Kevin Drum

Max Boot tries to defend President Biden's border policy in the Washington Post today. Here's a long excerpt:

This is not Trump redux. The previous president carried out inhumane policies such as separating children from their parents, in part, because he wanted to deter more arrivals — but also because, as Adam Serwer of the Atlantic has argued, “the cruelty is the point.” Being beastly to helpless migrants helped to burnish Donald Trump’s brand with his rabidly nativist base.

Biden, by contrast, expressed horror at the way the Border Patrol treated the Haitians. The Department of Homeland Security is investigating what happened. If abuses occurred, they were contrary to the president’s intent — not in compliance with it as under Trump. That’s a big difference.

Biden is being excoriated for returning some of the migrants back to Haiti, which can’t cope with them. But, while 2,000 people have been sent to Haiti, 12,400 people from the Del Rio camp will be able to request asylum status — which usually means they can stay in the United States while their cases are adjudicated. You would never know from all the criticism that far more migrants are being allowed to remain here than are being sent home.

Biden hasn’t yet ended Trump’s pandemic policy of automatically expelling many of the migrants apprehended along the southern border — a senior administration official tells me that was on the verge of happening before the delta variant of the coronavirus hit in July — but he has considerably relaxed it. In July 2020, 92 percent of migrant encounters resulted in expulsion; by July 2021, it was down to 47 percent. Biden has already ended other inhumane Trump policies such as the “Muslim ban” and family separations. Biden just announced that the refugee cap in the next fiscal year will be eight times higher than the one Trump announced in October 2020. Biden has also reduced “inland” deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents far below the level not only under Trump but also under President Barack Obama.

In short, Biden is doing a lot more to make immigration policy humane than progressives who sloganeer about abolishing ICE have ever done. But he gets no credit.

Over the past few years immigration has become much like abortion: there's almost no middle ground. On one side you have the Trumpies and their wall, settling for nothing less than bringing illegal immigration down to zero. On the progressive side, the 2020 primary debates made it clear that most of the candidates favored policies so loose that they were effectively advocating open borders.

But it's worth noting that Biden was very explicitly opposed to the loose border policies that most Democratic candidates favored. He made that very clear. His immigration policies are far more humane than Trump's, but he's still committed to protecting the border.

I doubt that an investigation will show that CBP officers did anything wrong in their treatment of Haitian immigrants. It made a big impact thanks to a single picture that gave a seriously mistaken impression, but video suggests there was nothing very unusual about the situation. Mounted patrol officers are common; there were no whips; there was no roundup; and the general tenor of the operation was fairly low key. You might still object to it, of course, but it doesn't appear to have been intentionally cruel or harsh.

There's no great solution to our current border problem, which has been caused by immigrants seeking asylum. Conservatives are unhappy about large numbers of immigrants being allowed to stay, but the law provides little choice about that. Liberals, by contrast, are unhappy that asylum seekers are being held at all. The only real answer is to speed up the asylum process, and that requires a huge increase in the judicial infrastructure that governs the border. That's the work of years, not months.

I don't have any brilliant solutions to offer. I don't think anyone does. Until and unless Congress and the president do something about the entire asylum process, this is going to remain a mess.

The FBI released final crime figures for 2020 today, and there were no surprises:

Murders were up by nearly 30%, clocking in at about 6.5 per 100,000. Meanwhile, violent crime in general was up by only a few percent, hitting 400 per 100,000. This remains something of a mystery since normally the two move up and down together.

This is it. We have finally gone over the edge. We had a good run.

A couple of days ago I wrote that Democrats have done little to help the middle class over the past few decades. The poor? Yes. The elderly? Yes. The disabled? Yes. But the middle class has been largely left out.

To illustrate this I listed the seven major programs in the $3.5 trillion omnibus spending bill. This provoked some questions on Twitter that deserve an answer. To refresh your memory, here are those programs:

1. Funds various climate initiatives.
2. Adds dental, hearing, and vision benefits to Medicare.
3. Makes the increased child tax credit permanent.
4. Provides two years of free community college.
5. Provides funding for long-term care done at home.
6. Provides universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds.
7. Makes the increased Obamacare subsidies from January's coronavirus bill permanent.

How does the middle class make out in each of these? Let me make clear that I'm talking about concrete benefits that a middle-class voter would immediately recognize. Not "that would benefit the economy and eventually be good for the middle class." So let's go through them.

