By Lindy Li

Given that Asian American voters could provide the margin of victory in battleground states such as Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan, Democrats must make a concerted effort in 2020 to encourage them to vote and to convert the Trump supporters among them.

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, as good a time as any to reflect on the political power of a community that doesn't always get the same attention as other minority groups. Asian Americans are incredibly diverse, making generalizing on topics, like voter patterns, difficult. The fastest growing in the country, this population includes Vietnamese, Filipino, Korean, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and other ethnicities. And each of these groups demonstrates a different level of support for President Donald Trump. For example, according to an October 2018 APIAVote poll, 64 percent of Vietnamese Americans approved of Trump, while only 14 percent of Japanese American voters did.

Granted, Trump did not win the general Asian American vote in 2016, securing just 18 percent. And this figure, too, cloaks sharp internal differences, with 4 percent and 24 percent of Pakistani and Chinese Americans supporting him, respectively. Meanwhile, 32 percent of Latinos supported the GOP in 2016. And yet, the question for many remains: How does one explain why anyone of immigrant heritage would support a man who makes xenophobia a centerpiece of his agenda?

For my own family and other immigrants from countries with painful communist pasts, America was more than Winthrop’s "city upon a hill." America symbolized opportunity, freedom and boundless promise — in short, everything our birth country was not. So when Democrats shifted noticeably leftward, many of these immigrants were aghast.

To continue reading:

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/democrats-can-t-afford-ignore-asian-american-voters-2020-ncna1009496

Request for funding to care for unaccompanied migrant children and adults and to hire new judges for asylum claims coming to floor this upcoming week.

Far from enough help, not fast enough, doesn’t address children with families, or the many human rights violations, but such as it is, what’s going on. Read news story for more.
—-snip——-

Congress is nowhere near agreement on any major immigration law changes. As a stopgap, the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday approved a modified version of the emergency funding request by a 30-1 vote. It's on its way to a floor vote next week.

The bipartisan vote likely means that the Senate will take the lead in writing the legislation, which needs to pass into law before the House and Senate leave for vacation next week. A spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee chairwoman, Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., said the panel has drafted its version of the measure and expects a bipartisan vote early next week.

The legislation contains $2.9 billion to care for unaccompanied migrant children — more than 50,000 have been referred to government care since October — and $1.3 billion to care for adults. There's also money to hire new judges to decide asylum claims.

To win Democratic support, the panel's chairman, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., agreed to drop Trump's request for Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention beds, where adults and a small number of families are held, and agreed to a Democratic provision to block any of the money in the legislation from being diverted to building a border wall.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/06/20/mexico-border-top-immigration-official-pleads-emergency-funding/1508376001/

By Dan De Luce

WASHINGTON — To supporters of the Iran nuclear deal, it's no surprise that President Donald Trump is now facing a potential war with Iran.

Long before Trump was elected, advocates of the nuclear agreement — including then-President Barack Obama, French President Emmanuel Macron and others — had argued that abandoning the accord carried grave risks that could lead to an armed conflict.

"So let's not mince words. The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy or some form of war — maybe not tomorrow, maybe not three months from now, but soon," Obama said in a speech in 2015 defending the deal before a congressional vote.

Trump as a candidate vowed to dump what he called "the worst deal ever" and he made good on his promise in 2018. A year later, Trump is openly discussing the pros and cons of bombing Iran

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/obama-others-warned-trump-pulling-out-iran-nuke-deal-could-n1020461

From “Slate”

The former vice president has more foreign policy experience than any other candidate. But his record isn’t all what you’d expect.

Joe Biden enters the 2020 campaign as the only Democratic candidate with any experience in making foreign policy, and that experience is immense: 36 years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (12 as chairman or ranking member), eight years as vice president, probably more knowledge of the full range of global issues than anyone else on the political scene. So what does this long record reveal about how he might behave as commander in chief?

It’s a mixed picture, as one might expect of someone who was born during World War II, grew up amid the rise of America’s global dominance, first ran for Senate during its disastrous comeuppance in Vietnam, then played an active, sometimes shifting role in the debates on subsequent interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.

Above all, and in starkest contrast to President Donald Trump, Biden has always been a champion of the alliances that he sees as the foundation of U.S. power and values— especially NATO but also with nations in Asia and the Western Hemisphere. He is also—contrary to Trump as well as some of his rivals in the upcoming primaries, notably Sen. Bernie Sanders—an unabashed free trader.


