uphill battle. Following the Paris attacks in November 2015, the House passed another piece of legislation that would have effectively halted the admission of Syrian refugees into the United States. In January, the Senate blocked the measure.

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This New Bill Could Make Trump and Cruz’s Anti-Refugee Dreams a Reality

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President Obama Meets With Raul Castro for a Historic Meeting in Cuba

by Bryon6591cdfuls Posted on March 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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A day after making history by becoming the first sitting US president to visit Cuba in 88 years, President Barack Obama joined Cuban president Raúl Castro for a joint press conference inside the Palace of Revolution in Havana, where the two leaders candidly discussed the steps both countries would need to take to begin normalizing relations.

“This is a new day—es una nueva día—between our two countries,” Obama said.

In their addresses, both leaders acknowledged the profound differences that remained between the two countries on subjects such as human rights and democracy. Castro urged the United States to lift decades-old economic sanctions and also called for its departure from Guantanamo.

“We recognize the position President Obama is in and the position his government holds against the blockade, and that they have called on Congress to lift it,” Castro said.

Then, in the rare Q&A session that followed, Castro appeared defensive when asked about the regime’s political prisoners. “Give me a list of those political prisoners and I’ll release them,” he said. “If we have those political prisoners they will be free before nighttime.”

His frustration continued when Obama gently nudged him to answer another question, this time about human rights violations. (Castro had said he’d answer just one question.) “Human rights,” he eventually said, “should not be politicized.”

With such remarks, it’s not exactly surprising the press conference ended on this uncomfortable note:

MORE: How did the Obama administration finally break through years of deadlock on Cuba? Read our story on the crazy back-channel negotiations here.

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President Obama Meets With Raul Castro for a Historic Meeting in Cuba

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Weekly Flint Water Report: March 12-18

by DonF985465 Posted on March 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here is this week’s Flint water report. As usual, I’ve eliminated outlier readings above 2,000 parts per billion, since there are very few of them and they can affect the averages in misleading ways. The average for the past week was 10.81.

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Weekly Flint Water Report: March 12-18

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Three Cheers For a Contested Convention

by AnaBruxner Posted on March 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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I guess a contested Republican convention has now made a full circle1 from “Spare me” to “I always said that”:

In multiple television interviews Sunday, Reince Priebus, chairman of the RNC, raised the prospect of a protracted convention fight with multiple rounds of voting needed to determine the winner. “We’re preparing for that possibility,” Mr. Priebus said on ABC. That marks a shift from earlier this month, when Mr. Priebus told a gathering of conservatives that a contested convention was “highly, highly unlikely.”

Sounds like fun. Seriously. Just think of all the free publicity this gives the Republican Party.

1Half circle?

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Three Cheers For a Contested Convention

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The Head of Jeb’s Super PAC Is Tired of the Endless Conservative Con

by SherryKifarsy Posted on March 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Mike Murphy is a longtime Jeb Bush friend and loyalist, and he’s also the guy who ran Right to Rise, the Super PAC that blew through $100 million in an epically futile effort to sell Bush to the masses. So it’s understandable that he might be a little bitter about the success of Donald Trump, who almost single-handedly destroyed Bush.

Keep that in mind when you read Matt Labash’s long debriefing of Murphy as he was cleaning up the last remnants of the Right to Rise offices a month ago. At the same time, Murphy is neither a rookie nor a naif, and that gives him a deep perspective on what’s changed over the years in the conservative movement. He acknowledges that Republican voters have grown angrier over the past decade, but he blames a lot of this on Republicans themselves, aided and abetted by a press that barely understands politics anymore and is eager to jack up its ratings by scaring the hell out of people:

He says a lot of the anger is springing from people’s fears and hard realities — the middle class not getting a raise in a decade. Generally pessimistic older white voters see the demographic shifts and don’t like it. The media are incessantly “sticking red-hot thermometers in lukewarm water and saying, ‘Wow, that water’s pretty hot!’ “

….Still, Murphy adds, the problem with our current antiestablishment climate isn’t that people aren’t correctly identifying problems. It’s that the problem-solvers they’re turning to are bigger snake-oil hustlers than the ones they’re turning away from….Let’s think through Trump, Murphy says. “He doesn’t understand the presidency. You don’t call up the head of Mexico and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to build a fabulous wall with first-class gold toilets and you’re gonna pay for it.’…He has no understanding of presidential powers. He has no understanding of Congress. It’s like putting a chimp in the driver’s seat of a tractor.”

