“The constitutional law here appears straightforward: Congress can’t outright ban TikTok or any social media platform unless it can prove that it poses legitimate and serious privacy and national security concerns that can’t be addressed by any other means. The bar for such a justification is necessarily very high in order to protect Americans’ First Amendment rights, Krishnan said.”
…
“members of Congress have not provided concrete proof for their claims about Chinese digital espionage and seem to have little interest in offering any transparency: Before the committee voted to advance the bill Thursday, lawmakers had a closed-door classified briefing on national security concerns associated with TikTok.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/24094839/tiktok-ban-bill-congress-pass-biden
“For well more than a century, the federal government has enjoyed near exclusive authority over immigration policy, while states have largely been restricted to assisting in carrying out federal policies. The Supreme Court has reinforced this rule many times over many decisions, such as Truax v. Raich (1915), which said that “the authority to control immigration — to admit or exclude aliens — is vested solely in the Federal Government.”
Texas, however, now wants the Supreme Court to abandon this longstanding constitutional rule, and it thinks that the political tumblers have finally aligned in a way that would lead the Court to do just that.
Texas seeks to upend the longstanding balance of power between the federal government and the states through a law, known as SB 4, which allows Texas state courts to issue deportation orders that will be carried out by Texas state officials. The law is now before the Supreme Court in two “shadow docket” cases, known as United States v. Texas and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy v. McCraw.”
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“The reason why the federal government has historically had exclusive authority over nearly all questions of immigration policy is to prevent a single state’s mistreatment of a foreign national from damaging US relations with another nation. Indeed, Hines v. Davidowitz (1941) warned that “international controversies of the gravest moment, sometimes even leading to war, may arise from real or imagined wrongs” committed against foreign nationals.
Which isn’t to say that the United States must always treat foreign citizens with caution or deference — just that a decision that could endanger the entire nation’s relationship with a foreign state should be made by a government that represents the entire nation.”
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“the current Supreme Court has only a weak attachment to following precedent, especially when a precedent is widely disliked by modern-day Republicans. So there is at least some risk that the Court’s GOP-appointed majority will allow SB 4 to go into effect.”
https://www.vox.com/scotus/2024/3/12/24097438/supreme-court-texas-deportation-sb4-unconstitutional-border-migrants
“it’s important to understand that when we talk about “gangs,” we’re not talking about the exclusively criminal business enterprises seen, for example, in Mexico’s drug cartels. Since at least the 1990s, various leaders in Haiti have relied upon gangs to assert their political will; Chérizier, for example, was allegedly affiliated with Moïse prior to his assassination. As the AP reported, “the state has grown fatally weak and gangs are stepping in to take its place.
In other words, Haitian gangs are best understood as armed political actors. The current crisis is not just a security one but a political one as well.”’
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“Armed groups have been intimately connected with Haitian politics since the mid-20th century, when François “Papa Doc” Duvalier established the Tontons Macoutes to terrorize perceived enemies of his regime. Such groups have been “deeply involved with political actors as well, in terms of control for elections, protecting businesses, going after rival businesses,” Jake Johnston, senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told Vox.”
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2024/3/12/24098422/haiti-prime-minister-ariel-henry-resigns-gang-violence-g9
“During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump called for a ban on all Muslim immigration to the United States, the targeted assassination of terrorists’ family members, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and enormous corporate tax cuts.
And voters considered him the most “moderate” Republican candidate in more than four decades.
To the extent this perception had any basis in reality, it reflected Trump’s genuine moderation on one highly salient issue: Unlike many of his GOP predecessors, the mogul emphatically opposed any cuts to Medicare and Social Security. This likely made it a bit easier for ideologically conflicted older Rust Belt voters to pull the lever for a Republican.
As president, Trump never pursued large cuts to Medicare or Social Security benefits and implored his party to avoid them during the debt ceiling fight last year.
Since the days of FDR, Democrats have profited from their reputation as the more stalwart guardians of entitlement benefits. Trump’s triangulation threatens to nullify that critical source of partisan advantage. President Joe Biden has therefore sought to portray Trump’s avowed support for Social Security and Medicare as fraudulent. And on Monday, the presumptive GOP nominee bolstered the president’s case.
In an interview with CNBC, Trump said that he was open to cutting entitlement spending. Then, his campaign said that he wasn’t.
