Sunday School 2/11/24: Extra Credit

Little Marco Rubio (R-Florida Man) was in the State of the Union classroom on Sunday, and Jake Tapper was hosting, so I figured, why not drop in? 

Rubio, who sponsored legislation back in December requiring any American president to get the advice and consent of the Senate, or an Act of Congress, before pulling the US out of NATO or messing with our membership, was asked if he was "comfortable" with Trump's recent comments on Russia, NATO, and us potentially not supporting our allies. Here's his 264-word response.

Well, that's not what happened. And that's not how I view that statement. I mean, he was talking about something, a story that he talked about happened in the past. By the way, Donald Trump was president, and he didn't pull (us out of) NATO. In fact, American troops were stationed throughout Europe. As they are today, they were then as well. But he's telling a story. And, frankly, look, Donald Trump is not a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He doesn't talk like a traditional politician. And we have already been through this now. You would think people had figured it out by now. What he's basically saying is, if you see the comments, he said NATO was broke or busted until he took over because people weren't paying their dues. And then he told the story about how he used leverage to get people to step up to the plate and become more active in NATO. He's not the first American president. In fact, virtually every American president at some point in some way has complained about other countries in NATO not doing enough. Trump's just the first one to express it in these terms. But I have zero concern, because he's been president before. I know exactly what he has done and will do with the NATO alliance. But there has to be an alliance. It's not America's defense with a bunch of small junior partners. Some of these are big countries with big economies. Many of them are doing more. The Germans are doing a lot right now.

He didn't, but Tapper should have asked why that legislation was so important if Trump's only blowing smoke. He did ask how Rubio'd explain to Israel and Ukraine why he's going to deny them aid. Here's his 333-word explanation; I've broken it into themes for clarity. 

First: "I'd do anything for you, dear, Israel."

I don't oppose giving them the help that they need, especially in the case of Israel. And if you put the Israel thing up to a -- if you put Israel aid up to a vote right now, it would pass. I don't even know -- maybe a couple of people would vote against it. But, basically, it would pass very quickly. The problem is, Israel is being held hostage so they could get Ukraine.

Second: "I'm An American, and I might miss the Super Bowl." 

As far as how do I explain it to them, before I explain anything to them, I have to explain to my constituents, I have to explain to the people of Florida, I have to explain to the American people because I'm a US senator. And my number one obligation is America. If America is not strong, we can't help any of our allies. And I will have to explain to them why the Senate is going to work all through Super Bowl weekend, which is fine with me.

 Third: "We're being invaded!"

We're going to make a big priority, except on something that's critical to this country, which is the invasion that's going on, on our own border, on our own border. We're over -- according to a House committee and the documents and the statistics they put out -- I think these numbers are low, but let's just use them -- 3.3 million people have been released into the country who arrived here illegally. Over 600,000 of them either have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges against them.

And, fourth: "We don't need no stinking bill." 

I mean, this is a huge problem and it has to be addressed and they put out a bill. They can call it whatever they want. It wasn't a border security bill. It wasn't tough. And, frankly, it was negotiated by three people. I don't begrudge it, but I wasn't involved in that negotiation. I didn't even ask for a bill. I asked for the president to reverse the executive orders that created this crisis when he took over in January 2021.

Tapper asked directly if Rubio supported aid to Ukraine. 

I think, if we secure our own border here in the United States, I have said that we should do -- we should help Ukraine. Look, half the money that's going to Ukraine is not going to Ukraine. It's to buy back our own weapons that we gave them to restock our own shelves. And, obviously, Taiwan is included there as well. My problem is this: Before we do these things, we have to make America and Americans a priority again...

Besides, the current migrant crisis, he said, is causing "a crime wave," and

Why are we spending all of this taxpayer money to house migrants, feed migrants, accommodate migrants? We have a bunch of needs in our own country for Americans. How is that not our priority? Americans have to be our priority, and then we can help our allies.

Tapper played a clip of Brandon Judd, the head of the Border Patrol union, saying the bill Rubio helped defeat "absolutely is" better than the status quo, and

Nobody can argue that it's not better than what we currently have. Although it's not perfect, it is a step in the right direction. And I would rather have the step in the right direction than nothing. 

Rubio thinks the union's wrong, saying "It's not better than nothing."