He entered the Senate, in 1973, as a foe of the Vietnam War, which had left him and many others skeptical of America’s ability to be the world’s policeman. As late as 1990, he voted against authorizing President George H.W. Bush to use military force against Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait.

Continue reading
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/biden-obama-foreign-policy-record-2020.html

him several critical assignments and he proved not only a loyal supporter, but a highly effective
negotiator. This article is but one of many which point out how Biden transformed the office to become a key player in the West Wing. It was not merely out of personal friendship that President Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom:


From the fiscal cliff to gun control to Afghanistan, Scranton's favorite son has transformed himself from affable gaffer to West Wing powerhouse.

Barack Obama just can't get enough out of Joe Biden these days. And anybody who's been following Biden's steady ascent in stature over the last several years -- from gaffe-happy presidential contender to one of the most powerful vice presidents in U.S. history -- couldn't be less surprised.

Perhaps the only surprise at all is that, in contrast to a year ago, it took Biden quite this long to become the president's point man on the latest round of fiscal talks. The exact reason for the delay is not clear. Perhaps it is that, only a week and a half ago, Obama had called on his vice president to lead a commission to expedite recommendations on a truly serious national issue, gun violence (as opposed to the present trumped-up issue, fiscal reform, which requires only the smidgeon of political courage necessary to depart from ideological rigidities). Maybe Obama wanted to keep his veep's powder dry for that.

Or maybe it is just that, in the awkward pattern of political dance partnerships that have emerged over the last couple of years, whenever Barack Obama and Speaker John Boehner fail to execute -- as they did after the "Plan B" debacle -- it's Biden and his old Senate colleague, Mitch McConnell, who step into the spotlight. The Biden-McConnell duo didn't cut it during last year's cliffhanger over the debt limit, of course. But in a sign of just how important a figure the vice president has become in Washington, Biden's absence until now has been one reason that Republicans doubted Obama's seriousness about cutting a deal, my colleague Chris Frates reported last week.


https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/12/joe-biden-the-most-influential-vice-president-in-history/266729/

From conclusion of Mother Jones’ editorial:

Joe Biden and the Iraq War: It’s Complicated


So the story of Biden’s Iraq war vote has more facets than that of Clinton’s. He pressed the CIA for evidence to back up the White House’s fear-mongering, and when he saw the case was weak, this veteran legislator attempted to craft a bipartisan plan to slow Bush’s gallop to war and endeavored to counter the Bush-Cheney propaganda, insisting that Saddam did not pose an immediate threat. He might have succeeded had he not been sabotaged by Gephardt. Yet, when crunch time came, Biden did not say no to Bush, and he did not cast a tough vote against the go-to-war measure. Instead, Biden backed the resolution and tried to convince the public—and maybe himself—that Powell would save the day. That was a miscalculation and perhaps a sign that this Washington institutionalist put too much faith in the system, or at least in one man.

For most Democratic voters, and maybe most voters overall now, Biden ended up on the wrong side of the Iraq war vote—and on the wrong side of history. That’s the bottom line. (In 2005, Biden said he regretted his vote, remarking, “It was a mistake to assume the president would use the authority we gave him properly.”) In his own way—the way of a skilled legislator who could work with Democrats and Republicans—he did try to impede Bush’s war. It was only after he failed that Biden yielded to the forces of conventional political reality and voted in sync with the prevailing pro-war sentiment of the moment.

(The part about Gephardt and Dem hawks interesting)

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/joe-biden-and-the-iraq-war-its-complicated/

Poll of the week: A new Monmouth University Nevada Democratic caucuses poll finds that former Vice President Joe Biden leads with 36%. He was followed by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 19%, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders at 13%, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 7% and California Sen. Kamala Harris at 6%.
The poll was the first high-quality poll taken of the third-in-the-nation Nevada caucuses.
What's the point: The big question for most of the 2020 Democratic presidential field is how to beat front-runner Biden.


https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/15/politics/joe-biden-iowa-new-hampshire-poll/index.html

“The pace with which we are proceeding is consistent with the exceptional urgency of this matter: an attack on our elections that was welcomed by our President and benefited his campaign, followed by acts of obstruction by the President designed to interfere with the investigation of that attack.”

https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/bite-me-nadler-barr/18437/