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CNN
a day ago
- Politics
- CNN
Analysis: The common thread in Trump's latest moves: squeezing big blue cities
Donald Trump Immigration Federal agencies US militaryFacebookTweetLink Follow President Donald Trump is moving systematically to tighten his grip on Democratic-leaning big cities — the geographic center of resistance to his agenda — by undermining their autonomy and eroding their political strength. Those militant goals are the common thread that links the high-profile initiatives Trump has launched in recent days to seize control of law enforcement in Washington, DC; pressure red states to draw new congressional district lines; and potentially pursue an unprecedented 'redo' of the 2020 census. These new efforts compound the pressure Trump is already placing on major cities with an agenda that includes aggressive immigration enforcement; cuts in federal research funding to universities central to the economy of many large metros; and threats to rescind federal funding for jurisdictions that resist his demands to impose conservative policies on immigration, education, homelessness and policing. Trump is pursuing this confrontational approach at a time when major metropolitan areas have become the undisputed engines of the nation's economic growth — and the nexus of research breakthroughs in technologies such as artificial intelligence, which Trump has identified as key to the nation's competitiveness. The 100 largest metropolitan areas now account for about three-fourths of the nation's economic output, according to research by Brookings Metro, a center-left think tank. Yet Trump is treating the largest cities less as an economic asset to be nourished than as a political threat to be subdued. Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, said Trump's approach to the nation's largest cities is 'colonial' in that he wants to benefit from their prodigious economic output while suppressing their independence and political clout. This administration is 'treating America's great economic engines as weak and problematic colonial outposts,' Muro said. 'They view them as the problem, when (in reality) they are the absolute base of American competitiveness in the battle against China or whoever (else).' Antagonism toward major cities has long been central to Trump's message. Several times he has described American cities with mayors who are Democrats, members of racial minorities, or both, as dystopian 'rodent-infested' 'hellholes.' Trump in 2024 nonetheless ran better in most large cities than in his earlier races, amid widespread disenchantment about then-President Joe Biden's record on inflation, immigration and crime. Still, as Trump himself has noted, large cities, and often their inner suburbs, remain the foundation of Democratic political strength and the cornerstone of opposition to his agenda. A series of dramatic actions just in the past few days shows how systematically Trump is moving to debilitate those cities' ability to oppose him. The most visible way Trump is pressuring big cities is by deploying federal law enforcement and military personnel into them over the objections of local officials. In his first term, Trump sent federal law enforcement personnel into Portland, Oregon, and Washington, DC, in the aftermath of George Floyd's 2020 murder. But after he left office, Trump, who does not often publicly second-guess himself, frequently said that one of his greatest regrets was that he did not dispatch more federal forces into cities. In his 2024 campaign, he explicitly pledged to deploy the National Guard, and potentially active-duty military, into major cities for multiple purposes: combating crime, clearing homeless encampments and supporting his mass deportation program. In office, Trump has steadily fulfilled those promises. When protests erupted in Los Angeles in June over an intense Immigration and Custom Enforcement deportation push, Trump deployed not only the National Guard (which he federalized over the objection of California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom), but also active-duty Marines. Then, the administration used those forces not only to guard federal buildings, but also to accompany ICE (and other agencies) on enforcement missions — including a striking deployment of armored vehicles and soldiers in tactical gear to a public park in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood. The underlying immigration enforcement that precipitated the LA protests constituted a different show of force. As a recent CNN investigation showed, ICE is relying much more on street apprehensions in cities in blue states than in red states, where it is removing more people from jails and prisons. The administration says that imbalance is a result of 'sanctuary' policies in blue states and cities limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. But civil rights groups see the administration's confrontational blue-state approach as an attempt to intimidate both local officials and immigrant communities. (The fact that ICE last week conducted an immigration sweep directly outside a Newsom press conference bolstered the latter interpretation.) Whatever the rationale, research by the University of California at Merced suggests