Look, there are some things in that bill that we should do, change the asylum standard and the like. Here's what else the bill did. The bill basically creates an asylum corps, OK? It creates a bunch of -- thousands of bureaucrats, basically agents, asylum agents, that would be empowered right at the border to either allow people into the country with an immediate work permit. Today, they have to wait six months. You give them an immediate work permit, you're going to have more people coming. That's a huge magnet. Or they have the power to immediately release them and grant them asylum, which now puts them on a five-year path to citizenship, which is what a lot of Democrats want. They want to turn a bunch of illegal immigrants into voters, into citizens, into voters, in the hopes that those people will then turn around and vote for them in future elections, grateful because they will know who let them in. That's a huge problem. That doesn't solve the border. It makes it worse.

Tapper argued the bill didn't have a path to citizenship, but Rubio said it did - a green card in a year, and citizenship in four, he said, for people who are granted asylum. And, he added,

And these bureaucrats would have the power to grant you asylum, not even a judge, a bureaucrat.

Tapper pointed out that "immigration judges" aren't judges either, they're immigration attorneys. He also noted the bill is "by far the most conservative border security bill in four decades," according to Sen. Jim Lankford - even more conservative than the bill Rubio helped negotiate in 2013, and that it didn't include much of what the Ds wanted. He asked why this wasn't a win for the Rs.

Rubio's response? Let me count the ways: the president doesn't have to shut down the border; 1,400 migrants still need to be processed during a shutdown; it sunsets in three years; it doesn't touch the 'parole' system; and decisions made by immigration judges can be overruled by the Attorney General, but the decisions made by these new asylum officers can't be. 

Hmm... the AG is an unelected bureaucrat; couldn't he overturn every denied asylum request, to create those brown voters Rubio mentioned? It sure would have been fun if Jake asked that.  

Rubio agreed changing the asylum standard is good, but "it's ultimately going to be applied by an administration that has proven its unwillingness to enforce our immigration laws." No matter what he was asked, his answers were consistent: from his perspective, bad liberals were going to be making bad decisions at the border - period.

Now, in the hands of another administration, perhaps that asylum standard could be applied differently. But, ultimately, once you have this asylum corps hired by Mayorkas, hired by Biden, put at the border, they are going to be -- they will have the power...

Given the whole process that occurs after a bill passes - funding allocations, regulation-writing, job classification, hiring, background checks to complete... does he really think all that would happen before January 20, 2025 - or does he think Biden's going to be re-elected?

Tapper moved on to Trump's bizarre comments about Nikki Haley's 'missing' husband Michael, who's on a year-long deployment with the SC National Guard. Everyone knows that, including Trump, and asked what Rubio thought about that. He thinks "they're part of the increasing nastiness of this campaign and every campaign in American politics."

I mean, they're calling him a grumpy old man. They're attacking Donald Trump.  

"A Grumpy old man?" The horror! He shared other 'nasty' comments and then said

But at the end of the day, I think one of the things I'm not going to do any longer is, like, respond to every comment Donald Trump makes and say, oh, you still support him? I do. And I support him because Joe Biden's a disaster, because Joe Biden is a disaster. He's done tremendous damage to this country. America is less prosperous and the world is less safe because Joe Biden became president.

See you around campus.

In Case You Missed It (v108)

I did a little better getting posts out last week - I hit all four of the regular weekly features, which I haven't done in a while. Immigration - well, migration, I guess might be the better term - was a hot topic. Here's your recap.

For your Sunday School, I focused on Jon Karl's conversations in the This Week classroom. Among his guests? Oscar Leeser, the mayor of El Paso, and Eric Adams, the mayor of NYC. Here's a bit of the conversation with Leeser.

Karl asked Leeser to explain what he does when he arranges for migrants to move north, which is different than what Gov. Greg Abbott is doing by dropping them in front of the Vice President's residence. 

Leeser made a great point in his response.

...if you look at -- the people are not coming to El Paso, they're coming to America, and that's something that's really important.

While (in my words, not the mayor's), Abbott shoves people on a bus and sends them to a political target, Leeser and NGOs in El Paso try to get them where they want to go, where they have people they know. In the past, around 95% of asylum seekers and migrants had sponsors - family or friends who have arranged transportation, and who are waiting for the person to arrive. And now?

So, we have about 50% of the people today that do not have a sponsor, they don’t have money. So, we're helping and working to get them to where they want to go. So, that's been really important that we don't send anyone where they don't want to go. We make sure we help them and we put human beings and, you know, and we put them on buses with food and make sure they get to their destination where -- and make sure that we always continue to treat people like human beings.

