Month: April 2019

Do you think that just maybe we really need to win this presidential election in 2020? Like, it’s not an option?

When looking at the dumpster fire we call the American political environment, I think we can all agree that the last thing we really needed was more Herman Cain. As I explained yesterday in my Senate Republicans Wish the Democrats Could Filibuster Trump’s Nominees piece, the senior GOP leadership in Congress certainly feels that way. They were already begging rank-and-file senators to call the White House and warn them off nominating Cain for a position on the Federal Reserve before Cain called them a “bunch of yahoos” on Wednesday night.

Herman Cain, whose prospects for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors have grown shaky before President Donald Trump even nominates him, likely gave his detractors in the U.S. Senate more reason to oppose his confirmation with comments at a University of Kansas lecture Wednesday night.

Cain, 73, the long-time business executive and 2012 presidential candidate, warned against the dangers of socialism, renewable energy and Medicare for all. He described the Senate Banking Committee, which would vet him if he were nominated, “as a bunch of yahoos.” He compared the right to health care to the right to own a Cadillac, and said God would decide when it was time to stop using fossil fuels.

“When God is ready for us not to have fossil fuels, he’ll find a way,” the former Godfather Pizza CEO told the audience at the Vickers Lecture Series at School of Business.

Cain also likened himself to Dr. Martin Luther King, and said: “You reach a point in your successful career where making more money isn’t inspiring enough.”

Cain’s reward for those remarks was to learn that his nomination is almost certainly doomed.

A fourth Republican senator announced Thursday that he would oppose Herman Cain if President Trump nominated him to the Federal Reserve Board, all but dooming his potential appointment.

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), a close Trump ally, told reporters that “if I had to vote right now, there’s no way I could vote for” Cain. The president had floated the businessman for the Fed board last week.

Cramer’s opposition makes him the fourth Republican to denounce Cain’s potential nomination, effectively ending Cain’s chance at confirmation. GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Cory Gardner (Colo.) and Mitt Romney (Utah) all came out against Cain on Wednesday.

With four of the 53 Senate Republicans opposed to Cain, he would not reach the necessary 51 votes for confirmation without getting support from Democrats, which is unlikely.

I’m not certain, but it looks like perhaps the Senate Republicans are drawing a hard line against Cain so that’ll have some cover to accept the other insane nomination Trump is floating for the Fed.

Stephen Moore may have been held in contempt of court for failing to pay child support and alimony and he may owe more than $75,000 in taxes to the IRS, but that doesn’t seem disqualifying to a lot of Senate Republicans:

“I know Stephen Moore, he’s a smart man, he’s the head of Club for Growth,” said Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL). “We have to do this in regular order, but I think he would probably be a good voice on the Fed. One, he’s got to be nominated first. Second, he’s got to be confirmed.”

“I said, ‘Pay your taxes; pay your support!’” Shelby said, when asked about Moore’s financial problems.

“Stephen is a solid guy, I know Stephen pretty well. I think Stephen has been right about a few things, with regard to the Fed’s treatment of interest rates, especially,” [Sen. Kevin] Cramer said. “I want to hear more about the specific issues surrounding some of his financial situations.”

The North Dakota senator added that he did not see Moore’s run-in with the IRS or the divorce settlement being disqualifying for his nomination if he had cleared up both issues.

So, the way it looks right now, the dumpster fire will get less Herman Cain and more Stephen Moore.

Back in May 2018, I wrote On Stefan Halper and Carter Page in an effort to settle whether the FBI counterintelligence unit had been justified in keeping tabs on Page during the 2016 campaign. I concluded that they had sufficient cause to enlist Mr. Harper for this job, but I never questioned whether this amounted to spying “on the campaign” of Donald Trump. It just didn’t seem like the right way of framing the matter.

