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Can the Democrats find a sane stance on immigration? Im not so sure. In an article at The Atlantic, Peter Beinart eloquently shows how Democrats have drifted farther from a mainstream point of view on this issue. In the middle of the last decade, left-wing pundits could talk about the unfairness to natives and legal immigrants alike of Americas lax enforcement regime; they could speak about the deleterious effect of low-skilled immigration on the wages of Americans, and so on.

Beinart considers only two factors in the Democratic drift. First, that Democrats came to believe that there was much more political upside in being pro-immigration as Latino voters went more and more for their party. And second, that they decided to buy into the unproven argument that the supply of immigrant labor has no effect or even a positive effect on native wages.

The victory of Donald Trump is enough to make Beinart urge Democrats to reconsider. He argues that Democrats need to show some respect toward the law, and toward the desire of many Americans (including Democrats) for some sense of social cohesion in America. He recommends that Democrats put an emphasis on assimilation, both to make Americans more comfortable with a high level of immigration and to make them comfortable with redistributing the gains that mass immigration brings to the wealthy back to the natives who lose out.

Its an interesting but incomplete argument. Ive argued that the way for conservatives and Republicans to reach out to Hispanic communities is to become the party of assimilation and integration. Assimilation and integration arent just a matter of giving Americans a sense of cohesion, theyreabout improving the prospects of recent immigrants themselves, and giving them a greater stake in our society.

But ultimately, I dont think Beinart is truly reckoning with the ideological shift that is taking place on the left. Giving America a normal immigration policy, and getting buy-in from Democrats for a consistent pattern of enforcement for immigration laws will require overcoming more than a mere distaste for assimilation. Enforcement of immigration laws not to mention the laws themselves, which define who can come in and for what purpose is bound to be problematic for the left in one way or another.

In Newsweek, Matthew Feeney looked at recent data showing that Latinos have become less likely to report crimes since Trump became president. He cites a 2012 poll finding that 28 percent of U.S.-born Latinos agree with the statement, I am less likely to contact police officers if I have been a victim of a crime for fear they will ask me or other people I know about our immigration status.

Feeneys heavy implication is that enforcing immigration laws isnt worth it if makes people more vulnerable to crime. In fact, the argument amounts to saying that all internal enforcement of immigration law should be held hostage by existing circumstances, in particular a large population of illegal immigrants.

One could as easily look at it the other way. What the data actually show is that negligent enforcement patterns in the past open up new fields for criminality in the future. The problem isnt immigration-law enforcement in itself, its that a lack of enforcement has created a situation where many Latinos in America are socially embedded with and dependent on people with no legal right to be in America. For some reason, however, the way to be a good ally on the left is to advocate more immigration, not to support making a more lawful and just society for legal immigrants.

Beinart also leaves untouched some of the exotic arguments that have gained currency on the left when debating immigration. Beinart says Democrats should be pro-immigration because it is such a boon to the immigrants. He picks up an argument Ezra Klein posed to Bernie Sanders last year: that to fight global poverty, policymakers should consider sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.

There are so many odd assumptions in this argument. First, if immigration is about fighting global poverty, then weve been aiming this relief at people who do not need it.If the humanitarian benefit to the immigrant is the overriding concern, then having immigration from India, other parts of Southeast Asia, and Mexico amounts to aiming your poverty-relief program at the upper-middle class or the wealthy. The vast majority of people on earth, some 5.5 billion, live in countries with lower living standards than Mexico.

In fact, just considering this should warn people away from thinking about immigration policy in terms of global poverty reduction. America cannot make a statistically meaningful reduction in global poverty through this policy mechanism. Trying to do so is much more likely to make America more like Qatar, a place of startling inequality with a rigid, racialized economic caste system.

More fundamentally, many liberal and leftist opinion leaders have adopted an expansive definition of white supremacy from academia, one that is novel and confusing to people that associate the term with Ku Klux Klanners and neo-Nazis, people who think that whites are innately superior or ought to be. California state senate leader Kevin de Leon invoked this language while criticizing Trumps immigration policies: It has become abundantly clear that AttorneyGeneral [Jeff] Sessions and the Trump administration are basing their law enforcement policies on principles of white supremacy not American values, he said.

