President Trump, seen speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday, has fired his national security adviser. With John Bolton gone, what does that mean for Afghanistan peace talks and other major foreign policy?
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President Trump, seen speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday, has fired his national security adviser. With John Bolton gone, what does that mean for Afghanistan peace talks and other major foreign policy?
Win McNamee/Getty Images
President Trump spiked the peace negotiations for a war he’s desperate to end and sacked the national security adviser who shaped much of his foreign policy in Asia and the Middle East.
Where does the Trump administration’s foreign policy go from here?
Until Saturday, one path, at least, appeared clear: Washington was inching closer to some kind of agreement with the Taliban to end the 18-year conflict in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, though his administration was taking a tough official line against Iran, Venezuela, North Korea and Russia — it was sometimes accompanied by a soft semiofficial line taken by Trump himself.
Then Trump announced Saturday he was canceling a summit he’d planned to convene secretly at Camp David with Afghan government and Taliban leaders, and he proclaimed Monday that he considered peace talks to be “dead.”
That night, Trump talked with national security adviser John Bolton in an exchange that Bolton said resulted in him offering his resignation. Trump says he asked Bolton to quit.
Effect on policy
Bolton became the latest top official to be terminated in a presidential tweet over a disagreement with the principal, with uncertain consequences for the conduct of a major American policy.
In the past, these kinds of resignations have resulted in pyrrhic victories for those involved.
When then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and then-envoy Brett McGurk resigned at the end of 2018 rather than go along with Trump’s planned withdrawal from Syria, they appeared to stay the administration’s hand from the full military pullout Trump had contemplated.
One question now is how long Bolton’s policy, without Bolton himself, will endure within the administration.
Trump has desired for years to cut bait on the war in Afghanistan and he seems unlikely to leave peace talks dormant for long. The special envoy who’s been carrying on the negotiations with the Taliban, Zalmay Khalilzad, appears to be staying on in his administration job.
Factors beyond Bolton
But the timing of when talks could resume and when they might show results is important, and all that has been cast into doubt.
One reason is Afghanistan’s presidential election scheduled for this month.
President Ashraf Ghani is considered a favorite to secure another term, but the Taliban accuse his government of being stooges for the Americans. The closer that election comes, the likelier there could be violence that further delays the resumption of negotiations.
A Taliban attack that resulted in the death of an American service member was the reason Trump gave for abrogating negotiations, although they may have begun to founder before his surprise announcement on Saturday.
Another factor is the American presidential election next year.
Trump supports withdrawing thousands of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. He has long been dubious of the establishment consensus on how to preserve stability there, and the objections of hawks who say Washington must persevere until a final victory.
Trump went down that route with Mattis — for a time.
He agreed to an increase in the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, curtailed much of the public reporting about the conflict and kiboshed any talk about timetables for the end of the war.
Then the president apparently ran out of patience, and he has made clear he doesn’t care for American deployments to continue in their current form any longer than he can manage.
Bolton’s ouster removes an internal skeptic about that approach, and whoever Trump names as his replacement will need to be on board the current program.
But with the diplomatic track toward an endgame in Afghanistan derailed, there’s also no telling what the next phase could look like.
Also unresolved: Iran, North Korea
Bolton’s defenestration also scrambles the outlook for other tough areas of foreign and national security policy.
Bolton helped write the playbook that Trump and his advisers used to abrogate America’s participation in the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by then-President Barack Obama.
What followed was the campaign of “maximum pressure” on Tehran that brought it to the brink of a flashpoint with the U.S. and other world powers over oil and other sanctions.
Now Trump is airing his willingness to talk with Iran.
Another unresolved line of effort is that toward North Korea. Trump loves kvelling about the warm relationship he says he’s developed with strongman Kim Jong Un, including through the “beautiful letters” that arrive at the White House from Pyongyang.
That relationship so far hasn’t yielded a lasting agreement in which North Korea would dismantle its nuclear weapons program in exchange for sanctions relief or other normalization of its relationship with the world.
One reason it hasn’t was Bolton, who held out for more concessions from the North. Kim’s regime criticized both him and Trump’s most enduring foreign policy lieutenant, Pompeo, at one point asking for the secretary of state to be replaced as their interlocutor on the American side in order to continue talks.
Trump has said, in so many words, that everything is fine with North Korea — the regime’s periodic regional missile tests don’t bother him so long as it doesn’t fire weapons that can threaten the United States or test another nuclear weapon.
With Bolton gone, is Trump that much likelier to agree to another summit with Kim, and then to some kind of new agreement with North Korea?
U.S. intelligence officials have said they don’t believe Kim would ever give up his strategic weapons program because he views it as essential to his regime’s survival.
“Excellent news”
Some arms control advocates, however, hailed Bolton’s departure because they said it means improved odds for new treaties with Russia.
The United States has let one major nuclear agreement lapse with Russia — the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty — and the New START agreement is up for negotiation in 2021.
For every issue, a take — but the bottom line was expressed by Pompeo on Tuesday at a White House briefing that originally was to have included Bolton. The secretary of state told reporters that the only person who determines who works for Trump, and what that means for the policy of the United States, is Trump.
Republicans held onto a district Trump carried by 12 points in 2016, while Democrats’ sagging rural performance also drew notice.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Republicans went all-in to keep hold of a key congressional district in a special election Tuesday, and they won — but they still have good reason to be concerned about the result.
While the GOP can celebrate the election of a new congressman, Dan Bishop, his 2-point victory in a district President Donald Trump carried by 12 points in 2016 continues a worrisome trend for the party, which suffered heavy losses in the 2018 midterms and has not seen the political environment improve as Trump gears up for reelection.
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Trump cannot win a second term without improving his political position, and Democrats know it, casting Bishop’s narrow win as a sign of progress in North Carolina. But Democrats also saw worrying trends of their own on Tuesday, as their candidate Dan McCready benefitted from a surge in metropolitan support that would have brought them victory — if not for an even stronger swell in rural support for Bishop and the GOP.
In short, Tuesday’s results outlined the path to 2020 victory for both parties, cut along the fundamental trend of politics in the Trump era: cities and suburbs swinging more and more Democratic, while the president’s appeal brings exurbs and rural voters deeper into the GOP fold. Trump pushed harder on one side of the scale to win in 2016; Democrats pushed back on the other side to take the House last year. And next year, it will decide whether Trump gets another term or a Democrat takes the White House for four years.
Trump’s election-eve rally for Bishop brought thousands to Fayetteville on Monday night on the eastern edge of the district, and it’s hard to argue with results: McCready had carried the surrounding county, Cumberland County, by more than 4 percentage points last year. But Bishop won it by the narrowest of margins on Tuesday, also making improvements in neighboring counties far from the Charlotte suburbs where McCready was strongest.