The FBI hadn’t been spying on Page when he first came to their attention in 2013. They had been spying on two Russians: Victor Podobnyy, an SVR Agent whose cover was a job as the Russian Attaché of the Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York City, and Igor Sporyshev, a SVR Agent whose cover was a job as Trade Representative of the Russian Federation in New York City. The SVR is Russia’s  foreign intelligence service, so it’s the rough equivalent of our CIA. The FBI noticed that Page, a former naval intelligence officer, was interacting with Mr. Podobnyy and had handed him documents. It’s in the nature of intelligence work that when you’re observing the activities of adversarial intelligence agencies, you will discover Americans they have recruited or are attempting to recruit. That doesn’t mean that the FBI was spying on Carter Page when they noticed him make a handoff of documents, and it doesn’t mean that they were spying on him when he went to Moscow on July 7th and 8th, 2016, gave a speech critical of U.S. foreign policy at the New Economic School, and met with high-ranking Kremlin-connected figures.

Page’s actions aroused suspicions because he repeatedly walked right into routine surveillance operations. Mr. Halper, an FBI asset who lived and worked in Cambridge, England was enlisted to make contact with Page and later with George Papadopoulos only after those two gentlemen had contact with Russians officials, intelligence officers and/or assets.  That’s why I don’t wholly disagree with Byron York when he defends Attorney General William Barr’s congressional testimony that the FBI spied on the Trump campaign. In some limited ways, they did monitor the activities of two of the campaign’s foreign policy advisers, both of whom were traveling extensively abroad and meeting with Russians of interest.

But I think it’s highly misleading to suggest that this amounted to an effort to spy on the campaign. In a normal world, this kind of surveillance would be undertaken to protect a campaign. Ordinarily, a campaign would be grateful to learn that someone they were trusting to give them foreign policy advice might have been recruited or compromised by a foreign power.

After Carter Page left the Trump campaign in September 2016, the FBI successfully obtained a warrant that allowed them to look back at communications that Page had conducted during the campaign. Mr. York uses this retroactive element in the warrant to argue that Trump’s campaign was surveilled, but that’s an incredible stretch. To the extent that the campaign was surveilled in real time, it was only through Stefan Halper developing relationships with Page and Papadopolous to assess their intentions and the possibility that they were compromised or acting as agents of a hostile foreign power. In the former case, the FBI was investigating someone the campaign had fired precisely (or ostensibly) because of his connections to Russia. Why would the Trump campaign object to a retroactive look at his activities?

In the case of Page, he had been on their radar already for three years. In the case of Papadapolous, he was clearly being manipulated (at best) in a Russian intelligence operation. At one point, Papadopoulos was wittingly and willingly engaging with a woman he falsely believed to be Vladmir Putin’s niece. Again, this kind of diligence from our counterintelligence team is something a campaign ought to be grateful for rather than something that is seen as a violation of their privacy.

I think Barr was irresponsible when he characterized this as spying on the Trump campaign, although he was careful to note that he was unaware of any inappropriate activities and merely wanted to satisfy himself that the the proper protocols had been followed. I’m not sure I trust him to keep to that, but I don’t see a problem if he wants to take a look at it.

I didn’t draw this assignment today, but here’s a thread for you to discuss it anyway.

Welcome back, music lovers. Kraftwerk were among the pioneers of practically any subgenre of electronic music we now take for granted. Here is a clip from a concert in 1970:

And here’s the video of the complete gig for those who have the patience (I advise having the patience here – you’ll be rewarded if you love experimental music).

There are times when I wish I had been born a couple decades earlier, so that I could have been around West Germany when this scene was going on. German progressive music (also known by many as krautrock) was amazing. I got turned on to some of this simply because I was already listening to some technopop as a teen, but also because I had something of a soft spot for British progressive as well. I was told If I enjoyed Dark Side of the Moon I needed to check out early Tangerine Dream, Can, and a whole bunch of stuff from Kraftwerk that at the time was out of print. Tracking that stuff down was something of a hobby of mine for a while. These days we can just find it all on YouTube it seems.

More to come as time permits. In the meantime, cheers!

There are so many things about the modern world that are different from the 1920’s and 1930’s that I’m reluctant to make comparisons between the two eras. But there is one commonality that has me very concerned as we head into the 2020 presidential election. I’m worried about what will happen if a significant fraction of our economic elites in the business community conclude that their interests are better protected by siding with Donald Trump. This isn’t an ordinary progressive concern. It’s usually taken as a given that rich business executives will mostly side with the Republican nominee for president. The reason this upcoming election is different is because Trump and his political movement are different, and in many ways un-American.