….”Then the problem becomes how are we the world’s reserve currency anymore? We get away with a lot of shit because people think we have a stable system….We borrow a lot of f — ing money. Because people think the number one safest instrument in the world is the U.S. Treasury bond. And if we start making reality-show clowns in charge? Run on the American bank. You think the pissed-off steelworker in Akron has trouble now? Wait until we have a financial collapse and they take 25 percent off the dollar. He’ll be serving hot dogs in an American restaurant in China.”

….Murphy starts waxing philosophic….Everything is so postmodern and meta that “nothing means anything, because everything is what the scam is….So many simpleton reporters — whose depth of knowledge extends to whatever they read in the Real Clear Politics polls average that morning. Fly-by-night pollsters feeding the media, which is creating news so that they can report on it.

….I suggest to Murphy that many of these things he’s decrying have been the tricks of his trade. He’s like a magician denouncing the false-bottomed top hat. “I don’t mind technique,” he says. “I can be shameless. I have a long career at this. But when everything is a short con, then there’s never another short con. Because you need trust, and you’ve destroyed it.“….

….The cable-news business establishment who are, whatever they insist, for Trump, since Trump equals ratings….But just as notable, he points out, is the antiestablishment establishment….”Like, Antiestablishment Inc.,” Murphy says. “You can find them at 123 Establishment Lane, Des Moines, Iowa. Often, they’re involved with the postage meter or credit card machine somewhere for small-dollar donations.“

….Take, for instance, he says, the Tea Party — “a racket, though it’s supposed to be a nonracket,” full of faux four-star generals who say, ” ‘You’ve got to pay me because . . . I represent the Nebraska sub-Army 14 of the Tea Party.’ “…Murphy concedes there are lots of voters who “subscribe to a loose set of principles that D.C.’s broken. They’re tired of the establishment. Tired of people in the racket.” But there’s a racket of people sending them letters asking for money. “The poor old lady sends her $25 to defeat Nancy Pelosi, and $22 of it goes to ‘fundraising costs.’ “

Rick Perlstein in particular has written a lot about how the modern conservative movement has largely turned into a machine for swindling people—especially the elderly. There’s Glenn Beck pitching gold as a hedge against nonexistent hyperinflation. Fred Thompson hawking reverse mortgages. The acolytes of direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie setting up operations that scare the bejeesus out of old people but use most of the money they raise to pay themselves and their consultants. The talk radio hosts who repeatedly insinuate that Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster—and then quickly break for a commercial. Mike Huckabee peddling diabetes cures and Ben Carson praising the glories of glyconutrients to their evangelical fans. The endless production of simpleminded right-wing books as a handy income stream, some of them with more than the usual whiff of corruption.

Even some conservatives have finally started to recognize that the short con—which is elderly enough that it’s become a long con—is hurting the conservative cause. Mike Murphy is apparently one of them, and he considers the rise of Donald Trump little more than just desserts for a party that’s either tolerated or actively encouraged this behavior for decades. In the end, Trump took a look at the conservative movement and decided that they were amateurs. The big con needs more than talk radio or direct mail or scary ads. It needs national TV provided willingly and often—and Trump knew exactly how that game worked. He’s not running his con any differently than conservatives always have. He just knows how to pull it off way better than they do.

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The Head of Jeb’s Super PAC Is Tired of the Endless Conservative Con

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Quote of the Day: Since When Is a Sex Tape Not Newsworthy?

by AudryN6748784 Posted on March 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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From Samantha Barbas, a law professor at the University at Buffalo, commenting on the $115 million verdict Hulk Hogan won against Gawker in an invasion-of-privacy case:

For a jury to say that…a celebrity sex tape is not newsworthy, represents a real shift in American free press law.

Ain’t that the truth? It’s hard to believe that a red-blooded American jury concluded that sex tapes aren’t a vital part of our media ecosystem. Maybe our nation really is going down the drain after seven years of Obummer’s leadership.