“Trump’s support in these mixed rural-suburban districts is really strong,” said David McIntosh, the president of the conservative Club for Growth and a former Indiana congressman.
Republicans agreed the party’s fortunes are tied to Trump’s in 2020 — and argued the results on Tuesday suggested that might not be a bad thing.
“The rest of the party is going to live or die based on how the president, in ’20, performs,” said Patrick Sebastian, a GOP consultant in the state. “If Trump can win North Carolina by a point or two, that’s excellent news for party.”
Meanwhile, Democrats were quick to find the silver lining in McCready’s narrow defeat. Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.), the chairwoman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee noted that there are nearly three dozen GOP-held House seats that are less Republican-leaning than North Carolina’s 9th District.
“We fell an inch short tonight, but it took more than $6 million in outside Republican spending and a last-minute Trump rally to scrape by in a district that the president carried by 11.9 points,” Bustos said.
Democrats did increase their margins in and around Charlotte in the election, but they were swamped by Bishop’s stronger performance east of the city. McCready won Mecklenburg County, which includes parts of Charlotte and its southern suburbs, 56 percent to 43 percent, up from a 10-point in 2018. Those are some of the same trends that led the party to lose Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the 2016 presidential race, even if stronger numbers in metropolitan areas can put new states on the map for the party.
“If we don’t connect with rural voters — if we don’t show up in 2020 and win these places back — then Trump wins,” Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, tweeted late Tuesday night.
Kellyanne Conway, the former GOP campaign pollster working as a counselor to Trump in the White House, touted Trump as the difference-marker, boosting “enthusiasm, optimism and turnout” for Bishop with Monday night’s rally.
“The haters waste so much time trying to insult and impede the president that they fail to grasp the political currency he conveys in tight races like this,” said Conway.
The president took even more credit for Bishop’s win, writing in a victory lap on Twitter that Bishop was trailing and “asked me for help, [and] we changed his strategy together, and he ran a great race.”
Bishop’s embrace of the president — in the closing days of the campaign, he repeatedly decried the treatment Trump had received from Democrats and the news media and said he would go to Congress as a vocal Trump defender — also serves as a playbook for other Republicans.
“Republicans should be watching: Run with the president and win,” Conway said.
That could include vulnerable incumbents like GOP Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is facing a spirited primary race from a self-funding opponent accusing him of insufficient loyalty to Trump, in addition to the challenge of seeking reelection in a swing state.
Republicans were quick to trumpet the success of their coordinated effort — from last-minute visits from Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, all the way down to the congressional leaders and the constellation of official and outside groups and super PACs — in pushing Bishop across the finish line.
That may not be replicable in November 2020 all the way down the ballot. But Trump’s robust campaign operation — which he continues to build as Democrats fight for their party’s nomination — will be formidable, despite the president’s low political standing compared to past incumbents.
“The White House, Republican leadership and all our Republican and conservative partners were there for us every step of the way because they all understood what was at stake in this election,” Bishop said in his victory speech Tuesday night.
For McCready, who campaigned for this House seat for 27 months — launching a campaign in 2017, suffering an apparent defeat in 2018 only to run again in 2019 when the previous election was voided amid credible allegations of ballot fraud — he sounded some of the same bipartisan notes that twice brought him close to winning a congressional seat Democrats haven’t held since the 1960s.
“We may not have won this campaign, but that does not mean we were wrong,” McCready said in his concession speech. “And as long as there are people who thrive off our division, there is still work to be done.”
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Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks to supporters at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles last month.
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Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks to supporters at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles last month.
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Elizabeth Warren is on the rise among Democratic voters, but she and other Democrats are less popular with the overall electorate, raising concerns about a bruising primary that could go on for the better part of the next year, a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll finds.
The survey also finds President Trump continuing to struggle, with economic concerns seemingly starting to affect his standing, leaving a cloudy picture about the 2020 presidential election.
Here are some key findings from the poll, and how the results indicate what’s ahead in 2020:
Warren finds herself in a strong position with Democratic voters ahead of Thursday’s Democratic presidential debate.
Seventy-five percent of Democratic voters now say they have a favorable impression of Warren — that’s up from 53% in January, the last time the poll asked the favorability of candidates or potential candidates. That’s a whopping 22-point jump.
What’s more, those saying they have a negative impression has gone down from 17% to 11%.
“Elizabeth Warren seems to be on the verge of starting to make significant and serious inroads into this contest,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, which conducts the poll. He added, “Heading into the debate, she’s very well positioned.”
Biden holding up
Former Vice President Joe Biden, who leads in most national polls of the Democratic contest, is also well liked, but he’s seen a decline since January — 71% of Democrats say they have a positive impression of Biden, a 5-point drop, and 22% don’t, an 11-point increase in his negative rating.
“One of the initial senses of what Joe Biden presented was that he seemed to be less of a risk,” Miringoff said, “but his performance so far has not been gaffe-proof, and, as a result, people are not as comfortable, and that opened up the door for others, and particularly Warren.”
Biden has been taking most of the slings and arrows of his Democratic opponents, given his lead in the race, and his campaign would argue that he’s held up well considering.
The broader electorate isn’t quite sold on either of Biden or Warren. Biden has the higher name recognition, and voters overall give him just a 45% favorable, 46% unfavorable rating. Voters are similarly split on Warren, who gets a 41% favorable and 42% unfavorable rating.
Sanders popular with the base, but not the general electorate
Bernie Sanders, who has retained his loyal following, has seen an increase in his favorability rating among Democrats since officially declaring his candidacy. The Vermont senator has gone from 57% positive in January to 66% now. But it’s a different story with the broader electorate – 55% of voters say they have an unfavorable impression of Sanders, while just 38% have a positive one.
“Bernie Sanders having over 50% negative has to be concerning to Democrats looking for electability,” Miringoff noted.
Harris is better known, but also unpopular with general electorate
California Sen. Kamala Harris was also tested, but the difference of views of her between the primary and general election electorate are most striking. Harris has gone up 20 points with Democrats, as she has increased her name recognition, going from 36% favorable in January to 56% now. Back then more than half of Democrats were either unsure or never heard of her. That’s down to just a quarter of Democrats now.
So, she’s worn well with Democrats, but not with a general electorate so far. Among registered voters, she has a 31% favorable, 42% unfavorable rating. (The poll did not test the favorability of the candidates with a general-election electorate back in January.)
“When you look at the national electorate,” Miringoff said, “there’s still a lot of work to be done on the part of Democrats to start attracting a positive reaction.”
Democrats want to beat Trump
How the candidates fair with a general-election audience could be critical, as Democrats are increasingly saying beating Trump is more important than whether a candidate shares their position on most issues. In this poll, 58% said that, an increase from 54% in July and 46% in June.
