President Trump has bundled five issues together into a compromise package in negotiation with democrats to secure the border and reopen the government. Democrats have rejected the proposal, which is both expected and bewildering.
It’s expected because Democrats have been bitterly partisan during the entirety of the Trump Presidency; and it’s bewildering because all five issues on the table are issues which Democrats have overwhelmingly supported in the past.
Today, the Senate will vote on the compromise proposal and Democrats are largely expected to vote “no.” But here is how they have voted on each of the five components in the past:
The bill, End the Shutdown and Secure the Border Act, not only will take a first major step to secure the border, it includes policy Democrats have supported before. But, out of bitter partisanship, they are rejecting it.
And in case you still aren’t convinced that’s the case, let me just leave you with a sampling of Democrat quotes about immigration and the border wall that predate President Trump’s request for $5.7 billion in funding:
Call your Senator today and tell them to stop playing partisan games with our country’s security. Enough is enough.
Jessica Anderson
Vice President
Heritage Action
=============================
#EIE18 VIDEO RELEASE
Dr. Eva Moskowitz
"We’re going to have to go faster in order to solve the educational crisis we’re in.”
Last month, ExcelinEd hosted a thousand state and national policymakers, education leaders and advocates at the 2018 National Summit on Education Reform (#EIE18). Today, we’ve released videos of keynote speaker Dr. Eva Moskowitz.
Moskowitz founded the first Success Academy Charter School in 2006. Today, Success Academy serves 15,500 students across 30 schools in New York City; 75 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch and 87 percent of whom identify as children of color. They are the seventh largest school-district in New York state and number one in student achievement.
In 2018, 17,700 children lined up for 3,288 open Success Academy seats. This means that for every child who enrolled in new seats at Success, five students who hoped to enroll were placed on a waiting list.
“We have a limited amount of time to solve this problem,” Moskowitz said, “and so we’re going to have to be bolder. We’re going to have to go faster in order to solve the educational crisis we’re in.”
Highlights from Dr. Moskowitz's opening keynote at the 2018 National Summit on Education Reform.
Full-length recording of Dr. Moskowitz's opening keynote at the 2018 National Summit on Education Reform.
Learn more about education opportunity at ExcelinEd.org/Opportunity.
Join us at #EIE19
=====================
By Lawrence Wittner
950 words
Ever since the U.S. atomic bombings of Japanese cities in August 1945, a specter has haunted the world―the specter of nuclear annihilation.
The latest report from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, issued on January 24, reminds us that the prospect of nuclear catastrophe remains all too real. Citing the extraordinary danger of nuclear disaster, the editors and the distinguished panel of experts upon whom they relied reset their famous “Doomsday Clock” at two minutes to midnight.
This grim warning from the scientists is well-justified. The Trump administration has withdrawn the United States from the painstakingly-negotiated 2015 nuclear weapons agreement with Iran and is in the process of withdrawing from the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia. In addition, the 2010 New Start Treaty, which caps the number of strategic nuclear weapons held by the United States and Russia, is scheduled to expire in 2021, thus leaving no limits on the world’s largest nuclear arsenals for the first time since 1972. According to Trump, this agreement, too, is a “bad deal,” and his hawkish national security advisor, John Bolton, has denounced it as “unilateral disarmament.”
Furthermore, while nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements crumble, a major nuclear weapons buildup is underway by all nine nuclear powers. The U.S. government alone has embarked on an extensive “modernization” of its entire nuclear weapons complex, designed to provide new, improved nuclear weapons and upgraded or new facilities for their production. The cost to U.S. taxpayers has been estimated to run somewhere between $1.2 trillionand $2 trillion.
For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin used his televised 2018 State of the Union address to laud his own nation’s advances in nuclear weaponry. Highlighting a successful test of Russia’s RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile with a payload of 15 nuclear warheads, he also boasted of developing a working laser weapon, a hypersonic missile, and a cruise missile powered by a nuclear reactor that could fly indefinitely. Putin noted that the hypersonic missile, called Kinzhal(or dagger), could maneuver while traveling at more than 10 times the speed of sound, and was “guaranteed to overcome all existing . . . anti-missile systems” and deliver a nuclear strike. The cruise missile, displayed on video by Putin in animated form, was shown as circumventing U.S. air defenses and heading for the California coast.
When it comes to bellicose public rhetoric, probably the most chilling has come from Trump. In the summer of 2017, angered by North Korea’s missile progress and the belligerent statements of its leaders, he warned that its future threats would be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” The following year, referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, he bragged: “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger and more powerful one than his.”
The problem that government officials have faced when engaged in this kind of missile-rattling behavior is public concernthat it could lead to a disastrous nuclear war. Consequently, to soothe public anxiety about catastrophic nuclear destruction, they have argued that, paradoxically, nuclear weapons actually guarantee national security by deterring nuclear and conventional war.
But the efficacy of nuclear deterrence is far from clear. Indeed, despite their possession of nuclear weapons, India and Pakistan fought wars against one another, and, like the United States and the Soviet Union, came perilously close to sliding into a nuclear war. Furthermore, why has the U.S. government, armed (and ostensibly safe) with thousands of nuclear weapons, been so worried about Iraq, Iran, and North Korea acquiring them? Why does it need additional nuclear weapons?
Beginning in 1983, Ronald Reagan―under fierce public criticism for his nuclear buildup and disturbed that U.S. nuclear weapons could not prevent a Soviet nuclear weapons attack―initiated a nuclear safety program of a different kind: missile defense. Called the Strategic Defense Initiative (but derided by Senator Edward Kennedy as “Star Wars”), the program involved shooting down incoming nuclear missiles before they hit the United States, thus freeing Americans from any danger of nuclear destruction.
From the start, scientists doubted the technical feasibility of a missile defense system and, also, pointed out that, even if it worked to some degree, an enemy nation could overwhelm it by employing additional missiles or decoys. Nevertheless, missile defense had considerable appeal, especially among Republicans, who seized upon it as a crowd-pleasing alternative to nuclear arms control and disarmament.
The result was that, by the beginning of 2019, after more than 35 years of U.S. government development work at the cost of almost $300 billion, the United States still did not have a workable missile defense system. In numerous scripted U.S. military tests―attempts to destroy an incoming missile whose timing and trajectory were known in advance―the system failed roughly half the time.
Nevertheless, apparently because there’s no policy too flawed to abandon if it enriches military contractors and reduces public demands for nuclear disarmament, in mid-January 2019 Trump announced plans for a vast expansion of the U.S. missile defense program. According to the president, the goal was “to ensure that we can detect and destroy any missile launched against the United States―anywhere, any time, any place.”
Even so, all is not lost. Leading Democrats―including presidential hopefuls―have demanded that Trump keep the United States within the INF Treaty and scrap plans to expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Adam Smith, the new chair of the House Armed Services Committee, has called for “a nuclear weapons policy that reduces the number of weapons and reduces the likelihood of anysort of nuclear conflict.” Using their control of the House of Representatives, Democrats could block funding for the administration’s nuclear weapons programs.
And with enough public pressure, they might do that.
–end–
Dr. Lawrence Wittner, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).