the administration's enforcement approach is hurting blue cities. Using census data, the school's Community and Labor Center recently found that from May to July the number of California workers holding a private-sector job fell by about 750,000 — proportionally an even greater decline than during the 2008 Great Recession. Hispanic people and Asian Americans accounted for almost all the falloff. Sociology professor Ed Flores, the center's faculty director, said he believes the decline is 'absolutely' tied to economic disruption flowing from 'the presence of ICE and the way that (people) are being apprehended' on the street. New York City, too, has seen a notable drop in the labor force participation rate among Hispanic men. Now, with the military (if not ICE) presence in LA winding down, Trump has sent hundreds of National Guard troops into Washington, DC, while also utilizing a section of federal law that allows him to temporarily seize control of the city's police department. In his news conference last week announcing the DC moves, Trump repeatedly said he would supplement the National Guard forces, as he did in LA, with active-duty troops if he deems it necessary. And he repeatedly signaled that he is considering deploying military forces into other cities that he described as overrun by crime, including Chicago, New York, Baltimore and Oakland, California — all jurisdictions with Black mayors. 'We're not going to lose our cities over this, and this will go further,' Trump declared. Most experts agree that Trump will confront substantial legal hurdles if he tries to replicate the DC deployment in other places. 'What they are doing in DC is not repeatable elsewhere for a number of reasons,' said Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice. Nunn said Trump can order this mission because of the DC National Guard's unique legal status. On the one hand, Nunn noted, the DC Guard is under the president's direct control, rather than the jurisdiction of a state governor. On the other, he said, the Justice Department has ruled that even when the president utilizes the DC Guard, its actions qualify as a state, not federal, deployment. That's critical because state guard deployments are not subject to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act's ban on federal military forces engaging in domestic law enforcement. If Trump tries to deploy the National Guard to address crime in the big cities of blue states, such as Chicago or New York, Nunn argued, he would face a catch-22. Since there's virtually no chance Democratic governors would agree to participate, Trump could only put troops on those streets by federalizing their states' National Guard or using active-duty military, Nunn said. But, he added, 'once they are working with federalized National Guard or active-duty military forces, the Posse Comitatus Act applies' — barring the use of those forces for domestic law enforcement. Trump could seek to override the Posse Comitatus Act's ban on military involvement by invoking the Insurrection Act. The Insurrection Act has not been used to combat street crime, but the statute allows the president to domestically deploy the military against 'any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.' Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor who specializes in the relationships among different levels of government, agreed that invoking the Insurrection Act to justify sending the National Guard into cities over mayors' objections would shatter the generally understood limits on the law's application. But he also believes that precedent provides no firm assurance that this Supreme Court, which has proved extremely receptive to Trump's expansive claims of presidential authority, would stop him. Trump 'could try' to win court approval of military deployments to fight crime by citing the Insurrection Act's language about ''domestic violence' and 'unlawful combinations'' and then claiming that is 'depriving the people of their right to security,' Briffault said. Whatever the legal hurdles, more widely deploying the military on domestic missions would bring substantial consequences. Mayor Jerry Dyer of Fresno, California, who spent 18 years as the city's police commissioner, says that putting military forces onto the streets of more cities would create problems of coordination with local officials and trust with local communities. 'Whenever you start sending federal resources into local jurisdictions and actually take over the policing of that jurisdiction, it can become very disturbing to that community and quite frankly can create some neighborhood issues and ultimately a lack of trust,' said Dyer, who co-chairs the Mayors and Police Chiefs Task Force for the US Conference of Mayors. Even more profound may be the implications of numbing Americans to the sight of heavily armored military forces routinely patrolling the streets of domestic cities — an image that historically has been common only in authoritarian countries. New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a leading scholar of authoritarian regimes, wrote last week that the ultimate aim of Trump's domestic deployments 'is to habituate Americans to see militarized cities and crackdowns against public dissent in cities as normal and justified.' Step