Tacos and Cerveza

Executive Inaction:  After days of claiming that only Congress could cancel the child detention policy that he created, Trump kind of, sort of caved, temporarily putting an end to the crisis by executive action.  He did that flanked by a strident Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen who only the night before had been shouted out of a Washington DC Mexican restaurant while trying to chow down on tacos and cerveza, and the ever obsequious VP Pence who gazed at him lovingly while he wielded his presidential pen. Trump’s decision to relent wasn’t based on any change of heart, or for that matter any heart, but rather resulted from pressure from within the Republican party, the awful optics of pictures of caged, crying children appearing in the newspapers and on various cable channels, fears that those images would turn suburban Republican voters away in the Fall, and to the extent that their publicists are to be believed, pressure from favorite daughter Ivanka, her husband Jared and wife Melania.  Trump’s executive action does not call for the end of the “zero tolerance” policy that led to the separation and institutionalization of the children in the first place, nor does it mandate that the more than 2000 children who were affected by the policy be returned to their parents anytime soon, if at all.  The problem was and is that by mandating the arrest and detention of all people crossing the border illegally, even first offenders and those seeking refugee status, the zero tolerance policy forced the separation of children from their parents due to the terms of the “Flores Settlement Agreement” which essentially says that children are not supposed to spend time in adult detention centers. To meet the terms of the Flores Agreement, the Obama administration minimized the problem by limiting the detention of first time border crosses to those that they perceived to be dangerous and only separated parents and children if they believed that the children were in an abusive situation.  The Trump administration plans to continue detaining everyone crossing the border “illegally,” but will provide for children to stay with their parents in detention facilities even though the overflow of detainees is overwhelming the system.  The problem is that the Flores Agreement prohibits the detention of children in those facilities  for more than twenty days and given the backlog in the immigration courts caused to a large degree by the zero tolerance policy, the detention of the children will almost immediately violate the terms of the Flores Agreement. If Trump really wanted to make this problem go away, he would have just directed Attorney General Sessions to call off the zero tolerance policy, he could have done that with one phone call to the Justice Department.  The bottom line is that the kids will still end up in pens at least until a court or two rules that they can’t be placed with adults, but at least for now, they will be with their parents.  At least the “lucky” ones will be with their parents, as of last night, there are no plans to return the more than 2000 babies, toddlers, and adolescents who have been dispersed to centers and foster homes around the country to their parents or guardians, partially because the dispersal has been so poorly handled that in many cases few, if any, of the agencies involved know how to get in touch with any of those parents and in some cases the parents have already been deported.  As to the dispersal, late yesterday several major airlines including American, Southwest, United and Frontier announced that they will no longer transport immigrant children separated from their parents because their mission is to “bring people together” not to pull them apart.  While signing his executive order, the one that he said he couldn’t sign, Trump announced that Congress was on the verge of passing immigration legislation. Not surprisingly his optimism on that front is misplaced.  Though House Republicans have been wrestling with two versions of immigration legislation, a harsh one and a really harsh one, current expectations are that neither version will have enough votes to pass the House and even if something ekes through it will be dead on arrival in the Senate.  At least for now, the Senate is only considering legislation to permanently prevent the separation of children from parents and is having a hard time doing even that. 

Other Plans:  Immigration legislation isn’t the only thing that’s floundering.  Trump’s plan to pass a rescission package that would shave $15 billion from the Omnibus spending bill, targeting social programs like the Children’s Health Insurance Program, has also hit a road block in the Senate.  A procedural vote to send the legislation to the Senate floor for a wider vote went down after Republican Senators Susan Collins and Richard Burr joined Democrats by voting against it.  Collins had been on record opposing components of the bill for awhile but Burr’s defection was a surprise.  He is fighting against cuts in certain water and land conservation programs.  On the health care front, Trump handed Obamacare another blow on Tuesday by announcing plans to make it easier for small businesses and trade groups to purchase health care coverage outside of the Obamacare markets.  The problem is that since the proposed plans provide only “skinny” coverage, they are cheaper, and as a result they drive up Obamacare premiums by drawing healthier participants away from the Obamacare market.  Trump continues to chip away at Obamacare so that what he hasn’t been able to do legislatively, he is doing through a series of these administrative actions.

Michael Cohen Saga:  Michael Cohen, Trump’s one time fixer/lawyer resigned from his role as deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee, not all that shocking when you consider that raising money is kind of hard to do when you are widely known to be the subject of at least two federal investigations.  The most interesting thing about his letter is that he rebuked Trump’s children separation policy on the way out by writing “As the son of a Polish holocaust survivor, the images and sounds of this family separation policy is heart wrenching. While I strongly support measures that will secure our porous borders, children should never be used as bargaining chips.”  This chip in the Trump-Cohen wall is fueling more speculation that Cohen is getting closer to turning on his “father figure,” the guy he famously said he would take a bullet for.  In other Cohen news, American Media Inc., the publisher of National Enquirer, was recently subpoenaed by federal authorities as part of an effort to determine if they helped suppress anti-Trump information before the 2016 election.  The Feds are seeking records related to the $150,000 payment made to former Playmate and one time Trump girlfriend Karen McDougal, the payment that squashed her tell all story.  The Michael Cohen countdown goes on and on.