Trump’s reflections on public policy tend to bear only a loose resemblance to coherent thoughts. And his remarks about entitlements on CNBC Monday were no exception. In that exchange, anchor Joe Kernen told Trump that “something has to be done” about entitlement costs, then asked if the former president had changed his mind about cutting “Social Security, Medicare, [and] Medicaid” in light of the rising national debt.
Trump replied:
So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting, and in terms of, also, the theft and the bad management of entitlements — tremendous bad management of entitlements. There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do. So I don’t necessarily agree with the statement.
Biden pounced on Trump’s words, posting a clip of the Republican’s answer and vowing that no cuts to entitlements would be allowed “on my watch.” The Trump campaign replied, “If you losers didn’t cut his answer short, you would know President Trump was talking about cutting waste.”
This rebuttal is disingenuous. Trump plainly stated that there was a lot that the government could do “in terms of cutting” entitlements and “also” in terms of combating “theft and bad management of entitlements.” What precisely the former president is referring to when he alleges that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are rife with theft, bad management, and waste is unclear. And neither he nor his campaign has produced any actual evidence of such improprieties.
This said, it’s also true that, by the end of his answer, Trump was evincing disagreement with Kernen’s statement that entitlements needed to be cut. So, one could reasonably argue that, as with so many of Trump’s statements, his musings on entitlement reform were too suffused with internal contradictions and baseless demagogy to have any concrete meaning.
Yet Trump’s gaffe is not the only reason for voters to fear that a Republican victory in November could lead to leaner Social Security benefits.
For one thing, Trump spent his entire presidency trying to cut Medicaid, an entitlement program that provides not only health insurance for low-income Americans, but also long-term care for older voters. And he has tried to cut Social Security benefits for disabled and low-income people.
For another, the GOP’s avowed fiscal commitments cannot be reconciled with preserving Medicare and Social Security in their present forms. Congressional Republicans are committed to enacting trillions of dollars worth of new tax cuts, perennially increasing defense spending, and balancing the federal budget. There is no politically tenable way to do this without cutting Social Security or Medicare.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/3/12/24098773/trump-social-security-medicare-cuts-entitlements-position-2024
“Higher levels of immigration are boosting America’s economy and will reduce the deficit by about $1 trillion over the next decade.
In its semi-annual forecast of the country’s fiscal and economic conditions, released this week, the Congressional Budget Office slightly lowered its expectations for this year’s federal budget deficit. The CBO now expects the federal government to run a $1.5 trillion deficit, down from the $1.6 trillion deficit previously forecast.
That reduction is due in part to higher-than-expected economic growth, which the CBO attributes to “more people working.” The labor force has grown by 5.2 million people in the past year, “mostly because of higher net immigration.””
…
“It also tracks with what other studies have repeatedly shown: More legal immigration grows the economy, helps fund government programs, and doesn’t strain entitlement or welfare programs.
Unfortunately, the very same Congress that bears most of the responsibility for the federal government’s poor fiscal state is also a major hurdle to increasing legal immigration that could help solve some of that fiscal mess.”
https://reason.com/2024/02/08/surging-immigration-will-reduce-deficits-by-1-trillion/
“Though the majority of general-election presidential polls at this stage of campaign 2024 feature only President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, a growing number are beginning to reflect what most voters’ ballots are going to actually look like: pretty crowded.
So what happens when other names are added to the two least popular presidents in the modern polling era? Led by former Democrat and current independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., they combine to attract support in the low double digits, usually. But what really has Democratic operatives in a funk is how the introduction of competition affects the spread between the Big Two. Long story short, it widens Trump’s lead. At least as of now.”
https://reason.com/2024/02/08/third-party-candidates-widening-trumps-lead-over-biden/
“The migrants say they are leaving due to a slump in China’s economy as it struggles to rebound from the COVID pandemic, as well as to escape strict lockdowns and restrictions.
“The unemployment rate is very high. People cannot find work,” Xi Yan, a Chinese writer who crossed the border in April, told the Associated Press. “For small business owners, they cannot sustain their businesses.”
In June, China’s unemployment rate for 16-to-24-year-olds reached 21.3%, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Sin Yen Ling, a spokesperson for the Asian American civil rights group Chinese for Affirmative Action, told the Austin American-Statesman that Beijing’s “recent crackdown on industries such as tech, real estate and education where young people have traditionally sought jobs have contributed to the high unemployment rate.”