This more expansive idea of white supremacy obliges its opponents to decry what would be normal policies of enforcement or immigration selection anywhere else. In this ideological framework, discriminating based on job skills, on fluency in English, or on compatibility with American society amounts to a concession to or a defense of white supremacy in America. At the extreme end, it could be held that stopping any non-white immigrant from entering America delays the moment at which the power of white supremacy is finally ended. And so it is morally impermissible to do so.

And that is why I think it is, for now, impossible for Democrats to come to a normal, even if still liberal, position on immigration. Over time the Left has backed itself into a position where nearly all immigration laws are impossible to endorse. Enforcement has a disparate impact, by its very nature. And because any immigration policy necessarily must discriminate when it comes to choosing who comes in and who doesnt, the Left now feels obliged to object to any standards that promote cohesion, such as requiring language and work skills. These constitute an illegitimate defense of white supremacy or expression of racial animus.

Ultimately, the Lefts commitments to such an exacting form of egalitarianism oblige them to oppose concessions to reality, to a world that is contingent, conditioned by history. To admit a legitimate need for cohesion is to concede to a flaw of human nature that should be eliminated.

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer for National Review Online.

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Finding the Way Back on Immigration Isn't Going to Be Easy for Democrats - National Review

Another gut-punch loss for Democrats, another soul-searching moment.

Really, Democrats are having the same internal arguments about why they lost Georgia's special election on Tuesday as why they lost the presidency in November. For one side of that argument, The Fix spoke to Alejandro Chavez, Democracy for America's campaign manager, who was on the ground in Georgia. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

THE FIX: What's your takeaway from why Democrats lost a special election you thought you could win?

We cannot continue with business as usual. We cannot continue the same vote-targeting models, we cannot continue the same stream of centralized candidates who don't run on a populist message. We can't continue down these ways that we've seen haven't work for us. We need to change things. And a lot of that has to come from the party's leadership specifically. Meaning spend less on ads and huge TV programs and more on field operations.And we gotta be strong on the message.

Republican Karen Handel won the seat of former congressman Tom Price in Georgia's 6th Congressional District on June 20, defeating Democrat Jon Ossoff. (Amber Ferguson/The Washington Post)

Let's break that last part down. What do you mean, Democrats have to get stronger on message?

If you look at Rob Quist in Montana and James Thompson in Kansas, they ran on a very populist message in their races, like on single-payer health care. And they closed the gap on Trump in those races.

Then Look at Ossoff, who ran in the middle of that. Trump won by 1.5 points against Hillary Clinton, and then Ossoff lost by four.

Everyone else picked up 14, 15 points on a 20-point lead. And one of the biggest things was they ran on a populist message that was clear.

So you're saying, let's engage the party's most liberal voters?

It's not necessarily about just resonating with them. There are a lot of people who are not registered that, if they were, under these messages, they would be Democrats.

Here's an example: More than 50 percent of millennial Latinos don't believe their vote impacts their day-to-day life. We need to make an impact with them on the message of not just 'Trump is bad.' But the things that are most important: affordable education, a living wage, comprehensive immigration reform; some of that will get these people to start being active.

We're just not getting that message out in every race.

I hear you say millennial and Latino voters Democrats' sleeping giants are the key to victories that have eluded the party recently?

Yes. And it has to be a clear message. And it has to be in districts like this. It's not enough to just get independents and Republican moderates. We have to get this other chunk that's not participating active. But it also has to be a clear message. It can't be: 'Well, if Trump is bad, then X, Y Z.' It has to be: 'I stand for this.' That's what moves people.

So, basically, run mini versions of Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign?

I don't think it's just what Bernie Sanders says. It's a question of strategy. No one likes somebody who moves back and forth with what consultants are telling you. Nobody like that. There's something about sticking by your convictions and saying what you stand for and running on that that I do actually think move people.

Implicit in what you're saying is that a Democratic candidate who moderates positions, like Ossoff, doesn't have conviction?

Yes.

Moderate Democrats would fire back that the way to win over the working class, white, rural Trump supporter isn't by getting more liberal.

I think they also some of the people who are disenfranchised. When you go into these communities there are a lot of these values that are shared. Everybody wants to have access to education. Everybody wants a livable wage. Those are the things that go across country, across gender, across racial lines. These are important to everybody and if we're running on those convictions and those values, we're not alienating.

Do Democratic candidates need to get more in-your-face about Trump?

