Rule one. Don't ever trust Republicans.

When reading about a good vote by any Republican, remember rule one. Don't ever trust Republicans.

Senate GOP Gives Trump Green Light on Slush Fund.

Fealty to Trump Wins Out Again

In an early morning vote, the GOP-controlled Senate passed the reconciliation bill funding immigration enforcement — but without any language in it barring President Trump’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund.

Hours earlier in the marathon session, Republicans had defeated an attempt by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to explicitly ban the slush fund. But Republicans had votes to spare, allowing vulnerable GOP Sens. Susan Collins (ME), Dan Sullivan (AK), and Jon Husted (R-OH) to vote for Schumer’s measure and campaign on opposing the slush fund even though all three senators ultimately voted in favor of the final bill.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was the only GOP senator to cross the aisle and oppose the final bill.

Two GOP senators who were loudly opposed to the slush fund — Thom Tillis (NC), who is not seeking re-election, and Bill Cassidy (LA), who lost in the GOP primary — ended up voting for the final bill. “I’m taking the cue from my colleagues that are in cycle,” said Tillis. “Whatever suits their purposes.”

The Trump administration has been playing a nod-and-wink game on the slush fund all week long.

In Senate testimony Tuesday, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche declared the slush fund dead but refused to commit to it in writing. On Wednesday, President Trump publicly declared his “love” for the slush fund and claimed to be unsure whether it was in fact dead.

On Tuesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) tweeted that the purported victims of Biden DOJ “weaponization” could still press their claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act, even if the slush fund were dead.

In response to Graham, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, who signed the settlement agreement that resolved Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS by creating the slush fund, tweeted: “We’re on it.”

Woodward’s tweet was deleted Wednesday morning.

“Republicans are trusting the word of Todd Blanche, who built a career on lying, that the administration will just drop this slush fund,” Schumer warned on the Senate floor before last night’s final vote.

It appears likely that the Senate GOP’s failure to ban the slush fund will at the very least encourage the Trump administration to make abusive use of the Federal Tort Claims Act to reach sweetheart settlements with Jan. 6 rioters and plotters, along with other purported weaponization victims.

The Trump DOJ has already shown itself more than capable of friendly, non-adverse settlements of weak cases it could have defended, not just in Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS, but in million-dollar paydays for former Trump advisers Michael Flynn and Carter Page. (Talking Points Memo).

Can we stop Bill Pulte's appointment as the head of Intelligence?

3 GOP senators vote to bar Pulte from serving as temporary director of national intelligence

Three Republican senators — Sens. Bill Cassidy (La.), Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) — voted for a Democratic amendment Thursday to bar Bill Pulte from serving as temporary director of national intelligence while he also serves as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA).

The three GOP senators voted for an amendment to the budget reconciliation package sponsored by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
It would have prohibited any Senate-confirmed head of another federal agency or department from performing the role of director of national intelligence in an acting capacity.

The amendment failed on a vote of 49-49.
All three Republicans have questioned Pulte’s credentials to oversee the nation’s intelligence agencies.

“The best I can tell you is he’s not qualified, but I don’t know anything about him other than that,” Cassidy told The Hill earlier this week.

Collins, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, questioned whether Pulte — the heir to the founders of one of the nation’s biggest homebuilding companies, Pulte Homes — even has a security clearance.
“I do not know Mr. Pulte at all. I don’t know whether he has any intelligence or military background. I don’t even know whether he has a security clearance,” she said Tuesday, appearing surprised by President Trump’s selection of Pulte to serve as his principal adviser on national security matters.

Murkowski told The Hill this week she wasn’t aware of anything in Pulte’s background that would qualify him to preside over the CIA, the National Security Agency and other critical intelligence agencies. “I know what he has been doing in the housing sector; I’m not so familiar with why the president would have selected him,” she said.

Senate Democrats are incensed by Trump’s decision to put Pulte in charge of the nation’s intelligence agencies after he used his role as the FHFA director to dig up mortgage information to support criminal allegations against Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook — the first Black woman appointed to the central bank’s board of governors — and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D).

Cook has been embroiled in a legal battle with Trump, who attempted to fire her from the Fed. James filed a $250 million lawsuit against Trump, his children and the Trump Organization on fraud allegations.

