McCain aims to revive immigration reform when he returns to Congress

Before leaving Washington for treatment for brain cancer, McCain, R-Ariz., said he broached the idea with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. The two collaborated on unsuccessful immigration legislation in 2013 as part of the bipartisan effort known as the “Gang of Eight.”

President Trump’s goal of building a U.S.-Mexico border wall might provide an opening for a bigger bargain on the issue, McCain said.

“Immigration reform is one of the issues I’d like to see resolved,” McCain told The Arizona Republic in a Thursday interview. “I’ve got to talk to him (Schumer) about when would be the best time. I think there are all kinds of deals to be made out there. I really do.”

Uphill battle under Trump administration

His goal remains a long shot in the Trump era, with Senate Majority Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., running the Senate and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., leading the House of Representatives.

Even at times when the White House was friendly to the idea, success on the issue has proved elusive for McCain, who has worked on comprehensive immigration reform bills for more than 10 years. But while former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama wanted immigration reform, Trump has appeared hostile to any approach that would balance border-security investments with a pathway for citizenship for immigrants without legal status who have settled in the United States.

McCain’s remarks came a day after Trump backed a Senate bill from Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and David Perdue, R-Ga., that proposes sharp cuts to legal immigration.

But the six-term McCain, who turns 81 on Aug. 29, also is in a more reflective place in his long Senate career as he faces a serious health challenge and undergoes chemotherapy for brain cancer.

“We’ll know in a few weeks,” McCain said of the cancer on Thursday in a meeting with Arizona Republic editors and reporters. “I hate the use the word ‘beat it,’ because it’s not a matter of beating. You either get cured or you don’t get cured.”

A plea for bipartisanship

The nation’s eyes were on McCain in the early hours of July 28when he gave a decisive thumb’s down to the Senate Republican “skinny repeal” health-care legislation, which had the effect of derailing the current GOP push to undo the Affordable Care Act, one of Obama’s signature accomplishments.

Earlier in the week, McCain — who returned to Washington after a surprise July 14 craniotomy to remove a blood clot that revealed the cancer — entranced his colleagues with a memorable July 25 floor speech in which he decried the Senate’s current state of partisan dysfunction and urged a return to bipartisan camaraderie and compromise.

McCain said he was “shocked” the rest of the Senate stuck around to hear him speak.

“I think they stayed to listen, not so much because of my vote, because of what I was trying to say,” McCain said. “They’re not happy with this polarization. They’re not happy with this not getting anything done. That’s not why they come to the Senate.”

More support for reform

In the meeting with the newspaper’s editorial board, McCain said Schumer is in agreement about the need to return to immigration reform.

“Basically it’s what we passed last time, brought up to date with the new challenges, like opioids,” McCain said. “It’s still there. We got 68 votes, I think, the last time. I don’t think that’s going to be any different next time.”

One longtime champion of comprehensive immigration reform applauded McCain’s return to the fray, despite the long odds.

“It’s difficult to imagine Trump signing a comprehensive immigration reform bill because he’s so focused on stoking his base,” said Frank Sharry, the executive director of the liberal-leaning national pro-reform organization America’s Voice.

“But you can see how more and more people are moving away from Trump as his poll ratings sink, as his lying becomes endemic, and his temperament is so obviously juvenile,” he said. “It’s conceivable that a group of bipartisan-minded Republicans in the Senate can make common cause with bipartisan-minded Democrats.”

McCain would be the natural leader of such a movement, Sharry said.

In 2013, McCain and Schumer led the bipartisan Gang of Eight, which also consisted of Republican Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Marco Rubio of Florida, and Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois, Michael Bennet of Colorado and Robert Menendez of New Jersey.

Their legislation aimed to balance border security with a pathway to citizenship and a modernized visa system.

In his new book, Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle, Flake positively recounted his role in the immigration deliberations, which resulted in a bill that passed the Senate but went nowhere in the Republican-controlled House.

“The Gang of Eight — four Republicans, four Democrats — proved that the process as designed can actually work,” Flake wrote in the book.

For his part, McCain said he realizes it won’t be easy, and doesn’t know if he could ever persuade to Trump and McConnell to go along.

“I don’t know, but what I do know is that if we could pass it through the House and Senate the way we passed it through the Senate last time, it’s like this Russia (sanctions) bill, it doesn’t matter,” McCain said. “Do you think he signed it because he liked it?”

Concerns about border wall and merit-based immigration

In conversations with The Republic, McCain was skeptical that the Senate would support a wall as envisioned by Trump, or its price tag. He emphasized, as others have, that certain stretches of the border don’t need a wall because of natural barriers.

“I’m not against a border wall, OK, but go to China and you’ll see a border wall there,” McCain said. “We need technology, we need drones, we need surveillance capabilities and we need rapid-reaction capabilities. But to think that a wall is going to stop illegal immigration or drugs is crazy.”

McCain said he supports merit-based immigration but worries about how farm labor, such as the workers who pick lettuce in Yuma, and other low-skilled workers would fare under the Cotton-Perdue bill that Trump is backing.