by step, she argued, Trump is seeking 'to disempower and delegitimize all Democratic municipal and state authorities.' In less obvious ways, the battle that has erupted over redistricting — and the likely fight approaching over the census — constitutes another Trump-backed effort to 'disempower' large metropolitan areas. The unusual mid-decade congressional redistricting that Texas Republicans are pursuing at Trump's behest would increase the number of Republican-leaning US House seats largely by reducing the number of districts representing the state's biggest metropolitan areas, including Dallas, Houston and Austin, which all lean Democratic. The new map would further dilute the political influence of Texas' major metro areas, even as they have accounted for about four-fifths of the state's population and economic growth over recent years, said Steven Pedigo, director of the LBJ Urban Lab at the University of Texas' Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. 'The growth in Texas has been driven by urban communities, but those communities are not going to be represented in these additional maps,' Pedigo said. In that way, the new Texas map extends the strategy that Republicans there, and in other growing Sun Belt states, used in the maps they drew after the 2020 census, said John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. States such as Texas and Florida that added the most House seats and electoral votes after the 2020 census — and are poised to gain the most again after 2030 — are adding population primarily among non-White people and in Democratic-leaning metro areas, Bisognano noted in a recent memo. Yet both of those groups will be denied the additional House representation generated by that population growth if the Republicans controlling Sun Belt state governments continue to draw district lines that splinter metro populations and favor rural ones. 'They are subjugating (metro voters) to produce a partisan outcome that is not reflective of the people of those cities,' Bisognano said. The calls from Trump and Vice President JD Vance to 'redo' the 2020 census, partly to exclude undocumented immigrants, could marginalize cities even more. Even if Trump could surmount the many legal and logistical obstacles to conducting a mid-decade census, a reapportionment of House seats and electoral votes that excluded undocumented immigrants would not result in the shift of influence from blue to red states that many conservatives envision. John Robert Warren, a University of Minnesota sociologist, concluded in a 2025 paper that if unauthorized immigrants were excluded from the 2020 census, California and Texas would each lose a House seat and New York and Ohio would each gain one. 'It would make literally zero difference,' Warren said. 'If you assume Texas and Ohio go red and California and New York go blue, then it's just a wash.' Excluding undocumented immigrants from the count, though, could offer Trump another way to squeeze urban centers. Many agricultural communities have substantial undocumented immigrant populations, but half of all undocumented immigrants live in just 37 large counties, according to estimates by the Migration Policy Institute. 'Within a state that Republicans control, by not including (undocumented people), it would be much easier to draw Republican districts because you would have a smaller minority population base to work with,' said Jeffrey Wice, a redistricting expert at New York University's law school. Not only congressional representation but also the many federal funding sources tied to population would shift toward rural areas if the census undercounts the urban population, he noted. Wice, who formerly consulted for Democrats on redistricting, says blue states and cities can't assume Trump won't pursue any of these possibilities, no matter how far-fetched they now seem. The same is surely true on the deployment of federal force into blue places. The New Republic's Greg Sargent recently published an internal Department of Homeland Security memo that described the joint ICE-National Guard mission in Los Angeles as 'the type of operations (and resistance) we're going to be working through for years to come.' (Emphasis added.) During World War II, the German siege of Leningrad famously lasted nearly 900 days. Big blue American cities may be counting down the hours as anxiously for the 1252 days remaining in Trump's second term.
Bloomberg
3 days ago
- Politics
- Bloomberg
What Harvard Can Learn from the University of Florida
So much bad news has been emanating from US universities — from MAGA's overreach today to the left's overreach yesterday to a general sense of malaise — that it's easy to miss the good news. Yet hope can be found amidst the gloom — mostly in the Red and Purple States, mostly in flagship state universities and mostly in the guise of 'civic life and leadership.' This year the University of Florida created 20 new tenured or tenure-track positions in its Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education. Though the school was founded only in 2022, it already boasts 53 faculty — including the renowned Renaissance scholar James Hankins who has decamped from Harvard for the 2026-27 academic year — and some 1,350 students with 1,500 expected in the fall semester.