I don't know if Trump is the conversation to be even having. While he may be toxic, solely that has not translated into victories for us.

Republicans think that tying Democrats to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is working for them.

Nancy Pelosi is not where we need to go. She's failed leadership. While she might be doing some great things in her district, the truth is she's the person who's been leading this front that we've been running on for years, so she has to go as leadership.

What she's doing isn't working. She's the leadership, it's failed and, ultimately, it's her responsibility.

Do you feel like Democrats are under pressure to solve this disputes or miss their chance to cut into Republicans' House majority in 2018?

This conversation should have happened Jan. 1. Hell, this should have happened back in 2016. So, hopefully this was a wake up call that we need.

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'Nancy Pelosi is not where we need to go.' Why Democrats lost Georgia, a progressive story. - Washington Post

ATLANTA As Democrats point fingers in the wake of Jon Ossoff's loss in a Georgia special election on Tuesday, some of them are aimed at Nancy Pelosi, the partys longtime House leader, who appeared in almost every GOP attack ad broadcast in the most expensive House race in history.

A number of Democrats are renewing their calls for Pelosi to step aside, demanding a change to the trio of septuagenarians that have been leading the House Democratic caucus for years.

Picking up on the chatter against Pelosi, President Donald Trump piled on, tweeting on Thursday that he hoped Pelosi wasn't dethroned (and that Sen. Charles Schumer would remain Senate Democratic leader) because that would be bad for the GOP.

As one of his first moves after declaring his candidacy against Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC), Democrat Joe Cunningham tweeted, "If elected, I will not vote for Nancy Pelosi for speaker. Time to move forward and win again.

A handful of House Democrats made similar calls on Wednesday, with Rep. Kathleen Rice of Long Island, New York, appearing on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" to say: "Her time has come and gone."

"The rationale for getting new leadership is we are losing and we have been losing since 2010 thats it," Rice said.

Rice, like others who spoke out, backed a failed challenge to Pelosi earlier this year from Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH).

Ryan himself told MSNBC that it will be "very hard" for Democrats to win back the House with Pelosi at the helm, since candidates have to "carry this very toxic Democratic brand."

"You see these commercials that tie these candidates to leader Pelosi week in and week out in the last several months. That still moves the needle," he said.

Last year, Ryan, a gum-chewing former football player from blue-collar Youngstown, gave the San Francisco-based Pelosi the most serious threat yet to her leadership post, but two-thirds of the caucus ended up rallying around Pelosi.

She is a prodigious Democratic fundraiser and consummate legislative tactician with loyal allies across the ideological spectrum of the party, and is in no real danger of loosing her leadership post, at least at the moment.

Pelosi has raised a massive $568 million for Democrats since she joined leadership in 2002, according to her office, and $142 million in the past election cycle alone.

At a closed-door meeting with colleagues, there were no challenges to the Democratic leadership or any obvious signs of dissent, according to a source in the room.

Republicans will continue to run ads trying to demonize whoever is the Democratic Leader," said Drew Hamill, Pelosis spokesman. "Republicans ran national ads against Tip ONeill in the 1980s. This isnt new."

He added: Republicans blew through millions to keep a ruby-red seat and in their desperate rush to stop the hemorrhaging, they've returned to demonizing the party's strongest fundraiser and consensus builder. They don't have Clinton or Obama so this is what they do."

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi speak following a meeting with then-President Barack Obama on congressional Republicans' effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act on Capitol Hill in January. Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

And other Democrats are urging colleagues to focus on fighting Republicans, not each other.

"I hate losing, and losing earlier this week didnt feel too good. However, there's a fight to be waged in Washington right now and it's not with ourselves," California Rep. Eric Swalwell said on MSNBC.

But for every Democratic official or operative publicly calling for new leadership, there are others who privately express the same sentiment.

"We're always reviewing that, believe me, Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) said when asked if the caucus needed a change at the top.

We need to have that discussion, added Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), a rising star in the party.

While opponents can turn the leader of any party into a boogeyman, Pelosi and her San Francisco hometown have proven to be a uniquely potent GOP weapon in the purple-to-red battlegrounds Democrats need to win.

Republican Karen Handel, who defeated Ossoff, even ran an ad in Spanish attacking Pelosi, while an outside group aired another featuring San Franciscans thanking Ossoff for his campaign.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, for instance, doesnt inspire nearly the same hostility, and he publicly campaigned for Handel before Tuesdays election. Its almost impossible to imagine Pelosi doing the same for Ossoff or any other Democrat in a similar Republican-dominated district.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, a Ryan-aligned GOP super PAC that spent heavily in Georgia, said its polling showed Pelosi to be one of the most effective attack messages in the race as they tried to undercut Ossoff's portrayal of himself as a noncontroversial moderate.

And former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who represented Georiga's 6th district, said Republicans "know exactly how to run against a Nancy Pelosi led party."

"I want her there for at least another decade," he said on Fox News.

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Nancy Pelosi Faces Heat From Democrats After Georgia Loss - NBCNews.com

House Oversight and Government Reform ranking member Elijah Cummings speaks with other Democrats at a Jan. 9 news conference to call for an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption

House Oversight and Government Reform ranking member Elijah Cummings speaks with other Democrats at a Jan. 9 news conference to call for an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Updated at 5:52 p.m. ET

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee want to see White House records on the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, his security clearance and his access to classified information.

In a letter to White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, the oversight panel's 18 Democrats question why Kushner's security clearance hasn't been revoked.

The Democrats say Kushner, one of President Trump's closest advisers, had meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and the CEO of a Russian state-owned bank. They say he failed to disclose the meetings as he applied for security clearance and allowed administration officials to say he'd had no such meetings.

"It is unclear why Mr. Kushner continues to have access to classified information while these allegations are being investigated," says the letter, which seeks similar records on former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Flynn was asked to resign in February after misleading Vice President Pence about his contacts and conversations with Kislyak during the transition period.

This and other investigative efforts put the Oversight Committee Democrats, led by ranking member Elijah Cummings, D-Md., at the center of a brewing battle over congressional oversight.

The Trump administration has ignored hundreds of congressional letters of inquiry.

It is also brandishing a legal opinion, crafted by the Justice Department, holding that most of Congress lacks the constitutional power to conduct oversight of the executive branch.

It isn't just an attack on Democrats, currently the minority party in both chambers on Capitol Hill.

"This is nonsense," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote to Trump earlier this month. Grassley is a champion of strong oversight and has been known to do investigations of executive branch agencies using just his personal staff.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., this week dispatched a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House counsel Don McGahn, accusing the administration of waging "a campaign of increasing secrecy if not dishonesty." The letter was also signed by 25 other House Democrats.

The Justice Department's legal opinion takes a dismissive view toward individual members of Congress. It says the Constitution limits oversight powers the authority to ask executive branch agencies for information on what they're doing to committee chairs. That freezes out even most Republicans, the overwhelming majority of whom don't chair committees and every Democrat on Capitol Hill.

Under this policy, when your local representative writes a letter asking questions about some problem, the agency most likely blows it off.

House Democrats now keep lists of their letters ignored by the administration. The total so far: 260, on issues ranging from infrastructure priorities to possible records of Russian financial ties to President Trump and his family.

In an interview with NPR, Grassley said the administration policy runs counter to "everything that every eighth-grade student has studied about checks and balances of government." Citing language from the presidential oath of office, he said the policy "eliminates the check of most members of Congress to see that the laws are faithfully executed by a president."

An administration spokesman told NPR the White House is reviewing Grassley's letter and looks forward to "a mutual understanding." The statement concluded, however, that the Justice Department document "accurately states the law and the legal obligations" for dealing with congressional requests.

Grassley told NPR that if the Trump White House doesn't act to roll back the policy, Congress can kill it through legislation.

The policy can sound innocuous. "The Justice Department said they should treat individual members of Congress' requests for information as Freedom of Information Act requests like anyone in the public can send in," said Nick Schwellenbach, director of investigations for the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. "So this is a bit of a subtle change, but it's important."

Not all agency heads are taking as hard a line as the Justice Department. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly told a Senate hearing this month that his department would respond to all congressional inquiries, "regardless of who the letter comes from, and it doesn't have to just come from a ranking member or chairman."

Then there's the "seven-member rule," which requires executive branch agencies to deliver any information requested by at least seven members of the House Oversight Committee. The rule dates from 1928 and isn't well-known, but it was most recently invoked just five months ago.

Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., contrasts the administration's position with Trump's "drain the swamp" rhetoric last fall. He told NPR, "They certainly put an emphasis, with this idea of draining the swamp, on accountability and transparency. But so far, they seem to have moved in the complete opposite direction."

