The Biden Administration Is About to Make a Big Mistake

The White House’s involvement in Congress’s border talks appears to be taking a hard-right turn.

Immigration officials in the Biden administration have signaled to Senate Republicans that they’re open to a swath of Democrat-opposed border policies, including some that were previously tried by Donald Trump, reported The Wall Street Journal.

Those include alterations to the asylum process that would make it harder for migrants to get full asylum, by tightening the initial screening procedure, and expanding a fast-track deportation program for use across the country instead of just at the border. The administration has also said it’s open to designating other countries as “safe third countries” as possible deportation zones.

It also appears to be in favor of adding 12,000 beds to detention centers, raising the total to 46,500 beds, in an apparent attempt to compromise on a Republican proposal to detain asylum-seekers instead of releasing them with a court date, according to the outlet.

At stake for the administration is a contentious foreign aid package to Israel and Ukraine that the GOP has effectively held hostage in exchange for bigger changes at the border—though it also comes as the latest in a series of blows that Biden has made against his own voting base, particularly young voters and people of color, making it harder for the president to turn to their linchpin support again in the upcoming election.

“Extreme Republicans are playing chicken with our national security, holding Ukraine’s funding hostage to their extreme partisan border policies,” Biden told Congress in a speech on Wednesday. “And I’m willing to do significantly more. But in terms of changes to policy and to provide resources that we need at the border, I’m willing to change policy as well.”

“I’ve asked for billions of dollars for more border agents, more immigration judges, more asylum officers,” he added. “Republicans have to decide if they want a political issue or if they want a solution at the border. Do they really want a solution?”

Young voters have also come out in droves against Biden’s unwavering support of Israel, a move that could radically depress voter turnout for the incumbent.

A November survey by The New York Times/Siena College showed that the president was neck and neck with Trump among voters younger than 30, with Biden pulling at 30 percentage points and Trump at 29 percent. Meanwhile, conspiracy-touting independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. inspired 34 percent of the surveyed young voters.

“We write to you to issue a very stark and unmistakable warning: you and your Administration’s stance on Gaza risks millions of young voters staying home or voting third party next year,” read an open letter to Biden penned by March for Our Lives, GenZ for Change, and the Sunrise Movement.

House Republicans have launched an investigation into antisemitism at MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania, following a hearing with those colleges’ presidents that highlights the GOP’s hypocrisy when it comes to free speech.

Harvard president Claudine Gay, MIT president Sally Kornbluth, and University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill testified before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Tuesday about their responses to incidents of antisemitism on their campuses. All three women have been criticized for saying that responses to alleged antisemitic instances—including the content of chants popular at pro-Palestinian marches—need to be context-specific.

“After this week’s pathetic and morally bankrupt testimony by university presidents … the Education and Workforce committee is launching an official Congressional investigation with the full force of subpoena power into Penn, MIT, & Harvard and others,” committee Chair Elise Stefanik said in a statement Thursday.

“We will use our full Congressional authority to hold these schools accountable for their failure on the global stage.”

Stefanik had asked the university presidents whether students chanting “Intifada” violated the schools’ codes of conduct. Each president said it would depend on the context, with Gay pointing out that chants she finds “personally abhorrent” could still be protected under freedom of speech. Stefanik then insisted that this chant was calling for “genocide of the Jews,” a contested and subjective interpretation at best. A clip of her questioning that omitted the context—that the line of questioning was rooted on “Intifada” and not calls for genocide—then went viral, creating a firestorm.

Magill explained her stance further in a video on Wednesday, saying that “speech alone is not punishable,” but calls for genocide would be “harassment or intimidation.”

It does not seem to have occurred to Republicans, who regularly pride themselves on being the protectors of free speech, that they have launched a project to essentially police free speech on college campuses. The GOP seems to have no problem upholding free speech when, say, Donald Trump is threatening his political opponents.

Representative Jerry Nadler slammed his Republican colleagues on Tuesday for moves that “weaponize Jewish lives for political gains” while in reality doing nothing to “genuinely counter” antisemitism.

Republicans also don’t seem to have an issue upholding free speech when it relates to Islamophobia. Although they have taken many steps to supposedly address rising antisemitism, they have made no mention of the sharp rise in Islamophobia in recent months.

In fact, many Republicans are actually suppressing the free speech of groups trying to combat Islamophobia. In November, the University of Florida chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine sued state Governor Ron DeSantis, university chancellor Ray Rodrigues, and university president Ben Sasse for barring the group from campus.

The students, backed by the ACLU, accused them of “violating their [First] Amendment rights.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened doctors who perform abortions with felony charges, even if a court says they can conduct the procedure.