The broader electorate continues to be split on whether the ideas they’ve heard from Democrats are going to take the country in the right direction (46%) or the wrong one (43%). That’s a slight improvement from July when it was the mirror opposite. Still, more independents say their ideas move the country in the wrong direction (49%) than right one (42%).
Trump
President Trump doesn’t fair much better than his potential Democratic opponents. His overall approval rating is low (41%), a near-record number of people “strongly disapprove” of the job he’s doing (45%), a record number disapprove of his handling of foreign policy (56%) and a majority say they will “definitely” vote against him in 2020 (52%).
What’s more, while the economy is buoying him — 51% overall and 53% of independents rate it as excellent or good — he’s seen something of a bad economic summer. While the economy is still growing and unemployment is low, economic forecasts have turned gloomy with warning signs of a coming recession.
Trump’s economic handling has taken a hit. More now disapprove (48%) than approve (47%) of it, a sharp turnaround from July when a majority (53%) approved of his handling of the economy.
Overall, Americans who responded were split, 47%-to-46% on whether Trump’s policies have strengthened or weakened the economy. And the number of people who think his policies have weakened the economy has increased 6 points since July.
Despite all that, more Americans think Trump will win reelection (46%) than lose (37%).
Just 5% of Republicans think he will lose, while 11% of Democrats think he will win and 14% are unsure. Independents, 49%-to-32% think he’s going to win.
Methodology
The survey of 1,314 adults was conducted with live callers via telephone by The Marist Poll and has a margin of error of +/- 3.6 percentage points. There are 1,160 registered voters with a margin of error of 3.8 percentage points. There are 542 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents with a margin of error of +/- 5.6 percentage points.
Conservative Republican Dan Bishop won a special election Tuesday for an open House seat in North Carolina, averting a Democratic capture of a GOP-leaning district. But his narrow victory did not erase questions about whether President Trump and his party’s congressional candidates face troubling headwinds approaching 2020.
Bishop, 55, a state senator best known for a North Carolina law dictating which public bathrooms transgender people can use, defeated centrist Democrat Dan McCready. Bishop was the beneficiary of an election-eve rally in the district headlined by Trump, who told the crowd a victory would be “the first steps to firing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and winning back the House in 2020.”
McCready, 36, a former Marine turned financier of solar energy projects, was banking on the district’s suburban moderates to carry him over the top. He was already a familiar name in the district: He narrowly trailed in an election for the seat in November that was later invalidated after evidence surfaced of vote-tampering.
Tuesday’s election had been seen as too close to call, in itself an ominous sign for Republicans. Trump won the district by 11 percentage points in 2016, and a loss would have been a worrisome preface to the party’s campaigns next year. Republicans have held the seat since 1963.
Special elections generally attract such low turnout that their results aren’t predictive of future general elections. Even so, a McCready victory, or even a narrow defeat, would have signaled that the Democrats’ 2018 string of victories in suburban districts in red states including Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas could persist.
There is almost no pathway to Republicans regaining House control next year unless they avoid losing suburban districts and win back some they lost last year.
The district stretches from Charlotte, one of the nation’s financial nerve centers, through its flourishing eastern suburbs and into less prosperous rural counties along the South Carolina line. More than half its voters were expected to come from the suburbs.
Since Trump became president, voters in such communities — particularly women and college-educated voters — have abandoned him in droves over his conservative social policies and vitriolic rhetoric on immigration and race.
Along with a GOP victory in a second vacant House district in North Carolina, Republicans pared the Democratic majority in the House to 235-199, plus one independent. That means to win control of the chamber in 2020, Republicans will need to gain 18 seats, which a slew of GOP retirements, anti-Trump sentiment among moderate voters and demographic changes suggest will be difficult.
Suburban defections would also jeopardize the reelection prospects of Trump, who’s already facing slipping poll numbers. Limiting the erosion of those voters will be crucial for him to retain swing states like North Carolina, which he won by less than 4 percentage points in 2016.
“I am a registered Republican, but I am fed up with the agenda of the Republican Party,” said Bob Southern, 75, of Mint Hill, a Charlotte suburb. “I am so disappointed in this president, and he frightens me very much.”
Southern said he voted for McCready.
Bishop was counting on the district’s Republican-leaning tendencies.
“Bishop, his policies follow my convictions. After hearing Bishop, knowing that he’s for the 2nd Amendment and he’s against illegal immigration,” said Susie Sisk, 73, another retiree from Mint Hill. The registered Democrat said she voted for Bishop.
A McCready win would also have let Democrats brag that they controlled a congressional district that covers a piece of Charlotte, where next summer’s Republican National Convention will be held to renominate Trump.
Underscoring the GOP’s all-out effort to avoid a demoralizing defeat, Vice President Mike Pence also campaigned in the district Monday. And while McCready outspent Bishop by nearly $3 million, top outside GOP groups poured in $6.4 million, outpacing Democrats’ $2.9 million and nearly evening out the expenditures.
In the other special election, Republican Greg Murphy, a doctor and state legislator, as expected defeated Democrat Allen Thomas to keep a House district along North Carolina’s Atlantic Coast.
That seat has been vacant since February, when 13-term GOP Rep. Walter Jones died. Trump won it handily in 2016.
The bathroom law that Bishop sponsored was repealed after it prompted a national outcry and boycotts that the Associated Press estimated cost North Carolina $3.7 billion.
Bishop bound himself tightly to Trump, backing his proposed border wall with Mexico and accusing Trump critics of being intent on “destroying him.” In a TV spot airing election day, he said his opponent is “backed by radicals,” as the screen flashed the faces of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
McCready used his creation of a company that’s financed solar energy projects to cast himself as a job creator and environmental champion. He also focused on containing healthcare costs and ran a spot featuring his trademark promise to prioritize “country over party.”
The district received a black eye this year when state officials voided its 2018 election, which McCready lost by 900 votes to GOP candidate Mark Harris. That decision followed allegations of ballot tampering by a Republican political consultant, and Harris opted to not run again.
Another jolt of notoriety occurred in July when Trump staged a rally for Bishop in nearby Greenville. Trump said four Democratic women of color should “go back” to their home countries, though all are U.S. citizens and three were born in the U.S. The crowd began chanting, “Send her back.”
Normally a leader in progressive politics, California is something of a follower in this case. Earlier this year, Oregon limited rent increases for most tenants to 7 percent annually plus inflation. In New York, state lawmakers significantly strengthened regulations that dictate the rents of almost half of New York City’s rental stock and allowed other cities to impose their own rent caps.
