Last month, Texas lawmakers convened for a special legislative session to debate some of the most extreme anti-immigrant bills any state legislature has ever considered. Already, one such bill — SB 4, which threatens humanitarian workers and family members of undocumented immigrants with severe criminal penalties — was passed by both chambers and is now headed to Gov. Greg Abbott to be signed into law. With just days left in the current legislative session, the legislature is attempting to short-circuit debate and rush through an even more fanatical bill that manufactures a new state crime so that Texas police may arrest, jail, and deport people.

If enacted, HB 4 would easily rank among the most radically anti-immigrant bills ever passed by a legislature. The anti-immigrant agenda advancing in the current special legislative session has been fueled by groups with links to white supremacy. Just last month, it was revealed that Texans for Strong Borders — an anti-immigrant advocacy group connected to neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes — urged Gov. Abbott to call a special legislative session to take up anti-immigrant legislation such as HB 4.

One of the versions of this legislation being considered would make it a state crime to attempt to enter the State of Texas from Mexico between ports of entry, and authorize state police and sheriffs to arrest, prosecute, and imprison anyone suspected of violating this new and unprecedented state law. Another version would go a step further and purports to authorize these officers — who are not trained in immigration law — to also deport people they suspect of violating this law.

In federal immigration proceedings, people have a right to due process and an opportunity to demonstrate that they should not be deported because, for example, they have lawful immigration status, are U.S. citizens, or are eligible for humanitarian protection. No such safeguards are in place under this version of HB 4. In fact, people suspected of illegal entry will be deprived of the basic rights afforded by federal immigration law and Texas criminal law: The bill suggests they can be summarily ordered removed to Mexico without even an opportunity to speak to a lawyer.

HB 4 is preempted by federal law and unconstitutional for good reasons. No state has ever empowered its police to deport people, but we’ve seen before that laws authorizing local law enforcement agents to investigate immigration offenses lead to racial profiling. Citizens and immigrants with permission to be in the U.S. would be at risk of wrongful arrest, detention, and deportation. This unprecedented move will distract police officers from investigating actual crimes, deter victims of human trafficking from coming forward, and in turn, make our communities less safe.

Ultimately, lawmakers are pretending they can stop people from coming to the U.S. by turning local law enforcement into border patrol. Evidence already shows that deterrence policies from fleeing persecution and instead create more disorder and harm. Laws like HB 4 would unnecessarily waste taxpayer dollars under the guise of national security and public safety, all while harming our communities and the integrity of federal immigration laws.

This bill is unprecedented, but the script is far too familiar.

HB 4, in all of its forms, is founded on the idea that there is an “invasion” at our Southern border. This is the same logic, rooted in white supremacy, that motivated the man who killed 23 people and wounded 22 others during a shooting at an El Paso Wal-Mart in 2019. This rhetoric has repeatedly been backed by Texans for Strong Borders. And it’s no surprise that last month, reports revealed that that Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — who also serves as President of the Texas Senate — received $3 million from a conservative PAC also connected to white supremacist leader Nick Fuentes.

The hateful narrative these voices are pushing has real consequences. We’ve already seen vitriolic state policies like Operation Lone Star lead to the tragic drownings and other deaths of people and children seeking safety. We cannot allow other harmful anti-immigrant policies take root — not in Texas, not in any state.

With the fate of HB 4 to be decided in coming days, our lawmakers must not feed this dangerous myth that harms both immigrants and non-immigrants alike.

Texans have a critical opportunity to act now and demand that their representatives vote no to policies that criminalize migrants and divide our communities. We can’t allow our elected officials to misuse our legal systems to do the work of white supremacists.

Source : ACLU

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The prospect of a US government shutdown grows more likely with each passing day as lawmakers have yet to reach a deal to extend funding past a critical deadline at the end of the month.

Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle are hoping to pass a short-term funding extension to keep the lights on and avert a shutdown. But it’s not at all clear that plan will succeed amid deep divisions over spending between the two parties and policy disagreements over issues such as aid to Ukraine.

Here’s what to know if the government shuts down and what’s driving the current state of play:

How a government shutdown could be triggered

Government funding expires at the end of the day on Saturday, September 30 when the clock strikes midnight and it becomes October 1, which marks the start of the new fiscal year. (As shorthand, the deadline is commonly described as September 30 at midnight.)

If Congress fails to pass legislation to renew funding by that deadline, then the federal government will shut down at midnight. Since that would take place over the weekend, the full effects of a shutdown wouldn’t be seen until the start of the work week on Monday.

