Scoop: GOP fight coming over labor unions

“GOP leaders see an opportunity for a new, working-class coalition, which includes more union outreach. It’s a major shift, and fault lines are already forming over President Trump’s pro-labor Cabinet nominee, former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer.”

“Hawley has been quietly circulating draft legislation that would prevent employers from stalling union contract negotiations — keeping the process to months, not years, according to a copy obtained by Axios.”

https://www.axios.com/2025/01/30/senate-republican-josh-hawley-pro-labor-bill-chavez-deremer

Trump, the government funding chaos agent, is back

“Trump’s 11th-hour decision to get involved in negotiations, weighing in via social media (and seemingly without coordinating with congressional allies), is reminiscent of his first-term approach to Capitol Hill, when he regularly blew up funding talks and directly caused the longest government shutdown in US history.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/392197/trump-government-shutdown-musk

States Keep Passing Unconstitutional Age-Verification Laws for Porn Sites

“”There will always be websites willing to provide porn without carding viewers. These platforms are also less likely to take other steps to stay within regulatory or creator-protective limits,” Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote in March. “By driving viewers away from platforms like Pornhub—sites that engage in at least some content moderation, are relatively receptive and responsive to authorities, and are willing to forge mutually beneficial partnerships with porn creators—age verification laws could actually increase viewership of exploitative or otherwise undesirable content.””

https://reason.com/2024/04/11/states-keep-passing-unconstitutional-age-verification-laws-for-porn-sites/

New American Military Aid for Ukraine – What’s in the package and what impact will it have?

New American Military Aid for Ukraine – What’s in the package and what impact will it have?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc436PwqeqM

Mitch McConnell says Tucker Carlson and Trump’s waffling delayed crucial Ukraine aid

“At a press conference, the Kentucky Republican pinpointed two men responsible for that delay: former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and former President Donald Trump.
“The demonization of Ukraine began by Tucker Carlson, who in my opinion ended up where he should have been all along, which is interviewing Vladimir Putin,” McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters. “And so he had an enormous audience, which convinced a lot of rank and file Republicans that maybe this was a mistake.”

“I think the former president had sort of mixed views on” Ukraine aid, he added, before alluding to the failed attempt to add border security provisions to the bill, “which requires you to deal with Democrats, and then a number of our members thought it wasn’t good enough.”

“And then our nominee for president didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all,” McConnell said. “That took months to work our way through it.”

The top Senate Republican has been an ardent supporter of Ukraine aid and battled a slew of conservative voices who have sought to block it. He called the expected passage of the bill “an important day for America, and a very important day of freedom-loving countries around the world.””

https://www.yahoo.com/news/mcconnell-says-tucker-carlson-trumps-223340768.html

How McConnell and Schumer beat hardline conservatives on Ukraine

How McConnell and Schumer beat hardline conservatives on Ukraine

https://www.yahoo.com/news/mcconnell-schumer-beat-hardline-conservatives-090000343.html

‘Zero Illegal Crossings’ Is an Unattainable Goal for the Border

“The U.S. government, for all the money and agents it’s thrown at the border over the past several decades, has never been able to practically “shut down the border” or achieve zero illegal crossings (all the legal issues with those proposals aside).
Between the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 and January 2021, the U.S. has spent $333 billion to fund the agencies tasked with immigration enforcement, according to the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration nonprofit. The budgets for those agencies have been rising for years.

But more enforcement money hasn’t necessarily led to lower illegal crossings. As budgets have gone up, apprehensions of people who crossed the border between authorized ports of entry have gone up, down, and remained static. In other words, they don’t cleanly align: Though Customs and Border Protection reported 2.05 million apprehensions in FY 2023, it reported somewhat close to that number—over 1.5 million—in FY 2000. Annual apprehensions hovered below 500,000 from FY 2010 through FY 2018.”

“The U.S.-Mexico border stretches nearly 2,000 miles, much of it treacherous. No matter the funding and no matter the enforcement mandate, there’s no way that agents could stop every illegal crosser traversing the deserts, mountains, and waters that make up the border region. That’s proven impossible along much smaller and more surveilled borders, such as the boundaries of East Germany and North Korea.”

https://reason.com/2024/02/02/zero-illegal-crossings-is-an-unattainable-goal-for-the-border/