Most states have laws that explicitly ban rent control, a century-old mechanism that has divided tenant activists, who argue that it is the most cost-effective way to quickly curb housing costs, and economists, who largely agree that it constrains the long-term housing supply. Only four states — California, Maryland, New Jersey and New York — have localities with rent control, along with Washington, D.C.
But the idea of rent control is gaining steam, fueled by a far-reaching network of tenant unions and others organizing efforts to combat displacement and skyrocketing rents.
Despite efforts to reduce homelessness in Los Angeles, new numbers show the issue there has hit a new high.
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SAN FRANCISCO — Trump administration officials confirmed Tuesday they are on the ground in California looking at ways to intervene in the state’s mounting homelessness issue, which President Donald Trump has criticized as “disgusting” and a “disgrace to our country.”
But many elected officials and homelessness experts in the Golden State said any White House assistance would be disingenuous given federal housing cuts have helped exacerbate the problem. Some also accused Trump of using the homelessness issue to win over conservative supporters ahead of the 2020 election.
“We need federal support and resources to build more housing for people living on the streets,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said in a statement. “But simply cracking down on homelessness without providing the housing people need is not a real solution.”
Nathan Click, chief spokesman for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, also in part blamed the president for the state’s poverty woes. “If the president is willing to put serious solutions, with real investment, on the table, California stands ready to talk. He could start by ending his plans to cut food stamps, gut health care for low-income people and scare immigrant families from accessing government services,” he said.
State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) was even more blunt.
“Trump needs to back off and focus on his own mess of an administration,” Wiener said. “Rounding up homeless people into federal facilities won’t solve the problem. We need to get people the help they need, including shelter, housing, and other services.”
Trump plans still unclear
Trump officials have not specified what kinds of actions or solutions they would implement in California.
A senior administration official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations confirmed to USA TODAY that a team of federal officials was on the ground in California assessing local homeless camps. The official said the team was conducting a fact-finding mission to learn more about the crisis.
The news was first reported by The Washington Post, which cited unnamed officials describing a coming crackdown, particularly in cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, which have some of the nation’s largest homeless populations.
The report did not specify what actions officials planned to take, but suggested that camps could be razed with homeless individuals moved into either new facilities or refurbished buildings.
According to last year’s survey by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, some 130,000 Californians were homeless, or nearly a quarter of the national total.
Officials said Los Angeles’ “Skid Row” was a particular priority. The area has seen a growing number of homeless as housing prices there and in most California cities continue to skyrocket. Los Angeles County saw nearly 59,000 homeless residents during a June count, up from approximately 55,000 people in 2017.
Late Tuesday, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti released a letter written to Trump that outlined a number of things his administration could do to help the homelessness issue in Los Angeles, which with some 79,000 homeless residents, trails only New York City.
Garcetti, who recently led administration officials on a tour of a range of homeless shelters and housing complexes, said that although “this crisis is decades in the making,” solutions could include protecting existing fair-housing laws, rescinding proposed HUD rules to evict mixed-status immigrant families from assisted housing, and supporting measures that would expand the housing safety net for veterans and the poor.
No where in Garcetti’s letter did he address the prospect of L.A. homeless encampments being razed and its population’s moved to federal housing projects.
White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement Tuesday that “like many Americans, the president has taken notice of the homelessness crisis, particularly in cities and states where the liberal policies of overregulation, excessive taxation and poor public service delivery are combining to dramatically increase poverty and public health risks.”
Deere added that Trump has “directed his team to go further and develop a range of policy options for consideration to deal with this tragedy.”
First reaction: ‘Internment camps’
But critics are far from eager for the president’s help.
Bob Erlenbusch, executive director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness, fretted that president was looking to round homeless people up.
“My first reaction is that it felt like internment camps for people experiencing homelessness,” he said. “The president doesn’t seem to have any grasp of the homeless crisis not only in California but around the country.”
Some, however, welcomed the possibility of federal intervention.
When asked about whether razing homeless camps could be seen as a violation homeless peoples’ civil rights, U.S. Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Richvale) said Democrats across the state might be overreacting.
“Civil rights based on people squatting on land that isn’t theirs, that is a bit of a reach there,” he said.
A meeting held this earlier this year on homelessness in California seemed to presage the administration’s interest in potentially stepping in.
Jonathan Anderson, executive director of the Redding-based Good News Rescue Mission, the only homeless shelter in Shasta County in northern California, said that during a national homelessness conference in April, officials from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development asked to meet with the 30 executive directors of rescue missions from California, Washington and Oregon about possible future partnerships.
The discussions touched on “how could these faith-based nonprofits co-locate and partner and bring the government agencies into sharing the workload that we’re doing. That was very encouraging. No decisions were made. It was just very open dialogue,” he said.
“They did say,” Anderson added, “that no matter what happens, the majority of this is going to be focused around the L.A. region.”
Trump has had a long running feud not only with California’s governor, but also with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who represents San Francisco. California has filed roughly 50 lawsuits against the Trump administration in the past two years over matters ranging from immigration to the U.S. Census.
The president has not hesitated to blast the largely liberal state, whose importance in the 2020 election has grown since its primary was moved to March.
“Nearly half of all the homeless people living in the streets in America happen to live in the state of California,” Trump said during a rally in Ohio last month. “What they are doing to our beautiful California is a disgrace to our country. It’s a shame.”
Newsom ran for governor on a range of liberal platforms, including addressing homelessness, which in Newsom’s hometown of San Francisco has led to needles and feces being strewn along main business and tourist thoroughfares such as Market Street.
The governor has pledged $1 billion from his budget to tackling homelessness, including allocating $650 million to local governments to deal with emergency homelessness aid and shelter, and $265 million for mental health support.
It’s unclear how much authority a federal entity might have in trying to implement anti-homelessness measures in California.
“If you’re not doing anything illegal, authorities can’t just pick you up to tell you where to go,” says Steve Berg, vice president for programs and policy with the National Alliance to End Homelessness in Washington, D.C., a non-profit that works with communities to tackle homelessness.
“Having people at all levels pay attention to this issue is good,” he says. “But only if you’re approaching it in a solution-oriented way.”
Feds can help — with money
David Garcia, policy director at the University of California, Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation, said he was skeptical about the Trump administration’s aims.
“Any strategy that focuses on removing homeless camps and displacing the homeless lacks compassion at best, and at worst exacerbates the challenges,” says Garcia. “Based on this administration’s rhetoric, they don’t seem to be focused on really solving the homelessness crisis.”
Garcia notes that the administration’s increasing pressure on immigrant populations within the U.S. has only added to the growing legions of homeless, as federal assistance continues to dry up and immigrants fear applying for aid.
“If the federal government is interested in helping, that’s great,” says Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, a research center founded by a donation from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne.