A Travis County district judge issued a temporary restraining order Thursday against Texas’s strict abortion laws to allow a woman to terminate her pregnancy. The woman, Dallas resident Kate Cox, and her husband had wanted to have a child, but doctors warned the fetus had a lethal abnormality and would not survive past birth.

Within hours, Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a warning of his own. “The Temporary Restraining Order (“TRO”) granted by the Travis County district judge purporting to allow an abortion to proceed will not insulate hospitals, doctors, or anyone else from civil and criminal liability for violating Texas’ abortion laws,” he said in a statement.

“This includes first degree felony prosecutions.”

Paxton acknowledged that Cox’s ob-gyn, Dr. Damla Karsan, was shielded by the order; the TRO “does not enjoin actions brought by private citizens”—a blatant threat to people who seek or provide abortions.

Cox was 20 weeks’ pregnant when she found out her fetus had trisomy 18, a condition caused by having an extra chromosome. This abnormality is almost always fatal, either before birth or soon after.

After Roe v. Wade was overturned, abortions were banned in Texas except to save the life of the pregnant person. Since trisomy 18 is only fatal to the fetus, not the patient, Cox’s situation did not qualify for a medically necessary abortion.

She filed a lawsuit Tuesday asking a judge to let her terminate her pregnancy. Thursday’s ruling was the first time in at least 50 years that a judge has intervened to allow an adult to get an abortion.

Paxton’s office can appeal the ruling and ask a higher court to prevent Cox from getting an abortion, but he has not yet done so.

This is not the first time that Texas’s cruel and restrictive laws have caused legal backlash. Over the summer, a group of 15 women sued the state after they were denied abortions. All of the women had wanted to carry their pregnancies to term but needed abortions because their fetuses had fatal anomalies.

One defendant, Samantha Casiano, vomited in court while telling the story of how she was forced to give birth to a baby without parts of the brain and skull. Casiano said she had to watch her child die four hours after being born.

Mike Johnson compared himself to Moses and said that becoming House speaker was part of God’s plan.

Johnson was the keynote speaker at Tuesday evening’s National Association of Christian Lawmakers’ annual gala. The NACL is a Christian nationalist organization that says its goal is to codify a “biblical worldview” into law. Both its founder and Johnson are big fans of the “Appeal to Heaven” Christian nationalist flag.

During his speech, Johnson said that a few weeks before Kevin McCarthy was ousted from the speakership, God told him to “prepare and be ready.”

“We’re coming to a Red Sea moment. What does that mean, Lord?” Johnson said, referring to when God parted the Red Sea so Moses could lead the enslaved Jews out of Egypt.

“When the speaker’s race happened and Kevin McCarthy, who’s a dear friend of mine, was deposed and vacated from the chair, oh wow! Well, this is what the Lord may have been preparing us for.”

“At the time, I assumed the Lord is going to choose a new Moses, and thank you Lord, you’re going to allow me to be Aaron,” Johnson continued, referring to Moses’s brother.

But as the votes dragged on, Johnson said, God told him, “Now, step forward.”

While Aaron did help Moses, he also nearly caused the destruction of the Israelites. When Moses went up Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments, the people grew tired of waiting. They convinced Aaron to make a statue of a golden calf, and Aaron was going to become the new leader. So really, Johnson said he was prepared to lead a rebel group that worships a false idol.

Johnson repeatedly eschews the separation of church and state, instead flaunting his extremist Christian beliefs. And yet he is still allowed to stay in power, despite the risk his ideology poses to the country.

Americans seem to have no interest in the Republican primary debates, even with two more of the mud-slinging spectacles freshly lined up by CNN for January.

Over the last several months, viewership of the debates has tanked. The first crowded debate in August hit a high of 14.2 million viewers, though those numbers have since plummeted, with just 3.2 million people tuning in to Wednesday’s debate between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Koch-backed former Ambassador Nikki Haley, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and biotech millionaire Vivek Ramaswamy.

The 90-minute punch-packed bully specials haven’t done much for any of the GOP contenders in the polls, according to aggregated data from FiveThirtyEight. As of Thursday, DeSantis’s and Haley’s numbers have barely budged; they continued to poll at a measly 12.7 and 10.6 percent, respectively.

At this point, it’s a scramble to gain an inkling of the attention so easily pulled by the GOP’s greatest showman, Donald Trump, whose strategy of outright avoiding public debates has proved effective among Republican voters—he leads the primary with around 60 percent of the vote, per aggregate polling.

To that point—Fox News’s sleepy town hall between Sean Hannity and a sluggish Trump was the most watched program on Tuesday, pulling just as many viewers as a full and formal debate stage, according to ratings released by the network.

If Americans are voting with their remotes, they’ve made it abundantly clear that none of the candidates on the GOP debate stage are of any interest to them.

