“GTFO”: Congress To Refugees; You Don’t Have To Go Home, But You Can’t Stay Here
“Can you name for me – or identify for me – a suicidal terrorist who hasn’t been Muslim?” Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) asked U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Leon Rodriguez at a hearing on Thursday.
“I’m not even going to answer that question, congressman,” a stunned Rodriguez replied just hours before the House overwhelmingly passed a bill to keep Syrians out of the U.S.
“Why can’t you answer that question?” King goaded.
“What I can say is that we do our job,” Rodriguez said. “If terrorists are attempting to gain admission to the United States then we do our job to prevent them from doing so.”
“You’re telling me that you’re doing a thorough vetting process, but you aren’t able to tell me that you specifically ask them what their religion is?” King said as Democrats shuddered. “And if you don’t specifically ask them than neither are you able to quantify the risk to the American society?”
So began the day that the U.S. House may have handed ISIS a huge gift when it voted to erect new hurdles to keep Syrian refugees out of the country.
Newly-minted Speaker Paul Ryan tried to assure reporters early in the week that the bill – hastily assembled in the wake of the attacks in Paris – wasn’t about keeping Muslims out of the country, but other Republicans didn’t listen to their party’s standard-bearer. Instead, they unleashed borderline (and beyond) Islamophobic rhetoric to all who would listen.
It’s not just Steve King. Throughout the week 30 Republican governors (and one Democrat) went further than the House as they rushed to close their borders to all Syrians (even though they can’t legally do it), including GOP presidential candidates Chris Christie (NJ) and John Kasich (Ohio). Donald Trump called for closing mosques. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) readied legislation to ban Muslim Syrians from entering the U.S.
And local Republican leaders garnered national headlines for arguing everything from interning Syrian refugees to activating the National Guard to keep Syrians from crossing state lines.
The debate about Syrian refugees came less than a week after terrorist attacks rocked Paris, and it was centered more on unknowns and potentialities than on any tangible threats to the homeland from ISIS, also known as Daesh in the Arab world.
Democrats were appalled, but none more than the only two Muslims in Congress (the first and the second ever elected): Democratic Reps. Keith Ellison and Andre Carson.
“The language we use reinforces them. Daesh is trying to make a case that the West is at war with Islam,” Ellison (D-Minn.) told The Daily Beast. “They’re trying to say they’re the ones defending themselves. The truth is, that’s a lie; that’s completely untrue. But when we say ‘we’re only going to take in Christian refugees, Daesh gets up and says, ‘Told ya. The Crusaders are looking out for the Crusaders.”
Carson said the language was hurtful.
“It’s sad. It’s unacceptable,” Carson told The Daily Beast as he grimaced. “We have to be careful that we’re not making statements for what we perceive to be political gain that at the same time undermines our values.”
Carson said his fear is the heated charges against Muslims play into the strategy of Daesh.
“Young people are very vulnerable. [Daesh] is operating the way, a lot of sociologists have noted, that cults behaved in the 70s, 80s and even 90s. They are capitalizing off of disillusionment,” he said, adding that Congress ought to be engaging people from other countries; not alienating them.
“There is a tendency, or a human impulse, in the midst of these kinds of incidents for elected officials to live in absolutes,” Carson said. “To live in an absolute without noting the nuance that is there, that you have good Muslims who are working in their intelligence agencies and law enforcement communities to keep their countries safe, really does a disservice to all the contributions that Muslims are making.”
The legislation the House passed requires the heads of some of the nation’s top security agencies to personally certify that anyone from Syria or Iraq seeking refuge in the U.S. is “not a threat to the security of the United States.”
Experts argued about worst case scenarios but, on Thursday, their objections seemed to fall on deaf ears.
“No terrorist in his right mind would use the refuge program as a way to enter the United States,” Immigration Services Director Rodriguez said. “They may find other channels; it’s not going to be through the refuge program. It’s too intrusive. It’s too invasive. It’s too thorough in the security checks that it does.”
