TEXAS EXPANDS IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT POWERS
Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday signed a border security bill into law that will give state law enforcement the power to arrest illegal immigrants and will allow local judges to order them out of the country.
The move sets up a clash with the federal government, which has responsibility for immigration enforcement. Legal challenges are likely.
In a bill-signing ceremony at a border fence in Brownsville, Texas, Abbott said the law was necessary as the state struggles with record levels of border crossings that have occurred during the Biden administration.
“Biden’s deliberate inaction has left Texas to fend for itself,” Abbott said.
Separately on Monday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection temporarily shut down two railroad border crossings in Texas to shift officers to help process migrants. Rail operators said the closures at Eagle Pass and El Paso would hamper trade ahead of Christmas.
Over in Washington, Senate negotiations to secure border policy changes tied to a Ukraine and Israel aid bill still do not appear to be close to a deal.
The White House yesterday warned that the Biden administration can generate one more aid package for Ukraine before spending authority runs out at the end of this month. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby did not elaborate on what the aid package would include.
But for comparison, the last aid package, announced on Dec. 6, included up to $175 million in air defense munitions, additional ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rockets Systems, artillery ammunition, High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles, anti-armor missiles, small arms ammunition, demolitions munitions for obstacle clearing, equipment to protect critical national infrastructure, and spare parts, ancillary equipment, services, training, and transportation.
After that, further aid for Ukraine will require congressional action.
The $106 billion supplemental aid package was requested by President Joe Biden but Republicans have said there’ll be no deal until the flow of illegal immigrants over the southern border is halted.
Both senate leaders claimed progress was being made but more or less said there’ll be no deal this week.
“Finding a middle ground is exceptionally hard, and both sides must accept they will have to make concessions and it’s going to take some more time to get it done,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the Senate floor yesterday.
“There are a number of significant issues our colleagues are still working to resolve,” and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) chipped in a few minutes later. “Our colleagues at the negotiating table are clear-eyed about the fact that getting this agreement right and producing legislative text is going to require some time.”
Translation: Don’t expect a Christmas miracle.
As for the sticking point in negotiations, McConnell hinted that the country’s asylum process is at the center of it.
McConnell spoke of GOP efforts to “produce meaningful policy change, fix our broken asylum system, and secure the southern border.” He added that “addressing the border crisis at home is a fundamental part of legislation that will help America with the national security challenges we face around the world.”
But don’t expect the longest-serving leader of the Senate Republican Conference in U.S. history to roll over on U.S. allies abroad.
McConnell went on to recite a litany of aggressive acts by foreign adversaries, including attempts by Iranian agents to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea, and said, “If America conducts freedom-of-navigation operations as peacetime exercises but fails to actually protect this freedom from immediate real-time threats, then we’re just play-acting as a global superpower.”
This line-in-the sand rhetoric cuts back to the point McConnell and other strength-abroad Republicans have repeatedly made about the war in Ukraine. Namely, you have to nip global aggression in the bud.
“Needless to say, our greatest strategic adversary and systemic rival is watching especially closely how we respond to this brazen challenge,” McConnell said.
—Savannah Pointer and Lawrence Wilson
A LOOK AT HALEY’S TOP BACKERS
Nikki Haley is tied to numerous political action committees that raised more than $28 million the last time they were required to disclose. The former U.N. ambassador’s top backers include Democrat donors and a Silicon Valley billionaire.
Three super PACs are supporting Haley: SFA Fund, Team Stand For America, and Stand For America PAC. About $17 million was held by SFA Fund.
A super PAC can solicit or make unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations, labor unions, and other political committees, according to the FEC.
Jan Koum, a Ukrainian-American tech billionaire is Haley’s largest single donor. Koum gave $5 million to SFA Fund Inc. between February and June. Koum is worth $15.3 billion according to Forbes.
Tim Draper, a California-based billionaire, gave $1.25 million to SFA Fund in June. Forbes estimates Draper’s worth at $1.2 billion. He’s given to both Republican and Democratic candidates.
Vivek Garipalli, co-founder of Franklin, Tennessee-based Clover Health, gave $1 million to SFA Fund in March. Garipalli is a consistent political donor who typically gives to Democratic Party causes.
Laurel Asness is the wife of Clifford “Cliff” Asness, the managing and founding principal of Greenwich, Connecticut-based AQR Capital Management LLC. She gave $1 million—her largest-ever political contribution—to SFA Fund in February.
