Does your vote count?
Survival lessons for 2024
This guy, this Texas guy, Representative Al Green.
He’s a little older now, at 76.
If you hear him speak it’s obvious he’s got a mellow manner about him, is very articulate and reasonable. He’s a lawyer and for 26 years was a Justice of the Peace. He then ran for Congress in a district that includes a big section of our country’s 4th largest city, Houston.
After undergoing abdominal surgery, he was aware of an important vote that was about to happen. He spoke with his doctors who told him it was okay to return to Congress briefly for that vote. He showed up in his hospital gown, voted and returned to his hospital bed Where he’ll have to stay a few more days.
His effort was decisive in changing the outcome. The House Republican leaders were outraged and claimed it was a surprise attack, a trap set by Democratic leaders. Democratic leaders denied it, claiming they had no foreknowledge of his appearance. When CBS News contacted him by phone in his hospital bed, he replied “Nobody on the Hill pressured me. I went there to help a good man keep his reputation. What they [Republicans] did was wrong.”
Three Republicans refused to follow Trump’s direction and also voted against the effort of House Speaker Mikey Johnson to impeach the Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas.
Once again, it displayed the weak position of Johnson, who only got elected to his position after several others failed to win the support of their GOP colleagues. After leaving the House chambers redfaced, he indicated a second vote would occur after a GOP member returned ( currently out for cancer treatment) and that vote would succeed in impeaching Mayorkas. No other Cabinet Secretary has been impeached in more than 150 years.
Even if he’s correct, every Republican in the House is aware that the Senate is unlikely to convict Mayorkas because - as many Senators have publicly noted - Mayorkas has committed no high crimes nor misdemeanors, the written standards for impeachment.
The second vote, like the first, is just a political game that won’t lead to what Republicans claim they want, the complete closure of the Southern border from people trying to move here and become US citizens. Even those using all the legal ways to accomplish that. But they lack the honesty to say out loud what they’re thinking which includes “if they’re brown, turn them down.”
Beyond that, they’re thinking ‘since more jobs have been filled during Biden’s first three years than by any other president in history… and inflation has receded from its post-pandemic high for more than a year and is likely to drop further in this year… and corporate profits are setting new record highs… Biden’s economic performance will not be a campaign issue. The price of gasoline remains a little higher, the only negative on his great record.
Their old effort to convince voters that Hunter Biden’s poor decisions have profited his dad has been a complete failure so the only issues that they still have are immigration and the costs to aid Ukraine and Israel in their efforts to thwart their attackers.
The immigrant issue is the only one that remains supported by a majority of the country. So the fake effort to get Mayorkas fired is simply a campaign ploy.
The GOP has been pushing fear of immigrants for decades and they’re still overinflating the numbers of immigrants and the risks they pose. For the past 30+ years, under Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden immigration reform has been thwarted because of Congress members who refuse to permit compromise. And it’s especially obvious that the GOP House leadership is fully committed to prevent any reform before Election Day.
The Senate reached a solid compromise this week but Trump ordered Congressional Republicans to block that bill and they meekly and quickly complied. Border control isn’t what they want at all. They just need one issue to try and maintain their weak holds on multiple Congressional seats.
Making Mayorkas the fall guy for that is just their continued play-act.
(Jan 8, 2024 photo of Secretary Mayorkas, Credit: Kaylee Greenlee Beal/Bloomberg via Getty Images © Provided by CBS News)
So let’s take a look at the impact of immigrants on our country, based on facts. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, tasked with regular projections of economic performance with the passage of new bills, wrote this last Wednesday about immigration’s impact on the economic health of the US:
Putting that in better perspective, for the next eleven years, our country will produce $50 billion per month more in GDP due to increased immigration to this country. And $7.58 billion will be collected in tax revenues every month till 2034.
Contrary to the stories pushed by Republican lawmakers, all the incoming immigrants won’t be a drain on the US treasury. They’re generating jobs, wealth and income for our government’s use. For our use.
“If you are a caregiver, if you are a baby boomer, if you are someone who cares for someone who is aging, we currently do not have the economic or social structural capacity to take care of our seniors. We will increasingly not have that if we, quote-unquote, lock up our border and shut down migration. The thing that has distinguished U.S. economic performance from other countries like Japan or other developed economies is the fact that are pro-immigration policies allow us to continue in our economic growth, whereas similar countries with anti or more closed border policies to experience economic stagnation when they submitted themselves to this xenophobic border panic narrative that Fox News, frankly, seeks to pedal and instill in so many people.”
Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in 2/8/24 interview with Chris Hayes, per Frances Langum at Crooks & Liars.
Sensible immigration policy reform is necessary, which is the only thing both parties agree on. The Republican Party has declined in popularity for three decades, which leaves them with two options: offer policy prescriptions that more Americans want, or resort to the promotion of unreasonable fears and the promotion of fake scandals.
Tragically for this country, they’ve been choosing the second option repeatedly for more than three decades. Whitewater, the suicide of Vince Foster, the endless investigations of the terror attacks that cost 4 American lives in Benghazi, Hillary’s use of a private email server (as other Secretary of States have done), Senator Kerry’s record of medal-winning service on a swiftboat in Vietnam, and the multiple attacks on the unelected Hunter Biden, who owed back taxes that he’s since paid.
Secretary Mayorkas is simply the latest pawn in the GOP game plan because they haven’t accomplished any successful policies - nor proposed any - other than tax cuts that have mostly benefited the top 2% of the wealthiest Americans - in the past 50 years.
Advice to remember from writer James Baldwin.
And a hat tip to Gloria Gaynor…
If Gloria can survive all that, we can outlast the tinpot dictator wannabe.
Speaking as an immigrant, only two things, two pieces of paper, protect me from being rounded up: My US passport and my naturalization papers. Both could be easily revoked by the likes of Trump and Bannon and Steven Miller. After 60+ years as a US citizen, it's a sobering thought.