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Quote of the Day: Since When Is a Sex Tape Not Newsworthy?

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Mitt Romney Announces He’s Voting for Ted Cruz

by AnnettOlmstead Posted on March 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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After condemning Donald Trump in a speech earlier this month, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney took an all-of-the-above approach to stopping the Republican front-runner from picking up the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination. He campaigned for John Kasich in Ohio last week and offered to do the same for Sen. Marco Rubio in Florida.

But although Kasich did win his home state, Romney is now jumping ship. On Friday, ahead of the potentially winner-take-all Utah caucuses, the favorite son is going all-in for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

In a statement on his Facebook page, Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, announced he would be supporting Cruz not just in Utah, but in all future contests as well. Lest there be any confusion, Romney offered praise for Kasich but indicated the time had come to pick just one candidate to stop Trump. Here’s the statement:

This week, in the Utah nominating caucus, I will vote for Senator Ted Cruz.

Today, there is a contest between Trumpism and Republicanism. Through the calculated statements of its leader, Trumpism has become associated with racism, misogyny, bigotry, xenophobia, vulgarity and, most recently, threats and violence. I am repulsed by each and every one of these.

The only path that remains to nominate a Republican rather than Mr. Trump is to have an open convention. At this stage, the only way we can reach an open convention is for Senator Cruz to be successful in as many of the remaining nominating elections as possible.

I like Governor John Kasich. I have campaigned with him. He has a solid record as governor. I would have voted for him in Ohio. But a vote for Governor Kasich in future contests makes it extremely likely that Trumpism would prevail.

I will vote for Senator Cruz and I encourage others to do so as well, so that we can have an open convention and nominate a Republican.

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Mitt Romney Announces He’s Voting for Ted Cruz

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This Is the Real Reason the GOP Should Worry About Merrick Garland

by JoleneHogg Posted on March 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Merrick Garland has spent the last decade in the weeds of some of the most contentious clean-air cases in history—and he’s consistently come out on the side of the environment and against big polluters.

Garland, the DC Circuit Court chief judge who is President Barack Obama’s pick to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, faces a steep climb to confirmation in the face of fierce opposition from Senate Republicans.

But if Garland makes it to the Supreme Court, the battle over Obama’s flagship climate regulations will likely be one of his first big cases. That policy, known as the Clean Power Plan, aims to slash the nation’s carbon footprint by restricting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The Environmental Protection Agency built the plan on a provision of the Clean Air Act that allows it to set emissions standards for existing “stationary” sources (i.e., power plants, rather than, say, cars) and then leave it up to each state to choose how to reach that standard. The rule was immediately challenged by two dozen coal-reliant states, which have argued that it oversteps EPA’s legal authority because it applies to the whole electricity system rather than to individual power plants. Shortly before Scalia’s death, the Supreme Court voted 5-to-4 to put the plan on hold while Garland’s current colleagues in the DC Circuit Court weigh its legality.

The climate regulations will likely wind up in front of SCOTUS sometime next year. So, Garland’s record on cases involving the Clean Air Act—which many legal experts see as the world’s single most powerful piece of environmental law—is a helpful guide for how he might rule. Garland once described the Clean Air Act as “this nation’s primary means of protecting the safety of the air breathed by hundreds of millions of people.”

Garland brings a very different perspective to the bench than Scalia, says Pat Parenteau, a former director of Vermont Law School’s Environmental Law Center. Whereas Scalia was famous for his strict, literalist interpretation of the law, Parenteau says Garland tends to focus on the real-world outcome of his cases, an approach that could make him more likely to accept the administration’s Clean Power Plan arguments.

“In a close case, with Garland on the bench, the Clean Power Plan’s chances of winning go way up,” he said.

A review of two of Garland’s recent Clean Air Act rulings sheds some additional light:

White Stallion Energy Center v. EPA: In 1990, Congress amended the Clean Air Act to require that the Environmental Protection Agency research how to cut down on mercury and other toxic air pollutants spewing out of coal- and oil-fired power plants. After more than a decade of false starts, the EPA finally issued a mercury rule in 2012 and was hit with a suit from industry groups charging that the agency hadn’t considered how much mercury controls on power plants would cost. The lead plaintiff, White Stallion, was a proposed coal-fired power plant in Texas that was ultimately canceled but whose name remained on the suit.

