Tag: Brookings Institution

NPR's Audie Cornish speaks with David Brooks of The New York Times and E.J. He laid out a very good case on obstruction but felt he couldn't charge him because of the Justice Department rule that says you can't indict a president. CORNISH: Let me let David jump in here because you looked at this existentially, that there are a broadly kind of three-pronged threat, looking at Russia being one of them, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks another and then the White House itself, Donald Trump. He's always trying to interfere with investigations, do things that are against the rules. And so that undermines our sort of governmental infrastructure. The Russians are undermining our informational infrastructure by introducing falsehoods into the public debate. CORNISH: I want to go back to the attorney general's press conference. BROOKS: Well, I'd given him faith that he was being accurate in what was in the report. There have been some more moves among Senate Republicans. DIONNE: Well, yeah, that's two, right, exactly - maybe David, too.

(As these are annual numbers, only larger counties have large enough populations for statistical significance, and, therefore, not all counties are included on the charts below.) When we consider the foreign-born population, we often think largely of immigrants from Latin America. But as our analysis last year noted and as Brookings Institution analysis of the new Census Bureau data suggests, more foreign-born residents of the United States come from Asia than from Latin America. The larger the circle on the chart above, the larger the percentage of the foreign-born population in that county which is from Latin America. They did so in 2016, as the chart below indicates. There’s a correlation between the urban population in a county and its vote. (In that chart, we’ve rescaled the circles to represent the overall population of foreign-born individuals in the county, not just those from Latin America.) If we consider the change in the foreign-born population, particularly the change in noncitizen foreign-born residents per county from 2008 to 2016, the places with the biggest increase in that population since 2008 were more likely to vote Republican. If we scale the circles to the populations of the county, the chart looks like this: Clearly Trump’s rhetoric on immigration, often echoing Bannon’s, was resonant in the 2016 campaign. Clearly, too, places with more foreign-born residents voted more heavily against him.

Trump’s US supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is certainly competent at dodging difficult questions. In his confirmation hearing in Congress this week, he was asked for his opinion on Roe v Wade, the supreme court case that legalized abortion nationwide. It has been reaffirmed many times”. And it means that Kavanaugh’s confirmation – any confirmation to the supreme court – must be put on hold. The president is under criminal investigation. Do we really think that same president should be picking a judge who may ultimately decide, for example, whether the president can pardon himself? The three men who wrote the Brookings paper “have either been before the Senate for confirmation, worked on supreme court or other confirmations, or both”. According to Senator Patrick Leahy, 99% of Kagan’s documents from her time in the White House were made available to the senate judiciary committee. If Kavanaugh and his Republican champions believe he is a qualified justice, then they should act like it and give the Senate proper time to vet him. Is Brett Kavanaugh the problem, or the US supreme court itself?

For months, the political world has hung on the question of whether Donald Trump’s former aide Michael Cohen would cut a deal with federal prosecutors to spill the beans on the president. For the White House, it seems, the question of whether Cohen will cooperate with prosecutors is not if, but when. Fox News, the president’s approved station, sprinkled its broadcasting schedule on Wednesday with Cohen-bashing, convening a panel to paint Cohen as an unethical lawyer, an opportunist, a unregistered lobbyist and an inconstant friend. Matt Drudge, the circus barker of the far right, was more succinct on Thursday, branding Cohen “the Rat”. But one thing is for certain is this doesn’t look good, and people in the Trump ranks are talking about it. “Because Michael was always considered to be the ultimate loyalist, and this really throws a monkey wrench in that whole theory.” A second former Trump campaign adviser, Sam Nunberg, said that Cohen’s decision to hire the Washington power lawyer Lanny Davis made it clear he was looking for a deal. “Any political person would know: the minute he signed Lanny Davis, it was over,” said Nunberg. His decision to release the audio recordings with Trump could annoy prosecutors who would have preferred to preserve such material as potential evidence, legal analysts say. And other former aides who have struck deals with prosecutors, including Michael Flynn and Richard Gates, did not grant major interviews or send their lawyers on television in advance of their agreements, leading to speculation that Cohen may yet be seeking some detente with Trump. “My wife, my daughter and my son have my first loyalty and always will,” he told ABC this month, adding: “I put my family and country first.”

Dionne of The Washington Post and Brookings Institution and Mary Katharine Ham of The Federalist about the political news of the week including the Korea summit, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt and Ronny Jackson's withdrawal as VA nominee. Earlier today, the world witnessed a historic handshake between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in. DIONNE: Well, if North Korea gives up all its nuclear weapons, I promise I'll say yes to that. And Kim Jong Un seems more to be the driver of events so far. HAM: Yeah, I mean, I think he does deserve some credit for his unorthodoxy and unpredictability, changing the calculus in a really intractable problem. CHANG: Well, about that strategy, I mean, in the next several weeks, the president's expected to sit down with Kim Jong Un. CHANG: But it wasn't just Jackson this week. CHANG: Sure. I mean, the the list of people who have left is staggering compared to any other administration, and a lot of the people who leave leave with their reputations much diminished from where they were before, which I think is dangerous for the country, putting aside what you think of Trump, 'cause it's going to be very hard for Trump to attract people to government - good people to government 'cause they don't want to be soiled by the very process you describe really well. CHANG: All right, that's E.J.

Dionne of the Washington Post and the Brookings Institution join NPR's Ari Shapiro to discuss the week in politics. Dionne of The Washington Post and the Brookings Institution. SHAPIRO: David, you've been critical of President Trump's reluctance to criticize Putin, and yet the actions of the United States in this case seem to be pretty tough on Russia. My thinking on all this is that their Trump is better than our Trump, that Putin, like Trump... SHAPIRO: (Laughter). SHAPIRO: Although... DIONNE: If... SHAPIRO: If his goal has been to undermine NATO and the European Union and these other Western alliances, his actions sure seem to have brought those countries together in this case. SHAPIRO: David, do you think this China-North Korea meeting is helpful or harmful to American interests with North Korea? And but to run the second-largest bureaucracy in the U.S. government without any administrative experience or health care administrative experience strikes me as putting him in an impossible position. SHAPIRO: A lot of people in Washington don't have to imagine it. SHAPIRO: David Brooks and E.J. BROOKS: Thank you.

Adolescents are notoriously difficult to reason with. Canada has 36 million people. The U.S. has more than 326 million people. The news has been filled for years with horror stories about wait times and poor care (or no care) within Veterans' Affairs (despite its $200 billion budget) and the Indian Health Service. If the government cannot provide care for 9 million veterans (those actually enrolled in the VA health care system) or 5.2 million Native Americans, what makes anyone think they can provide it for 330 million Americans? Politicians' cost projections are always wrong. Current projections put the costs of Sanders' proposal at $32 trillion dollars. In practical terms, this will means tens of millions more people streaming into the country demanding "free" health care. When the funding deficits hit -- as they always do -- then the public discovers the first hard truth: Single-payer isn't a health care provision system; it is a health care rationing system. There are always unanticipated problems, and government is too big to respond nimbly or change quickly, even when the need is great.