What could happen during a shutdown

In the event of a shutdown, many government operations would come to a halt, but some services deemed “essential” would continue.

Federal agencies have contingency plans that serve as a roadmap for what will continue and what will stop. The White House Office of Management and Budget will formally initiate the process of preparing for a shutdown on Friday, sending a communication to agencies reminding them to review and update shutdown plans.

Government operations and services that continue during a shutdown are activities deemed necessary to protect public safety and national security or considered critical for other reasons. Examples of services that have continued during past shutdowns include border protection, federal law enforcement and air traffic control.

Federal employees whose work is deemed “non-essential” would be put on furlough, which means that they would not work and would not receive pay during the shutdown. Employees whose jobs are deemed “essential” would continue to work, but they too would not be paid during the shutdown.

Once a shutdown is over, federal employees who were required to work and those who were furloughed will receive backpay.

In the past, backpay for furloughed employees was not guaranteed, though Congress could and did act to ensure those workers were compensated for lost wages once a shutdown ended. Now, however, backpay for furloughed workers is automatically guaranteed as a result of legislation led by Sen. Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, that was enacted in 2019. Employees deemed “essential” and required to work were already guaranteed backpay after a shutdown prior to the passage of that legislation.

And federal employees aren’t the only ones who can feel the effects of a shutdown.

During past shutdowns, national parks have become a major focal point of attention. Although National Park Service sites across the country have been closed during previous government shutdowns, many remained open but severely understaffed under the Trump administration during a shutdown in 2019. Some park sites operated for weeks without park service-provided visitor services such as restrooms, trash collection, facilities or road maintenance.

The last federal government shutdown was the longest in more than 40 years

There have been 20 gaps in federal funding since 1976. Most have occurred under a divided government — when the White House, House and Senate are not controlled by a singular party — like the current breakdown in DC.

“If you’re a government worker, it’s highly disruptive – whether you’re not going to work or whether you are,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization. “If you’re somebody who wants to use one of the services that you can’t get access to … it’s highly disruptive. But for many people … all the things that they are expecting and used to seeing of government are still happening and the inconveniences and the kind of wasted time and wasted resources aren’t things that they see and feel directly.”

Why the US could be headed for a shutdown

There is a deep divide between the House and Senate right now over the effort to reach consensus on and pass full-year spending legislation as House conservative hardliners push for deep spending cuts and controversial policy add-ons that Democrats as well as some Republicans have rejected as too extreme.

With the funding deadline looming, top lawmakers from both parties hope to pass a short-term funding extension known on Capitol Hill as a continuing resolution or CR for short. These short-term measures are frequently used as a stopgap solution to avert a shutdown and buy more time to try to reach a broader full-year funding deal.

It’s not clear, however, whether there will be enough consensus to pass even a short-term funding bill out of both chambers before the end of the month as House conservatives rail against the possibility of a stopgap bill and have threatened to vote against one while demanding major policy concessions that have no chance of passing the Senate.

A fight over aid to Ukraine could also take center stage and further complicate efforts to pass a short-term bill.

Senate Democrats and Republicans strongly support additional aid to Ukraine, which could be included as part of a stopgap bill, but many House Republicans are reluctant to continue sending aid and do not want to see that attached to a short-term funding bill.

What has the White House said about a shutdown?

The White House issued a stark warning this week that a shutdown could threaten crucial federal programs.

In its warning, the White House estimated 10,000 children would lose access to Head Start programs across the country as the Department of Health and Human Services is prevented from awarding grants during a shutdown, while air traffic controllers and TSA officers would have to work without pay, threatening travel delays across the country. A shutdown would also delay food safety inspections under the Food and Drug Administration.

“These consequences are real and avoidable – but only if House Republicans stop playing political games with peoples’ lives and catering to the ideological demands of their most extreme, far-right members,” the White House said.

Source : CNN

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The retirement industry received some welcome news late last year when lawmakers passed another major bipartisan retirement security package, but industry sources aren’t expecting 2023 to yield many more legislative victories when it comes to retirement issues.

“Everything that they could find where there was bipartisan agreement made it into this bill,” said Michael P. Kreps, Washington-based principal and co-chairman of the retirement services practice at Groom Law Group, about SECURE 2.0, a retirement security bill attached to a $1.7 trillion year-end spending bill and signed into law Dec. 29.

“They didn’t leave a lot on the table. People always come up with new ideas and there will be new priorities, but with a new Republican leadership in the House with their own priorities, without Chairman (Richard) Neal driving a retirement agenda, it’s likely that retirement isn’t a front-burner issue, at least for a while.”

SECURE 2.0, which builds off the original SECURE Act that Congress passed in 2019, includes dozens of provisions, including expanding automatic enrollment for employees joining 401(k) and 403(b) plans, lowering the eligibility requirement for part-time workers to join 401(k) plans from three years of consecutive work to two, and allowing employers to make matching contributions to a 401(k) plan, 403(b) plan or SIMPLE IRA based on qualified student loan payments.

The SECURE 2.0 package was made up of three bills introduced during the last Congress, including one from Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., a longtime retirement security advocate and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee last Congress, and the committee’s now-retired Ranking Member Kevin Brady, R-Texas.

Retirement-related bills will likely still get introduced in the new session that began Jan. 3 and continues through 2024, but the issue won’t rank high on the priority list in a divided Congress, sources said.

One bill that was introduced in December and is likely to be reintroduced in this Congress would grant workers without an employer-sponsored retirement plan access to a federal program similar to the $748.1 billion Thrift Savings Plan, the retirement system for 6.7 million federal employees and members of the uniformed services.

The bipartisan Retirement Savings for Americans Act, introduced in both the House and Senate, closely follows a March 2021 paper published by the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan public policy organization, that argued the TSP could be a model to build wealth for low-income workers.

John Lettieri, president and CEO of the Washington-based Economic Innovation Group, said the bill’s introduction late last year was more of a messaging vehicle. “This is a way of planting the marker … to generate interest and attention and to generate feedback from a variety of stakeholders,” he said in December. “Think of this as a dress rehearsal for a more substantial effort in the new Congress.”

Mr. Neal has his own automatic enrollment bill that could also be reintroduced at some point. Originally floated in late 2017, the Automatic Retirement Plan Act would require employers that don’t offer retirement plans to automatically enroll their workers in individual retirement accounts or 401(k)-type plans. Mr. Neal attempted to include the measure in Democrats’ Build Back Better Act, but it was stripped from the package during negotiations before it passed in 2021.

Bradford P. Campbell, a Washington-based partner at law firm Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP and former assistant secretary of labor for the Employee Benefits Security Administration during President George W. Bush’s administration, said bills that attempt to improve the retirement system moderately have a better chance of passing in Congress.

“We’re going to see a number of different bills that run the spectrum from trying to tweak the current system to those that would fundamentally change the current system,” Mr. Campbell said. “I think the reality is the tweaking bills, so to speak, have a much better chance of success.”

Oversight

While another retirement bill passing Congress is a long shot, added oversight of the Department of Labor and Securities and Exchange Commission is not.

Republicans won control of the House in November and now have the ability to hold hearings and issue subpoenas and document requests from the Biden administration.

Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., the new chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in a statement last month that the committee will focus its efforts on “conducting appropriate and aggressive oversight of the Biden administration.”

The SEC in particular was “not subject to particularly aggressive oversight under Chair (Maxine) Waters’ (D-Calif., who previously led the committee) leadership,” said Jamie D. McGinnis, Washington-based counsel in the corporate department and member of Ropes & Gray LLP’s asset management group who previously worked for Mr. McHenry as senior policy adviser and lead securities counsel at the House Financial Services Committee. “I think the aggressiveness of oversight will increase significantly.”

Much of the oversight at the SEC and Labor Department will focus on climate and environmental, social and governance-related issues, congressional Republicans have indicated.

Several rule-making initiatives at both agencies have drawn Republican ire in recent months.

At the Labor Department, the agency finalized a rule in November that takes effect Jan. 30 and permits retirement plan fiduciaries to consider climate change and other ESG factors when selecting investments and exercising shareholder rights. It also reverses two Trump-era rules that the Biden administration said had a chilling effect on ESG investing but maintains the department’s position that fiduciaries may not sacrifice investment returns or assume greater investment risks as a means of promoting collateral social policy goals.

DOL rule

Republicans last year introduced bills and joint resolutions to nullify the DOL rule.

Rep. Greg Murphy, R-N.C., who co-sponsored one such bill in October, said in a news release that the Biden administration’s changes to ERISA “abandon fiduciary responsibility by allowing ‘woke’ ESG factors to dictate investment returns — putting Americans’ retirement savings at risk.”