Even DeSantis’s one-off, completely unrelated matchup against California Governor Gavin Newsom held more public interest than the most recent debate. Fox’s “Great Red vs. Blue State” publicity stunt, which saw the Florida governor thoroughly scorched and humiliated amid his own references to poop and science denialism, garnered 4.7 million viewers.

Still, faltering public interest might not be the only reason why Wednesday’s debate fell flat on its face. Droves of potential viewers complained online that they weren’t able to find it—perhaps unsurprising given that the debate was aired on The CW, the network most famous for airing Gossip Girl and the final (and worst) season of Gilmore Girls.

Taylor Swift was named the 2023 Time “Person of the Year” on Wednesday, and of course conservatives have been quick to claim that there is a vast liberal conspiracy to blame.

Right-wing commentator Jack Posobiec posted to X, formerly Twitter, early on Wednesday morning, writing that Swift’s “girlboss psyop has been fully activated,” and claimed that Swift is gearing up to be part of a “2024 voter operation for Democrats on abortion rights.”

Psobiec posted again, linking a video of Taylor Swift crying while talking about her frustrations with former Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn’s conservative voting record.

“I can’t see another commercial and see her disguising these policies behind the words ‘Tennessee Christian values.’ I live in Tennessee, I am Christian, that’s not what we stand for,” Swift said in the video. Swift broke her career-long political silence in 2018 to post on Instagram urging her followers to vote against Marsha Blackburn during the 2018 midterm elections when Blackburn ran for Senate.

Posobiec captioned the video of Swift, “The day the op was born.”

Former Trump adviser and resident internet twerp Stephen Miller also took to X on Wednesday night to air a similar grievance:

Conservatives’ claims that the billionaire superstar is secretly a political operative come after a remarkably apolitical year from Swift.

In 2022, she tweeted her disappointment with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but she hasn’t done all that much since. In October, Swift posted on Instagram encouraging young people to register to vote on National Voter Registration Day. As a result, over 35,000 people did so, contributing to a 23 percent increase in overall registrations. Swift’s call to action was distinctly nonpartisan.

So why all of the fuss? Do conservative men just hate to see a girlboss winning? Maybe a post by one of Donald Trump’s dear Fulton County co-defendants, Attorney Jeff Clark, can give us some idea of what’s going on.

Clark quote-tweeted Posobiec’s first post, and added, “This is what happens when we cede culture to the Left. Brainless youth raising themselves on Taylor Swift’s saccharine bland music and that washing over into the serious world of politics.”

Clark seems to hate Taylor Swift because he deems her representative of the so-called “brainless youth,” but to some degree, Swift is a uniquely apolitical pick for Time’s Person of the Year, with the possible exception of 2006’s “You” (seriously, what was that about?). But now it seems like conservatives are confused. Is Swift a major political player, or is she just a piece of leftist cultural flotsam washing up onto a more “serious” shore?

The answer is neither. Swift is a billionaire singer-songwriter and movie star who has kept everyone’s attention for the last 365 days. And ultimately, Swift was granted one of the biggest platforms in the world—the only women’s rights mentioned in the article anointing her as “Person of the Year” were Swift’s rights to her own master tapes.

Republican politicians are making morbid warnings about the future of the party’s narrow majority in the House in the wake of a mass exodus of their elected officials.

The dwindling GOP caucus is thanks in part to several major retirement announcements, including those of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, former Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry, and Representative Bill Johnson, as well as the expulsion of serial fabulist George Santos last week. Those vacancies set the House balance at 219–213 for the time being, meaning that Republicans need a practically united caucus—a rarity—to pass their conservative agenda.

“I can assure you Republican voters didn’t give us the majority to crash the ship,” wrote Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on X, blaming the Freedom Caucus for inducing the legislative nightmare that ousted McCarthy and stoking division.

“Hopefully no one dies,” she added.

So far, 30 members of the House and seven senators have announced they will not be seeking reelection in 2024, though some seem to be expediting their exit. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Wednesday, McCarthy revealed he wouldn’t even wait until the end of his term to ditch Capitol Hill, opting instead to vacate his seat by the end of the month.

But the retreat might be about more than just a legislative migraine. In recent years, Republican officials have become increasingly incensed by a lack of action by their party on Capitol Hill, voicing anxieties about returning to the campaign trail empty-handed.

“One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did,” lamented Texas Representative Chip Roy during a speech on the House floor last month, coming down hard on former President Donald Trump for failing to act on border security while wielding a Republican majority in the White House and both chambers of Congress.

“Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides well, ‘I guess it’s not as bad as the Democrats,’” Roy added.

Donald Trump is starting to plan his Cabinet for a potential second term, and the people on his shortlist are nothing less than nightmare fuel for democracy.

Trump is weighing different options based on two main factors: “pre-vetted loyalty to him and a commitment to stretch legal and governance boundaries,” Axios reported Thursday, citing anonymous sources close to the GOP presidential primary front-runner.