Garland joined the majority opinion, in April 2014, upholding the mercury rule. The majority found that, for one thing, the EPA did consider the costs ($9.6 billion per year, by EPA’s estimate, in return for $37-90 billion per year in public health benefits). Regardless, the majority found that the cost to industry was never meant to be a deciding factor when EPA writes air pollution regulations:

For EPA to focus its “appropriate and necessary” determination on factors relating to public health hazards, and not industry’s objections that emissions controls are costly, properly puts the horse before the cart, and not the other way around as petitioners and our dissenting colleague urge.

As Ann Carlson, an environmental law scholar at UCLA, wrote in a recent blog post, the White Stallion case illustrates that Garland shows “significant deference to EPA both in its interpretation of ambiguous language in the Clean Air Act and in its technical determinations about how to craft regulations.” In other words, Garland is inclined to trust that the EPA’s experts know what they’re doing.

Later, Garland stood by the mercury rule a second time. Following the DC Circuit Court decision, the legal battle continued to the Supreme Court, which ultimately sent the rule back to the EPA with instructions to recalibrate the agency’s cost calculations. The rule is still stuck at that stage today, but Garland ruled that in the meantime, the rule should stand—essentially the opposite of how SCOTUS treated the Clean Power Plan.

The rule “wasn’t jettisoned during the bouncing back and forth,” said Pat Gallagher, director the environmental law program at the Sierra Club. “This is the pragmatic sensibility of Garland. He isn’t bringing ideology to the table. He’s not on the war path to show that the EPA is usurping powers.”

American Corn Growers Association v. EPA: In this case, Garland was the lone dissenter when the court threw out regulations from the EPA meant to reduce haze in national parks. This case in particular is a useful proxy for the Clean Power Plan because both regulations follow the same model (the EPA sets a standard and lets states decide how to implement it). In both cases, industry groups objected to how the EPA categorized polluters. In the haze case, Garland once again sided with the EPA.

Garland’s dissenting opinion also showed that he is more interested in helping the executive branch enforce the laws created by Congress than in searching out hair-splitting details that can be used to tie the administration’s hands, Parenteau said: “Garland is going to try to interpret a statute to be consistent with the purposes of the statue.” In other words, like in the White Stallion case, he generally trusts that EPA knows the best way to achieve the ends of the Clean Air Act. And he’s disinclined to second-guess the agency’s methods as long as they seem to accomplish what Congress intended.

“In the Clean Air Act, Congress declared a national goal of restoring natural visibility in the country’s largest national parks and wilderness areas,” Garland wrote. Overturning the haze regulation “will prevent the achievement of Congress’ goal.”

That doesn’t mean he automatically caves to the EPA; in fact, Garland has a record of ruling against the agency when he thinks it hasn’t done enough to enforce the law. In American Farm Bureau Federation v. EPA, he ruled that the agency hadn’t gone as far as the Clean Air Act requires to regulate airborne particulate matter. And in Sierra Club v. EPA, he found that the EPA had tried to let states circumvent the agency’s own regulations on ozone.

“Garland defers to the agency scientists as long as the reasoning looks sound,” Gallagher said. But, “if they are hiding the ball, he will dig in and ferret that out.”

That adds up to good news for the Clean Power Plan.

“It’s not a slam dunk, because EPA is using a provision that wasn’t designed to confront climate change,” Parenteau said. But the Clean Power Plan “is the most carefully crafted and supported plan I think EPA has ever produced. Garland might change the very dynamic of the situation.”

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This Is the Real Reason the GOP Should Worry About Merrick Garland

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The Startling Reasons Why Heart Attacks May Kill More Black People

by EstellaDavitt9 Posted on March 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Medical researchers have known for years that America’s leading cause of death, heart disease, kills people of color at a higher rate than it does white people. A new study out this week suggests that the reasons why may be much more heavily influenced by systemic issues, such as emergency room care, than previously thought.

Researchers found that California hospitals with the highest share of black patients exceeded emergency room capacity more frequently than other hospitals, which forces them to reroute ambulances carrying overflow patients to other medical facilities. The study, funded by the National Institute of Health and published in the medical journal BMJ Open, reviewed data on medical emergency services in 26 California counties serving nearly 30,000 patients between 2001 and 2011.