This WikiPedia entry on the economics of fascism isn’t perfect, but it can serve as my starting point:

The first fascist movements arose in the last years of World War I. They were a form of radical nationalism carrying a promise of national rebirth, they blamed liberalism, socialism, and materialism for the decadence they perceived in society and culture, and they expressed an appreciation for violence and the role of leadership and willpower in shaping society…

…Fascism rose to power by taking advantage of the political and economic climate of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly the deep polarization of some European societies (such as the Kingdom of Italy and Weimar Germany), which were democracies with elected parliaments dominated by supporters of laissez-faire capitalism and Marxian socialism, whose intense opposition to each other made it difficult for stable governments to be formed. Fascists used this situation as an argument against democracy, which they viewed as ineffective and weak. Fascist regimes generally came into existence in times of crisis, when economic elites, landowners and business owners feared that a revolution or uprising was imminent. Fascists allied themselves with the economic elites, promising to protect their social status and to suppress any potential working class revolution. In exchange, the elites were asked to subordinate their interests to a broader nationalist project, thus fascist economic policies generally protect inequality and privilege while also featuring an important role for state intervention in the economy.

As a caveat here, I want to be clear that I’m not predicting an imminent reprise of the Holocaust or an outbreak of World War Three. I hope we can agree that fascism would have been undesirable even without extermination camps and wars of aggression. What troubles me is the potential for a breakdown in our basic system of checks and balances which protects our civil rights, economic freedom, and First Amendment rights.

The commonalities I see between today and the interwar period should be pretty obvious to you too. We have two sides of a political divide that are increasingly unable to work together, making a functional government harder and harder to assemble. The American public now holds Congress in extreme low regard and is beginning to doubt the integrity of many other core institutions, including our law enforcements agencies, courts, intelligence community and even the media.

One side of the political divide is promoting “a form of radical nationalism carrying a promise of national rebirth.” They are attacking liberalism and socialism. The attack on materialism doesn’t originate at the top with Trump, obviously, but it is a key element of the religious conservatives’ critique of American society. They call it “secularism,” and they are Trump’s most ardent and reliable supporters.

On the economic front, the Trump movement isn’t consistently aligned with big business (on free trade and cheap labor, for example) but their anti-regulation and anti-tax policies are a way of promoting the elites’ interests and protecting their social status.

Since the Great Recession hit in 2007-2008, the Democrats have been gradually moving in a more economically populist direction, and their current crop of candidates is collectively far to left on economics than in any previous presidential election cycle. While the party doesn’t resemble the #Occupy Movement, it is still perceived as threatening. Some of the leading Democratic contenders, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are explicitly threatening to the business community, and proudly so.

I’m not making an argument against populist progressive Democrats when I say that I worry about the consequences if we reach a tipping point where business leaders conclude they need to fall in with Trumpism in order to protect themselves from a bigger threat.  Just in terms of freedom of the press, our major media outlets are big business conglomerates now, and if they don’t rigorously defend our First Amendment rights, we will lose a free press and potentially our rights to free expression.  That’s what I hear echoing when I read that the fascists protected the economic elites and “in exchange, the elites were asked to subordinate their interests to a broader nationalist project.” I’d like to think that our business elite is different from the folks in Italy and Germany during the rise of fascism. I hope that they have enough patriotism and respect for our Constitution to see that it would be a mistake to align with Trump. But this isn’t something I have a lot of confidence in, and that’s what is keeping me up at night.

I guess this is less of a prescription than a warning. If the left in this country wants to run on an economically populist platform that scares the bejesus out of our big business community, they cannot afford to lose. We’re in a bad position now as a country because Trumpism by its nature corrupts the morals of its adherents and undermines support for our rights and institutions. When it begins to undermine our elites’ support for civil rights and the rule of law, that’s when it gets truly dangerous.  There is more to think about here than just needed reforms to our laws. We have to think about how what we do has an influence on how others react.

It’s looking like the left is going to inspire quite a reaction.  Are we prepared to face the consequences if we don’t win that battle?

Before the filibuster was eliminated for most presidential nominees, the White House needed to negotiate with the other party to assure that their candidates were at least minimally acceptable. Without a handful of votes from the other side, there was no way to get their people confirmed. President Trump would have been laughed out of town if he suggested he might select Herman Cain and Stephen Moore to serve on the Federal Reserve board. In retrospect, the old system often saved the Senate leaders of the president’s own party from having to play the heavy. Ridiculous nominees were generally rejected internally within the White House vetting process for lack of viability. If they somehow slipped through and were sent to the Senate, the opposition party played the bad guy by rejecting them.