Democrats are threatening to block an extension of enhanced surveillance authority under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in protest of Pulte serving as director of national intelligence even temporarily.

Warner called Pulte’s appointment “insulting” to the intelligence agencies.

“The president is saying, ‘Oh don’t worry, this guy can do both the mortgage job, the housing job and the intel job.’ That’s insane,” Warner said.
Other Republicans have suggested they would vote against Pulte if Trump nominates him to serve as director of national intelligence for a longer term.

“Very few Senate-confirmable positions come with statutory eligibility requirements. There are good reasons why the Director of National Intelligence is one of them. Anyone performing this role of such immense public trust must have the extensive national security experience required by statute, and no nominee who falls short of this requirement will earn my vote,” former Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said in a statement Wednesday. (The Hill).

One more thing.

If you want more information about Trump's goal in appointing Pulte, the WSJ has it.

Exclusive | Trump Urges ‘Less Shackled’ Pulte to Fire Intelligence Community Employees

President Trump said he wants Bill Pulte, his incoming acting director of national intelligence, to begin the process of firing a large number of employees as part of a shake-up of the U.S. intelligence community.

Tuesday's election in California ends at last.

Meet the new #1 candidate for Governor in California.

No final vote count yet in the Los Angeles Mayor's Primary, though incumbent Mayor Karen Bass has secured her place on the November ballot. Former reality TV star Spencer Pratt and District 4 City Councilmember Nithya Raman are fighting for the second spot.

This 'n that.

Hatred grows in America.

I saw the Lynn Ahrens-Stephen Flaherty musical, Ragtime, at Lincoln Center this week.

The chilling lyric, “There were no Negroes then. There were no immigrants," echoed loudly across the auditorium of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in NYC .

When the show was first produced in 1998,at the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts, now the Lyric Theatre, on 42nd Street, there was no Trump administration.

Racism was America's painful scar then. The children of immigrants sat comfortably in the deeply-cushioned, tufted seats of the newest Broadway house, awaiting the start of the lavish production.

The White House’s Latest Provocation Is ‘Grotesque and Terrifying and Juvenile’

“They walk among us.” The glowing green letters emerge ominously against a dark backdrop. Above them hover the words “aliens” and “declassified,” suggesting the release — long awaited in some corners of the internet — of secret government files concerning extraterrestrials. Slowly, tantalizingly, more text appears: “For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret.” Then the big reveal: It’s not the trailer for a horror film; it’s a White House web page, posted last Thursday. And the scary creatures in question aren’t extraterrestrials; they’re the other kind of aliens — the immigrant kind, the kind hunted by ICE.

“Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives,” the page announces. “They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences.” That’s the joke: Human beings are described as nonhuman invaders. Fascism, but make it a troll.

This web page, which invites users to look up the number of immigrants supposedly arrested on charges of criminal activity in American cities and towns, belongs to a subgenre of Trumpian gestures that are menacing and sophomoric at the same time. “Grotesque and terrifying and juvenile,” is how Ernesto Verdeja, a genocide-prevention expert at the University of Notre Dame, described it to me. These gestures are hard to write about: The ugliness is undisguised, so what is there to say? And yet, these statements, step by preposterous step, change the world we live in.

With phrases like, “They do not belong here” and, “Deport them all,” the page struck me as an incitement for Americans to commit acts of violence against immigrants. But Benjamin Valentino, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, thinks that the purpose of the page is not to get Americans to do anything: It’s to get them to do nothing, while the government commits its campaign of cruelty against millions of people just trying to live in peace. “They want a majority of the population to turn their backs,” he said. “That’s all that’s necessary.”

Valentino co-founded the Early Warning Project, which assesses the risk of mass atrocities around the world. To be sure, anti-immigrant violence in the United States does not approach the scale of the atrocities Valentino usually studies. But the dehumanizing language of the sort used by the Trump administration is, he said, “a pretty standard indicator” of risk, a necessary if insufficient condition of mass violence directed at a particular group.

“It’s not that it turns normal people into murderers,” Valentino said. “It’s that it turns them into bystanders.”

