Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association

White House says Biden will increase refugee cap this year, after Dem fury over original target

Adam Shaw | Fox News — Sat, 17 Apr 2021 02:06:52 +0000

The White House says a new cap will likely be coming by May 15.

The White House on Friday said that President Biden is expected to increase the refugee cap for this fiscal year, just hours after he signed an order that kept it at Trump-era levels and sparked fury from congressional Democrats.

“The President’s directive today has been the subject of some confusion,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in an afternoon statement.

BIDEN TO KEEP REFUGEE ADMISSIONS AT TRUMP-ERA LEVELS, DESPITE EARLIER MOVES TO INCREASE IT

Former President Donald Trump lowered the refugee cap for FY 2021 to 15,000 — something the Biden had pledged both during the campaign and his first days in office to raise.

Biden had promised to increase the cap to 125,000 for the next fiscal year, which begins in October. He also said he would work with Congress to make a “down payment” on that number. In the meantime, Secretary of State Antony Blinken proposed to Congress lifting the cap to 62,000 for this fiscal year.

However, the administration announced Friday that Biden was signing an emergency presidential determination to keep the number at 15,000 while changing the regional allocation of who is brought in — allowing more slots from Africa, the Middle East and Central America, while ending restrictions on Somalia, Yemen and Syria.

It brought immediate and widespread criticism from left-wing Democrats and immigrant activist groups.

AOC RIPS INTO BIDEN FOR KEEPING ‘RACIST’ TRUMP-ERA REFUGEE CAP

“This Biden Administration refugee admissions target is unacceptable,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said. “These refugees can wait years for their chance and go through extensive vetting. Thirty-five thousand are ready. Facing the greatest refugee crisis in our time there is no reason to limit the number to 15,000. Say it ain’t so, President Joe.”

“Completely and utterly unacceptable. Biden promised to welcome immigrants, and people voted for him based on that promise,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, said. “Upholding the xenophobic and racist policies of the Trump admin, incl the historically low + plummeted refugee cap, is flat out wrong.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez@AOC

Completely and utterly unacceptable. Biden promised to welcome immigrants, and people voted for him based on that promise. Upholding the xenophobic and racist policies of the Trump admin, incl the historically low + plummeted refugee cap, is flat out wrong. Keep your promise.

The New York Times@nytimes

Breaking News: The Biden administration will keep its cap on refugee admissions at the low level set by the Trump White House, walking back an earlier pledge. nyti.ms/3eadvJw

In the later statement indicating the number could go higher than 15,000, Psaki said that Biden had been consulting with advisors to “determine what number of refugees could realistically be admitted to the United States between now and October 1.”

“Given the decimated refugee admissions program we inherited, and burdens on the Office of Refugee Resettlement, his initial goal of 62,500 seems unlikely,” she said, a reference to the ongoing crisis at the southern border, of which the ORR is a key agency in dealing with migrant children.

DEMS URGE BIDEN TO INCLUDE AMNESTY FOR SOME ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS IN SECOND SPENDING BILL

Psaki then said that with the reforms to the refugee admissions in place, a new updated cap will be announced before the middle of May.

“While finalizing that determination, the President was urged to take immediate action to reverse the Trump policy that banned refugees from many key regions, to enable flights from those regions to begin within days; today’s order did that,” she said. “With that done, we expect the President to set a final, increased refugee cap for the remainder of this fiscal year by May 15.”

The controversy represents the latest political difficulty for the Biden administration, which has been facing intense pushback over its handling of the continued crisis at the southern border.

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The administration has overseen a dramatic surge in migration — including unaccompanied children — which has led to shocking images of packed migrant facilities and children being dumped by smugglers at the border.

The administration has been scrambling to cope with the influx, building new facilities and trying to get other countries to increase troop presences at their borders. But critics have accused the administration of fueling the crisis by rolling back Trump-era border protections and policies.

