We begin today’s roundup with Joe Scarborough’s piece on Trump’s cruel immigration policy:
Reagan took a position on immigration that most Republicans today would consider heresy, yet voters rewarded him with a decisive victory and a landslide reelection a few years later. Far less popular has been President Trump’s politically toxic policy of ripping children from their mothers’ arms. That depraved stance, adopted as a bargaining chip to use against Democrats, garnered support from only 17 percent of Americans . But it did earn him the antipathy of our closest allies, Pope Francis and every living former first lady. [...]
With the incarceration of more than 2,300 infants, toddlers and children unresolved, Trump’s policy of breaking up families remains an open wound on America’s character and a political crisis for the few Republicans who still believe they can salvage November’s midterm elections.
Here is Alexandra Schwartz’s analysis of how the Office of Refugee Resettlement is out of its depth on this crisis:
By definition, O.R.R. shelters are not designed for long-term residency. According to Flores v. Reno, a legal settlement in 1997 that established baseline conditions for the treatment of minors in government custody, the government is obligated to hold minors in “the least restrictive setting” according to their needs, and to release them into the custody of a parent or other family member “without unnecessary delay.” One terrible irony of the current crisis is that a government office whose explicit goal is to reunify children with their families is now being used to hold children who have entered its jurisdiction because the government has forcibly removed them from their parents’ care.
Stephen Collinson at CNN takes on Trump’s compassion gap:
You care, but does the President?
Anytime a commander in chief faces that question, it's a sure sign that something is wrong.
But Donald Trump and his administration are finding their humanity under scrutiny in the harrowing saga of kids separated from their parents after illegally crossing the southern border.
The administration's handling of the crisis lacked many things: coherence, competence and a duty to the truth over a crisis the President caused and blamed on others.
But there was something even more fundamental missing: compassion.
Paul Krugman:
The speed of America’s moral descent under Donald Trump is breathtaking. In a matter of months we’ve gone from a nation that stood for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to a nation that tears children from their parents and puts them in cages.
Amanda Schaffer has a harrowing account of one child’s experience:
“I asked the clinician, ‘When is this child going to be reunited with his parents?’ He was evasive. First it was ‘Oh, well, we don’t know.’ And then it was ‘Well, he won’t be reunited with his parents unless he behaves.’ The lack of compassion was scary, and it didn’t seem like there was really a plan.
Catherine Rampell, meanwhile, explains the biggest hoax in this debate:
The hoax is the premise that President Trump’s administration has invented to rationalize such crimes against humanity: his narrative that America has been “ infest[ed]” with hordes of crime-committing, culture-diluting, job-stealing, tax-shirking, benefits-draining “aliens.”
No part of that description is remotely true. Yet the Trump administration seems to have successfully shifted the national dialogue away from “Do we have a border immigration problem?” to “What’s the right way to fix our border immigration problem?”
Truly, it’s bizarre. Unauthorized border crossings have been falling over time.
On the topic of the Trump campaign’s possibly illegal campaign activity, Margaret Hartmann writes about the latest revelations:
Three sources tell the Washington Post that during the presidential campaign and after Trump was elected, National Enquirer executives would send Cohen digital copies of articles related to Trump for his approval prior to publication. Since Trump has a close relationship with David Pecker, chief executive of the magazine’s parent company American Media Inc., the stories tended to be quite positive to start with, but one person said Cohen would sometimes request changes, like a more flattering cover photo or headline change.
On a final note, Ryan Cooper at The Week makes the case for Medicare for all:
America is in the ludicrous position of flinging the equivalent of the entire economic output of Indonesia (population: 260 million) at its health-care system and still people are dying for the lack of $50 worth of 100-year-old commodity medications. [...] Liberals predicted that ObamaCare would "bend the cost curve" through various ultra-complicated incentives and rules. Some of them sort of worked, others did not. But overall spending has continued to far outpace the rate of inflation. The simplest answer is "all-payer rate setting," otherwise known as medical price controls. Effectively, the entire Medicare price schedule (which is much cheaper than other prices, but also needs to be rationalized) would be extended to every provider. This works great in many countries — but does not solve the problem of coverage. So at that point, you might as well complete a universal Medicare system and fold everyone into it.
In a normal country, the question of whether the nation can afford a generous national health-care system is a sensible one. But America is not a normal country. We already dedicate enough resources to fund two generous medical systems — indeed, if we paid Canada's medical prices, just existing medical taxes would already be more than enough to pay for a decent Medicare-for-all system. It's simply a question of driving a big enough political brush hog through the mess of the existing system. Clear out all the policy crud, and all Americans could enjoy the world's most generous coverage — and save money to boot.