At the SEC, the most discussed proposal is one that would require public companies to disclose a host of climate-related information in their registration statements and periodic reports. The proposal, released in March, has broad backing from institutional investors and asset managers, but will likely be challenged in court by the business community.

Under the proposal, public companies would be required to disclose the greenhouse gas emissions they generate or purchase, and the indirect emissions generated from a company’s supply chain, if material, though smaller companies would be exempt from the latter requirement, referred to as Scope 3. Some stakeholders in the business community and Republicans in Washington said the proposal exceeds the SEC’s authority.

Republicans in both the House and Senate introduced bills last year that would limit the SEC’s ability to establish additional disclosure requirements on public companies, including the proposed Scope 3 requirements.

“For whatever reason, Republicans have decided that (opposition to ESG and climate regulation) is going to be an issue for them and they’re going to make it an issue so I suspect it will be a recurring theme throughout the next few years,” Mr. Kreps said.

Republicans could also introduce “policy riders” on must-pass appropriations bills this Congress to try to stop the agencies from implementing certain rules, like the SEC’s climate disclosure rule and Labor Department’s ESG rule, sources said.

Source : Pion Line

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Defense policy legislation that’s headed to President Joe Biden’s desk will earn the commander in chief’s signature, but he’s not going to like it.

The National Defense Authorization Act, which outlines military spending and policy priorities each year, will force the administration to roll back a requirement that troops get vaccinated against Covid, a provision on which Biden’s Republican detractors have already declared victory.

But the bill — which on Thursday passed a Democratic-led Congress — is also a bipartisan rebuke of Biden’s military budget and a raft of other plans. It prescribes $45 billion more for national defense spending than the administration proposed, reverses efforts to kill a new nuclear missile and scrambles Pentagon efforts to retire a number of ships and aircraft to save money.

A U.S. official told POLITICO that the $858 billion defense bill is “clearly” being seen as a swipe at the administration.

“There are too many targeted provisions in the legislation that it cannot possibly not be — and the left appears to have taken them without a fight, in order to just get it passed, and to fund the important work of the Defense Department,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly. Congress must still enact separate legislation to fund the Pentagon.

But Biden won’t hazard a veto of the measure, which would jeopardize a 61-year streak of defense policy legislation becoming law each year.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday that Biden will sign the bill “later this week,” noting that each NDAA “has some provisions we support and some we do not.”

For many on Capitol Hill, the amount of ink spilled to counter Biden’s plans is just another chapter of Congress exercising its prerogatives. Outgoing House Armed Services Chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.) argued that, while the administration may not be pleased with where the bill landed on vaccines and other issues, “every bill has something in it the administration doesn’t like.”

“They don’t like it, but nobody gets everything they want in this life,” Smith said. “So I think we reached a very reasonable set of compromises and produced a very good product.”

Here are some of the big changes Congress spearheaded in the just-passed defense bill:

Repealing the vaccine mandate

By signing the bill, Biden will be forced to agree to a repeal of the Pentagon’s policy requiring troops to receive the Covid vaccine or face expulsion from the military.

The repeal is a victory for Republicans who pushed to do away with the policy during negotiations on a final defense bill. Conservatives have hammered the administration for forcing out thousands of military personnel and piling onto an already rough recruiting environment.

Rescinding the August 2021 mandate is a black eye for Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who still back the policy as a matter of health and readiness for the armed forces.

“[Biden] still believes that repealing the mandate is a mistake,” White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters recently. He added that locking down a defense bill and funding for the military “is obviously of prime importance.”

But Democrats who hold majorities in the House and Senate ultimately agreed to the provision, with some lawmakers conceding it’s appropriate to revisit the policy.

The bill, however, doesn’t prohibit a new vaccine requirement in the coming months, meaning Austin could implement a new policy when the 2021 directive is repealed. Doing so, however, would spark a battle with the Republican-controlled House next year.

Democrats also rejected a GOP push to reinstate troops who didn’t get the shot, a proposal that could be a fault line in next year’s deliberations.

Supersizing the Pentagon budget

Both parties roundly rejected Biden’s $813 billion military spending plan as too low to meet worldwide threats and counter the impacts of inflation on the Pentagon.

Instead, Congress endorsed that hefty $45 billion increase to Biden’s budget, which already would have boosted defense by about $30 billion over last year’s level. The final bill amounts to an increase of roughly $75 billion, or nearly 10 percent, from the previous year.