Asness is also a major Republican Party donor. He has repeatedly given gifts of $100,000 or more to causes such as the Republican-backing Senate Leadership Fund and Congressional Leadership Fund. Forbes estimates that Asness is worth $1.6 billion.
Christopher Redlich Jr., a member of the board of the San Francisco-based Gladstone Foundation and the board of overseers at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, gave a total of $1 million to SFA Fund between March and June. He also made small contributions to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden during their 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
Steven Stull, president of New Orleans-based Advantage Capital Partners, gave $1 million to SFA Fund in June.
Ronald “Ron” Simon, founder and chairman of Newport Beach, California-based RSI Equity Partners, gave $1 million to SFA Fund in June. He’s a consistent Republican Party donor.
—Austin Alonzo and Lawrence Wilson
DOES RFK Jr’s STANCE ON VACCINES MOVE THE NEEDLE?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been one of the most consistent foes of the COVID-19 vaccines in American public life.
“I would argue that the science is very clear right now that they [vaccines] caused a lot more problems than they averted,” the presidential hopeful said in late April on the television program “Piers Morgan Uncensored.”
That skepticism places him on the side of many Republicans, though not former President Donald J. Trump, who launched Operation Warp Speed to develop the therapeutics.
But while polling shows some independents and younger voters leaning towards Kennedy, many Republicans remain loyal to Trump and wary of supporting the Kennedy family scion in his quest for the White House. The Epoch Times’ Jeff Louderback delves into why.
Setys Kelly, who is seeking a role on the Ohio Republican State Central Committee, sympathizes with Kennedy on vaccine-related issues but is sticking with Trump.
In her view, the latest Kennedy family member to seek the presidency is still a Democrat, despite the fact that he is no longer running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“I do think it would be a good thing if he [Trump] had some parts of Kennedy’s vision for unity while not compromising on core values. I think that would resonate with voters who are on the fence,” she told The Epoch Times.
Another point of departure is abortion. Kennedy backs abortion through the first trimester, a stance with which many conservatives may disagree.
Dr. John Witcher, who founded the nonprofit MS Against Mandates, told The Epoch Times at a Kennedy town hall that he hopes Trump will concede he erred in some ways when it comes to “the jab.”
“Though he never mandated them, he pushed the shots. He knows that a lot of his constituents are 100 percent against the vaccine, but he doesn’t want to admit that he was duped by Dr. Fauci,” Witcher said.
Time will tell if Kennedy’s presence in the race forces a rethink by the former president.
Note: The Constitution Ave team will be taking a break over Christmas. The newsletter will not be published next week, but will return to your inboxes on Jan. 3, 2024.WHAT’S HAPPENING
- President Joe Biden speaks at the memorial service for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
- Former President Donald Trump rallies supporters in Waterloo, Iowa.
- Israeli President Isaac Herzog speaks to NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly and Atlantic Council President Frederick Kempe.
BOOKMARKS
At The American Conservative, Lewis Andrews makes a provocative and, ultimately, optimistic argument about the relationship between that conflict and the country’s debt: “Today’s political acrimony is not so much a barrier to dealing with America’s fiscal troubles as it is the necessarily disguised first stage of actually doing so.”
The Epoch Times’ Steve Ispas and Lear Zhou follow up on another politically significant story that many other media outlets have quickly dropped—namely, the discovery of a secret Chinese biolab in California that included materials in a freezer that was labeled, “Ebola.”
The Epoch Times’ investigation uncovers new information on the owner’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The freezer labeled “Ebola”? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) never examined the bags within it, as they weren’t labeled.
Alongside the California biolab, Chinese ownership of American farmland has also given lawmakers pause. It’s part of a bigger trend.
Reuters reports that foreign ownership of farmland rose 8 percent in 2022. Yet, Chinese investments actually decreased from 2021 and made up under 1 percent of non-American agricultural holdings in 2022, according to the USDA report cited by Reuters. Canada (32 percent), the Netherlands (12 percent), Italy (6 percent), the United Kingdom (6 percent), and Germany (5 percent) held larger percentages of foreign-owned agricultural land.
James Bennet resigned from his position as New York Times editorial page editor after facing controversy over running an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). In a lengthy takedown of his former employer published by The Economist, Bennet opines that “The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias.”
Of course, media bias can take many forms, some more obvious than others. Writing in The Epoch Times in September, former journalist Randy Tatano catalogs how the media uses everything from lighting to carefully chosen adjectives to skew your views. It’s a handy guide, but in the end, none of us are immune to propaganda.