CNN
05-08-2025
- Politics
- CNN
ICE follows starkly different playbooks in how it's arresting immigrants in red and blue states, data shows
Immigration Federal agencies Donald Trump Immigration politicsFacebookTweetLink Follow The Trump administration is apprehending hundreds of immigrants every day across the country – but there's a stark split in where Immigration and Customs Enforcement makes those arrests in blue states and red states. In states that voted for President Donald Trump, ICE agents are far more likely to arrest immigrants directly from prisons and jails, a CNN analysis of data from the agency found. In Democratic-leaning states, by contrast, ICE is frequently arresting immigrants from worksites, streets and mass roundups that have sparked protests and intense backlash in cities such as Los Angeles. Most of those arrested don't have any criminal record. The ICE data shows that overall, more immigrants are being arrested in red states than blue states – both in the community and, especially, in prisons and jails. But there is a clear divide in where ICE is apprehending people: 59% of arrests in red states took place in prisons and jails, while 70% of arrests in blue states took place in the community. That partisan gap between red and blue states existed before Trump's second term began – but it has widened since last year. Trump officials say the differing tactics are simply a downstream effect of sanctuary policies in many Democratic-controlled states and large cities, which can limit prisons and jails from cooperating with ICE. In many of those states, local authorities can't hold immigrants in custody based on ICE orders alone – so they're often released before immigration officials can arrest them. 'Sanctuary cities are going to get exactly what they don't want, more agents in the communities and more worksite enforcement,' Trump border czar Tom Homan told reporters last month. 'Why is that? Because they won't let one agent arrest one bad guy in a jail.' But advocates for immigrant rights say the community arrests – from raids at factories and restaurants to surprise detentions at ICE check-ins – are punitive measures aimed at instilling fear in blue states and cities. The aggressive tactics reflect 'a deliberate federal strategy to punish Massachusetts and other immigrant-friendly states for standing up against Trump's reckless deportation machine,' argued Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, the executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, a Boston-based nonprofit that represents immigrants in court. An ICE spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment on CNN's analysis. The divide is especially dramatic in Massachusetts, where 94% of immigrants arrested by ICE were apprehended in the community, and 78% of them had no criminal record. The state has a court decision and local policies that limit law enforcement from cooperating with ICE. The agency's regional office was also led until March by Todd Lyons, who is now the acting ICE director, and who has described the focus on community arrests in Massachusetts, his home state, as a direct response to sanctuary policies. 'If sanctuary cities would change their policies and turn these violent criminal aliens over to us, into our custody, instead of releasing them into the public, we would not have to go out to the communities and do this,' Lyons said at a press conference in June. Regardless of the cause, the varying local laws and ICE tactics are creating a 'patchwork system' across the country, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a lawyer and policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute. Immigrants are facing 'really divergent outcomes based on where people live,' she said. CNN's analysis is based on ICE records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Deportation Data Project, a research group associated with the UC Berkeley law school. The analysis covers the period since Trump took office through late June. In its annual reports, ICE defines arrests in two categories: those that happen in prisons and jails, and 'at-large' arrests in the community. In prisons and jails, ICE typically sends a detainer request to corrections officials for undocumented inmates, and then agents come to the facilities to arrest them before they leave custody. Community arrests, by contrast, include everything from workplace raids to teams trailing and apprehending immigrants. In 2024, under President Joe Biden – whose administration said it was prioritizing arresting and deporting undocumented immigrants with criminal records – about 62% of ICE arrests were from prisons and jails, while 27% were in the community, the data shows. So far in Trump's term, arrests overall are up, and the balance has changed: 49% have been in prisons and jails, and 44% in the community. But those percentages diverge widely between the 31 states won by Donald Trump and the 19 states won by Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, which have similar total undocumented populations, according to 2023 estimates from the Center for Migration Studies, a nonprofit. In the Trump-voting states, ICE is not only more likely to arrest immigrants already in custody, but they're also more likely to have a record: 41% of those arrested in red states had a prior criminal conviction, compared to 36% of immigrants arrested by ICE in Harris states. Most prior convictions are for lower-level crimes like traffic offenses, immigration violations and other non-violent charges, a CNN analysis of internal ICE data found earlier this summer. In part, that disparity comes from how states and cities without sanctuary policies respond to ICE detainer requests. In most red states, those detainers are honored, allowing ICE to pick up thousands of undocumented immigrants directly from jail or prison. But in many blue states and cities, sanctuary policies direct officials to refuse ICE detainer requests without a court warrant. Some states go further in limiting local police's collaboration with ICE: Boston prevents officers from even asking about immigration status, for example. The ICE data suggests that some sanctuary policies are blocking the agency from arresting immigrants – to a point. In Mississippi, for example, which has banned the establishment of sanctuary policies in the state, 87% of immigrants ICE filed a detainer request for through the end of May were later arrested by the agency in prisons and jails. In New York, which has state and local policies limiting cooperation with ICE, only 4% of the immigrants that ICE had requested detainers for were arrested in prisons and jails. So in blue states, the Trump administration has instead relied more on a different policy: immigration raids and community arrests. In Los Angeles, where those raids sparked unrest earlier this summer, Trump deployed the National Guard. The administration later sued the city for its sanctuary policies, saying the city was contributing to a 'lawless and unsafe environment.' Many activists, though, say the nature of those blue-state raids – and especially ICE's efforts to promote and publicize them – show they serve a broader purpose beyond just evading sanctuary policies. Those aggressive tactics are 'shocking and they're such a departure from the norm,' Bush-Joseph said. 