“What they can start with is dramatically increasing their financial support for affordable housing,” says Kushel.
Since Trump entered office, the White House budget has proposed slashing funding for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in each year’s budget. The White House’s 2020 budget proposes slashing the department’s funding by $9.6 billion.
Amid these cutbacks, the Trump administration has expanded grant programs for local agencies working to help individuals experiencing homelessness. The 2020 budget proposed increasing funding for services for people experiencing homelessness by 9% to $2.6 billion.
Despite widespread skepticism over the Trump administration’s potential plans for homeless people in California, some officials acknowledged that the problem may well now be beyond the scope of local and even state officials.
San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, a Republican, has been critical of the Trump administration and said he didn’t vote for the president in 2016. But like Trump, the San Diego Mayor also says California politicians have largely failed to address the state’s homelessness crisis. In 2018, the homeless population in San Diego dropped to 8,576 people, down by 600 people from the year before.
“San Diego has taken significant action over the last few years to reduce homelessness, but cities can’t do it alone,” said Faulconer, who has funded shelters and storage facilities for individuals experiencing homelessness and implemented policies to curb tent encampments and people sleeping in their cars. “We welcome additional federal resources to help us move more individuals off the streets and into housing.”
In nearby Palm Springs, City Councilwoman Christy Holstege said the president was likely attacking state lawmakers for political gain as the 2020 election creeps closer.
“He’s using talking points to rally his base,” said Holstege. “That’s what he’s doing here, trying to shame California about our homelessness crisis.”
The number of individuals experiencing homelessness in Palm Springs has skyrocketed in recent years, growing to 196 homeless people earlier this year. On Monday, state lawmakers earmarked $10 million to be used to fund homelessness services and infrastructure in the city.
“My question to the president would be if he’s going to raze camps, then where will those people go,” Holstege said. “The reason there are tent camps is because there isn’t sufficient housing.”
Contributing: Samuel Metz, Palm Springs Desert Sun
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JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his intention on Tuesday to annex the Jordan Valley, a large swathe of the occupied West Bank, if he wins a closely contested election just a week away.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said in a statement that “all signed agreements with Israel and the obligations resulting from them would end” if Netanyahu went through with the move.
Israel captured the West Bank in a 1967 war and Palestinians, who signed interim peace deals with Israel in the 1990s that include security cooperation, seek to make the area part of a future state.
Israeli political commentators saw Netanyahu’s declaration, in a speech broadcast live on Israel’s main TV channels, as a bid to siphon support away from far-right rivals who have long advocated annexation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
“Today, I announce my intention, after the establishment of a new government, to apply Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea,” Netanyahu said in a speech broadcast live on Israeli TV channels, calling the area “Israel’s eastern border”.
That step, he said, could be taken “immediately after the election if I receive a clear mandate to do so from you, the citizens of Israel”.
Arab League foreign ministers condemned Netanyahu’s plan, saying it would undermine any chance of progress towards Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Around 65,000 Palestinians and 11,000 Israeli settlers live in the Jordan Valley and northern Dead Sea area, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. The main Palestinian city is Jericho, with around 28 villages and smaller Bedouin communities.
Fighting for his political life after an inconclusive election in April, Netanyahu also reaffirmed a pledge to annex all of the settlements Israel has established in the West Bank. But he said that broader step could take longer and required “maximum coordination” with Washington, Israel’s close ally.
“Out of respect for President Trump and great faith in our friendship, I will await applying sovereignty until release of the president’s political plan,” he said, referring to a long-awaited blueprint from Washington for Israeli-Palestinian peace.
The U.S. plan, Netanyahu reiterated, would likely be presented very soon after Israel goes to the polls on Sept. 17. Netanyahu, head of the right-wing Likud party and in office for the past decade, failed to form a governing coalition following a national ballot in April.
“There is no change in United States policy at this time,” a Trump administration official said when asked whether the White House supported Netanyahu’s move.
“We will release our Vision for Peace after the Israeli election and work to determine the best path forward to bring long sought security, opportunity and stability to the region.”
White House senior adviser Jared Kushner said in early May that he hoped Israel would take a hard look at President Donald Trump’s upcoming Middle East peace proposal before “proceeding with any plan” to annex West Bank settlements.
In an interview with the New York Times in June, U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman said that “under certain circumstances” Israel has the “right to retain some, but unlikely all, of the West Bank”.
‘PERPETUAL CONFLICT’
Hanan Ashrawi, a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organization, said on Twitter after Netanyahu’s announcement that the Israeli leader was out to impose a “greater Israel on all of historical Palestine and (carry) out an ethnic cleansing agenda”.”All bets are off. Dangerous aggression. Perpetual conflict,” she wrote.
Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed in 2014 and Palestinians have called Trump’s proposal dead in the water, even before its publication, citing what they see as his pro-Israel policies.
Last March, just before Israel’s previous election, Trump – in a move widely seen as an attempt to bolster Netanyahu – recognized Israel’s 1981 annexation of the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in the 1967 conflict.
“It’s an election stunt and not a very impressive one because it’s so transparent,” Yair Lapid, co-leader of the centrist Blue and White Party, said in a statement about Netanyahu’s plan.
Slideshow (4 Images)
Blue and White, led by former armed forces chief Benny Gantz, and Likud are running neck and neck in opinion polls.
The Jordan Valley, which Palestinians seek for the eastern perimeter of a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, stretches from the Dead Sea in the south to the Israeli city of Beit Shean in the north.
The 2,400 square km (926.65 square mile) valley accounts for nearly 30 percent of the territory in the West Bank. Israel has long said it intends to maintain military control there under any peace agreement with the Palestinians.
Additional reporting by Ali Sawafta in Ramallah; Editing by Ed Osmond, Howard Goller and Sonya Hepinstall
Over a turbulent 17 months, President Trump and national security adviser John Bolton had disagreed on a variety of issues, from North Korea to Venezuela to Iran.
But Trump finally decided to remove his top security aide on Tuesday after a heated discussion in the Oval Office, following accusations by other officials in the administration that Bolton had leaked to the news media, tried to drag others into his battles with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over Afghanistan, and promoted his own views rather than those of the president, according to people familiar with the matter.
Trump called Bolton to meet with him Monday afternoon as he prepared to leave for a campaign rally that night in North Carolina.
Bolton was seen by some in the administration as the source of a media report that Vice President Pence and he were allies in opposing a peace deal with the Taliban, negotiated by Pompeo’s State Department. Just before the meeting, Trump had tweeted that it was “Fake News,” designed to “create the look of turmoil in the White House, of which there is none.”
Bolton denied the charge, but the Afghanistan issue turned out to be a tipping point.
