"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
Hon. Cecelia M.Espenoza Former Appellate Immigration Judge, BIA; Member, Round Table of Former Immigration Judges Source: Denverdemocrats.orgHon. Jeffrey S. Chase Jeffrey S. Chase Blog Coordinator & Chief Spokesperson, Round Table of Former Immigration Judges
“Sir Jeffrey” Chase reports:
Hi all: The bipartisan Children’s Immigration Court bill that we endorsed was introduced today.
The press release of Sen. Michael Bennet included this quote from Cecelia!
“The most vulnerable people in immigration proceedings are unaccompanied children. The Immigration Court Efficiency and Children’s Court Act of 2023 not only improves the process for children, it also provides necessary support and guidance to the overburdened immigration court system to address the needs of these children,” said Cecelia M. Espenoza, Former Appellate Immigration Judge.
Thanks to Sen. Michael Bennett (D-CO), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), Rep. Maria Salazar (R-Fla.), Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-MI), and Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR)! This is long, long overdue! A great bipartisan idea! 😎
Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-MI) Credit: Ike Hayman SOURCE: Wikipedia
Rep. Hillary Scholten, the only former EOIR attorney in Congress, and an indefatigable advocate for good government, due process, common sense, and the well-being of children had this to say:
“Let’s be clear about one thing–infants and children should not be in a situation where they have to stand trial in immigration court,” said Scholten. “We have a deeply broken immigration system in this country. But as we continue the long and complicated work for repairing it, of fighting for justice in a political climate that has grown callous to the suffering of children, the next best option is creating a court that works to accommodate their unique needs. As a mom, I’ll never stop fighting for these vulnerable kids.”
Heather Cox Richardson Historian Professor, Boston College
Professor Heather Cox Richardson writes in “Letters From An American” (01-02-20):
. . . .
It seems clear that, with no chance of proving this election fraudulent, Trump is now trying to incite violence. Nonetheless, Republicans who are jockeying for the 2024 presidential nomination want to make sure they can pick up Trump’s voters. While McConnell doesn’t want Senators to have to declare their support either way, those vying to lead the party want to differentiate themselves from the pack.
On Wednesday, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) announced he would join the efforts of his House colleagues to challenge Biden electors from Pennsylvania and perhaps other states. This will not affect the outcome of the election, but it will force senators to go on record for or against Trump. In a statement, Hawley listed Trump talking points: the influence of “mega corporations” on behalf of Biden and “voter fraud.” Hawley seems pretty clearly to be angling for a leg up in 2024.
On Wednesday night, Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) made his own play for the future of the Republican Party. He refuted point by point the idea that Trump won. He scolded his colleagues who are signing on to Trump’s attempt to steal the election, calling them “institutional arsonists.”
“When we talk in private, I haven’t heard a single Congressional Republican allege that the election results were fraudulent – not one,” he wrote on Facebook. “Instead, I hear them talk about their worries about how they will “look” to President Trump’s most ardent supporters.” They think they can “tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage,” he wrote, but they’re wrong. “Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government.”
Today, Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT), the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, launched his own bid to redefine the Republican Party with an attack on Trump’s apparent botching of the coronavirus vaccine rollout. In a press release, Romney noted “[t]hat comprehensive vaccination plans have not been developed at the federal level and sent to the states as models is as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable.”
But he didn’t stop there. Romney went on to say that he was no expert on vaccine distribution, “[b]ut I know that when something isn’t working, you need to acknowledge reality and develop a plan—particularly when hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake.” He offered ideas of his own, offering them “not as the answer but as an example of the kind of options that ought to be brainstormed in Washington and in every state.” After listing his ideas, he concluded: “Public health professionals will easily point out the errors in this plan—so they should develop better alternatives based on experience, modeling and trial.”
Romney’s statement was about more than vaccine distribution. With its emphasis on listening to experts and experimenting, it was an attack on the rigid ideology that has taken over the Republican Party. Romney has said he comes to his position from his own experience, not his reading, but he is reaching back to the origins of conservative thought, when Irish statesman Edmund Burke critiqued the French Revolution as a dangerous attempt to build a government according to an ideology, rather than reality. Burke predicted that such an attempt would inevitably result in politicians trying to force society to conform to their ideology. When it did not, they would turn to tyranny and violence.
Sasse’s point-by-point refutation of Trump’s arguments– complete with citations—and Romney’s call to govern according to reality rather than ideology are suggestive. They seem to show an attempt to recall the Republican Party to the true conservatism it abandoned a generation ago.
Much as the idea appeals to me, and much as I admire Professor Richardson, it seems like an noble, yet unrealistic, hope rather than a slice of reality. As noted by Professor Richardson, the current GOP abandoned any real values at least a decade ago. They now rely on the “anti-democracy right” to keep them in business as a party that wields political strength out of proportion to the minority of voters it represents.
I find it perversely amusing, yet fundamentally disturbing, to have heard a Trump voter on TV recently claim to have “voted for the GOP platform” not the man in the last election. She was woefully ignorant of the fact that the GOP had no platform in 2020 other than “whatever Trump says.”
The history of those in the GOP who have been openly critical of Trump and his cult supporters is that they generally either 1) fall into line behind Moscow Mitch and Trump on most issues (e.g., Romney, Collins, et al.) or 2) head for the hills (e.g., Flake, Corker). Unlike the Dems, where spirited opposition is always threatening to rock the boat, true opposition and public dialogue are nearly non-existent in today’s GOP.