1. Funds various climate initiatives. Nothing for the middle class.
2. Adds dental, hearing, and vision benefits to Medicare. Nothing for the middle class.
3. Makes the increased child tax credit permanent. This one is tricky. Ready? The CTC has been around for a while, bobbing up and down over the years. Before 2021 it was set at $2,000 per child, which means the Biden CTC expansion is not worth $3,000/$3,600 per child, but $1,000/$1,600.
   ..
   But wait! There's more. The pre-2021 CTC provides nothing at very low incomes and slowly increases, so it's not very generous to the poor. The Biden expansion makes it fully available at all incomes, which means the bulk of the benefit goes to the poor. A middle-class family is likely to see an increase of only $100 per month or so.
4. Provides two years of free community college. The provision creates a federal-state partnership grant to eliminate the cost of tuition. In other words, the money goes to community colleges, not to people. Also, its main effect is to allow students greater choice in which school to attend, since local community colleges tend to be nearly tuition free already.
5. Provides funding for long-term care done at home. The middle class likes this as an idea, but the Biden plan is a state partnership that boosts pay for home health workers and reduces the waiting list for home care. In other words, it mostly benefits the poor and tops up state Medicaid coffers.
6. Provides universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds. This is genuinely a middle-class program, though it helps the poor even more.
7. Makes the increased Obamacare subsidies from January's coronavirus bill permanent. In its original form, Obamacare subsidies ended at about $80,000 for a family of three. In reality, though, the subsidies declined so fast with income that they were negligible for families making more than about $65,000. It was mainly a program for the poor and working class.
   ..
   However, Obamacare did raise the cost of individual premiums by thousands of dollars, thanks to its regulations that required insurers to provide more comprehensive coverage. As a result, middle-class families found themselves paying more for coverage but getting no subsidies. Obamacare was essentially anti-middle class.
   ..
   The increased subsidies in the spending bill would help the poor a bit, but mainly they help the middle class. Subsidies would be available at much higher incomes, and no one would have to pay more than 8.5% of their income for coverage. This is a huge deal for the middle class.

In the end, two of the programs are aimed at the middle class in a significant way, with a couple of others providing modest benefits that are largely hidden. In other words, it's not that the omnibus bill literally ignores the middle class so much as it provides limited benefits and does so in a form that hides even those. And Obamacare expansion, which is clearly the biggest middle-class program, appears to have very little support in the Democratic caucus.

It's worth saying a bit more on this subject. First off is presentation. It's not enough just to do something that benefits the middle class. It needs to be visible. That could mean clear dollar amounts that are obvious to everyone. Or it could simply mean a card. For example, in addition to Medicare cards, Biden could issue "Long Term Care" cards that make it clear you qualify for a new benefit. Don't scoff at this: politically, new benefits only work if people know they're getting them. And most people don't pay enough attention to the news to know they're getting something unless you make it absolutely clear. Remember all those folks who never realized that TennCare or KentuckyCare were actually Obamacare?

Second, any benefit that works through the tax code is problematic, and not just because it obscures the source of the benefit. The problem for Democrats is that Republicans own tax cuts as an issue. Any time you provide some kind of tax cut or tax refund, you're fundamentally playing in the Republican sandbox and you're unlikely to get full credit for it.

Third, there are other ways of making economic appeals to the middle class. Republicans use tax cuts, and Donald Trump added revenge against China to the list. This worked even though (a) job losses to China happened in the aughts and haven't been much of a factor since, and (b) Trump's tariffs were largely a hidden tax on the middle class.

Finally, I have to acknowledge that Democrats don't actually have a lot of options here. Ideally they should be united around big programs that help the middle class, but there aren't many to choose from. Universal health care is the only big-ticket item left, along with a few medium-size programs like childcare and long-term care. This makes things harder. On the other hand, Republicans have a similar problem: decades of tax cuts have reduced middle-class income taxes nearly to zero, so there's not a lot more they can do on that front.

That said, politics is always messy. There are still things Democrats can do for the middle class, but it's critical that they be both sizeable and visible. Obamacare expansion is a good place to start.

Leimert Park in South LA is considered one of the centers of Black life in Southern California. It has also been the target of gentrification for years, bringing with it all the usual misgivings among residents who are watching the character of their neighborhood change as Black residents are priced out:

There are a lots of fears....Fears that once new residents move in, they’ll act like gentrifiers and start calling the police on longtime Black residents. “We are diverse. We welcome everyone into our neighborhood. But we hope, just as when they move into Chinatown, or Japantown, that they recognize this town is based on African American culture,” Fields said. “I don’t want to go for a run outside my house and have somebody chasing me down thinking I’m causing trouble.”

But another fear is about what will happen now that California has passed a law that allows developers to build duplexes and 4-plexes on property that was once zoned for single-family homes:

“If we destroy the single-family neighborhood by allowing developers to come in and tear down the single family homes and put up triplexes and duplexes and quadplexes that we can’t afford to buy, we’ve lost,” Fields told me.

I don't get this. If a single-family home near Leimert Park is going for $1.5 million, then a single unit of a 4-plex would go for—what? Maybe $500,000? That's more affordable. If anything, it seems like the best bet the Black community has for remaining a strong presence in the face of gentrification that otherwise has little chance of being stopped.

Am I missing something here?