The government estimates there are more than 19 million refugees displaced across the globe – the most in history – and roughly a quarter of them are from Syria. The Obama administration maintains they’re trying to attract the most vulnerable to the United States.
“We are looking at people who have been tortured,” testified Anne C. Richard, the Assistant Secretary of Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration at the State Department.
She then continued the gruesome list of asylum seekers. “Burn victims from barrel bombs, people who are widows and children, but also the elderly, families that have been ripped apart as members have been murdered in front of their eyes.”
King was unmoved.
“We’re talking about a huge haystack of humanity,” King chided the witnesses. “And that hay is benign, relatively speaking, but in that haystack are the needles called terrorists.”
By: Matt Laslo, The Daily Beast, November 19, 2015
“The Reality Of Refugee Admissions”: Yes, The Government Vets Them
The political panic over the admission of Syrian refugees into the United States, following the terrorist attacks in Paris, has unleashed a wave of fear-mongering, bolstered by a notion being propagated by the right wing, that Americans couldn’t possibly know who is being let into our country. Thirty-one U.S. governors have said they won’t accept any Syrian refugees into their state, many of them claiming there’s a large inherent risk in doing so.
Of course, there’s a serious fallacy at work here: By the time any Syrian refugee actually arrives in the United States, we do know who that person is. Very well.
There is a clear difference between refugees in the United States and refugees in Europe, namely that refugees can’t simply walk or use small boats in order to get to the U.S. By contrast, Europe has a flood of humanity getting displaced into their borders, who may enter one of the countries without getting screened — thus creating the danger that even one ISIS terrorist can disguise himself among the people fleeing his cohorts, as French officials believe did occur with at least one attacker.
But the U.S. actually has the advantages of distance and time to pick and choose before anyone from such a faraway land can set foot over here.
That process involves a multitude of complex steps, starting with an initial screening by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which possibly leads to a referral to the United States and a gauntlet of security checks, personal interviews, medical screening, and matching with a sponsor agency in the U.S. itself. It is far from the mysterious influx of unknown people that the many governors and Republican presidential candidates are making it sound like.
As noted by defense policy researcher Josh Hampson in The Hill: “In fact, there have been no recorded terrorist attacks committed by refugees. The U.S. has admitted 1.5 million refugees from the Middle East since September 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks that have occurred since 9/11 have been committed either by American natives or non-refugee immigrants.”
A State Department spokesperson told The National Memo in an emailed statement:
The United States remains deeply committed to safeguarding the American public from terrorists, just as we are committed to providing refuge to some of the world’s most vulnerable people. We do not believe these goals are mutually exclusive, or that either has to be pursued at the expense of the other. To that end the refugee security screening and vetting process has been significantly enhanced over the past few years. Today, all refugees are subject to the highest level of security checks of any category of traveler to the United States, including the involvement of the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. All refugees, including Syrians, are admitted only after successful completion of this stringent security screening regime.
On a conference call Tuesday, an unnamed senior administration official confirmed to the press that the average time for processing a person through that entire gamut of interviews and background checks takes an average of 18 to 24 months. “As you know, we are trying to look at the process and see if we can make it more efficient without cutting corners on security.”
And yet at a congressional hearing Tuesday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch still had to explain to House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) — who had seized upon recent comments by FBI Director James Comey about the difficulties of the vetting process — that the Justice Department and others in the government do have a “significant and robust screening process in place,” which Europe has not been able to set up.
On Tuesday, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump posted a message to Instagram, with The Donald shouting to the camera with his typical bombast: “Refugees are pouring into our great country from Syria! We don’t even know who they are! They could be ISIS, they could be anybody! What’s our president doing — is he insane?”
And in the Louisiana gubernatorial race, Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter is running this ad — complete with clips of panic in the streets of Paris — ahead of the election this weekend: “One of the Paris ISIS terrorists entered France posing as a Syrian refugee. Now, Obama’s sending Syrian refugees to Louisiana.”
