The Morning Briefing: Census Madness, Tech Giants Head to the Hill and Much, Much More

Good Wednesday morning.

Here is what’s on the president’s agenda today:

The president hosts a credentialing ceremony for newly appointed ambassadors to Washington, DC
President Trump has lunch with the Secretary of Defense

Trump seeks to fund wall from Pentagon funding

After getting rolled by the Senate and the House last week with the awful omnibus (that he signed), the president is looking for alternatives to fund his wall. Trump really needs to get involved sooner in the budget process and tell these congressional jokers what he will and won’t sign before they toss some crappy shopping spree at him. That’s on him.

The omnibus has virtually no money for his wall because the Senate and the House don’t want the wall and it has all kinds of money for everything else, including many things he promised to cut or defund.

Trump has told advisers that he was spurned in a large spending bill last week when lawmakers appropriated only $1.6 billion for the border wall. He has suggested to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and congressional leaders that the Pentagon could fund the sprawling project, citing a “national security” risk.

He wasn’t spurned, he has a veto pen.

After floating the notion to several advisers last week, Trump told House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that the military should pay for the wall, according to three people familiar with the meeting last Wednesday in the White House residence. Ryan offered little reaction to the idea, these people said, but senior Capitol Hill officials later said it was an unlikely prospect.

I don’t think this is possible. Hopefully, the president has learned a lesson and will tell the Congress ahead of time not to send him a bill without his priorities funded or defunded. It’s simple: Congress has the power of the purse and the president can veto their budgets.

Census madness

Yesterday it was announced that the Trump administration is looking to include a question on the census that asks about citizenship. People are going bananas. States have vowed to #resist. Are you enjoying the left’s newfound federalism as much as I am?

New York, California and other states vowed on Tuesday to stop the U.S. government from asking in the 2020 census whether people are citizens, arguing the question could stop immigrants from participating and skew the makeup of Congress.

Would it stop immigrants or illegal immigrants from participating? Because legal immigrants ought to be counted in the census. Why would they be worried about participating? They are here legally. The objecting states are concerned because tax dollars, grants and congressional seats are apportioned based on citizenship; there would be a reduction in funding and representation if we are dishing out tax dollars and congressional seats based on people that are not citizens. See how that works?

But liberal opponents feared that the decision would have the opposite effect. They said the move was designed to undercount immigrants, potentially reducing their representation in Congress and federal funding for local jurisdictions, which is determined by population.

“It is a scare tactic to try to scare Latinos and others from participating in the 2020 census,” Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund, told reporters.

Not immigrants but illegal immigrants. The left likes to mix the two up when they spin to make this sound so heartless. But not everyone is crazy on the illegal immigration issue. Orange County, Calif., has voted to oppose the state’s sanctuary city law and will work with federal authorities to deport criminals from the U.S.

On Tuesday, the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted to condemn the state’s sanctuary law and to join a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit that contends it’s unconstitutional.

The law, Senate Bill 54, limits police cooperation with federal immigration authorities. It’s a capstone of the effort by Gov. Jerry Brown and legislators who, along with the mayors of the largest cities, have resisted more stringent efforts to deport people who are in the country illegally and opposed Trump’s call to build a wall along the entire U.S. border with Mexico.

How can progressives live with themselves, allowing violent offenders to be released into the communities they claim to represent? It’s just awful.

But on Tuesday its all-Republican Board of Supervisors voted 4-0 to join the federal lawsuit filed earlier this month against SB 54 and two other pro-immigrant state laws.

Supervisor Michelle Steel, an immigrant from South Korea, told the crowd that fixing the country’s immigration system will take time. “Along the way, law enforcement should absolutely cooperate fully within the constraints of federal law,” she said.

This is heading for the courts, so keep your eye on it.

Tech giants invited to the hill

This is gonna be lit!

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday extended an invitation to Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to testify on consumer-privacy protections, adding to the list of congressional panels requesting his presence. It also invited Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

“The hearing will broadly cover privacy standards for the collection, retention and dissemination of consumer data for commercial use,” the committee’s chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley, said in a statement. “It will also examine how such data may be misused or improperly transferred and what steps companies like Facebook can take to better protect personal information of users and ensure more transparency in the process.”

I don’t know why this wasn’t done sooner, it’s not as if this is a new issue. The Republicans were too spineless to care when social media was being used against conservatives and libertarians. They are only paying attention to it now because the left/media is angry that social media platforms may have been used to help Trump.

I sure hope one of the senators on the committee has the stones to ask about the bias against conservatives and libertarians. Probably not.

2A roundup

NRA’s political fund sees donations spike in February after Florida shooting

Wasserman Schultz proposes bill targeting ammunition: ‘You do not have the right to bear bullets’

Al Sharpton’s half brother marched against guns – and then was charged as an accessory to murder

NYT Has To Correct Gun Photo In Anti-2A Opinion Piece

Retired justice urges repeal of Second Amendment

Historical picture of the day: