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Speaker Johnson's obsequious loyalty to the Felon helps destroy America
Before jumping into the shenanigans of Congress, let me tip my proverbial hat to all of those who joined in No Kings demonstrations yesterday. I participated in a small one here in my hometown of Venice, CA, and while hanging out in a “park” after marching from the Venice Pavillon (if that’s what it’s still called), I was happy to see what I consider young people, 20’s and 30’s in the crowd. I approached one group and asked if I could ask an “old guy” question. After being told that I was not an old guy (flattery will get you everywhere), I asked them how old they were. Late 20’s and very early 30’s was the answer I got. Without any prompts (trust me, I was ready) they told me how they had contemporaries all over the city at other marches because they understood that all Americans needed to stand up and stop the madness. I hope this was true across the country because we need all ages, all colors, all identities to stand up for America.
In a not necessarily stunning, but certainly a stunting move, under the leadership of Speaker Johnson, and I use that term lightly as the only thing he seems to lead us towards is fealty to a man and not the Constitution, the House rejected the Senate’s bill that funded DHS, but not ICE. I guess because the Speaker comes from Louisiana where slavery still seems to be acceptable (see Angola prison), he cares little for the laws of our nation and is grandstanding for the far right wing of America. Given the behavior of ICE over the past year, to rubber stamp its behavior is to say that due process doesn’t matter, that no due process guidelines matter, and that making America white is what matters, and given the heinous Islamaphobia that has been promoted by the White House under the lead of Pee Wee German, we should not be surprised.
House Republicans in angrily rejecting a measure passed by their Senate counterparts that would have restored most funding for the DHS, has created the continuing chaos for travelers in our airports. Speaker Johnson dismissed the Senate bill, which withheld money for ICE and deportation operations, as “a joke,” and he said the House would instead advance a measure to fully fund the agency. The intra-party feud threatened to extend a partial shutdown of the agency that has left federal workers without paychecks and caused long waits at airports. I cannot imagine a more infantile, spoiled brat-like behavior than is being exhibited by the Speaker and the Republicans in the House. I cannot wait, hopefully, when the Republicans lose the majority in the House and begin to complain about negotiating with Democrats. Hey, Mike, you set the table for absolute refusals to negotiate, and absent the gross voter suppression you support, come next year any of your complaints about Democrats challenging the Felon will fall on deaf ears. You have single-handedly lead to a political stalemate that has damaged our nation and, in turn, the world.
One of the failings of the Democrats is with messaging over immigration. It is rare in the discourse to hear about how many immigrants were deported under both Presidents Obama and Biden; legally deported. Somehow the Felon and his acolytes have managed to create messaging that has suggested the Democrats were soft on illegal immigration. The fact is that the Democrats have embraced the value of immigrants, a key to our success as a nation, but not to criminals entering our country. The Obama administration deported more than 3 million noncitizens over two terms, the highest total in American history. Yet, he still created DACA to protect the young children brought to this country. Biden’s administration has seen high levels of enforcement. As of June 2024, approximately 4.4 million repatriations (including removals and expulsions) occurred, exceeding the totals of any single presidential term since George W. Bush. During Biden’s tenure, in fiscal 2024, Biden oversaw over 270,000 deportations, exceeding the annual figures for the Felon’s first term. The Biden administration prioritized removing recent border crossers, while simultaneously using enforcement returns (returning individuals who cross unlawfully without a formal removal order). But it was Obama's 3 million formal removals (removals through a court order) still exceed the total formal removals of the subsequent administrations.
The Felon seems to believe (pretends?) that ICE is actually popular and claims that the public is loving ICE. He even posted that the agents are “Great American Patriots, they just happen to have much larger, and harder, muscles than most — which is what they’re supposed to have.” Where he has no reasonable arguments concerns the fiscal impacts of immigration. Administration officials have said remarkably false things about that subject, instead exposing their unadulterated xenophobia. Pee Wee German recently asserted (he asserts, for sure; right or wrong is irrelevant to him) that “I believe — and I know President Trump believes — that when this theft is exposed, we will see that if all of it were stopped it would be enough to balance the budget…The extraction of wealth from American taxpayers to people who don’t belong here is the primary cause of the national debt, and this is the first ever effort to shut that down.”