To the extent that the Trump administration has pulled back on its violent anti-immigrant campaign, it has done so because nonimmigrants have stepped up — in the courts and, especially, in the streets. The most dramatic confrontations took place this past winter in Minneapolis, but in the months since the federal government ended its occupation of that city, resistance has continued. In Newark, N.J., demonstrators have been protesting the conditions at the Delaney Hall ICE detention facility. At least 63 people have been arrested in the past week alone. In New York City, a relatively new coalition called Hands Off NYC has, since January, trained more than 7,000 volunteers to peacefully resist ICE. The Aliens web page, Valentino thinks, is intended to discourage this kind of activity.

“The key is that you are supposed to see your city with a big red dot over it,” Valentino said, referring to a map on the website, then click to read, supposedly, the number of immigrants who have been charged with crimes. (For example, “Jamestown, N.Y.: 10; Larceny, Obstructing the Police; Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nigeria.”) “And you see the charges — do you want to risk your life for this kind of person?”

When the page went up, the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration advocacy organization, happened to be hosting a gathering of data experts. Participants thought they saw something interesting. “The page is poorly coded, badly designed, and yet weirdly transparent about some things the administration hasn’t been transparent about before,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the council, told me. It appeared that the map was based on raw data of ICE arrests — information that the government had mostly kept secret since the beginning of President Trump’s current term. The map is possibly the best document to date of the scale of the ICE campaign, which, it shows, has raged not only in big cities but in small towns, where it’s sometimes less visible.

As is usual for the Trump administration, the figures are decontextualized and misrepresented. In addition to the map, the page contains a supposed tally of “encounters,” a term that has one meaning in 1970s sci-fi and another in Customs and Border Protection-speak, where it typically refers to instances in which immigrants are apprehended. What struck me after spending too much time staring at the page was that it wants you to be afraid of all aliens: the space kind and the “illegal” kind, but also the “legal” kind, foreign-born people who have been living in this country for decades. As for the counter, it’s tracking nothing. The numbers just tick upward at a perfectly steady pace, one every second and a bit.

Underscoring the sophomoric aspect of this astonishing document is the fact that it’s shot through with references to “The X-Files.” I caught only one of them: The last lines say, “The truth is no longer out there. It’s right here. Right now” — a nod to the show’s tag line. Verdeja, the Notre Dame professor, grew up with the show, so he pointed out some other echoes, such as the combination of interplanetary warfare and a deep-state conspiracy. But superimposed on all that pop culture are the white supremacist tropes. The sentences about aliens “walking among us, living in our neighborhoods,” Verdeja said, read to him like invocations of the Great Replacement theory, which has become so familiar as to seem almost mainstream. “It’s similar to the way Jews were talked about in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s,” Verdeja said.

He made the comparison gingerly, wary of falling into an alarmist cliché. But the ideologues of Trump’s immigration policies are taking no such pains. A couple of days after the “Aliens” page was published, Gregory Bovino, the former head of the U.S. Border Patrol who oversaw the federal immigration operation in Minneapolis, traveled to Portugal for a meeting of far-right politicians to discuss “remigration,” a concept that refers to the forcible displacement of millions of people on the basis of their ethnicity in the wake of World War I — what we now call ethnic cleansing.

Driven by the same nativist and xenophobic ideas, the United States adopted the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924, which ended mass immigration by introducing national-origin quotas designed to favor Northern and Western Europeans and exclude nonwhite immigrants almost entirely. These quotas stayed in place for four decades — until they were repealed just over 60 years ago, which is when the White House page claims the story of the aliens begins.

The point of making historical connections is not to say that any two actions, or any two eras, are exactly alike. Context always changes. But it’s important to see that this web page isn’t just a troll. It didn’t come out of nowhere. Provocations like this are part of an old and terrible story, and it’s still being written today. (M. Gessen, New York Times.)

One more thing.

Tateh, an immigrant, is a principal character in Broadway’s Ragtime, based on the Doctorow book.👇

New York City is winning.

If you haven't been keeping score, or are disbelieving the news, it really is 2-0 games Knicks over the Spurs in the (M)NBA Finals.

The second game last night in Texas ended Knicks 105 Spurs 104.

The 3rd game takes place in New York on Monday.

Go, Knicks!

Have a good weekend. See you on Tuesday!