53percenter's Blog

The number of illegal immigrants detained at the Southern border and then released in border cities has risen to the point that Yuma, Arizona became the first city to declare a state of emergency Tuesday. Mayor Douglas Nicholls delivered that message during a press conference. The U.S. Border Patrol has been releasing migrants to Yuma’s shelter system for the last few weeks.

“There’s an imminent threat of having too many migrant releases into our community, and it’s above our capacity as a community to sustain,” Nicholls said as he announced the measure Tuesday.

The Border Patrol has released more than 11,000 migrant family members at nongovernmental shelters or bus stations along the border since March 19, when it began the practice of releasing noncriminal families directly from custody with notices to appear in court “as a last resort” as apprehensions spiked.

Mayor Nicholls, a Republican elected to the office in 2014, said he hopes that by declaring a state of emergency more border cities will follow his lead and then the cities can band together for more federal aid. Yuma is a city with a population of about 100,000. Their shelters and facilities are at capacity. Yuma is not a sanctuary city and there are no sanctuary cities in Arizona.

Purpose of the emergency declaration is to request resources to prevent humanitarian crisis. Full statement: https://t.co/rEsq1HtFhS pic.twitter.com/6MADg316Hy

— City of Yuma (@cityofyuma) April 17, 2019

The mayor said that U.S. Border Patrol agents have released 1,300 migrants in Yuma in the past three weeks. The only shelter in the city is a former Salvation Army store with a capacity of 200. The city has no way of accommodating shelter for them. He’s concerned about the safety of his city’s citizens and of the migrants, too.

“I had to do something to change the discussion and to change the posture, to get more resources or get the situation resolved in one manner or another,” he said.

Without help from the federal government, Mr. Nicholls said he worried that there could be a “catastrophic situation” with migrants left to wander the desert city with no help as summer temperatures start to rise. The high temperature for Friday is predicted to be 100 degrees.

The process of declaring a state of emergency is that a governor requests the declaration of the president. So, in this case, Mayor Nicholls will send his declaration to Arizona Governor Doug Ducey. Ducey said he’ll review the declaration once he receives it. However, it isn’t looking very hopeful for Mayor Nicholls. Ducey said he thinks it is the responsibility of Congress to handle the immigration crisis, not the White House.

Border cities are desperate for help. The Border Patrol has no ability to continue to hold migrants at the border because their shelters are full. Democrats raised a stink over a makeshift shelter under a bridge in El Paso that provided shelter in tents so it was shut down. There is no sign of relief in sight. The caravans from Central America continue to travel to the U.S. border and the policy of catch and release is once again in effect.

Meanwhile, border cities like Yuma are left to cope with a situation caused by no fault of their own. Mayor Nicholls points out that larger cities use non-profit networks to cope with the influx of those needing shelter and provisions.

Federal immigration authorities have said they are working with local nonprofit agencies to house and care for migrants after their release and before the move on to the interior of the country. Shelters in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas have been frequently full for months, with newly arriving migrants immediately replacing those departing.

Mayor Nicholls made the first move to ask for emergency aid. It’s a reasonable request. Even if Congress acted overnight (it won’t) the situation will be with us for the near future. Something has to be done to help border cities and towns. Setting free those asking for asylum or being detained for illegally entering the country with the requirement of appearing in court at a later date has failed.

A growing headache for McConnell and maybe for Trump too. Actual headline from the Daily Beast this evening:

I think when Trump first floated Cain’s name for a Fed slot, he expected Senate Republicans would go along without a fuss. And why not? That’s what they almost always do, especially with presidential nominations. In fact, they just got done nuking a Senate rule that required 30 hours of debate for certain nominees, replacing it with one that requires two hours instead. It seemed like they were building a conveyor belt to streamline confirmation of Trump’s picks for key vacancies.

And then suddenly there were four Republicans hinting that Herman Cain’s appointment to the Federal Reserve was dead on arrival.

When Trump was asked whether that opposition would lead him to yank Cain’s nomination, he dodged. He didn’t strongly rebuke the idea but he hasn’t made any moves to throw Cain under the bus either. Instead he left the matter up to Cain, saying that it would be for the nominee to decide whether he wanted to withdraw. But that was risky: What if Cain refused? That would put McConnell and his caucus back on the hot seat in having to potentially embarrass the president by rejecting his nominee. But it would put Trump on the hot seat too by leaving him effectively powerless to yank Cain’s nomination now in the name of avoiding embarrassment. The whole reason populists like Trump is that he’s willing to fightfightfight the establishment; if Cain is willing to fight on against Mr. Establishment Mitch McConnell, how could Trump possibly stand in his way?

A confirmation hearing may be inevitable, then, with Democrats destined to air Cain’s #MeToo dirty laundry extensively and Trump-skeptical Republicans like Mitt Romney destined to scoff at his political independence from the president.

Cain, a former pizza executive and 2012 GOP presidential candidate, told The Wall Street Journal in an interview Wednesday that he is “very committed” to sticking to his potential nomination, saying, “I happen to believe that you need some new voices on the Federal Reserve.”…

Cain stood firm, telling the Journal on Wednesday: “I don’t quit because of negative criticism. I don’t quit because of negative attacks. And I don’t quit because several senators have expressed reservations about my qualifications.”…

“What Kudlow was doing was giving me an out, and I appreciate that, but I don’t want an out,” Cain said. “You know that the president is a fighter, and Kudlow is a fighter. They might be getting a lot of blowback from some folks, I don’t know. But I don’t think they’re getting uncomfortable with it.”