The Trump administration may also stumble over the bipartisan institutional loyalties that run deep on Capitol Hill, especially in the Senate.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said in an interview, "The idea that the legislative branch would willingly go along with this kind of an assault on its powers by the executive branch runs contrary to the interests of every senator."

Original post:
Democrats Seek Records On Jared Kushner As Administration Tries To Stifle Oversight - NPR

For a few hours yesterday, climate science was not the target of attacks in Congress.

Researchers, diplomats and policy experts warned about the dangers of ignoring clear research showing that humans are warming the planet at an alarming rate in an unofficial hearing hosted by Democratic lawmakers.

The discussion was an alternative to the recent hearings in the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, run by Chairman Lamar Smith, the conservative Texas Republican who has accused federal climate scientists of engaging in a global conspiracy. He has subpoenaed researchers whose work negates the idea that climbing temperatures have paused, a key talking point for climate skeptics.

Whereas the Republican-led hearings emphasize, and sometimes exaggerate, uncertainties in climate science, the roundtable yesterday hosted by committee Democrats focused on its alarming findings.

The discussion was meant to show that lawmakers are not yielding the climate discussion to those who reject mainstream science, said Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), the committee's ranking member.

We feel very strongly that the persons who believe in the scientific research should have an opportunity to be heard, and not to just sit by and let the skeptics do all the talking just because they're in charge right now, she said.

That such a hearing would be held is a picture of America at this political moment, where scientific research that captures the attention of leaders elsewhere in the world is often viewed with suspicion.

Conservative lawmakers in other countries often recognize the overwhelming science that shows humanity's role in climate change and have signed on to address the challenge of scaling back carbon emissions.

And while climate policy will long be debated by conservatives and liberals, the rejection of its scientific underpinnings seems like a phenomenon that's unique to America, said David O'Sullivan, ambassador of the E.U. delegation to the United States.

Conservatives in other countries have accepted that the science is real and are looking for solutions because in Europe, the debate is over, he said.

There is a much, much greater consensus in Europe about the fact that climate change is a problem, that human intervention is heavily responsible for it and that we need to act to intervene in it to slow that down or correct it, O'Sullivan said. I am sometimes surprised by the liveliness of the debate about whether or not climate change is real or whether human intervention is responsible here in the United States.

Republicans have moved quickly to scale back federal funding for science in recent weeks. The Trump administration proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts, and the House Science Committee has advanced legislation that critics say would weaken science used to craft regulations.

Yesterday, U.S. EPA revealed that it was not renewing the terms of dozens of members of its board of scientific advisers, who review legislation. Trump did not cite scientific research when he withdrew the United States from the international Paris climate agreement a few weeks ago, though the agreement was based on science.

Researchers at the hearing said that Trump's past description on global warming as a hoax has damaging consequences. Scientists are now duty-bound to speak out in public to defend their work, said Ben Santer, an atmospheric scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

I don't believe in trickle-down ignorance, that when ignorance is manifest at the highest levels, when words like 'hoax' [and] 'conspiracy' are used right at the top. Those words matter, others hear them. Cutting the funding for science is concerning, but cutting the legitimacy for science, undercutting basic scientific understanding, is just as concerning, he said.

This week, two of Trump's Cabinet secretaries questioned basic climate science. In an interview on CNBC on Monday, Energy Secretary Rick Perry claimed that carbon dioxide emissions are not the primary driver of climate change. Scientists say they are.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt made a similar claim earlier this year, even though it's an established basis of climate science that humans are warming the Earth through activity like driving cars.

As the roundtable discussion was being held in the Rayburn House Office Building yesterday, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke was in a budget hearing across the street, questioning the accuracy of climate models widely relied upon by researchers.

Democrats acknowledged that there will always be political differences on climate policy, but they said climate science should not be a victim of that fight.

Of all the tragedies of the Trump administration, potentially the greatest is the destruction of our climate science, the withdrawal from Paris, the gutting of the EPA, the appointment of Pruitt and, absent Trump putting us in danger of a nuclear war, the thing that could affect the lives of billions of people on this planet is climate change, and the U.S. has given up its leadership, said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.).

Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at http://www.eenews.net.

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Democrats Hold Alternative Hearing on Climate Change - Scientific ... - Scientific American