This system has now been upended. The Republicans in the Senate have no cover anymore if they want to deny the president a nomination. The solution is to tell the White House in advance that they should not make these nominations because they’ll be rejected.

Senate Republican leaders are sending a message to members troubled by President Donald Trump’s controversial Federal Reserve picks: Speak up.

During Tuesday afternoon’s Senate Republican lunch, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell advised senators concerned about Trump’s selection of former presidential candidate and pizza executive Herman Cain and conservative economic commentator Stephen Moore to share their views with the White House now, before Trump officially moves forward with the nominations, a source familiar with the remarks told CNN.

The basic conversation here is pretty straightforward. A Republican senator or his or her staffer calls the White House chief of staff or the congressional liaison. They tell them that if they go forward with a nomination, they cannot count on their vote. If enough Republican senators send this message to the White House, they can dissuade the nomination from going forward. The benefit to the White House is that they can avoid embarrassment. This is also a benefit to the people who are under consideration for the jobs. The benefit for the Republican senators is that they can buck their own president quietly and behind the scenes and won’t come under pressure to back someone who is manifestly unfit for the position.

You can see how uneasy the Senate Republicans are about defying the president.

In hallway interviews with nearly 20 Republican senators on Tuesday, most were reluctant to candidly discuss Cain’s potential nomination. Many said they hadn’t heard the days-old news that Trump was planning to select him. Others opted to withhold comment, while some expressed vague reservations.

Most of them are uncomfortable even discussing these nominations. Some responses lack candor and others are outright disingenuous. They want to issue to disappear, but they are the only ones who can make the issue disappear. Most of all, they’d like to avoid being put in this position in the first place:

Republicans are in a slightly better position to confirm contentious appointees than they were before the 2018 midterm elections, with their new majority of 53, but they can still afford to lose only a few votes before any nomination would be doomed.

That concern prompted Sen. John Cornyn of Texas on Tuesday to warn the White House to consult in advance with Senate leaders on nominations like these.

The Senate is supposed to provide their advice and consent to presidential nominations, and certainly the hearing process can give them that opportunity. But it’s better politics to do most of the vetting prior to making any announcements. The president clearly expects the Senate Republicans to approve anyone he nominates because it is now technically within their power to approve people with no Democratic support.

Many warned that the Senate would break if the filibuster was weakened or eliminated, and here is an example of a worst case scenario. By blocking acceptable nominations during the Obama administration just to slow down business in the Senate, Mitch McConnell forced the Democrats to find a work-around. Now the Republicans are having difficulty rejecting ludicrous candidates because the White House sees no reason not to send them forward.

In Alex Jones removed from Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and Spotify, prompting free speech concerns on my personal blog, I mentioned the Media Bias Chart (above), which rates news sources on their bias and quality.  The next day, FiveThirtyEight displayed another chart about media bias from Nieman Labs that showed Democrats see most news outlets as unbiased. Republicans think they’re almost all biased.  After seeing both, I thought it would be interesting to compare the two to see if they agree and if they share any common patterns.  Besides, I’ve found it’s a good idea to listen when the universe is talking.

The first chart from Nieman Labs displays “‘net bias’ scores for news organizations: ‘the percentage who see each as `not biased at all’ or `not very biased’ minus the percentage who see each as `extremely biased’ or `very biased.’ On this measure, positive scores indicate that more people consider the news source unbiased than biased, and negative scores mean more people consider it biased than unbiased.'”

The news sources with positive scores in this study all fit in the green top box of the Media Bias Chart as “fact reporting” and “original fact reporting,” although the order differs; the Media Bias Charts ranks the Associated Press highest, followed by ABC News and CBS News, then NPR and PBS, followed by USA Today then The Wall Street Journal.  However, three sources that the Media Bias Chart displays in the green box as quality outlets, NBC News, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, all have negative scores.  Both The New York Times and The Washington Post fall in the “skews liberal” column, while NBC sits at the left end of the three broadcast networks, although still in the “minimal partisan bias or balance of biases” column, so conservatives may see them as biased despite the quality of their reporting.  To test that, I’m sharing charts of the perceived biases of news sources side-by-side with the results from Democrats on the left and Republicans on the right.