The additional money went toward buying more weapons as well as efforts to blunt the effects of inflation on Pentagon programs, troops and construction.

This marks the second straight year that Congress has significantly rewritten Biden’s budget. Defense legislation approved last year authorized an increase of $25 billion to the administration’s first proposal. It’s a pattern Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), who is set to chair House Armed Services next year, chalked up to Congress and the White House rarely seeing eye to eye on federal spending.

“I’ve been doing this 20 years,” Rogers said. “Every year we get a budget proposal from the president — doesn’t matter if it’s a Democrat or Republican — and we put it in a drawer and say, ‘Thank you.’ And then we write the budget.”

“I’ve never had a president’s budget, that I’ve seen, that came close to meeting the needs of the department,” he said.

The legislation only authorizes funding, however, and must be followed by an appropriations measure to make the increase a reality. Congress is set to clear a full-year funding package this week that adheres to the increase in the NDAA.

Nuclear weapons plans

Congress foiled one of the few major changes Biden proposed to the nuclear arsenal, keeping alive a sea-launched cruise missile first proposed by the Trump administration.

Proponents of canceling the developmental program criticized it as costly, destabilizing and redundant, because Biden kept low-yield nukes fielded by the Trump administration deployed aboard ballistic missile submarines. A 2021 report by the Congressional Budget Office estimated the missile will cost $10 billion through 2030.

But lawmakers ultimately authorized $45 million to continue the program after top military brass, including Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley, publicly expressed support for the weapon, in a split with Austin and other top civilians who argued the missile isn’t needed.

Biden, a longtime proponent of reining in nuclear weapons’ role in foreign policy, has largely stayed the course on nuclear policy halfway through his term, endorsing the wholesale overhaul of all three legs of the U.S. arsenal.

Lawmakers also voted to require the Pentagon to keep most of its inventory of B83 nuclear gravity bombs, which Biden proposed retiring. The agreement prohibits retiring or deactivating more than 25 percent of the stockpile until the Pentagon provides Congress with a study on how it will field capabilities to strike hard and buried targets.

More ships and planes

Navy shipbuilding efforts are on track to expand once again amid bipartisan criticism that the service’s budgets don’t match plans to grow the fleet. Lawmakers authorized $32.6 billion to buy new ships, boosting the budget by $4.7 billion and ordering up three new hulls the Navy didn’t ask for.

The additions include a third unrequested Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, which the White House said it “strongly opposes” when the House approved it. Navy leaders have questioned whether a strained shipbuilding base can handle a rate of three destroyers per year. The bill also set a legal floor of 31 amphibious warships for the Navy, which the administration also opposes, arguing it would “unduly constrain” military planning.

Congress also threw a wrench into Navy plans to retire two dozen ships. The move was aimed at saving money but it also drew criticism on Capitol Hill because the plans would have scrapped some troubled littoral combat ships relatively early in their service lives.

The compromise bill ultimately bars the Navy from retiring a dozen warships it had planned to decommission, including five littoral combat ships and a Ticonderoga-class cruiser.

The legislation also crimps efforts by the Pentagon to retire dozens of aircraft. It jams up the administration’s plans to retire Navy EA-18G Growler electronic warfare jets, requiring the service to maintain a fleet of at least 158 aircraft through fiscal 2027. The bill similarly blocks efforts by the Air Force to retire some F-22 fighters through fiscal 2027.

Lawmakers also limited the Air Force’s ability to reduce its fleet of E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System planes below a certain level. Those restrictions would be eased if the service submits an acquisition strategy or awards a contract for its successor, the E-7 Wedgetail.

Lawmakers, meanwhile, boosted procurement for a swath of aircraft across the military services. Most notably, Armed Services leaders approved $666 million for eight Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornets the Navy didn’t seek in its budget, keeping the production line active.

Extremism in the ranks

The final bill largely eschews issues related to the Pentagon’s efforts to root out extremism, but the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report accompanying its version of the bill calls for those plans to be curtailed, though the language is nonbinding.

The report language was added by Republicans with the backing of Sen. Angus King (I-Maine). It argues that the low instances of extremism in the ranks “does not warrant a Department-wide effort.” It further argues that the Pentagon anti-extremism effort “is an inappropriate use of taxpayer funds, and should be discontinued by the Department of Defense immediately.”

The measures preview a coming battle between Republicans and the Biden administration over a slew of personnel policies they contend are a distraction from the military’s warfighting mission and will likely be put under a microscope when the GOP controls the House next year.

Source: Politico

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