'But their intent might be more so about deterrence and trying to dissuade people from coming to the US-Mexico border, as well as trying to get people to self-deport.' Overall, ICE's arrest and detention machine may just be ramping up. The recent budget reconciliation bill signed by Trump includes billions in new funding for the agency. And a growing number of local and state law enforcement agencies – largely in red states – are signing up for an ICE program that allows them to help enforce immigration laws. ICE's embrace of public arrests is particularly pronounced in Massachusetts. While Massachusetts doesn't have a formal sanctuary law at the state level, a 2017 state supreme court ruling bans law enforcement from holding anyone beyond the time they would otherwise be released on the basis of an ICE detainer request. Boston and several other cities also have policies that go further, preventing law enforcement from coordinating with ICE more broadly. Lyons, the acting ICE director, led the Boston ICE office – which is responsible for arrests in Massachusetts and five other New England states – before being elevated to his current role. In interviews and statements, he's decried sanctuary policies in the state. 'Boston's my hometown and it really shocks me that officials all over Massachusetts would rather release sex offenders, fentanyl dealers, drug dealers, human traffickers, and child rapists back into the neighborhoods,' he told reporters this summer – without addressing the fact that a large majority of immigrants arrested in the state this year had no criminal convictions. In May, ICE carried out what officials described as the largest enforcement operation in the agency's history, arresting more than 1,400 people in communities across Massachusetts. Around New England, other high-profile cases have included ICE officers detaining a Tufts PhD student who co-wrote a student newspaper op-ed critical of Israel and smashing the window of an immigrant's car and yanking him out of the passenger seat in front of his wife. ICE's aggressive tactics in the region have been defined by 'a general level of mean-spiritedness and brutality,' said Daniel Kanstroom, a Boston College law professor who founded the college's immigration and asylum law clinic. 'We've never seen masked agents before. We've never seen students arrested for writing op-eds before. We've never seen people dragged out of immigration court before.' Stepped-up community arrests are having a marked impact on immigrant-heavy neighborhoods in the Boston area, local advocates say. In suburbs like Chelsea and Everett, which have large Salvadoran and Central American communities, some immigrants are staying home out of fear of ICE raids. 'We're seeing people not going to their doctor's appointments, kids not going to school, folks not going grocery shopping,' said Sarang Sekhavat, the chief of staff at the Massachusetts Immigrant & Refugee Advocacy Coalition. 'You're seeing a lot of businesses in some of these neighborhoods really suffering because people just don't want to leave home… bustling, active neighborhoods that have become very quiet now.' ICE's dragnet has picked up people like Geovani Esau De La Cruz Catalan, who was arrested by immigration agents on the street outside his Chelsea home in June – just days after he crossed the stage at his high school graduation. The 20-year-old, who has no criminal history, came to the US from Guatemala in 2022. He told CNN his hopes to build a new life in America were dashed when he was detained. 'I thought they were going to take away all the dreams I had,' De La Cruz said in Spanish. 'I was in shock.' De La Cruz spent two weeks in ICE custody before being released with a future immigration court date. His stepmother, Mayra Balderas, said he has a work permit, but it's unclear whether he'll be allowed to stay or deported back to Guatemala. Balderas, an American citizen who immigrated to the US more than three decades ago, said ICE agents were frequently patrolling her Chelsea neighborhood, something she'd never seen before Trump took office. 'Since I've been here, I never have any experience like that – going into the neighborhoods and pulling people and doing what they're doing,' Balderas said. 'They are scaring people.' Methodology CNN analyzed data on ICE arrests and detainers published by the Data Deportation Project, a research group associated with UC Berkeley law school. The data includes administrative arrests, in which immigrants arrested face deportation, not criminal arrests for human trafficking or similar crimes. For data that was missing information about the state where an immigrant was arrested, when possible, CNN inferred the state based on which ICE field office conducted the arrest, using areas of responsibility described on the ICE website. A state could not be identified for about 11% of arrests, and those are not included in state-by-state totals. Based on information in ICE annual reports and interviews with policy experts, CNN defined arrests in jails and prisons as those with an apprehension method described in the data as 'CAP Local Incarceration,' 'CAP State Incarceration,' or 'CAP Federal Incarceration' (referring to ICE's Criminal Alien Program) and arrests in the community as those listed as 'Non-Custodial Arrest,' 'Located,' 'Worksite Enforcement,' 'Traffic Check,' or 'Probation and Parole.' About 7% of arrests were listed as 'Other Efforts' or didn't fit clearly into either category.