Visas granted to Chinese nationals to work, visit or study in the U.S. have also become increasingly hard to come by, leading to the spike in finding alternate ways into the country due to recent tensions between China and the U.S.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-are-so-many-chinese-crossing-the-southern-border-172637085.html
How Ukraine War Is Reshaping US Military
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBdOkoc82JE
“Charges against a man initially arrested as a suspect for attacking police officers in New York City were dropped, according to the Manhattan District Attorney, because he had been misidentified as a participant in the January 2024 brawl, not because crime by a “migrant” has “no consequences,” as suggested in social media posts.
Posts on social media, opens new tab shared a photograph showing a 22-year-old Venezuelan man, Jhoan Boada, with captions such as: “The Manhattan DA just dropped all charges against Jhoan Boada, 22, migrant who flipped the bird at photographers following his involvement in a gang attack on the NYPD. No consequences.”
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“The Manhattan DA’s office said in an email, citing court documents, that, “After a thorough and diligent investigation, Jhoan Boada has been exonerated as a participant in this assault” and that the complaint against Boada was dismissed.
The DA’s office told the court that another man, Marcelino Estee, had been identified as the person described in the complaint as “wearing the black & white jacket with pink shoes, committing this assault” and that Estee had been charged for his participation.”
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/charges-dropped-after-suspect-misidentified-attack-nypd-officers-2024-03-13/
“If Joe Biden will not be prosecuted for mishandling classified material, why does Donald Trump face 40 felony charges based on conduct that looks broadly similar? It is a question that Trump’s supporters were bound to ask after Special Counsel Robert Hur, formerly a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, released his findings about Biden last Thursday. But Hur’s report includes important details that plausibly explain the contrasting outcomes in these two cases. Although Biden’s embarrassingly hypocritical lapses belie his avowed concern about safeguarding material that could compromise national security, the evidence of criminal intent is much stronger in Trump’s case.”
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“That provision applies to someone who “willfully retains” national defense information when he “has reason to believe” it “could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.””
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“”Contemporaneous evidence suggests that when Mr. Biden left office in 2017, he believed he was allowed to keep the notebooks in his home,” Hur writes. Biden took the same position in an interview with Hur’s office, saying “his notebooks are ‘my property’ and that ‘every president before me has done the exact same thing,’ that is, kept handwritten classified materials after leaving office.” In particular, he cited “the diaries that President Reagan kept in his private home after leaving office, noting that they included classified information.”
Hur does not agree with Biden’s understanding of the law. “If this is what Mr. Biden thought, we believe he was mistaken about what the law permits,” he says. But he adds that Biden’s position “finds some support in historical practice.” The “clearest example,” he says, is “President Reagan, who left the White House in 1989 with eight years’ worth of handwritten diaries, which he appears to have kept at his California home even though they contained Top Secret information.”
Yet as far as Hur could tell, neither the Justice Department nor any other federal agency took steps to “investigate Mr. Reagan for mishandling classified information or to retrieve or secure his diaries.” Hur concludes that “most jurors would likely find evidence of this precedent and Mr. Biden’s claimed reliance on it, which we expect would be admitted at trial, to be compelling evidence that Mr. Biden did not act willfully.””
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“the classified Afghanistan documents did not come up again in Mr. Biden’s dozens of hours of recorded conversations with the ghostwriter, or in his book. And the place where the Afghanistan documents were eventually found in Mr. Biden’s Delaware garage—in a badly damaged box surrounded by household detritus—suggests the documents might have been forgotten.”
That explanation, Hur says, is reinforced by the fact that Biden’s memory “was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017” and “in his interview with our office in 2023.””
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“Hur notes that Biden’s “cooperation with our investigation, including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage, will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully”
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“Unlike “the evidence involving Mr. Biden,” Hur writes, “the allegations set forth in the indictment of Mr. Trump, if proven, would present serious aggravating facts. Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it.”
That alleged conduct underlies eight additional felony charges against Trump. “In contrast,” Hur writes, “Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview, and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.” Trump’s alleged defiance and deceit, in short, distinguish his conduct from Biden’s: They suggest that Trump retained national defense information “willfully,” as required for a conviction under 18 USC 793(e), and that he committed additional crimes to cover up the underlying offense.”
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“Hur plausibly concluded that criminal charges against Biden were not appropriate because there was insufficient evidence that he “willfully” retained documents he was not supposed to have. But that does not let Biden off the hook for repeatedly violating the standard of care that he himself insists is essential to protecting national security.”
https://reason.com/2024/02/11/trumps-alleged-defiance-and-deceit-distinguish-his-handling-of-secrets-from-bidens/