He fights! And he’s being smart about broadcasting his commitment to seeing this through. Cain knows that the more public he is about wanting to battle for the seat, the more support for his nomination will grow among the grassroots right and the harder it’ll be for Trump to bow to McConnell’s wishes by yanking the nomination. For example, Cain has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today arguing that the Fed already has enough academics. What it needs, he says, is people who have firsthand business experience with markets who’ll know how to interpret the monetary signals they’re emitting:

The Fed still operates on the “professor standard,” enshrined with Bill Clinton’s nominations of pure academics. Their textbooks say strong economic growth, particularly strong wage growth, causes inflation, which Fed policy should temper. Both the Bush and Obama administrations perpetuated the professor standard, and both presided over income stagnation…

We need new voices at the Fed that understand stable money and know how to interpret important market signals—and that means breaking the professor standard. Monocultures tend to be fragile, but is the Fed so closed off that it can’t handle challenges to its models or the assumptions that feed them? So fragile it can’t consider that the economy is driven by production, not consumption, and that the dollar’s commodity value is important to the real investment that fuels production? I hope not.

Do you want more Ivory Tower eggheads on the Fed or do you want hardnosed business people who actually know what they’re talking about? Which sort of person should the Trump revolution bring to power? He’s making it awfully hard on the White House to cut him loose with arguments like that. And yet:

SCOOP: Trump Administration officials pressed @BankingGOP on @THEHermanCain, @StephenMoore for Fed board; officials found little support for Cain some support for Moore for Fed board; officials concede both nominations in jeopardy amid lack of support more now @FoxBusiness

— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) April 18, 2019

Not just Cain but Trump’s other nominee, Stephen Moore, is at risk. I’ve been thinking that the Senate GOP might try to split the baby in this case, rejecting Cain but confirming Moore as a sop to the White House. But that’s politically dicey too. Unless Republicans make a big show of the #MeToo concerns about Cain in voting him down, it’ll be hard to argue that he’s meaningfully less qualified for the position than Moore is. Remember that Cain was chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City years ago. Confirming Moore, a white candidate, but not Cain under those circumstances is … bad optics, shall we say. And given how badly Cain seems to want the seat, he might notice those optics and call attention to them.

Here he is on Fox Business, again playing to a Trump-friendly audience by vowing to fight for the seat. If I were a nominee for a Fed spot and one of the knocks against me was that I was too much of a crony for the president to be trusted with that role, I probably would have declined the invitation here to defend Trump on an unrelated, politically supercharged matter like Russiagate.

It’s an 80-year low only because that’s when the subject first began being polled. In reality today’s percentage of church members is almost certainly the lowest in American history.

This may help explain why a Catholic priest’s mention of “the body of Christ” this week somehow ended up being translated by the New York Times into “a statue of Jesus.” They probably had no frame of reference.

That’s some graph. Normally with data related to matters of religious belief you’d expect to see a gradual slope downward, possibly starting in the 1960s. Not here. Church membership is cruising along steadily for 60 years — and then, in 1998 or so, something happens. Twenty years later, the share of church members across the population is down 20 points. At that rate you’d expect Americans to have completely given up membership in churches by 2070 or so.

Causation is complicated, Gallup notes: “A sharp increase in the proportion of the population with no religious affiliation, a decline in church membership among those who do have a religious preference, and low levels of church membership among millennials are all contributing to the accelerating trend.” Churches are losing members in part because religions are losing members — but even people who do belong to a particular faith are less likely to belong to a particular church. What gives?

My theory for any ominous social trend that began in the late 1990s is that it must be the farking Internet, which seems goofy at first blush here but less so upon reflection. The Internet may have no direct bearing on religious devotion but it does bear directly on people’s ability to replace real-world communities with virtual ones. If you’re satisfying your need to belong by participating in some online group, you may feel less need to join civic organizations, starting with your local church. Civic groups have also been experiencing membership decline for years, most dramatically and probably not coincidentally among younger adults — the sort of people more likely to spend longer hours on the Internet.

That is, it’s not necessarily a decline in religious belief that’s driving the decline in church membership, although no doubt that’s contributing. It’s the decline in real-world community of all sorts. How much of a coincidence can it be that loneliness in teenagers rose 50 percent between 2012 and 2017 as smartphones proliferated and social media became even more ubiquitous? Online communities don’t provide the same sense of meaningful companionship as real ones do, but they’re much easier to join and participate in. The bad supplants the good.

One potential flaw in my theory is that America’s “social capital” began dropping long before 1998. Robert Putnam famously diagnosed the problem in 1995 in “Bowling Alone.” Per Gallup’s numbers, churches were surprisingly resilient in retaining members even as other civic groups were apparently hemorrhaging them. But the flaw isn’t irreconcilable with the Internet theory of causation: It may be that Americans who had already severed ties with more secular groups like Kiwanis required a stronger cultural jolt to sever a bond as thick as religious community. The Internet ended up providing it. And now church membership is catching up to declining membership everywhere else.

Some demographic data for you. The first column shows the percentage of church members in each group from 1998-2000 and the second column shows the percentage from 2016-18. The third column shows the change between the two:

Obviously the Internet doesn’t explain everything. If it did, there wouldn’t be a single-digit decline among Republicans versus a 23-point decline(!) among Democrats, to the point where church members are now a minority of the party. Religiosity matters here.

Speaking of which, although men and women have each seen double-digit declines in church membership, the effect is more severe among men. Just 47 percent now count themselves as church members, i.e. a clear majority of an entire gender no longer belongs to a local religious community. And men are more likely to be Republican than women are, remember. If being right-wing were more closely tied to religious faith, we shouldn’t see numbers like these. What we’re getting here is a hint of a Trumpier, less Christian GOP. It makes sense that the president, at least at the time of his candidacy in 2015, wasn’t a member of a church either.