Kamala punts on amnesty for ‘DREAMers’

Another day, another potential Kamala Harris flip-flop. The vice president is now quiet on whether she still supports providing a pathway to citizenship for 2 million “DREAMers” —  illegal immigrant children who were given temporary relief from deportation through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

In 2019, when running for the Democratic nomination for president, Harris supported four executive actions to grant amnesty to 2 million DACA recipients.

Axios reports: 

Harris proposed putting DREAMers on a path to a green card by, among other things, granting work authorizations, using certain parole powers and waiving rules barring people from returning to the US if they leave to apply for a green card in a US consulate abroad.

Typically, individuals who are in the United States illegally are not eligible for a green card. Harris also supported expanding the deferred action program to cover an additional six million illegal aliens. 

“Every day in the life of a DREAMer who fears deportation is a long day,” Harris said at the time. “DREAMers cannot afford to sit around and wait for Congress to get its act together. Their lives are on the line.”

However, when Axios asked if Harris still supported these measures, her spokesman declined to answer specifically. “The vice president has fought for DREAMers throughout her career and is proud of the actions taken under her and President Biden to expand protections for them, including the executive action President Biden took this year, which she supported,” spokesman Ian Sams said. 

“As president, she’ll continue to protect DREAMers while also pushing the bipartisan border deal that will dramatically strengthen border security,” Sams added when asked if Harris would support using Parole in Place measures to protect DACA recipients.

The campaign’s non-answer is consistent with Harris’s recent shift to make herself seem tough on the border. She has moved away from the label “border czar” (one of the Axios reporters on the DREAMers flip-flop article previously wrote a piece claiming Harris was never the “border czar”), has touted her time prosecuting transnational gangs and says she supports the Senate’s “bipartisan border bill.” She seemingly no longer supports decriminalizing illegal immigration and reimagining Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as she suggested during her 2019 campaign. It’s not clear if she still believes illegal aliens should receive free healthcare, including free sex change surgeries for imprisoned illegal aliens. 

Harris has also abandoned support for a fracking ban, an electric vehicle mandate, banning plastic straws, a mandatory gun buyback, Medicare-for-All and a federal job guarantee.

Harris has not explained in detail her massive political transformation between 2019 and 2024 except to say that her “values have not changed.”  

-Amber Duke

On our radar

WHO’S POLLING AHEAD The latest iteration of the New York Times/Siena poll shows Donald Trump ahead of Kamala Harris by five points in Arizona, four points in Georgia and two points in North Carolina. It follows polls from CBS and NBC News that both had Harris up four points nationally and leading slightly in swing states. 

DO YOU EVER FEEL… Like a plastic bag in Governor Gavin Newsom’s California? Newsom signed a law Sunday that bans the use of plastic bags at grocery stores. The state previously banned thin plastic bags in favor of a thicker, recyclable plastic version, but now shoppers will be forced to use paper bags or bring reusable bags from home. 

MARKED OUT Top staff for North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson have resigned in the wake of reporting on the lieutenant governor’s lewd and antisemitic comments on a porn website. Robinson, who described himself as a “black Nazi,” has lost his general consultant, campaign manager, finance director and deputy campaign manager. 

Would-be Trump assassin put bounty on former president

Ryan Wesley Routh, the man accused of aiming a rifle barrel at Donald Trump while the former president was golfing at his Trump International golf course in Palm Beach, Florida last week, wrote a letter addressed to “the World,” according to federal prosecutors in a US District Court filing seeking to have him held without bail. In his letter, the prosecutors say, Routh wrote:

This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you. I tried my best and gave it all the gumption I could muster. It is up to you now to finish the job; and I will offer $150,000 to whomever can complete the job.

The letter, reports CNN, was found in a box a witness told investigators Routh had “dropped off a box at [the witness’s] home months before, which ‘contained ammunition, a metal pipe, miscellaneous building materials, tools, four phones and various letters.’ After learning of the apparent assassination attempt, the witness opened the box, according to the filing.”

The filing also asserts that Routh stalked Trump for at least a month before he showed up armed at the golf course and poked a rifle barrel through some hedges toward Trump.

“On multiple days and times from August 18, 2024, to September 15, 2024, Routh’s cell phone accessed cell towers located near Trump International [Golf Course] and the former president’s residence at Mar-a-Lago,” it says, adding that when Routh was arrested, he had a “handwritten list of dates in August, September and October 2024 and venues where the former president had appeared or was expected to be present.”

Routh is a convicted felon — and despite gun control laws that generally prohibit felons from possessing firearms, USA Todayreports that at the spot the rifle barrel was spotted, “FBI agents found an SKS semi-automatic rifle with a scope, loaded with twelve rounds of ammunition in the improvised sniper’s nest,” and that “a fingerprint on the SKS rifle found at the golf club was preliminarily matched to Routh.”

In addition to being charged with unlawfully possessing a firearm and “possession of a weapon with an obliterated serial number,” NPR reports, “more charges” — including attempted assassination — “and an indictment are expected later this week after prosecutors put the case before a federal grand jury.”

–Teresa Mull

Groundhog Day for government funding

What’s old is new again, as the House reverted to backing a short-term spending package that will fund the government through late December, after Speaker Mike Johnson’s attempt to pass a six-month funding bill, combined with the SAVE Act — a bipartisan measure to ban noncitizen voting — was pulled.

“We fell a bit short of the goal line,” Johnson wrote to his colleagues over the weekend. Now, Democrats have signed on to the latest version — which contains extra funding for the Secret Service, inauguration and presidential transition.

While this means that former president Donald Trump won’t see the SAVE Act tied to government funding, it does likely mean that the government will not shut down before November, averting a major potential headache for Republicans.

Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts bragged to her Democratic colleagues that the current iteration contains no GOP “poison pills,” without explaining her opposition to the SAVE Act. Johnson’s original six-month measure didn’t please some on his own side, who were willing to vote for it despite their reservations. Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the Republican chairman of the Appropriations Committee, called a six-month continuing resolution “pretty unprecedented.” 

The impending spending bill comes despite the Democratic-controlled Senate passing “zero” appropriations bills, about which GOP majority leader Steve Scalise recently said, “That’s unacceptable.”  

–Matthew Foldi