Nieman Labs quoted the original study’s findings.

“Democrats, including Democratic-leaning independents, tend to see most news organizations as unbiased, except for Fox News, Breitbart News, Mother Jones, the Huffington Post, and Vox,” the authors write. “Republicans, including Republican-leaning independents, tend to see all news organizations as biased. The two exceptions are Fox News and The Wall Street Journal.”

Sure enough, Republicans think that NBC News, The New York Times, and The Washington Post are all very biased, while Democrats consider them relatively unbiased.  In addition, Republicans appear to be picking up the slight differences in bias among other news sources.  Of the outlets with positive ratings, The Wall Street Journal skews conservative, while PBS, CBS News, and ABC News are all arrayed from right-to-left in the top center box, exactly the same order in which Republicans rate them as being biased.  In addition, the Media Bias Charts shows the Associated Press slightly to the left of PBS, which could be enough to flip their order on the chart from Nieman Labs of net bias.  All this is enough to make me conclude that for fact-reporting sources, slight differences in ideological slant are enough to affect their perceived bias by readers and viewers.

For sources that fall in the analysis, opinion, and propaganda boxes, ideological positions appear to be less important than the quality of reporting.  Both Democrats and Republicans think Vox and Mother Jones are biased, but Republicans think that CNN is more biased than either, while Democrats rank it between USA Today and The Wall Street Journal.  Looking at the Media Bias Chart might explain why.  While CNN is only as far left as The New York Times and Washington Post, it straddles the line between fair and unfair interpretations of the news, so its quality of reporting is rated lower than Vox, Mother Jones, and MSNBC, all of which present fair interpretations of news according to the Media Bias Chart while still in the “skews liberal” and “hyper-partisan liberal” columns.  The Republicans seem to pick up on this, rating CNN as the most biased news source, even more so than MSNBC, which makes no effort to hide its liberal leanings, especially in its evening shows.*  Both liberals and conservatives consider The Huffington Post as biased, an assessment the Media Bias Chart agrees with.  It also considers its reporting to be unfair interpretations of the news, so its lower quality places it below CNN on a survey of all respondents.  Finally, the most biased sources overall are Breitbart News and Fox News, which are both “hyper-partisan conservative” and “nonsense damaging to public discourse.”  Democrats drive that rating of Fox News, as they consider it the most biased news source, while Republicans consider it the least.  The power of ideology returns!  At least both sides agree that Breitbart is biased.  That’s reassuring.

*I think they are right to consider CNN biased, but I think it’s a personal bias against Trump, not an ideological bias against conservatives.

The New York Times simply will not stop documenting all the foreign labor and undocumented workers the president employs at his golf courses, hotels, and resorts. As a result, he’s basically been shamed into fixing the problem, but he’s trying to do it as quietly as he can.

In March, seven veteran maintenance workers at Trump National Jupiter, the golf club 18 miles north of Mar-a-Lago that Mr. Trump purchased in 2012, were informed that the work force was being reorganized. Workers had until March 22 to provide proof that they were legally eligible to work in the United States, they were told.

One by one, the workers — from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico — began to depart. Only one of the seven was a legal resident.

It’s curious that Trump says the country is full and cannot accept anymore legal immigrants or asylum seekers from Latin America, but can’t find more than one in seven legal residents to maintain his greens and fairways.

No one from the management at the Jupiter club, or at any of the Florida Trump properties, responded to interview requests for this story, nor did officials from the Trump Organization. But none of the immigrants doubted that club managers were aware all along that they were undocumented, and were disappointed to see them go.

“They knew immigrants working there are here illegally,” said Giovanni Velásquez, a 23-year-old from Guatemala who said he had been allowed to continue working as long as he did because he was needed. “The know-how that I have, the work I do, can’t be easily replaced. No American wants to do it.”

I don’t actually believe no that no American wants to work maintenance on a Trump-branded golf course, but they’re scarce enough to make it less of a headache to just hire from some local employment contractor and let them worry about the legal liability. Everyone knows that these workers are mostly undocumented, and no one apparently wants to put in the extra effort or pay the extra cost of searching out American citizens to do the work.