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Supreme court allows Trump to enforce new hardline immigration policy

Oliver Laughland — Mon, 03 Feb 2020 21:57:19 +0000

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez labels ruling ‘shameful’
Opponents argue it is essentially a ‘wealth test’

US supreme court building is seen in Washington. Photograph: Will Dunham/Reuters

The US supreme court has allowed the Trump administration to block immigrants seeking permanent residency in America on the basis of their likelihood to use public benefits such as housing assistance, healthcare, and food stamps even for short periods of time.

In response, the New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez labeled the Monday ruling “shameful” and said: “The American Dream isn’t a private club.”

The hardline policy, an expansion of the so-called public charge rule, has been litigated in lower courts by a collective of Democratic-leaning states and migrant rights activists, leading to several nationwide injunctions. The supreme court ruling lifts such blocks, allowing the policy to go into effect as litigation continues.

The justices voted 5-4 along ideological lines, with the conservative majority including chief justice John Roberts and the two judges appointed by Donald Trump, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, carrying the ruling.

Opponents of the policy, announced last August, argue it is essentially a wealth test that disproportionately affects non-white applicants for lawful permanent residency.

“America shouldn’t have a wealth test for admission,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “It’s a place where millions of people are descendants of immigrants who came w[ith] nothing [and] made a life. The American Dream isn’t a private club with a cover charge – it’s the possibility of remaking your future.”

The Trump administration lauded the decision and argued the lower court injunctions were an example of judicial overreach.

“It is very clear the US supreme court is fed up with these national injunctions by judges who are trying to impose their policy preferences instead of enforcing the law,” said Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy secretary at the US Department of Homeland Security.

The policy, which dramatically expands the public charge rule that previously covered applicants likely to need substantial and lengthy assistance, is the latest hardline immigration policy the supreme court has allowed to go into effect.

The court approved Trump’s travel ban on mostly Muslim majority countries; has allowed the use of $2.5bn in defense funding to construct a wall along parts of the southern border, and has allowed a rule to stop asylum seekers from Central America entering the US.

A 2019 survey by the Urban Institute found that the Trump public charge rule was already deterring people from seeking benefits for US citizen children, for fear of harming their own immigration status. Benefits for family members are not considered under the rule.

In a concurring opinion written by Gorsuch and joined by Clarence Thomas, the court criticized the use of nationwide injunctions.

“It has become increasingly apparent that this court must, at some point, confront these important objections to this increasingly widespread practice,” Gorsuch stated.

“As the brief and furious history of the regulation before us illustrates, the routine issuance of universal injunctions is patently unworkable, sowing chaos for litigants, the government, courts, and all those affected by these conflicting decisions.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/28/immigrants-residency-benefits-ruling-supreme-court-trump-policy

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Sorry If You’re Offended, but Socialism Leads to Misery and Destitution

David Harsanyi — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 04:26:21 +0000

Socialism is the leading man-made cause of death and misery in human existence.

On the same day that Venezuela’s “democratically” elected socialist president, Nicolas Maduro, whose once-wealthy nation now has citizens foraging for food, announced he was lopping five zeros off the country’s currency to create a “stable financial and monetary system,” Meghan McCain of The View was the target of internet-wide condemnation for having stated some obvious truths about collectivism.

During the same week we learned that the democratic socialist president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, is accused of massacring hundreds of protesters whose economic futures have been decimated by his economic policies, Soledad O’Brien and writers at outlets ranging from GQ, to BuzzFeed, to the Daily Beast were telling McCain to cool her jets.

In truth, McCain was being far too calm. After all, socialism is the leading man-made cause of death and misery in human existence. Whether implemented by a mob or a single strongman, collectivism is a poverty generator, an attack on human dignity and a destroyer of individual rights.

It’s true that not all socialism ends in the tyranny of Leninism or Stalinism or Maoism or Castroism or Ba’athism or Chavezism or the Khmer Rouge—only most of it does. And no, New York primary winner Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t intend to set up gulags in Alaska. Most so-called democratic socialists—the qualifier affixed to denote that they live in a democratic system and have no choice but to ask for votes—aren’t consciously or explicitly endorsing violence or tyranny. But when they adopt the term “socialism” and the ideas associated with it, they deserve to be treated with the kind of contempt and derision that all those adopting authoritarian philosophies deserve.

But look: Norway!

Socialism is perhaps the only ideology that Americans are asked to judge solely based on its piddling “successes.” Don’t you dare mention Albania or Algeria or Angola or Burma or Congo or Cuba or Ethiopia or Laos or Somalia or Vietnam or Yemen or, well, any other of the dozens of other inconvenient places socialism has been tried. Not when there are a handful of Scandinavian countries operating generous welfare-state programs propped up by underlying vibrant capitalism and natural resources.

Of course, socialism exists on a spectrum, and even if we accept that the Nordic social-program experiments are the most benign iteration of collectivism, they are certainly not the only version. Pretending otherwise would be like saying, “The police state of Singapore is more successful than Denmark. Let’s give it a spin.”

It turns out, though, that the “Denmark is awesome!” talking point is only the second most preposterous one used by socialists. It goes something like this: If you’re a fan of “roads, schools, libraries and such,” although you may not even be aware of it, you are also a supporter of socialism.

This might come as a surprise to some, but every penny of the $21,206 spent in Ocasio-Cortez’s district each year on each student, rich or poor, is provided with the profits derived from capitalism. There is no welfare system, no library that subsists on your good intentions. Having the state take over the entire health care system could rightly be called a socialistic endeavor, but pooling local tax dollars to put books in a building is called local government.

It should also be noted that today’s socialists get their yucks by pretending collectivist policies only lead to innocuous outcomes like local libraries. But for many years they were also praising the dictators of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the nation’s most successful socialist, isn’t merely impressed with the goings-on in Denmark. Not very long ago, he lauded Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela as an embodiment of the “American dream,” even more so than the United States.

Socialists like to blame every inequity, the actions of every greedy criminal, every downturn and every social ill on the injustice of capitalism. But none of them admit that capitalism has been the most effective way to eliminate poverty in history. Today, in former socialist states like India, there have been big reductions in poverty thanks to increased capitalism. In China, where communism sadly still deprives more than a billion people of their basic rights, hundreds of millions benefit from a system that is slowly shedding socialism. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the extreme poverty rate in the world has been cut in half. And it didn’t happen because Southeast Asians were raising the minimum wage.

In the United States, only 5 percent of people are even aware that poverty has fallen in the world, according to the Gapminder Foundation, which is almost certainly in part due to the left’s obsession with “inequality” and normalization of “socialism.” Nearly half of American millennials would rather live in a socialist society than in a capitalist one, according to a YouGov poll. That said, only 71 percent of those asked were able to properly identify either. We can now see the manifestation of this ignorance in our elections and The View co-host Joy Behar.

But if all you really champion are some higher taxes and more generous social welfare, stop associating yourself with a philosophy that usually brings destitution and death. Call it something else. If not, McCain has every right to associate you with the ideology you embrace.

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Socialist Green New Deal threatens Freedom, Prosperity, and the Environment

H. Sterling Burnett — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 04:19:06 +0000

Climate Change Weekly #327 (CCW)

Unless your idea of good government and an ideal society is totalitarianism, the Green New Deal (GND) has nothing to recommend it.

As I argued in CCW 313, it would be physically impossible to reach the goals set in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey’s (D-MA) socialist GND—a plan to do nothing less than remake the entire economy, sans fossil fuels, while promising full employment, living wages, free health care, and cheap energy from the Heavens for everyone in just over 10 years—and heck, why not throw in the promise of a chicken in every pot (except for vegetarians and vegans, of course), as well?

Even if the GND’s goals weren’t impossible to obtain within the time allotted, every credible economic analysis I’ve seen shows its costs would be so high that imposing it would be extremely undesirable. Early estimates indicate the GND would cost nearly $50 trillion in its first 10 years.

Settling aside the cost of transforming the transportation system and refurbishing the entire stock of housing and commercial structures in the United States, the American Enterprise Institute’s Ben Zycher has calculated the cost of decarbonizing the electric power system and meeting GND’s social welfare provisions, such as universal health care and free college tuition for everyone, will cost nearly $9 trillion dollars per year, when the political negotiations are all over.

The American Action Forum calculated GND could cost as much as $93 trillion dollars, or approximately $671,010 per household of four, through 2029.

The Heritage Foundation’s analysis of GND makes it look positively cheap by comparison. Heritage calculated only the costs of the energy portion of GND, estimating the taxes and regulations limiting carbon dioxide emissions would result in “a peak employment shortfall of over 1.4 million jobs; a total income loss of more than $40,000 for a family of four; [and] an aggregate gross domestic product loss of over $3.9 trillion, by 2024.”

Perhaps recognizing the foolishness of actually attempting to foist this steaming pile of “legislation” on voters, when Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) brought GND up for a vote in the Senate on March 26, not a single senator voted in favor of the bill. Even its authors and cosponsors voted “present” instead of yes.

This ignominious defeat, however, has not stopped more than 100 Democrat or Independent members of the U.S. House and Senate from cosponsoring or publicly endorsing GND, including Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Kristen Gillibrand (R-NY), Kamala Harris (D-CA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)—almost every senator currently vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Because, for reasons inexplicable to me, GND remains a talking point on the campaign trail and in Congress, my colleague and friend James Taylor, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, has written a detailed takedown of the proposal. Although Taylor provides an excellent discussion of GND’s economic costs, the portion of his paper I would like to focus on is the terrible environmental toll GND would impose on wildlife and wildlands in the United States and around the world without increasing governments’ abilities to control the climate.

Taylor writes, “Even if one accepts the dubious and alarming U.N. estimates regarding the temperature impact of CO2 emissions … if America were to immediately and completely eliminate all of its CO2 emissions, it would only mitigate less than two-tenths of a degree C[elsius] of global temperature increase by the end of the century, an amount that’s too small to be measured accurately.”

On the environmental front, Taylor calculates “replacing all existing conventional power plants with wind and solar power would require consuming an amount of land larger than the size of California, … an unprecedented assault on land conservation and the world’s greatest threat to biodiversity.”

A 2013 Wildlife Society Bulletin documented that although wind turbines produce just 1 percent of U.S. electricity, they already kill at least 1.4 million birds and bats each year, including many endangered and protected species. Taylor writes, “subsequent analyses found the death toll [of the Green New Deal] is likely 10–20 times greater than the 1.4 million estimate. If accurate, those estimates indicate dramatically increasing wind power could result in the slaughter of more than 100 million birds and bats each year.”

And that’s just the birds and bats. Because habitat loss is the biggest cause of species’ decline, placing industrial wind and solar facilities across the nation would result in the displacement and deaths of millions of animals of other species.

In addition, both wind and solar power require substantial amounts of rare earth elements, the mining, and refining of which produces millions of tons of toxic waste each year. Taylor writes, “An organization called Environmental Progress found solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy produced than nuclear power plants.”

Do you care about the environment? How about the health of the U.S. economy and your own bank account? If so, you should work with The Heartland Institute to bury the Green New Deal, and put politicians who support it into forced retirement.

Source: https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/socialist-green-new-deal-threatens-freedom-prosperity-and-the-environment

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Kellyanne Conway on the feud between Trump, ‘the Squad’

Fox News — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 12:51:56 +0000

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AOC’s Chief of Staff Admits the Green New Deal Is Not about Climate Change

Jack Crowe — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 00:09:54 +0000

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, N.Y.) during a House Oversight and Government Reform hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., May 9, 2019. (Leah Millis/Reuters)

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti admitted recently that the true motivation behind introducing the Green New Deal is to overhaul the “entire economy.”

Chakrabarti said that addressing climate change was not Ocasio-Cortez’s top priority in proposing the Green New Deal during a meeting with Washington governor Jay Inslee.