Newly-crowned House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) is trying to be a bit more low-key, although catering to the same doubts, as he told reporters Tuesday: “This is a moment where it is better to be safe than sorry. So we think the prudent, the responsible thing is to take a pause in this particular aspect of this refugee program in order to verify that terrorists are not trying to infiltrate the refugee population.”
One can perhaps “forgive” Trump for being utterly clueless, and simply expect that Vitter, in the homestretch phase of his campaign, would act like a demagogue. But shouldn’t the Speaker of the House act like he already knows the government has vigorous vetting procedures in place? And for that matter, what does a “pause” even mean when it comes to admitting in refugees who have taken up to two years to be screened?
By: Eric Kleefeld, The National Memo, November 17, 2015
“The Poor Are Bad And Irresponsible People”: The Grotesque Moral Atrocity Of Blaming The Poor For Being Poor
The Republican Party has long struggled with how to package its blatantly pro-rich policy portfolio of top-heavy tax cuts and deregulation. Such things are deeply unpopular — even self-identified Republicans are divided on whether the rich pay their fair share of taxes — but the GOP’s wealthy donor class demands them.
Thus far in the 2016 presidential race, candidates have basically landed on the George W. Bush formula: Sweeten your handouts to the wealthy with far smaller ones for the rest of Americans, and sell it with utterly preposterous promises of 50 zillion percent growth. Jeb Bush promises a growth rate not achieved since FDR started his term at the very bottom of the Great Depression and ended it at the peak of World War II mega-spending. Donald Trump promises half again as much as that.
Marco Rubio has one small change from the usual formula. Sure, he’s got the typical titanic handouts for the rich — incredibly, including the total abolishment of the capital gains tax. But he’s also got new welfare spending for middle-class families. However, in a sad demonstration of the conservative mindset, the poor are deliberately excluded from Rubio’s plan.
Here’s how Rubio’s new welfare benefit works: It’s a non-refundable tax credit of up to $2,500 for people with children — meaning unlike the Earned Income Tax Credit, it gives nothing to people who already have no federal tax liability. This means that the average lower-middle-class family — as Matt Bruenig calculates, ironically including households like the one Rubio grew up in — would receive nothing whatsoever from the credit.
Cutting out the poor is surely intentional, and the reason is obvious: Many conservatives basically think the poor are bad and irresponsible people who have made stupid, disgusting choices — particularly having kids outside of marriage — that put them in the place they are today. Hence, giving the poor welfare will merely short-circuit the process of bourgeois norm-formation at the root of their actual problems. Government handouts will just turn the poor into shiftless parasites.
If you spend much time in conservative comment sections, or among the #tcot crowd, then this idea will be extremely familiar. But even high-minded policy elites will own up to it on occasion. Robert Stein, the original creator of Rubio’s tax credit, told me it is “not designed to encourage fertility in the poor over and above what we already do.” W. Bradford Wilcox, another conservative thinker, wrote that he made a similar tax credit proposal non-refundable to “reduce the possibility that an expanded [child tax credit] might encourage single-parenthood.” Charles Murray has written several books wholly premised on poor-blaming, the most influential of which was probably 1984’s Losing Ground, which argued for abolishing welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, housing subsidies, and disability insurance (a tiny fraction of which might be replaced).
Indeed, until fairly recently, poor-blaming was mainstream Democratic Party thinking, too. Murray’s book was hugely influential on the right, but Democrats embraced it as well. In 1993, President Bill Clinton said in an interview that Murray’s analysis was “essentially correct,” recounting how a classroom of children once agreed with the idea that welfare would increase single parenthood. (I should note that while he pummeled the very poor, to his credit President Clinton also passed a sizable expansion of the EITC, which boosted benefits for poor people a bit higher on the income ladder.) Until the early 2000s, Hillary Clinton would routinely say similar things, boasting about how after welfare reform, recipients were “no longer deadbeats,” or that they had transitioned “from dependency to dignity,” as Buzzfeed News reports.