Folks on the panel also chimed in. For example, the WaPo's Mariana Sotomayor suggested

there doesn't seem to be much of a strategy from the administration or from Capitol Hill. It might be a topic this week, what with the Martha's Vineyard shenanigans, but this close to the midterms, no one's apt to want to talk about it, other than the Rs - but they're not talking about legislative solutions; they've "tried and tried and tried again and there's just no discussion right now about whether to actually engage in any changes."

Stick around to the end of the post to hear from Marc Short, former chief of staff to VP Mike Pence, who had, um, interesting thoughts about this issue.

The conversation continued in your Extra Credit, where I listened in on Jake Tapper's conversation with Mayor Adams, who was also in CNN's State of the Union classroom. On the larger issue, 

Adams said it's a humanitarian crisis "created by human hands," and that it's one of those moments where everyone is supposed to "come together and coordinate." That means the federal government, and the governors of Texas and Florida. And, he said,

We should not be really treating other cities and municipalities in the manner that we're witnessing now. And so, we need resources for housing, resources to make sure that we can properly give people the medical care, all of the basic necessities that you would give new arrivals that enter a city.

Tapper asked him about a message for the photo-op governors, Abbott of Texas and DeSantis of Florida.

Adams talked about them "hiding up" their actions on guns, for example, and on a woman's right to choose.

You see, this is their way of covering up when many people have been really concerned about the erosion of basic human rights. We're seeing crisis calls for coordination. We received a minimum of six buses early this morning, over 11,000 individuals, asylum-seeking migrants, have come to the city already. It is time for us to coordinate this humanitarian crisis that our country is facing.

Also in the classroom with Tapper? Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), who said

discussions "are ongoing" in the Senate, and said the last "hard push" was in 2017, when he and Sen. Angus King (I-ME) co-sponsored a bipartisan bill that got 54 votes. It addressed Dreamers, chain migration, a pathway to citizenship, and that "nothing has happened during this administration." 

Tapper didn't interrupt to ask what happened to the 2017 effort, when the Rs had a trifecta: the House, the Senate, and of course, the Trump White House. And he didn't ask what happened to immigration legislation in the next Congress in 2019, when the Rs held a 53-to-45 majority in the Senate. It would have been interesting to hear Rounds explain why nothing happened. 

Moving on to Wednesdays' wondering, Gov. Abbott popped up, but not for reasons related to his burgeoning travel agent career. He signed an Executive Order declaring Mexican drug cartels 'terrorists' in the Lone Star State.

Texans are victimized by Mexican cartels that produce and import (fentanyl). So, cartels are terrorists. And it's time that we started treating them that way.

His order directs law enforcement to "identify gangs that are supporting Mexican cartels and work to seize assets as well as disrupt cartel networks." And, he's

also directed Texas agencies to alert the public about the fentanyl crisis, including schools and workplaces through mediums like social media and public service announcements to make clear, that truly one pill can kill."

I don't have a problem with anything he did, including asking the White House to make a similar federal declaration; it's reasonable, and certainly defensible, which some of his recent antics aren't. But here's where the wondering comes in: fentanyl's been killing Americans, including Texans, for years, in rapidly increasing numbers. Abbott said that in Texas last year, nearly 1700 fentanyl-related deaths were reported. So, why did it take him so long to order his government to get the word out?

For your TGIF, we had two good week/bad week opportunities from the Sunshine State. Not surprisingly, DeSantis was one of them. I didn't pick who had what kind of week, I left that up to you. 

Ron DeSantis. Do I need to say more? I mean, I can. There's a case going to trial over his replacing an elected District Attorney; there's the lawsuit filed by the migrants from Texas who were sent to Martha's Vineyard; and there are calls to investigate him over that stunt, which included giving them incorrect information about benefits available to them. 

The other Florida reference was, perhaps, less expected: it seems the special master FPOTUS demanded in his attempts to kill or at least delay the investigations into his handling of our documents doesn't seem to be as 'special' as hoped. 

And what about Judge Raymond Dearie? First, there was the dessert ruling that Donald Trump can't have is cake and eat it, and there's put up or shut up with Trump's nonsensical claims about the FBI and the documents, and there's and you're going to pay for it - hardly music to the former president's ears. 

 I'll be back later with Sunday School; hope you'll be back, too.