But, aside from the raw nastiness of this statement, it’s helpful in prompting us to think about the fiscal impact of immigration. It’s useful to recognize that the federal government is, in a widely used expression, basically an insurance company with an army. Specifically, the federal government largely collects taxes from working-age adults to pay either for defense or for social programs that spend most of their money on the elderly, that is, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. What those idiots in the White House refuse to accept is that immigration expands the base of taxpayers, which means more people to share the burden of paying taxes to pay for defense. This includes undocumented immigrants, because their employers collect payroll taxes out of their wages, with the added fiscal payoff that they will never collect benefits. And because immigrants are relatively young and healthy, they increase the amount going into government coffers while having a delayed impact on outlays. The Social Security Administration does a review of factors affecting its projections, and consistently finds that higher immigration improves the system’s financial health, while lower immigration worsens it. (Talk about a creative way to finally get rid of Social Security, Medicare, and so much more!)
Of course, the war we are fighting here is not (not yet?) as violent as the wars we are fighting in the Middle East, or the one we support, hopefully, in Ukraine. And in all cases I keep wondering on whose side are we operating. This seems more relevant than ever when the Felon posted propaganda claiming that Ukraine discussed funneling money to Biden’s reelection campaign. Also, 4 Russian lawmakers arrived in Washington, D.C., for the first such visit since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 to talk with lawmakers and officials, “part of the normalization of relations with the United States of America,” as one of the Russians told the Russian press. Am I missing something? Normalize what? The invasion of a sovereign nation? Wait, that’s what the US under the Felon seems to be doing already. Think about it.
The Felon declared he was determined to achieve peace between Russia and Ukraine, but this week, according to Zelensky, administration officials said the U.S. would not guarantee Ukraine’s security unless Ukraine withdraws from its own land in Donbas. (Can the entire administration be an agent of the Russians?) Ceding the region to Russia would essentially give Putin what he launched the war to grab. It is the same region that was at stake in 2016, when Russian operatives told the Felon’s 2016 campaign manager they would help Trump’s presidential candidacy if he would look the other way as Putin installed a puppet over the region.
As for the steadfast support for Ukraine, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon is considering diverting weapons intended for Ukraine to the Middle East. They also noted that on Monday, Pentagon officials told Congress that it was going to divert about $750 million in funding provided by NATO countries for Ukraine to restock military weapons in the U.S. instead. About allocating weapons, General Bone Spurs told the reporters, “we do that all the time. We have them in other countries, like in Germany and all over Europe. Sometimes we take from one and we use for another.” And there you have it, another strategic move based on superior planning…NOT!
In case you missed it, last week, the U.S. eased sanctions on banks in Russia’s ally Belarus, and the Felon announced he would ease further sanctions on Belarus to try to get fertilizer into the U.S. since Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has stopped the transportation of about 20% of the world’s fertilizer. While this is going on, Belarus’s president Alexander Lukashenko signed a treaty with another of Putin’s allies, North Korea’s president Kim Jong Un, announcing a “fundamentally new stage” of the relationship between the two countries as they “oppose undue pressure on Belarus from the West.” Both Belarus and North Korea support Russia in its war on Ukraine. So, we create a crisis that we solve by opening financial pipelines to our adversaries? Strategic planning, indeed! And one more present to our pal, Vlad, by allowing a Russian oil tanker to get through the blockade and bring oil to Cuba…the same place we are intimating at invading. I guess strengthening our adversary’s economy, to support a nation we claim to want to liberate, might sound confusing, because it is! I am not a DARPA guy, but wouldn’t the US bringing humanitarian aid to Cuba be a better opening gambit?
Finally, I don’t know about you, but I am so tired of all the winning. I mean, recent reports show a loss of jobs and during the reign of Emperor Donny big losses in manufacturing jobs. And for the first time in history our national debt is larger than our overall economy. What about Venezuela? What even happened and what is going on with the oil money parked in Qatar? Solving a worldwide economic crisis caused by an offensive attack on Iran, by removing sanctions from our adversaries, thereby strengthening their resolve against our allies and that means us, too. But he does get all of his tee times, every weekend, on our time, at our expense.
It would appear that this past weekend’s No Kings rallies and marches set new records for participants. Did we get to that 10 million goal? No, but it seems the number exceeded 8 million. The point is many Americans from the complete spectrum of our nation took action. Now all we need to do is keep up with action and movement, letting the Felon and his cult that we will not let them steal away our country, after all, what better time than now?
Get up. Stand up.