Now to be fair, Bill Clinton noted that while he agreed with Murray’s prediction about policy mechanics, whether it would be morally correct to starve people out of single motherhood was the more important question. But it turns out Murray was wrong about both points, as he was about just about everything else in his book. Welfare reform did nothing to halt the long decline of marriage, which has been steadily eroding for decades, nor did it decrease the rate of single motherhood. On the contrary, as is seen in many other developed nations, a big fraction of children are now born to cohabiting couples who are neither married nor poor.
Welfare reform, in fact, didn’t do much but snatch money from very poor families with children, increasing the fraction of people living in extreme poverty by 150 percent.
Many conservatives and ’90s-vintage Clintonites imagine that most poor people are an unchanging core of working-age adults who are too busy having constant unprotected sex to go out and get jobs, but in reality, over 80 percent of them are either children, disabled, students, or involuntarily unemployed, constantly churning in and out of poverty. These people are poor because they generally can’t work. In a purely capitalist economic system, such people will always fall through the cracks. Neither work requirements for cash benefits nor Paul Ryan’s goofy “life plan” paternalism will conjure up jobs for 5-year-olds or the seriously mentally ill.
It’s also important to note that traditional welfare was a small program targeted at the very poor — the rest of the welfare state, notably Social Security (by far the largest anti-poverty program), Medicare, and Medicaid, has survived largely intact. So while welfare reform was a grotesque moral atrocity, it didn’t much affect the ongoing war on poverty, which has been a big, if incomplete, success.
But welfare reform does make a good test case. We can predict what will happen if Rubio gets to fulfill his desire to “reform” the rest of the welfare state along Clintonesque lines: The number of people in poverty will explode. And after that, conservative policy hacks will construct convoluted theories about how a decline in traditional marriage norms or something is to blame. The point, always, is to justify and deepen the existing social hierarchy.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, November 3, 2015
“Why Republicans Are Hell-Bent On Destroying Medicare”: Belief’s That Spring From Ideological Faith, Not Facts
One way you can identify politicians’ sincere convictions is by looking at the things they do even when they know they’re unpopular. There are few better examples than the half-century-long quest by Republicans to destroy Medicare.
As we move towards the 2016 presidential election, it’s something we’re hearing about yet again. Conservatives know the Democrats will attack them for it mercilessly, and they know those attacks are probably going to work — yet Republicans keeps trying. Which is why it’s clear that they just can’t stand this program.
When Medicare was being debated in the early 1960s, one of its most prominent opponents was a certain future president, who recorded a spoken word album called Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine. In it, he said that if the bill were to pass, “We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” He failed in that crusade, and ever since, conservatives have watched in pain as the program became more entrenched and more popular.
That popularity didn’t happen by accident. Medicare is popular because it gives seniors something they crave: security. Every American over 65 knows that they can get Medicare, it will be accepted by almost every health care provider, their premiums will be modest, and it won’t be taken away. On the policy level, the program is expensive, but that’s because providing health care for the elderly is expensive. It’s not because the program is inefficient; in fact, Medicare does an excellent job of keeping costs down. Its expenses for overhead (basically everything except health care) are extremely low, somewhere between 1 percent and 5 percent of what it takes in, compared to private insurance costs that can run from 10 percent to 20 percent and, in some cases, even higher. (See here for a good explanation of these figures.)
That’s not to say there’s nothing about the program that could be improved, because there certainly is. The Affordable Care Act tried to institute some Medicare reforms, including moving away from the fee-for-service model (which encourages doctors and hospitals to do as many procedures as possible) and toward a model that creates incentives for keeping patients healthy. It’s still too early to say how great an impact those changes will have. But Medicare is still in most ways the most successful part of the American health insurance system. And if you care about empirical truth, it’s impossible to argue that it’s a failure because it involves too much government.