“I think you have to consider that we do want high-tech people, but we also need low-skilled people who will do work that Americans won’t do,” McCain said. “I wouldn’t do it. Even in my misspent youth, I wouldn’t do it.”

Trump, Europe, and terrorism: There’s a lot he gets right

Our real problems are twofold. One, we have to deal with the rise of a political ideology that calls itself Islamic and radicalizes people into terrorism. The other problem is mass migration, which creates the pool of potential recruits and a pathway into Europe for those exporting terror.

Europe has accepted a large number of people from the developing world at a rate so fast that it has overwhelmed parts of the host population. This is not my judgment, but the judgment of the very Europeans who let those migrants in. The liberal elite that two years ago announced that we would welcome anyone who could make it here is now sending them home.

Britain has taken in refugees from Syria; Muslim migration mostly arrives here from the former British colonies of Bangladesh and Pakistan. Again, most of these folks are as British as I am — but some do not integrate, and segregation in inner cities is becoming self-evident. This exacerbates that toxic mix of politics, race, and religion that has given the security services the job of having to trace an estimated 23,000 subjects of interest.

They’re failing. Time after time, perpetrators of terror attacks turn out to be known to the authorities. One of the men who executed the London Bridge atrocity was actually featured in a TV documentary about radical Islam. He was filmed praying by a jihadi-style flag.

Why wasn’t he arrested just for doing that? Because, like the US, we have very liberal speech laws and you can’t just throw a man in prison for expressing the wrong view. Our liberal culture is one of the best things about being European, but it also hinders us in fighting those who cynically exploit it. A foreign-born criminal in Britain can delay deportation for years by invoking human rights laws.

We don’t want to close our borders. We don’t want to lock innocent people up. We don’t want to police free speech — although we do speak to a script. Whenever a terror attack happens, our politicians say: Everything is under control, keep calm and carry on, nothing must change. This is testing the patience of the public. Things are changing; they’ve changed dramatically for the families of the dead.

Through this veneer of political correctness, Trump cuts like a knife.

Trump gets it. Not the policy detail or the fine detail of the challenge we face, but he gets the raw, instinctive sense that things can’t go on as they are — that every time the elite say things are fine, they lose credibility and things feel even worse.

The free world was led for eight years by the sublimely intelligent Barack Obama, who left office with things in pretty much the same disorder. The promise that Trump holds out is, to be honest about the situation and take the steps necessary to change it. Where he oversteps the line, the law will hopefully restrain him — as the travel ban illustrates.

But he is right about the need for a Western-Israeli-Saudi alliance against terrorism. He is right about the basic need to restore control to migration. He is right to project an image of the West that is tough and unashamedly Western. The West should cease apologizing for what it is.

The British Conservative government stands by the President in part because it needs him: Britain voted to leave the EU, and now Trump is Britain’s closest diplomatic partner.

The situation recalls Voltaire, asked on his death bed if he’d renounce the devil; he replied: It’s a bit late in life to start making enemies.

So, the state visit will go ahead, and there will be protests. But if Trump could only get off Twitter for five minutes and focus on the essentials of the Western alliance, he’d discover that Europe is edging closer to his way of thinking on the most important issue of our time. There is, increasingly, more agreement between us than disagreement.

Why Donald Trump thinks Germans are bad, very bad

According to a report in German publication Der Spiegel……..

US President Donald Trump has charged Germans for cornering business and jobs in the US. While blasting Germans, Trump said, “The Germans are bad, very bad. See the millions of cars they are selling to the US. Terrible. We will stop this.” Donald Trump has been a vocal critic of trade imbalance between Germany and America that is largely tilted in German favor.

In January.

He had targeted German car-makers BMW and Mercedes-Benz comparing their high sale volume in America with low sale volume of Chevrolet in Germany and had threatened to impose 35 per cent import tariff on BMW on its cars imported from its Mexican plant. But, it is not only about German car-makers. In fact, data from the Wall Street Journal shows that apart from General Motors, with a market share of 17.1 per cent in April 2017 and Ford with market share of 15.1 per cent, the two largest automakers in the US, most other automakers in the top ten are foreign companies. i.e., Japanese Toyota has a market share of 13.5 per cent, German Chrysler has a market share of 12.4 per followed by Nissan’s 9.9 per cent, Honda’s 9.2 per cent and Hyundai’s 4.2 per cent.

In response to Trump’s criticism, German vice chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, Angela Merkel’s deputy, quipped that the US automakers needed to come up with better cars. He termed products of American automakers “worse, weaker and more expensive”, an Associated Press report said.

According to a Reuters report, the US has a trade deficit of $65 billion with Germany, its third largest negative trade balance. The top slot goes to China with which the US has a trade deficit of $349 billion. Japan accounts for $69 billion deficit, coming in at the second spot. And going by Trump’s assessment of Germans in context of running trade deficit, China and Japan should be even bigger headaches for the US economy then.