First and foremost, Trump needs a running mate. Former Vice President Mike Pence is out after he refused to overturn the 2020 election results and then ran a (lackluster and short-lived) presidential campaign against Trump.

Trump has apparently considered Senator J.D. Vance, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and failed Arizona gubernatorial hopeful Kari Lake. He has also mentioned Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is definitely gunning for a spot on Trump’s ticket.

Melania Trump wants her husband to pick erstwhile Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Trump has previously said he was open to having Carlson as a running mate. During a November podcast interview, Trump said he thought Carlson has “great common sense.”

Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, two of the most reactionary and vile former members of the Trump White House, could make a comeback. Miller has been floated for attorney general, while Trump is considering Bannon, who currently hosts a podcast that regularly traffics in white nationalism, as chief of staff. Kash Patel, a former member of the Trump administration and a current Trump adviser, could return for a top national security position.

Trump’s former assistant attorney general could also return for a top Justice Department job. Clark pushed department officials to say they were investigating claims of election fraud after the 2020 election. In August, Clark was indicted in Georgia alongside Trump and 17 other co-defendants for allegedly trying to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.

Trump’s inner circle is working hard to find ways to stack both the executive branch and his legal team with loyalists who will obey his every command. Trump has already said that if he is elected, he would be a “dictator” on the first day of his new term. If he succeeds at filling his Cabinet with allies, then it won’t just be day one.

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley claimed that TikTok is making young Americans more antisemitic, during the primary debate Wednesday night, but she got her one crucial stat so very wrong.

“For every thirty minutes that someone watches Tik Tok every day, they become 17 percent more antisemitic, more pro-Hamas, based on doing that,” Haley said, pulling those shocking numbers seemingly out of nowhere. The reason this statistic is so shocking is that it is false.

The study Haley is referencing was conducted by Generation Lab. That study claimed that research “suggests TikTok is a meaningful driver of the current surge in antisemitism.” The problem is that it conflated antisemitism and what it calls “anti-Israel” sentiment.

The Generation Lab survey asked 1,323 Americans under the age of 30 questions like “How true or false are the following statements: The Holocaust did not take place or the death toll of Jews is exaggerated,” alongside ones like “Please indicate your agreement or disagreement with the following statements: Israel has a right to exist as a homeland to the Jewish people.” The result is a study that is biased and that erases any and all distinctions between pro-Palestinian sentiment, concern about Israel’s ruthless bombing campaign of Gaza, and hateful antisemitism and bigotry.

TikTok has denied allegations that it is promoting pro-Palestine content, saying that young people just tend to be more pro-Palestine, a fact that has been borne out in a number of more rigorous studies.

Haley has previously called for the U.S. government to ban TikTok after a letter penned by Osama bin Laden circulated on the app in November. Haley has made talking about TikTok a central part of her campaign and promised that social media reforms would be some of her first major moves if she gets to White House.

One can only imagine how fearful a world would be where watching six and a half hours of hospital TV show edits and P.R. unboxing videos on TikTok would make a user’s antisemitism double. Thankfully, we don’t live in that world because it would be logically and mathematically impossible.

A candidate for former Representative George Santos’s old seat was convicted on January 6 charges after mounting an astoundingly stupid defense, according to a Department of Justice release.

Former Queens Republican Party District Leader Philip Sean Grillo was found guilty on Tuesday of one felony for obstructing the certification of the presidential election and four misdemeanors related to rioting on Capitol grounds. He has yet to be sentenced, though obstructing an official proceeding has a possible maximum sentence of 20 years.

Despite filming himself throughout the insurrection entering and exiting the Capitol building several times while shouting things like, “We stormed the Capitol” and “We shut it down,” and despite his experience in politics, Grillo testified in court that he had “no idea” Congress met inside the Capitol building.

“I’m here to stop the steal. It’s our f— House,” Grillo said in one clip.

“We f— did it! We got to the Capitol building. We f—did it! We f— did it, baby! We f— did it, you understand? We stormed the Capitol. We shut it down! We did it! We shut the mother—,” he said in another.

The court also saw videos of the local Republican official smoking weed and high-fiving rioters as he opened doors to help them flood inside the building, yelling at one point, “Our House.”

The New Yorker’s attorneys argued that Grillo “believed he was authorized to engage in the conduct set forth in the indictment,” according to legal documents.

The court didn’t buy it.

Grillo was arrested on February 23, 2021, by the FBI. He filed in May 2023 to run against Santos, whose own shady dealings have earned him a 23-count federal indictment, a scathing ethics report, and an expulsion from Congress. It is currently unclear if Grillo’s arrest will prevent him from participating in the February 13 special election to replace the disgraced lawmaker.