Trump will find a way to get it done now, since he’s boxed himself into a corner. But you never hear about greed and laziness as factors in why business owners aren’t hiring Americans for menial jobs.

Nancy has already written two pieces today about President Trump’s purge at the Department of Homeland Security, but I also have a few things to say about this fiasco, For starters, the president botched the plan by announcing an illegal replacement for Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. I could almost forgive Trump for this because he hit a snag that did not apply when he skirted the Senate confirmation process to appoint Mick Mulvaney to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Matt Whitaker to head the Department of Justice.

In those cases, he relied on separate clauses in the Vacancies Reform Act (although, in the latter case, it also required a dubious legal opinion from the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel). These exemptions enabled him to make temporary appointments of someone other than the next in command. What he didn’t realize is that the law which created Department of Homeland Security specifically supersedes the Vacancies Reform Act and states unambiguously that the order of succession must be followed. In this case, since there is no confirmed Deputy Secretary, the position must go to the Undersecretary for Management.

Claire Grady, who is the acting deputy, was actually confirmed as the Undersecretary of Management, so Trump has no authority to place anyone else in the job. And that means that if he wants Customs and Border Patrol Director Kevin McAleenan to head the department, he is going to have to fire Undersecretary Grady and leave all three of the top jobs vacant.

Unfortunately for Grady, despite coming up in the ranks as a civil servant, she enjoys no protection precisely because she was confirmed in her position by the Senate and thereby became a political appointee.  If the Trump administration is feeling generous, they will at least find her a decent paying job as compensation for their screwup.

Republican senators are looking at the spectacle of this uncoordinated purge and they are not impressed. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas says “It’s a mess.” Committee on Homeland Security chairman Ron Johnson of Wisconsin says, “I am concerned with a growing leadership void.”

Finance Committee chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa was already seething about the president’s comments on wind power, and now he’s found another war path. Specifically, he’s trying to protect Lee Francis Cissna, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, who is rumored to be next of Trump’s chopping block at DHS. Cissna worked on Grassley’s staff when he was chairing the Judiciary Committee, which explains why the senator is so incensed about this obscure position. He has been trying to intervene with Mulvaney, who has moved on from his stint at CFPB to serve as Trump’s chief of staff.

Grassley blames the purge on Stephen Miller.

The GOP senator was also critical of Stephen Miller, a senior White House adviser who has been one of the leading voices within the administration that has lobbied for the wholesale housecleaning at DHS.

“I think it would be hard for him to demonstrate he’s accomplished anything for the president,” Grassley said. When asked to elaborate, the senator chuckled and added: “It’s pretty hard to elaborate on it when there hasn’t been any accomplishments.”

In fact, Miller is catching a lot of flak for being the driving force behind Trump’s obsession with immigration and the current purge.

Moderate GOP Rep. Tom Reed of New York said he would prefer to focus on issues like infrastructure, drug pricing and health care in the 2020 election cycle, saying the issue of immigration is being kept alive “for political purposes.”

Reed also took a veiled shot at Miller: “One hard-liner is not going to dictate the outcome of this.”

As for Trump, most Republican lawmakers are keeping their criticism muted, but Senator John Thune let his displeasure slip when he observed, “He thinks it’s a winning issue. It works for him. It may not work for everybody else.”

There has been a concerted effort among Republicans in the Senate to stop the carnage, and no shortage of people who raced to the microphone to defend Kirstjen Nielsen from White House attacks.

“I thought that Nielsen was doing a fantastic job,” added Joni Ernst of Iowa, the No. 5 Senate GOP leader. “I would love to see some continuity. I think that’s important.”

…“Strikes me as just a frustration of not being able to solve a problem. Honestly, it wasn’t Secretary Nielsen’s fault. It wasn’t for lack of effort on her part. I don’t know if there’s anybody who’s going to be able to do more,” said Cornyn.

The bottom line is that there is growing chasm between the White House and the congressional Republicans. They don’t think the president’s immigration freakout is good politics for them and they are in no mood to enable him by going through confirmation processes for the entire leadership of the Homeland Security Department. All they see is impulsiveness, spite, radicalism and incompetence.