But Republicans do argue that, and it’s a belief that springs from ideological faith, not facts. In Wednesday’s debate, Rand Paul was asked whether Reagan was right about Medicare, and he responded, “The question always is, what works better, the private marketplace or government? And what distributes goods better? It always seems to be the private marketplace does a better job. Is there an area for a safety net? Can you have Medicare or Social Security? Yes. But you ought to acknowledge the government doesn’t do a very good job at it.” Paul’s ambivalence is obvious — he grudgingly acknowledges that you can have a “safety net,” including Medicare, even as he says it’s terrible. But if that’s so, why not get rid of it entirely?
The presidential candidates who have said anything specific about Medicare all want to move in the direction of privatization, which isn’t too surprising. After all, they believe that it’s impossible for government to do anything better than the private sector, and if you can take a government program and privatize it, that’s what you should do. That’s also what new Speaker of the House Paul Ryan believes: For years he’s been touting a plan to privatize Medicare by essentially turning it into a voucher program. Instead of being an insurer for seniors as it is now, the government would give you a voucher that you could spend to buy yourself private insurance. And if the voucher didn’t cover the cost of the insurance you could find? Tough luck.
When you ask Paul Ryan about this, the first thing he’ll say is that he wants a slow transition to privatizing Medicare, one that won’t affect today’s seniors at all, so they don’t need to worry. In Wednesday’s debate, Marco Rubio made the same argument. “Everyone up here tonight that’s talking about reforms, I think and I know for myself I speak to this, we’re all talking about reforms for future generations,” he said. “Nothing has to change for current beneficiaries. My mother is on Medicare and Social Security. I’m against anything that’s bad for my mother.”
In other words: Medicare is a disaster, but we would never change it for the people who are on it and love it so much. They don’t have to fear the horror of being subject to our plan for Medicare’s future. Which is going to be great.
That contradiction is the essence of the Republicans’ Medicare problem. It’s one of the most successful and beloved social programs America has ever created, and to mess with it is to court political disaster, particularly among seniors who vote at such high rates. And its success is particularly galling, standing as it does as a living rebuke to their fervent belief that there can never be any area in which government might outperform the private sector.
But grant Republicans this: A less ideologically committed group might say, “We don’t like this program, but it’s too politically dangerous to try to undo it. So we’ll just learn to live with it.”
Republicans won’t give up. They want to undermine Medicare, to privatize it, to try in whatever way they can come up with to hasten the day when it disappears. And no matter how often they fail, they keep trying.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, October 30, 2015
“The Budget Blitz”: Boehner And McConnell Get A Move On To Approve A Deal Before Conservatives Can Counter-Mobilize
Well, you have to credit John Boehner and Mitch McConnell with some chutzpah. On the very eve of Paul Ryan’s planned accession to the House Speakership via a deal with House conservatives to treat their views with more respect and avoid deals with Democrats, the GOP leadership is unveiling the largest bipartisan budget deal since 2011, a measure that would preempt any debt default or government shutdown threat until well after the 2016 elections. Moreover, even as Ryan pledges renewed fealty to the Hastert Rule and promises not to behave imperiously towards other Republicans, this deal was negotiated semi-secretly and will be sprung on Congress for a quick vote, perhaps as early as tomorrow, and is projected to get through both chambers via a minority of Republicans voting with most Democrats. It would indeed make it easier for Ryan to keep his promises because it would take the most contentious issues right off the table.
A lot of the details of the deal are unknown or hazy at this point, but it’s clear the main objective was to set aside sequestration and give Democrats some domestic spending increases and Republicans more defense spending. In that and other respects it resembles the budget deal Ryan himself cut with Patty Murray in December of 2013, not long after the last government shutdown, which constitutes one of the grievances conservatives harbor against the Wisconsin Ayn Rand acolyte.
I suspect the air today will be filled with squawking about this deal, and it could also prove to be a big fat target for the GOP presidential candidates who are debating economic and fiscal policy in Colorado tomorrow night. So yeah, Boehner and McConnell had best get a move on to get the deal approved before conservatives can counter-mobilize, and Paul Ryan should probably remember some pressing appointments back home in his district.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 27, 2015
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