This rerouting process, known as ambulance diversion, can lead to life-threatening delays in treatment for time-sensitive medical emergencies like heart attacks and increases the likelihood that patients will die, the authors say.

“Cardiologists often say that time is muscle, or time is heart tissue,” says Renee Hsia, an ER doctor and professor at the University of California-San Francisco who co-wrote the study. “When you have a clot, every minute matters. Even if you don’t die right away, you have a poorer heart over the long term.”

The study found that both black and white patients whose nearest hospitals were affected by ambulance diversion were less likely to receive standard treatments and less likely to live beyond a year after their heart attack, compared with patients at hospitals that don’t divert ambulances.

While the study focuses on California counties, the issue likely affects other states as well, Hsia said.

This new research may help illuminate why the rate of deaths related to heart disease is 33 percent higher for black Americans than it is for the overall US population, according to American Heart Association figures. Other experts have documented a variety of reasons for this disparity, ranging from less access among people of color to insurance and consistent medical care, longer waits for emergency medical help from first responders, less knowledge about symptoms, and implicit bias among physicians.

Emergency room overcrowding is caused by a long list of issues, Hsia said, and gravely ill patients are a special challenge at busy hospitals because they require more care.

Each new patient—especially one with a critical condition like a heart attack—requires extensive staff attention and technological resources before and after a physician sees him or her. When a person with a heart attack arrives in a hospital’s ambulance bay, for example, they must be unloaded by paramedics, directed to a bed by a triage nurse, undressed by a technician or medical assistant, and taken to have blood drawn by a nurse, Hsia said. Then a radiology technician must take a chest X-ray and process and print it, while another nurse or technician needs to take an EKG.

“All of these things take time,” she said, adding that such patients have more specialized needs after they are diagnosed. “If the physician decides the patient needs treatment for a heart attack, they have to activate cath lab, and a clerk has to page all the staff that needs to come in. Then you need all those people to come in, and you need a transport team to take the patient to the lab.”

“Those are all the steps where you could see bottlenecks happen,” Hsia said.

The authors found that hospitals with the 10th-highest share of black patients experienced overcapacity more frequently relative to other hospitals, forcing them to reroute ambulances to the next closest facilities. The same trend held for emergency rooms serving at least twice as many black patients as other hospitals within a 15-mile radius.

Previous studies have found that hospitals serving areas with a relatively high share of black residents have other problems that may affect the care they provide. Such hospitals are more likely to experience money shortages, in part because they are more likely to rely on public funding. Also, their patients are more often uninsured or covered by Medicare or Medicaid—which typically reimburse bills at a lower rate than private insurers. The shortage in funding can in turn make it tough to compete with privately funded hospitals when hiring specialized medical talent, such as cardiologists.

“These are structural disparities that people can’t see but are very real,” Hsia said.

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The Startling Reasons Why Heart Attacks May Kill More Black People

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Hillary Clinton Really Regrets Saying She’d Put Coal Miners Out of Work

by KimberlCaperton Posted on March 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last weekend, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton made an unexpectedly strong statement about her intentions for coal country. As I reported:

Speaking in Ohio about her plans to revitalize coal country, Clinton said, “We’re going to put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business.” That comment was immediately preceded by a promise to invest in the clean-energy economy in those places, and immediately followed by a pledge to “make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people.” But it’s not hard to guess which comment will end up as a sound bite in attack ads in coal states during the general election.

Unsurprisingly, the comment was quickly condemned by lawmakers from coal country. In response, Clinton sent a letter to West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin (D), to “clarify” what she meant. In the letter, she says that her comment about lost coal jobs was intended to describe an existing downward spiral in the coal industry, rather than a promise to intentionally put coal miners out of work through her policy decisions. You can read the letter below. It’s a helpful bit of context, but I doubt it will be enough to keep Donald Trump, or whoever her general election opponent turns out to be, from using the soundbite against her.

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Letter-to-Senator-Manchin (PDF)

Letter-to-Senator-Manchin (Text)

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Hillary Clinton Really Regrets Saying She’d Put Coal Miners Out of Work

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