In fact, according to a Financial Times report, Trump signed an executive order days before Chinese Xi Jinping’s US visit in April 2017 authorizing a study to look into the $500 billion annual trade deficit of the US. The study has a mandate of 90 days to analyze the issue country country-by-country and product-by-product, the report said. Also, Trump tweeted before the meeting that ” it will be a very difficult one in that we can no longer have massive trade deficits and job losses”

After Trump-Jinking Summit, the Trump Administration hailed it as a historic meeting with a breakthrough trade deal that would cut the US trade deficit with China as Beijing agreed to open its market for certain US companies and product categories. But experts are not satisfied.

According to a Forbes report, “the deal might actually increase America’s bulging trade deficit with China”. To support its point of view the Forbes analysis further says, “China over the last decade has been progressively closing off its market, and this trend is now proceeding faster than ever under current supremo Xi Jinping”.

Trump would often talk about “unfair economic ties” with Japan. He blames Japan of currency manipulation and unfair trade practices and went on to the extent to say Japan a “drag on the US economy’. He made the comment days before his White House inauguration on January 20 that drew sharp criticism from Japan.

Trade deficit was one of the central campaign themes of Donald Trump. He, in fact, has blamed trade deficit for slowing down the US economy. When the GDP data came out in April, he tweeted his displeasure, “The U.S. recorded its slowest economic growth in five years (2016). GDP up only 1.6%. Trade deficits hurt the economy very badly”.

Syria’s Civil War & War That Didn’t Happen

On the morning of Aug. 21…

Reports emerged from a Damascus suburb of a satin gas attack, a grim event in a civil war that had already cost the lives of 100,000 people and spurred the largest refugee crisis in a generation. Chilling videos of women and children, some twitching, others lifeless, brought out the strongest reactions yet from an international community that has sat on the sidelines for much of the country’s grinding two-year-long civil war.

Ten days later, after releasing to the public an intelligence report determining that Syrian President Bashar Assad fired the weapons and killed at least 1,429 people, President Barack Obama announced that he was going to ask Congress for authorization to strike Syrian chemical weapons installations. While Assad and his allies dismissed these allegations, the rebels seeking his overthrow appeared poised for a major breakthrough.

And then it never happened. US public opinion was dead set against another intervention in the Middle East. Russia, one of Assad’s closest backers, managed to convince Damascus to cede its chemical weapons stockpile to a UN Security Council mandate. The Assad regime has reportedly been cooperating with UN inspectors as it goes about now eradicating its stockpile.

All the while, the civil war rages, hollowing out cities and scattering communities. The rebels — a loose coalition of militias at the best of times — have grown more fragmented, with rival Islamist and secular-leaning factions even clashing with each other. Peace talks set for Geneva early next year could not come sooner, but few are optimist of what they will achieve……..!

US Army “Lost track of $1bn worth of arms”

Amnesty International urges the US and other countries to stop arms transfers that could fuel atrocities.

The US army has failed to monitor over $1bn worth of arms and other military equipment transfers to Kuwait and Iraq, Amnesty International says in a report citing a 2016 US government audit.

The now-declassified document by the US Department of Defence (DoD) audit, was obtained by the rights group following Freedom of Information requests.

The audit reveals that the DoD “did not have accurate, up-to-date records on the quantity and location” of a vast amount of equipment on hand in Kuwait and Iraq.

Some records were incomplete, while duplicated spreadsheets, handwritten receipts and the lack of a central database increased the risk for human-error while entering data.

“This audit provides a worrying insight into the US army’s flawed – and potentially dangerous – system for controlling millions of dollars’ worth of arms transfers to a hugely volatile region,” says Patrick Wilcken, Amnesty International’s Arms Control and Human Rights researcher, in the report.

The rights group says in the report that its own research has “consistently documented” lax controls and record-keeping within the Iraqi chain of command, which had resulted in arms winding up in the hands of armed groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL).

“After all this time and all these warnings, the same problems keep occurring,” Wilcken said.

‘Irresponsible transfers’

The military transfers were part of the Iraq Train and Equip Fund (ITEF). A program that appropriated $1.6bn to provide assistance to military and other security services associated with the government of Iraq, including Kurdish and tribal security forces.

The transfers included small arms and heavy weapons, machine guns, mortar rounds and assault rifles.

“This effort is focused on critical ground forces needed to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIL [also known as ISIS] in Iraq, secure its national borders and prevent ISIL from developing safe havens,” the DoD said in a report justifying ITEF.

“If support is not provided American interests in the region would be undermined.”

In response to the audit, the US army has pledged to implement corrective actions.

“This occurred during the Obama administration as well, and groups such as Amnesty International repeatedly called on irresponsible arms transfers to be tackled, as the weapons were not only falling into the hands of groups like ISIL but also pro-Tehran Shia jihadists fighting for the Iraqi government,” Tallha Abdulrazaq, a security researcher at the University of Exeter, told Al Jazeera via email.

“While ISIL certainly needs to be fought, if this is achieved by hurling arms at groups that are just as extreme as the militant group, how does that resolve the situation?”

Amnesty International has urged the US to comply with laws and treaties to stop arms transfers or diversion of arms that could fuel atrocities.

“This should be an urgent wake-up call for the US, and all countries supplying arms to urgently shore up checks and controls,” Wilcken said.