Among accumulated grievances that had been building for months, the president was annoyed that Bolton would regularly call on members of Congress to try to get them to push Bolton-preferred policies on Trump, according to a senior official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Many on Bolton’s handpicked staff were seen as unnecessarily confrontational with other parts of the national security bureaucracy.
Trump had been inundated with complaints, officials said. Pence and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who were awaiting Trump’s arrival Monday afternoon in Fayetteville, found Bolton increasingly abrasive and self-promoting.
Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had told Trump that his national security adviser was not helping him, officials said. Bolton had even refused, in recent weeks, to go on television and defend the president’s policies on Afghanistan and Russia.
Bolton, the president felt, wasn’t loyal. He wasn’t on the team.
After Trump made his views known, Bolton offered to resign. Trump, Bolton later insisted, said they would discuss it the next day. It was the last time he saw the president.
Then-national security adviser John Bolton answers journalists’ questions in Minsk, Belarus, on Aug. 29, 2019. (Sergei Gapon/AFP/Getty Images)
“He had the meeting then thought about it for a few hours, especially since the president wasn’t exactly begging him to stay on and he had had enough,” said a person familiar with Bolton’s thinking.
On Tuesday morning, Bolton handed a two-sentence letter to an aide for delivery to Trump, and left the building. “I hereby resign, effective immediately…” There was nothing about spending more time with his family, no praise or well-wishes for the president.
But just before noon, Trump stole his thunder, announcing in a terse tweet that he had fired his third national security adviser in a row. “I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the administration,” Trump wrote. “I will be naming a new National Security Advisor next week.”
“It was probably coming,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump ally, who called it “as much a personality conflict as anything else.”
“The president had gotten into a situation where he didn’t like reading about some stuff in the paper,” Graham said, and “it got to be a breakdown of trust” that had “pretty well shut down” the policy process among national security agencies.
At the White House, those outside the inner sanctum were stunned when Trump’s tweet appeared. At the Pentagon, there were cheers. When Pompeo appeared at an unrelated news briefing shortly after Trump’s tweet, he rebuffed frantic questions about Bolton, saying he wouldn’t talk about the administration’s “inner workings.”
“There were many times Ambassador Bolton and I disagreed, that’s to be sure,” Pompeo said. “But that’s true for lots of people with whom I interact.”
Then Pompeo smiled. That smile, one official close to Pompeo said, “spoke for itself.”
A known hawk
In the wake of Bolton’s departure, a number of senior administration officials and Republicans close to the White House — all of whom spoke only on the condition of anonymity about internal White House business — offered up long lists of those who would not mourn him. They included first lady Melania Trump, Pence, Mulvaney, Pompeo, Mnuchin, countless Defense Department officials and numerous international leaders.
But at the time of Bolton’s appointment, after Trump fired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster in April of last year, abrasiveness appeared to be what the president was looking for — a more in-your-face figure to replace McMaster’s military-like organization and policies.
Trump could hardly have been unaware of what he was getting with Bolton. A take-no-prisoners official in the administration of George W. Bush, where he strongly supported the 2003 Iraq invasion and used a seat as United Nations ambassador to push a hard line foreign policy, Bolton had spent the wilderness Obama years as a conservative think tanker and Fox News pundit. He advocated regime change in Iran, a preemptive strike against North Korea, and the severing of U.S. ties to international agreements and organizations he viewed as weak and accommodating.
His appointment, coinciding with that of Pompeo’s — one of the most virulent Iran hawks in Congress before the newly elected Trump had named him to head the CIA — to replace the out-of- favor Rex Tillerson as secretary of state gave a new muscularity to administration foreign policy. By the end of the year, the turnover was complete with the resignation of former defense secretary Jim Mattis.
Even as he began grumbling privately about Bolton in recent months, and surveying other advisers and friends about possible replacements, Trump publicly praised his pugnacious qualities.
“He has strong views on things, but that’s okay. I actually temper John, which is pretty amazing,” Trump said during an Oval Office news conference in May. “I’m the one that tempers him. That’s okay. I have different sides. I have John Bolton and other people that are a little more dovish than him. I like John.”
Divisions over policy
Within a week after Bolton came aboard, Trump authorized a missile strike against Syria. A month later, he withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear agreement. Both were seen as signals of Bolton’s arrival.
But Bolton also lost a lot of battles over a year and a half in office — among them, Trump’s outreach to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un; his abrupt decision to withdraw troops from Syria and accommodate Turkish concerns over America’s Kurdish Syrian allies; his friendly relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin; the president’s professed willingness to meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani; and the Pompeo-led negotiations with the Taliban that began in October.
Whether Bolton was responsible for the leaks — he has insisted he was not — word of his views always managed to be publicly revealed, even as Trump and others grew suspicious and started to work around him, most visibly on North Korea.
Trump came to view Bolton as a potential spoiler for a landmark nuclear deal with the isolated country and repeatedly excluded him from important meetings. During Trump’s second summit with Kim in Hanoi, Trump ordered that Bolton not be included in a dinner meeting with senior U.S. and North Korean officials.
When Trump made a surprise visit to the demilitarized zone in June, Bolton left early for Mongolia out of concern that his presence could hurt U.S. diplomatic initiatives, U.S. officials said.
U.S. officials said Bolton never believed Kim would surrender his nuclear arsenal and hoped the talks would collapse so that the United States could return to a maximum pressure campaign. He advocated persistently against an interim deal in Hanoi that would exchange some sanctions relief for partial denuclearization. When Trump walked away from that agreement, Bolton aides touted it as an achievement by the national security adviser.
Worsening relations between the United States and Iran also created tensions between Trump and Bolton. In June, after Trump decided against ordering a military attack on Iran after it downed an unmanned U.S. drone, Bolton was “devastated,” said one U.S. official familiar with the matter.
Bolton’s consistent advocating for harder economic sanctions against Iran rankled U.S. allies and went beyond the desires of Pompeo. State Department officials grew frustrated when leaks about sanctions policy deliberations appeared in neoconservative outlets such as the Washington Free Beacon. The distrust between Pompeo and Bolton’s team led the top diplomat to instruct his aides against consulting with Bolton’s team on Iran, in particular Rich Goldberg, the National Security Council’s director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction, said officials familiar with the matter.
Afghanistan as catalyst
On Tuesday, when word that Trump had fired Bolton exploded across Washington, Bolton told colleagues and confidants that he had never discussed Pence’s comments on anything, ever, with anyone outside the president’s policy circle. Bolton allies viewed the charge as a way to “knife John on the way out,” one person close to him said, calling it “flatly untrue.”
Bolton’s own frustrations with Trump had simmered in recent weeks as he became vexed by what he saw as the president’s policy indecision. The two men got along well on a personal level — although their relationship was somewhat distant — but Bolton began to tell friends that he had deep philosophical disagreements with Trump on the world and policy and they weren’t fixable.