“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Chakrabarti said to Inslee’s climate director, Sam Ricketts, according to a Washington Post reporter who attended the meeting for a profile published Wednesday.

“Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing,” he added.

The Green New Deal, proposed earlier this year by Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey (D., Mass.), would transition the U.S. economy entirely away from fossil fuels within ten years while simultaneously providing federal jobs and healthcare guarantee. It would also, according to its proponents, advance “social, economic, racial, regional and gender-based justice and equality and cooperative and public ownership.”

All told, the proposal will cost up to $93 trillion in new government spending over ten years, according to a recent report by the conservative American Action Forum.

NOW WATCH: ‘President Donald Trump Declares War on the Green New Deal’

JACK CROWE is a news writer at National Review Online. @jackrcrowe

Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/aocs-chief-of-staff-admits-the-green-new-deal-is-not-about-climate-change/

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Newt Gingrich: Ocasio-Cortez is vicious, cruel and dishonest – And determined to destroy the America we know

Newt Gingrich | Fox News — Fri, 05 Jul 2019 11:16:09 +0000

It took Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s visit to the border – and her dishonest comments afterward – to help me understand how profoundly vicious, cruel and dishonest she is.

When you look at the larger picture, it is clear that Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is eager and determined to undermine and destroy America as we have known it.

When your goals are that radical, lying is simply part of the game. When you despise American values and find the American people “deplorable” and contemptible, lying is perfectly natural.

The tragedy of Ocasio-Cortez’s type of vicious, deliberately dishonest politics is it sets the stage for innocent people to die. The poignant, heart-wrenching picture of the father and his daughter who died trying to get into the United States illegally should serve as a moral condemnation of every Democrat trying to use the border as a political weapon against Trump.

OCASIO-CORTEZ DEFIANT IN FACE OF CRITICISM FOR OPPOSING BORDER $$ BILL WHILE DECRYING CONDITIONS

Let me be clear: The American border is a disaster. The American immigration system is profoundly broken.

Despite these tremendous problems, Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow left-wing activists continue to send signals to desperate and ambitious people around the world that they can (and should) enter the United States illegally.

These signals are simply increasing the pressure on the border and overwhelming the Americans who are working to protect and control our national boundaries. We have immigration laws to protect Americans from people who may be criminals, carrying infectious disease, or are committed to changing America rather than becoming American.

The people who are coming to our borders determined to begin their lives in America by breaking the law are being encouraged by Ocasio-Cortez and her hard-left allies.

It is important to remember that during the late 19th century when we had enormous immigration, it was still tightly controlled. Immigrants were processed in an orderly way. If they had infectious diseases, criminal records, were anarchists – or even showed signs of low morals – they were denied entry and sent back to their home countries.

The modern left-wing idea of opening the borders as wide as possible would have been thoroughly rejected in any previous era.

The people who are coming to our borders determined to begin their lives in America by breaking the law are being encouraged by Ocasio-Cortez and her hard-left allies.

The Democrats have refused to control the border. They have refused to amend the amnesty provision in our immigration law, which is the loophole used by most sophisticated people seeking illegal entry).

The Democrats have also refused to provide legislative solutions for various left-wing judicial decisions that have crippled our enforcement capabilities. So, the word is out that it is a good time to sneak into the United States.

Now the Democrats are going a step further and talking about providing free health care for people who come here illegally. When word spreads that sick people can sneak into America and get free medical treatment from American doctors and nurses, the flood of sick immigrants will double and triple from the current numbers.

Meanwhile, the current team of hardworking, patriotic government officials working to enforce and administer our laws are being overwhelmed by the size of the invasion. Instead of helping these officials with their difficult jobs, the Democrats attack them, try to shame them, lie about them, and hold them up to ridicule.

This is not a cost-free political game.

The Ocasio-Cortez wing is blocking the help, undermining the existing workforce, maximizing the number of new people coming into the United States illegally, and then blaming the hard-working immigration and border agents for trying to do their jobs.

