Over there: Trump stoops still lower
In all the years since Teddy Roosevelt became the first White House resident to travel overseas while in office, presidents have represented the nation in foreign lands with dignity and above the partisan fray. And then there’s Donald Trump.
In Japan for an international summit, he palled around with Russia’s president for life Vladimir Putin before the cameras: “Fake news is a great term, isn’t it? You don’t have this problem in Russia but we do.” Vlad answered in English: “We also have. It’s the same.” (Putin has journalists and other critics killed.)
Then, one of those enemies of the people asked a critical question: whether he would tell Russia not to meddle in American elections.
“Yes, of course I will,” said the successor to Lincoln and FDR, goofily grinning with a fake serious voice towards Putin: “Don’t meddle in the election, president.”
May God please help one of these Democrats end this next November.
— New York Daily News
Grow up, everyone: Immigration solutions needed at the border
Toddlers without diapers. Children as young as 7 caring for infants they just met. Soap and toothpaste nowhere to be found. Dangerous overcrowding. Illnesses spreading. A father and daughter drowning.
This is the agonizing humanitarian catastrophe at the U.S.-Mexico border. President Trump did not cause it; a huge flow of desperate people, mostly from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, did. But the president’s punishing primal-scream response has exacerbated the misery.
Our great nation is a beacon to people from around the world. Right now, they are arriving by the thousands from the Southern Triangle, fleeing gang violence, domestic violence, chaos and bad economic conditions. When they reach the border, they typically request asylum.
Not all qualify; indeed, many surely do not. But under international and U.S. law, all are owed a hearing. Instead, today, men and women and children languish in unfit detention facilities for weeks and months on end, and the anguish only mounts.
This is not a choice between orderly and open borders, as the president pretends. It is a choice between humane and decent management of a problem and a juvenile, ideological refusal to wrestle honestly with it in hopes that it can be shouted away.
Congressional Democrats, who just agreed with Republicans on a necessary short-term humanitarian aid package, are offering a sane long-term way forward. They would:
create new avenues for migrants to apply for refugee status elsewhere, rather than converging on the border.
invest in a crushingly overwhelmed immigration court system, which has exhausted its capacity to process people and make swift judgments about whether they deserve asylum.
expand programs to track asylum seekers while they await hearings.
codify into law better humanitarian standards, including access to recreation time, basic supplies and child-welfare services.
and invest in Central America to fix the problems fueling the outflow, not petulantly cut off aid as Trump has done.
On the campaign trail, many would-be presidents have coalesced behind making border-crossing a civil rather than a criminal violation. That wouldn’t rationalize the flow; it would invite it to grow.
— New York Daily News