The Hill
29-06-2025
- Business
- The Hill
Thune, Vance cut deal with Senate conservatives to save GOP megabill
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and Vice President Vance struck a deal Saturday night with a group of Senate conservatives who want bigger Medicaid spending cuts to save President Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' from stalling. The deal hatched in Thune's office late Saturday evening paved the way for Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) to flip his 'no' vote on proceeding to the bill to 'aye' and for Sens. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) to also vote for the bill. Without their votes, the 940-page bill to boost spending on border security, immigration enforcement and the military and to cut an array of taxes could not have advanced on the Senate floor. It advanced 51-49. The vote to proceed to the sprawling budget reconciliation package remained open on the Senate floor for more than three and a half hours, stuck for a long time at 47 yes's and 50 no's. For much of that time, the four conservatives — Johnson, Scott, Lee and Lummis — huddled off the Senate floor to negotiate a way to add new language to the bill to further cut federal Medicaid spending. The language in the revised Senate bill is projected to reduce Medicaid spending by $930 billion over the next decade, according to a preliminary analysis by the Congressional Budget office. But Scott and his allies wanted to do more to reduce the amount of money spent on able-bodied adults who are allowed to enroll into Medicaid in states that expanded the program under the Affordable Care Act, which was former President Obama's signature domestic achievement. 'I met with the president today, met with him quite a bit. Met with the vice president. We all wanted to get to yes and we're all working together to make sure that happens,' Scott told reporters after voting to advance the bill. He said conservatives want to 'stop Blue State governors from taking advantage of Red States.' 'Paying for health care for illegal immigrants with federal tax dollars is going to end,' Scott said. Senate conservatives say that Thune and Trump have committed to support Scott's proposal to lower the 90 percent federal matching share for new Medicaid enrollees in expansion states. 'We have been working behind the scenes,' Johnson told reporters who flipped his initial 'no' vote on beginning debate on the GOP megabill to 'aye' to allow it move forward. Johnson said conservatives got an agreement from leadership to vote on an amendment 'that we're confident of.' 'At a certain point we just don't allow single working-age, able-bodied childless adults to sign onto ObamaCare expansion and get that 9-1 match,' he said. Johnson said that states receive a much lower federal matching share for disabled children enrolled in regular Medicaid. He said that conservatives whipped 'something very similar' Scott's proposal within the Senate GOP conference and asserted 'it's very close' to getting the 50 votes in needs to be included into the legislation. Senators will now spend up to 20 hours debating the reconciliation package before holding a marathon series of amendment votes known as a vote-a-rama. A final vote may not happen until Monday. Senate conservatives feel confident that Trump can help secure a majority vote for cutting the federal Medicaid match share in expansion states, even though the proposal is likely to be a hard sell with Republicans who have already complained loudly about the Medicaid cuts already in the bill. 'The leadership wants to do this, too,' Johnson said. 'This is what was key about the two-hour meeting with the president.' He said Trump is 'willing to do what needs to be done to put this nation on a path of eventually balancing our budget.' The cap on enrolling new people into expanded Medicaid would be implemented at a future date to give states some time to adjust to the change. Selling the proposal to more centrist Republicans in both the Senate and House, however, won't be easy. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) declared in early May that a proposal to directly reduce the enhanced federal match for states that expanded Medicaid was off the table. And Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who negotiated with Thune to increase funding for a rural hospital relief fund and to increase the flow of federal Medicaid dollars to Missouri over the next four years, warned GOP colleagues to stay away from bigger cuts to the program. 'I think that this effort to cut Medicaid funding is a mistake,' he said. 'We've been able for Missouri to delay it. … That's not true of all the states. And unless changes are made, after 2030 you'll see Medicaid reductions in my state. I'm going to do everything I can to defeat that.' 'I think that this has been unhappy episode here in Congress, this effort to cut Medicaid. And I think, frankly, my party needs to do some soul-searching. If you want to be a working-class party, you've got to deliver to working-class people. You cannot take away health care from working people,' he said. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who has also voiced strong concerns about the Medicaid funding cuts in the bill, said she voted to proceed to the bill Saturday out of deference to her leadership but warned that does not mean she will necessarily vote for the bill on final passage.