We owe it to the father and daughter who died in the Rio Grande to make clear who has a moral responsibility for the system that lured them into the river and left them to die.

That system is the one upheld by the Democratic Party’s political ideology in the House and Senate – and now in the presidential nominating process.

Every day that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and the Ocasio-Cortez radicals block reforming the immigration system, the House Republicans should take special orders and show the pictures of those who died the day before in a system the Democrats helped ruin – and refuse to reform.

Furthermore, Ocasio-Cortez should be called out for the viciousness, destructiveness, and dishonesty of her words and actions. It is time for decent people to stand up to her and ask: “Have you no shame?

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM NEWT GINGRICH

Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich is the host of the “Newt’s World” podcast and author of the New York Times bestsellers “Understanding Trump and Trump’s America.”

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/newt-gingrich-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-border-dishonesty

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Trump takes aim at Dem talk of impeachment

Brandon Conradis — Sun, 21 Apr 2019 03:17:10 +0000

President Trump on Sunday took aim at the Democrats pushing to advance impeachment proceedings against him as the dust settles from special counsel Robert Mueller‘s report on Russian election interference.

“How do you impeach a Republican President for a crime that was committed by the Democrats? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Trump tweeted shortly after arriving in Washington following an Easter Sunday spent at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

Trump’s tweet came after several Democratic leaders in Congress made clear on Sunday that the possibility of impeachment was still on the table, despite opposition from Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and others.

“Impeachment is likely to be unsuccessful,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told ABC’s “This Week,” before adding, “It may be that we undertake an impeachment nonetheless.”

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, expressed similar views on the Sunday show circuit, insisting Democrats would continue to look into the issue.

The possibility of impeachment gained new urgency after the release of Mueller’s redacted report on Thursday. Though the special counsel’s team concluded there was no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, it also outlined in vivid detail ways in which Trump had possibly sought to interfere with the investigation, raising questions over whether he obstructed justice.

Mueller himself declined to draw a conclusion one way or the other on that matter. But the open-ended nature of that section of the report has led to renewed calls by congressional Democrats to look into whether Trump should be impeached.

Shortly after the report’s release, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), arguably the most influential of the current crop of progressive lawmakers on Capitol Hill, said she would sign on to a resolution from Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) that would examine the issue of impeachment.

Then, on Saturday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) became the first 2020 presidential hopeful to explicitly call for the House to begin impeachment proceedings.

Those new calls are likely to cause friction with Democratic leaders such as Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who have sought to quell talk of impeachment, arguing it would be too divisive going into a heated presidential election.

Pelosi has repeatedly said pursuing impeachment against Trump “is not worth it,” echoing the argument made by figures who have said the best way to defeat Trump is to vote him out of office, including former FBI Director James Comey, who played a key role in Mueller’s investigation.

That view was also endorsed by a more moderate 2020 hopeful, Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who on Sunday argued Congress should not pursue impeachment just yet.

“Let the process play itself out,” Ryan said on CNN. “And let’s educate the American people too. This is a very nuanced document. Let the American people really see what’s going on here.”

Source: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/439937-trump-takes-aim-at-dem-talk-of-impeachment

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Democrats now pushing many of the same socialist policies that destroyed Venezuela

Justin Haskins - Fox News — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 09:37:33 +0000

Protests against the Nicolas Maduro regime in Caracas, Venezuela on Wednesday, Jan 23 2019 (Fox News)

Venezuela is once again in a state of economic and political chaos. Juan Guaido – Venezuela’s charismatic opposition leader and head of the country’s National Assembly – has declared himself Venezuela’s interim president, directly challenging the legitimacy of President Nicolas Maduro, who began his second term earlier in January.

In May 2018, Maduro won a highly controversial election in which he suddenly moved the election date from December 2018 to May and banned numerous political rivals from participating in the election. Maduro has also been accused of buying votes and rigging the election in his favor. Much of the international community, including President Trump, now say they believe the Maduro regime is illegitimate and support Guaido’s plan to have new elections.