Although he saw his exit as the culmination of problems rather than something out of the blue, Afghanistan was the catalyst.
Never happy with the decision to negotiate with the Taliban over a peace deal to end the war, Bolton was particularly disturbed that Pompeo had been given the lead role.
Under Pompeo, U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad had changed the parameters of U.S. policy on the issue. Several administrations had refused to talk to the militants, insisting that they should negotiate an end to the war only with the Afghan government. But Trump’s insistence that he wanted to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, and a conclusion that there would be no military victory by either side there, had led Pompeo and Khalilzad to believe that the United States should negotiate its own exit directly with the Taliban, even while using that leverage to force eventual inter-Afghan talks.
By summer, it was clear that a deal was in the making, and late last month, Khalilzad came to Washington to report that agreement had been reached to withdraw about 5,000 of the 14,000 U.S. troops, in exchange for a Taliban agreement to sever ties with al -Qaeda and ensure that no terrorist attack on the United States would ever again be launched from Afghanistan. Talks with the Afghan government, and a cease-fire, would come later.
Bolton thought it was a bad deal, as did many others. But Trump was more than intrigued at the idea of fulfilling his campaign pledge of troop withdrawals, and proposed finalizing the deal himself at a Camp David meeting he would host for Afghan government and Taliban leaders.
But as that plan came under criticism across the board, the president began to look for a way out, eventually seizing on the killing of a U.S. service member Thursday in a Taliban attack. Prodded by Bolton and others opposed to the negotiations, he decided to cancel the deal altogether, tweeting out his position on Saturday evening.
When news stories Sunday and Monday depicted Bolton as victorious, his demise became just a matter of time.
Robert Costa, Philip Rucker, Ashley Parker, Missy Ryan, Dan Lamothe and Souad Mekhennet contributed to this report.
Lawrence, Mass., has struggled to find its economic base since the decline of manufacturing. While the city is witnessing pockets of investment, as of August 2019, one-third of Lawrence’s children lived in poverty, 36 percent of residents received aid under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and just over 24 percent of residents lived in poverty.
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Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Lawrence, Mass., has struggled to find its economic base since the decline of manufacturing. While the city is witnessing pockets of investment, as of August 2019, one-third of Lawrence’s children lived in poverty, 36 percent of residents received aid under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and just over 24 percent of residents lived in poverty.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The U.S. poverty rate declined slightly last year, but finally fell below the 2007 level, right before the Great Recession pushed millions of Americans out of work and into financial distress.
The improving economy was a key factor in the decline. The U.S. Census Bureau noted in its annual report on income and poverty that there were 2.3 million more full-time, year-round workers last year and that median earnings for all such workers rose by more than three percent.
Amid these positive signs, the bureau reported separately that the number of people in the U.S. who did not have health insurance rose from 25.6 million people in 2017 to 27.5 million in 2018. That included 4.3 million children. Health advocacy groups called the increase extremely troubling and blamed declines in Medicaid coverage, especially for Hispanic children and children under the age of six.
Despite the decline in poverty, the Census Bureau found that 38.1 million people in 2018 were poor. This was 1.4 million fewer poor people than in 2017, but about one in eight Americans still lived below the poverty line — $25,465 for a family with two adults and two children.
Median household income last year was $63,179, not statistically different from the year before, but equal to the peak level reached in 1999.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers touted the new figures as a sign that President Trump’s economic policies are working.
“While Americans across the board generally saw improvements, the data show that in many cases those who had been forgotten in the past were lifted up the most,” the council said in a statement. Children and female-headed households saw some of the biggest declines in poverty.
But Elise Gould, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute, noted some disturbing trends. Although median household income rose for four consecutive years, the rate of growth and the income level has slowed significantly and is slightly below where it was almost two decades ago. “It’s a step in the right direction, but most families barely made up the ground lost” with the recession, she said.
There were also huge racial disparities in the figures. The median income for African-American households last year was $41,361, compared with $70,642 for white, non-Hispanic households. The poverty rate for blacks was almost 21 percent compared to about 8 percent for non-Hispanic whites.
Anti-poverty groups noted that the report also showed the importance of government safety-net programs in helping to keep millions of people from falling into poverty. In recent years, the Census Bureau has released a supplemental poverty measure along with the official one, which shows the impact of a range of benefits, including Social Security and tax breaks.
The 2018 supplemental poverty measure found that Social Security benefits kept more than 27 million people out of poverty last year and that refundable tax credits did the same for almost 8 million people. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, known as food stamps, also kept an estimated three million people from becoming poor.
These numbers will almost certainly be used by advocacy groups in their efforts to block Trump administration proposals to restrict this aid. Among other things, the president wants to impose new work requirements on those receiving SNAP benefits and Medicaid. The administration is also making it more difficult for immigrants who receive any public assistance from getting green cards.
Jared Bernstein, an economist with the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted the positive signs in the new report, but warned, “Such gains can demonstrably be reversed by policies hostile to them. It is thus extremely worrisome to consider the actions the Trump administration is taking to reduce government support of poor households, especially those with immigrants.”
The Census Bureau also found that there was little change in income inequality last year. The top 20 percent of households received more than half of all income. Woman also still earned 82 cents on the dollar, compared with men, the same as in 2017.
“Simply cracking down on homelessness without providing the housing that people need is not a real solution and will likely only make the situation worse,” said Mayor London Breed of San Francisco, whose city has been an object of the president’s scorn.
An estimated 59,000 homeless people live in Los Angeles County, according to acount conductedthis year by the county, about a 12 percent increase over 2018. Of those, an estimated 44,000, or 75 percent, were unsheltered. Within the city of Los Angeles, which is distinct from the county, there were 36,000 homeless, including 27,000 who were unsheltered, according to that same count.
Los Angeles’s mayor, Eric M. Garcetti, and other political leaders faced intense scrutiny this summer after the release of the results of the 2019 count, which also showed that the number of homeless had increased 16 percent in the city. The surge was especially shocking because the government spent hundreds of millions of dollars in 2018 to address the problem.
Voters approved two high-profile initiatives in recent years to fund homeless services in the region, including a 2016 city bond that earmarked $1.2 billion to build housing for the homeless and a 2017 county quarter-cent sales tax increase to raise about $355 million annually for 10 years. The mayor’s defenders and city officials have pointed out that the city housed nearly 22,000 people in 2018, a record number for the government and an increase of 23 percent from 2017. But even amid those efforts, the high cost of housing in Los Angeles, one of the priciest rental markets in the country, has continued to push more individuals and families out of their homes.
While Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles has often been a focal point for national conversations about homelessness, the high rate of unsheltered people has become a source of friction across the state, in cities including Eureka, Oakland and San Francisco. With nowhere else to go, the homeless often set up encampments on sidewalks and beneath highway overpasses. Increasingly, encampments are nestling against wild lands, raising concerns amid increasingly intense and volatile wildfire seasons.
But while the displeasure of middle-class urban residents often receives attention, the homeless themselves — many of whom have full-time jobs but cannot afford California’s high rents — have the most to be frustrated about. Safety is a huge concern: An analysis published earlier this year by Kaiser Health News found that a record 918 homeless people died last year in Los Angeles County.
The administration has discussed refurbishing homeless facilities or building new ones, The Post reported. An administration official said that while those ideas have been discussed, nothing has been settled.
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea launched at least two unidentified projectiles toward the sea on Tuesday, South Korea’s military said, hours after the North offered to resume nuclear diplomacy with the United States but warned its dealings with Washington may end without new U.S. proposals.
The North’s projectile launches and demand for new proposals were apparently aimed at pressuring the United States to make concessions when the North Korea-U.S. talks restart. North Korea is widely believed to want the United States to provide it with security guarantees and extensive relief from U.S.-led sanctions in return for limited denuclearization steps.
The North Korean projectiles fired from its South Phyongan province, which surrounds its capital city of Pyongyang, flew across the country and in the direction of the waters off its east coast, according to South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff and Defense Ministry.
The military said South Korea will monitor possible additional launches by North Korea but gave no further details like exactly what projectile North Korea fired.
Related: Donald Trump steps into North Korea
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Tuesday’s launches were the eighth such launches since late July and the first since Aug. 24. The previous seven launches have revealed short-range missile and rocket artillery systems that experts say would potentially expand its capabilities to strike targets throughout South Korea, including U.S. military bases there.
On Monday night, the North’s first vice foreign minister, Choe Son Hui, said North Korea is willing to resume nuclear diplomacy with the United States in late September but that Washington must come to the negotiating table with acceptable new proposals. She said if the proposals don’t satisfy North Korea, dealings between the two countries may come to an end.
President Donald Trump called North Korea’s announcement “interesting.”
“We’ll see what happens,” Trump said. “In the meantime, we have our hostages back, we’re getting the remains of our great heroes back and we’ve had no nuclear testing for a long time.”
There was no immediate comment from the White House following reports of the launches.
South Korea’s presidential office said national security adviser Chung Eui-yong presided over an emergency National Security Council meeting where officials expressed “strong concern” over the continuing short-range launches by the North.
In the late-night statement carried by state media, Choe said North Korea is willing to sit down with the United States “for comprehensive discussions in late September of the issues we have so far taken up, at a time and place to be agreed.”
Choe said she hopes the United States will bring “a proposal geared to the interests of the DPRK and the U.S. and based on decision methods acceptable to us.” DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s official name.
She warned that “if the U.S. side fingers again the worn-out scenario which has nothing to do with new decision methods at the DPRK-U.S. working negotiation to be held with so much effort, the DPRK-U.S. dealings may come to an end.”
Talks on North Korea’s nuclear disarmament fell apart in February when Trump rejected North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s demand for sweeping sanctions relief in return for partial disarmament at their second summit in Vietnam.
It was a huge embarrassment for the young North Korean leader, who made a dayslong train trip to the Vietnamese capital to obtain the sanctions relief he needs to revitalize his country’s troubled economy.
In April, Kim said he was open to another summit with Trump but set the end of the year as a deadline for the U.S. to offer improved terms for an agreement to revive the nuclear diplomacy.
Kim and Trump met again at the Korean border in late June and agreed to restart diplomacy, but there have no public meetings between the sides since then.
In recent months, North Korea has carried out a slew of missile and rocket tests to protest joint military drills between the U.S. and South Korea that North Korea views as an invasion rehearsal. Some experts said the North Korean weapons tests were also a demonstration of its expanding weapons arsenal aimed at boosting its leverage ahead of new talks with the United States.
Senate Democrats are trying to end President Donald Trump’s national emergency at the border, again.
This week, Democrats plan to force a vote on a resolution terminating the emergency Trump first declared in February. It’ll be the second time they’ve pushed a vote on this specific declaration, something they have the ability to do every six months, as laid out in the National Emergencies Act of 1976.
The last time Democrats tried to block the emergency in March, the resolution passed, but was vetoed by Trump. During that vote, Democrats were able to get 12 Republicans to join with them. Several disagreed with the precedent the declaration would set for a president’s use of executive power, and opted to cross party lines to express their opposition.
This time around, as Trump has begun raiding military construction budgets in order to fund the wall, the measure is intended to put Republicans — especially vulnerable senators in swing states — on the spot, again. And they won’t be able to avoid it: Because this resolution is “privileged,” a term that applies to measures the upper chamber must consider, Republicans will be unable to prevent it from coming to the floor.
“The Trump administration has proposed pilfering funds from projects in 23 states, three US territories and military installations in 20 countries, including $80 million from projects in North Carolina,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a floor speech on Tuesday. “How do we say to the men and women who risked their lives for us … that we’re taking their money away?”
The vote is putting vulnerable Republicans in a difficult position as the administration takes money from their states for the border wall
The vote has little chance of passing given the Senate’s Republican majority — instead, it’s intended to put Republicans in a difficult position.
It’s taking place, after all, as the Trump administration actively raids $3.6 billion in funding for 127 projects across the country. By holding this vote, Senate Democrats are asking lawmakers if they’re comfortable with the president moving this money to advance a project that has very little impact on their constituents. Effectively, it’s pushing senators to choose between support for Trump and concerns they might have about the funds that are being siphoned from state budgets.
As Vox’s Alex Ward has reported, about half of all 50 states would be affected by the planned funding shifts. Projects including improvements to the West Point military academy and natural disaster recovery efforts in Puerto Rico are among those that would lose money.
Such efforts have garnered pushback not only from Democrats, but Republicans as well. Sens. Mitt Romney and Mike Lee, both of Utah, said they were concerned with the decision to move state funding for the border wall. “Funding the border wall is an important priority, and the Executive Branch should use the appropriate channels in Congress, rather than divert already appropriated funding away from military construction projects and therefore undermining military readiness,” Romney said in a statement.
Senators in swing states like Colorado, Arizona, and North Carolina are the ones in the most precarious position as the vote approaches. If they vote in favor of blocking the emergency, they risk Trump’s wrath and the threat of a potential primary challenger — something Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) already experienced when he initially opposed the president’s national emergency earlier this year. If they vote in favor of keeping the declaration, they’re condoning the use of state funds for the border wall.
It’s a Catch-22 Democrats are hoping to use to their advantage.
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