The Guardian
17-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Oklahoma high schools to teach 2020 election conspiracy theories as fact
As part of the latest Republican push in red states to promote ideologies sympathetic to Donald Trump, Oklahoma's new social studies curriculum will ask high school students to identify 'discrepancies' in the 2020 election results. The previous standard for studying the 2020 election merely said: 'Examine issues related to the election of 2020 and its outcome.' The new version is more expansive: 'Identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of 'bellwether county' trends.' The revised curriculum standard comes at the behest of Ryan Walters, the state school superintendent, who has publicly voiced his support for Trump. In October, Walters lauded Trump in an interview, saying that 'Trump's won the argument on education'. Walters, who has also advocated for ending 'wokeness' in public schools, went on to say: 'We have education bureaucrats that are left-wing, elitist, that think they know best for families, and they have become so radicalized that our families are going: 'What is going on here?'' Oklahoma's new social studies standards for K-12 public school students, already infused with references to the Bible and national pride, were revised at Walters' direction. The Republican official has spent much of his first term in office not only lauding Trump but also feuding with teachers' unions and local school superintendents. 'The left has been pushing left-wing indoctrination in the classroom,' Walters said. 'We're moving it back to actually understanding history … and I'm unapologetic about that.' As part of his revisions, Walters also proposed removing education about Black Lives Matter and George Floyd's murder, Tulsa's NBC affiliate KJRH reports. The outlet further reported that the revisions were expected to cost the state's taxpayers $33m in new textbooks and related material. Other efforts by Walters include promoting Trump-endorsed Bibles across classrooms, as well as supporting an attempt to establish the US's first public religious charter school – a case the conservative-majority supreme court seems open to siding with. The new standard raised red flags even among Walters' fellow Republicans, including the governor and legislative leaders. They were concerned that several last-minute changes, including the language about the 2020 election and a provision stating the source of the Covid-19 virus was a Chinese lab, were added just hours before the state school board voted on them. A group of parents and educators have filed a lawsuit asking a judge to reject the standards, arguing they were not reviewed properly and that they 'represent a distorted view of social studies that intentionally favors an outdated and blatantly biased perspective'. While many Oklahoma teachers have expressed outrage at the change in the standards, others say they leave plenty of room for an effective teacher to instruct students about the results of the 2020 election without misinforming them. Aaron Baker, who has taught US government in high schools in Oklahoma City for more than a decade, said he's most concerned about teachers in rural, conservative parts of the state who might feel encouraged to impose their own beliefs on students. 'If someone is welcoming the influence of these far-right organizations in our standards and is interested in inserting more of Christianity into our practices as teachers, then they've become emboldened,' Baker said. 'For me, that is the major concern.' Leaders in the Republican-led Oklahoma legislature introduced a resolution to reject the standards, but there wasn't enough GOP support to pass it. Part of that hesitation likely stemmed from a flurry of last-minute opposition organized by pro-Trump conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty, which has a large presence in Oklahoma and threatened lawmakers who reject the standards with a primary opponent. 'In the last few election cycles, grassroots conservative organizations have flipped seats across Oklahoma by holding weak Republicans accountable,' the group wrote in a letter signed by several other conservative groups and GOP activists. 'If you choose to side with the liberal media and make backroom deals with Democrats to block conservative reform, you will be next.' After a group of parents, educators and other Oklahoma school officials worked to develop the new social studies standards, Walters assembled an executive committee consisting mostly of out-of-state pundits from conservative thinktanks to revise them. He said he wanted to focus more on American exceptionalism and incorporate the Bible as an instructional resource. Among those Walters appointed to the review committee were Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and a key figure in its Project 2025 blueprint for a conservative presidential administration, and Dennis Prager, a radio talkshow host who founded Prager U, a conservative non-profit that offers 'pro-American' educational materials for children that some critics say are not accurate or objective. In a statement to the Associated Press, Walters defended teaching students about 'unprecedented and historically significant' elements of the 2020 presidential election. Recounts, reviews and audits in the battleground states where Trump contested his loss all confirmed Democrat Joe Biden's victory, and Trump lost dozens of court cases challenging the results. In addition to the curriculum revisions, a proposed rule approved by the state board of education in January mandates that parents enrolling their children in the state's public schools show proof of immigration status. Describing the rule, which has been met with widespread outrage among parents, students and immigration advocates, Walters said: 'Our rule around illegal immigration accounting is simply that … It is to account for how many students of illegal immigrants are in our schools.'