Despite condemnation from dozens of world leaders and tens of thousands of protesters in Venezuela, Maduro, who continues to receive the support of the country’s military leaders, says he has no intention of backing down. It’s hard to imagine how this tragic situation can end without bloodshed.

ARE DEMOCRATS CELEBRATING THE SHUTDOWN STANDOFF AS A WIN TOO EARLY?

At the heart of Venezuela’s collapse is a laundry list of socialist policies that have decimated its economy, including many that congressional Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., are calling for today. Venezuela, which has the world’s largest oil reserves, was once Latin America’s wealthiest country, but over time, socialist leaders like Hugo Chavez and Maduro implemented increasingly more government social welfare programs, such as massive housing and infrastructure projects, government-run health care, and subsidized grocery stores.

When oil prices were high, Venezuela’s socialist government was able to fund and expand these programs, but the good times didn’t last forever. Oil prices eventually dropped, driving the country deep into debt. Rather than cut back on government programs when tax revenues fell, Chavez and Maduro printed money and accepted loans from countries around the world. When inflation increased, the Venezuelan socialists raised interest rates, issued punitive taxes, and eventually confiscated property and established price controls.

As a result of these policies, countless businesses closed and entrepreneurs fled the country, taking their wealth with them. But Maduro’s government refused to deviate from its socialist course, spending piles of cash on programs it couldn’t afford. By the end of 2018, inflation had reached a stunning 80,000 percent.

Although the U.S. economy is substantially stronger than Venezuela’s, a growing number of congressional Democrats are openly calling for many of the same costly proposals that have long been embraced by socialists like Maduro. For example, Sen. Bernie Sanders’, I-Vt., “Medicare for All” health care plan would cost $32 trillion in just the first 10 years of the plan, according to an analysis by the Mercatus Center. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has called for the creation of a new Office of Drug Manufacturing, which would give the federal government power to manufacture generic drugs. Other Democrats have called for price controls on drugs.

Perhaps most notable is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal,” which is really nothing more than a massive socialist Trojan horse. The Green New Deal would put government in control, either directly or indirectly, of most of the energy industry and mandate everyone use renewable energy sources like wind and solar by 2030. The Green New Deal would destroy whole industries related to fossil fuels, eliminating 3.4 million jobs in the process, and it calls for communities, rather than private businesses, to control energy markets. Additionally, the Green New Deal would impose other socialist policies like a federal jobs guarantee and a universal basic income program.

Although not all these specific policies have been created in Venezuela, the overarching economic strategy is exactly the same: Both Democrats and the socialists in Venezuela believe the road to prosperity is paved with gigantic government-run programs and miles of regulatory red tape. And both the socialists in Venezuela and the “democratic” socialists in the Democratic Party have the same strategy to pay for these expensive programs: running up the national debt, building new publicly owned banks (another proposal in Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal), and printing money.

Democrats believe the economic collapse in Venezuela won’t happen in the United States because our economy is too big to fail, but history has proven repeatedly that even the wealthiest nations can collapse when their economies are mismanaged. America’s national debt has nearly reached $22 trillion, and our annual deficits have been growing in recent years—under the leadership of both Democrats and Republicans. Although we’re not on the verge of seeing hyperinflation here in America in the immediate future, we could be closer than many think.

If the United States continues to borrow and print money, a strategy the Democrats are embracing, the world will eventually lose faith in our currency, which is now used in many of the most important international transactions. That could lead to the creation of a new international currency, which would trigger a collapse of our economy unlike anything we’ve seen since the Great Depression and cause hyperinflation, a major cause of the economic crisis in Venezuela.

Democrats’ left-wing economic policies would put us on the path to economic ruin. Let’s hope Americans learn from Venezuela’s mistakes and reject Democrats’ socialist vision for the United States.

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/democrats-now-pushing-many-of-the-same-socialist-policies-that-destroyed-venezuela

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