Here is Paul Ratje's now-infamous photo of mounted CBP agents chasing Haitian migrants at the Texas border:

And here is video of the scene, which presents a considerably different sense of what was going on:

Sorting through my footage from the border. I was in the river during the viral incident between a Haitian migrant and mounted CBP agent. It's shaky - but here's what I captured. pic.twitter.com/fnvxSU83tO

— Sarah Blake Morgan (@StorytellerSBM) September 24, 2021

None of this speaks to whether the Biden administration has adopted good or bad policies regarding the deportation of Haitians. It just shows what was happening on that particular day at that particular time.

Hilbert has had enough. After three weeks of being bumped from Friday catblogging by the drama queen cone kitty he demanded his turn in the spotlight. Besides, the vet promised that the cone was coming off tomorrow, which means that Hopper has only a few more hours of sympathy left. So here is Hilbert, demonstrating who's really the cutest cat around.

To refresh your memory, here is the list of major items in the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill:

1. Makes the increased Obamacare subsidies from January's coronavirus bill permanent.
2. Provides universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds.
3. Provides funding for long-term care done at home.
4. Provides two years of free community college.
5. Makes the increased child tax credit permanent.
6. Adds dental, hearing, and vision benefits to Medicare.
7. Funds various climate initiatives.

Since Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are demanding that the cost of the bill be reduced, much of the conversation has been around which items to keep and which to abandon. To my dismay, but not to my surprise, my #1 item appears to be on no one's keeper list.

The reason for this is obvious but rarely discussed: Democrats are so committed to helping the poor that they ignore practically everyone else. The increased Obamacare subsidies would primarily help the middle class, which means they have very little support compared to other items on the list.

This is admirable, but it can also become self-defeating. Over the past few decades, the only help the middle class has gotten from anyone has been in the form of tax cuts from Republicans. That hasn't benefited the middle class a lot, but it's better than nothing—which is roughly what they've gotten from Democrats.

Democrats desperately need to address this. They spend a lot of time scratching their chins and wondering why the white working/middle class doesn't vote for them, and inevitably they decide that it's all about racism or religion. And some of it is. Somehow, though, Democrats never manage to acknowledge that they do virtually nothing to help middle-class voters. They're keen on helping the poor; and the disabled; and the elderly; and the marginalized—but not the broad middle class. After all, "they should quit griping, they're still better off than the poor."

This is a recipe for electoral disaster, which is pretty much what's happened. Democrats have abandoned the middle class and then seem perplexed when the middle class abandons them. The middle class deserves better, something that Democrats used to know. They need to relearn it.

Robert Kagan writes in the Washington Post that 2024 is shaping up to be the mother of all constitutional crises:

First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024....Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary....The amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office.

....The stage is thus being set for chaos....Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it. As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian.

Meanwhile, Rick Hasen, a law professor and election expert at UC Irvine, says much the same thing:

The United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future U.S. elections, will not be conducted fairly, and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules. The potential mechanisms by which election losers may be declared election winners are: usurpation of voter choices for President by state legislatures purporting to exercise constitutional authority to do so, possibly blessed by a partisan-divided Supreme Court and acquiesced to by Republicans in Congress; fraudulent or suppressive election administration or vote counting by law- or norm-breaking election officials; and violent or disruptive private action that prevents voting, interferes with the counting of votes, or interrupts the assumption of power by the actual winning candidate.

How serious is this threat? I don't know, but Hasen is pretty level headed and he says he's scared shitless.

How can we avoid this? The only real answer is to pass federal legislation that sets rules for counting votes. Democrats have such legislation written and ready to go. However, it can't be passed via reconciliation and Republicans will filibuster it, so it requires 60 votes to pass. The only way it will become law is if Democrats kill the filibuster and then pass it with 51 votes.

Will they do it? It seems unlikely at the moment, but if they don't they can hardly claim to be taken by surprise in 2024 if Trump and the Republican Party do exactly what they're saying they'll do and steal the election in broad daylight.

News from the Golden State:

Standing before a foil-wrapped, fire-proofed monument in Sequoia National Park amid a haze of wildfire smoke, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday signed a $15 billion climate package for California, the largest such investment in state history.

....Big-ticket items in the package include $5.2 billion for drought response and water resilience; $3.7 billion for issues like extreme heat and sea level rise; $3.9 billion for electric vehicle investment and infrastructure; $1.5 billion for wildfire response and forest resilience, and $1.1 billion for sustainable agriculture.

This makes sense. Fighting climate change is all very well—and California has done plenty of this—but the fact is that there's nothing you can do at the state level that has more than a minuscule effect. Hell, even at a national level it's hard to have much effect on a global problem like climate change.

So it makes sense to assume that temperatures are going to keep increasing and something needs to be done about it. That can be done at a state level, and includes measures to adapt to and protect from higher temperatures. It's not ideal, of course, but it's pragmatic to assume the worst and do what you can to deal with it.