Nor does the lack of GOP soul searching and public recognition of Trump’s toxic, highly dishonest, and fundamentally anti-American “non-leadership” and responsibility for his own defeat, as well as the disastrous course his “maliciously incompetent non-leadership” has set for America, lead me to believe that the GOP will head in a “new direction” any time in the foreseeable future.
For example, as I’m writing this Cruz and ten other corrupt GOP “Senators” (or “Senators-elect”) are openly spreading lies and preaching sedition 🏴☠️ in the U.S. Senate.
That shows where the anti-American “Party of Putin and White Nationalist Extremists” ☠️🤮🤥 is headed these days. They might be the minority in their party, but you can bet that they won’t suffer any censure, much criticism, or real consequences from the rest of the GOP for essentially fomenting treason and seeking to undermine the credibility of an election fairly and overwhelmingly won by Biden and Harris.
The real hope for America’s survival is that under Biden and Harris, the Dems can finally figure our how to turn their numerical advantage in the general elections into actual political power to govern. Remains to be seen. Certainly hasn’t happened to date! That’s why we’re in this position, with Dems having won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections, but held the Presidency after only five of those seven elections.
While I agree with some of what Romney says these days, he is somewhat unique in the GOP. He is one of the few GOP Senators with sufficient independent standing in his home state to be largely immune to criticism and attacks by Trump and his cronies.
Based on their overwhelming refusal over the past four years to put our national interests above Trump’s personal agenda, I (unfortunately) think that a “loyal opposition” springing from today’s GOP is more of a “Dem pipe dream” than a realistic possibility.
Excerpts from two reports from the Washington Post:
“Senate Republicans suffered a dramatic failure early Friday in their bid to advance a scaled-back plan to overhaul the Affordable Care Act, throwing into question whether they can actually repeal the 2010 health law.
Their latest effort to redraw the ACA failed after Sen. John McCain’s decision to side with two other Republicans against President Trump and GOP leaders. The Arizona Republican, diagnosed with brain cancer last week, returned to Washington on Tuesday and delivered a stirring address calling for a bipartisan approach to overhauling the ACA, while criticizing the process that produced the current legislation.
It was a speech that laid the groundwork for Friday’s dramatic vote.
The vote was 49 to 51 — all 48 members of the Democratic caucus joined with McCain and Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) to block the legislation.”
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“Republican female senators whose disapproval of the GOP health-care effort has at times endangered its progress are facing an increasingly pointed backlash from men in their party, including a handful of comments that invoked physical retaliation.
In the past week, Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) has been challenged by a male lawmaker to a duel. She and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) were told that they and others deserve a physical reprimand for their decisions not to support Republican health-care proposals. Murkowski, who voted with Collins against starting the health-care debate this week, was specifically called out by President Trump on Twitter and told by a Cabinet official that Alaska could suffer for her choice, according to a colleague.
The language of retribution increasingly adopted by Republican men reflects Trump’s influence and underscores the challenges GOP women can face when opposing the consensus of their party, which remains dominated by men, outside experts said. A videotape of Trump surfaced during the campaign revealing him bragging in vulgar terms about groping women, and some believed that opened the gates for further insults and degrading behavior toward women.
“Masculine dominance in the Republican Party is not only in numbers but in culture,” said Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University and the author of “Navigating Gendered Terrain: Stereotypes and Strategy in Political Campaigns.”
“When the person who is supposed to be the leader of the party shows it’s okay to use those sorts of attacks, whether they are specifically gendered or not, that is something that catches on at other levels,” Dittmar said. “We see it in the [elected officials] who feel it’s okay to say things like this.”
Gee, are there only three adults in the “romper room” that passes for the Senate GOP? According to NBC’s Chuck Todd on Today, at least a dozen GOP Senators were “secretly relieved” that McCain vetoed the bill. What happened to their backbones? Whatever happened to governing for the good of the country, rather than trying to make good on boneheaded campaign promises? How much taxpayer money has the GOP wasted with its endless bogus votes to repeal Obamacare and the ongoing legislative circus they have been staging? Probably enough to pay for health care in all the rural counties in America.
Oh, and the threats to let Obamacare tank (that’s the latest version of Trump(we don’t)care)? Those hurt most would be the poor and struggling folks out there in Trumpland. Interesting that Democrats were willing to stand up for them, even though the folks in Trumpland were not willing to stand up for the rest of us Americans. Yeah, and no amount of Kris Kobach, Mike Pence obfuscation and outright lying can change the fact that the majority of Americans voted against the Trump Circus in the first place.
I’ve read lots of articles about how the rest of us need to be kind, compassionate, and understanding of the needs and situations of those who voted for Trump. Generally, I agree with that. It’s one country, and we should take care of everyone, including those who have differing ideas and those who can’t take care of themselves. But, as the GOP would say, at some point there has to be at least a little sense of personal responsibility. Don’t the folks who irresponsibly voted for a supremely (and obviously) unqualified individual to occupy the highest office in the land, and compounded the problem by putting a party that can’t (and never really has been) able to govern in power, bear any accountability for the disaster that has followed?
And one more thing. Could we please have a moratorium on articles about the “legislative genius” of Mitch McConnell?
