LAO: State could withstand mild recession

Good morning. TGIF. In non-Trump news, the state’s budget could survive a mild recession for four years without a tax hike or sharp cuts, according to a new report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

The LAO warned that the stock market fluctuations and other “volatile and unpredictable” economic factors make it difficult to project the state’s finances too far out. Regardless, the LAO estimates that the state would be fine through 2020-21. 

The projections would change with any new obligations, both at the state and federal levels.

Gov. Jerry Brown has been quick to veto new spending or tax cuts that aren’t paid for, like the ill-fated effort to remove sales tax on tampons and other feminine hygiene products, but the impending negotiations on transportation issues may call for new spending. The LAO also pointed to the possibility that a new president and Republican-controlled Congress may change federal policies that affect that state’s budget.

“Any such state or federal policy changes could have a significant impact on the state’s ‘bottom line,’” wrote the LAO. 

CalWatchdog has more. 

And now, in Trump-related news: 

• “As a growing number of California officials assail President-elect Donald Trump’s immigration policies, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday called on the state’s public university systems to declare themselves ‘sanctuary campuses’ to protect hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrant students from deportation,” reports Politico. 

• “Other California leaders rushed to join Rendon and [Kevin] de León in setting up the state as a liberal counterweight to Trump, laying the groundwork for four years of battles with Washington. Now, the circumstance in which California finds itself recalls that of a perennial rival: Texas playing the role of chief antagonist to President Obama.” The Los Angeles Times has more.

• “The National Border Patrol Council has high hopes for President-elect Trump’s border security policies. The union’s president, Brandon Judd, has been advising the Trump transition team. The union has encouraged the building of a border wall and changing enforcement policies put in place in the past four years.” The San Diego Union-Tribune has more. 

• “It was all hands on deck at Covered California’s monthly board meeting Thursday as leaders of the state insurance exchange and a panel of experts spent hours trying to divine a health care world according to President-elect Donald Trump,” reports The San Jose Mercury News. 

Legislature:

• Gone till December. 

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced. 

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“The California Democrats voting in favor of the measure were [Rep. Scott] Peters [(San Diego)] and Reps. Pete Aguilar (Redlands), Ami Bera (Elk Grove), Julia Brownley (Westlake Village), Jim Costa (Fresno), John Garamendi (Walnut Grove), Janice Hahn (Los Angeles) and Raul Ruiz (Palm Desert).”

Democrats divided

Already reeling from a string of losses under Obama at the state and federal level, nervous Democrats nationwide proved too hard to convince to go along with the president. “New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan, who is challenging Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) in her bid for reelection, urged the federal government to stop accepting Syrian refugees until the process is reviewed. Nevada Senate candidate Catherine Cortez Masto wants U.S. intelligence officials to sign off on the vetting process before admitting more refugees. And former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, aiming to unseat GOP Sen. Rob Portman in Ohio, joined the chorus,” Politico observed, “calling for a ‘short-term pause’ in the resettlement program.”

But many California Democrats have sided firmly in favor of fast-tracking more Syrian refugees, many of which have already settled in Southland locales such as San Diego. And some lawmakers explicitly linked the plight of the current group of refugees with their families’ own. Rep. Norma Torres, D-Calif., of Pomona, visited the Islamic Center of Claremont “to meet with members of two Syrian families who arrived in Southern California this fall,” the Times reported separately. “The stories she heard from the Kanjou and Wawieh families, about fleeing the violence of Syria and journeying through Lebanon and Egypt before arriving in Pomona, were familiar. Torres came from war-torn Guatemala to live with an uncle in Los Angeles when she was five years old.”

A spiking problem

The comparison has turned out to be well-timed. Adding to the controversy and raising the stakes, border officials have suddenly seen a significant spike in unauthorized crossings, reminiscent of the surge into Texas last year of surprising numbers of women and children. But rather than the kinds of economically-motivated unlawful immigrants who have become poster figures in California’s border debate, the current wave of includes many “women and children fleeing vicious gangs and endemic sexual violence in Central America who are hoping for asylum in the United States. Rather than hiding from Border Patrol agents they often try to find them, to ask for protection and start the long legal battle to remain here,” according to the New York Times.

“In October, the United Nations High Commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, said uncontrolled violence by the gangs had become ‘pervasive’ in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. He issued an ‘early warning’ of ‘a looming refugee crisis.’ A report by his agency found that women in particular ‘face a startling degree of violence that has a devastating impact on their daily lives.’ According to United Nations figures, this year El Salvador moved into first place in the world for the rate of murders of women and Guatemala ranked third, while Honduras had the highest murder rate over all.”

Politically, the situation could play into the hands of those Democrats still rallying around President Obama, who has castigated Republicans nationwide for opposing the increase in Syrian and Iraqi refugees he has targeted. “Apparently they are scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America,” he remarked, The Hill reported. “At first, they were too scared of the press being too tough on them in the debates. Now they are scared of three-year-old orphans. That doesn’t seem so tough to me.”

Pushing back amid the debate over the Congressional vote on Obama’s proposed policy, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., used his opportunity during a recent hearing as chairman of the House Judiciary subpanel on immigration to say of Obama that “with all due respect to him, what I’m afraid of is a foreign policy that creates more widows and orphans,” The Hill noted.

After forming quick — some say stealthy — plans to hand California some 300 undocumented immigrants detained in Texas, the federal government has reversed that decision, only to leave open the prospect of changing it back yet again.

The uncertainty underscores a surprising level of unpreparedness for the kind of illegal immigration now dominating headlines, which includes especially high numbers of children. Complicating the bureaucratic problem even further, many of the children are unaccompanied.

In recent years, illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border have been on a historic downturn, with border apprehensions at or near all-time lows. Unauthorized child immigrants, however, began increasing in number three years ago. As USA Today reports, federal authorities now say that since October 2013, over 52,000 children have been caught in illegal border crossings; prior to 2011, that figure stood at just 7,000 a year.

Notably, the number of apprehended children excludes those who crossed the border accompanied by parents or other adults (and, of course, those who haven’t been caught, whether because their journey was successful or ended in death). Since the October surge, authorities have snared over 39,000 adults with young children. As the Washington Post reports, some among that group have been released, but the Department of Homeland Security won’t give any detailed statistics — or even reveal whether any among that number simply failed to appear in immigration court.

California blowback

Circumstances are cloudy surrounding the Border Patrol’s plans to transfer to California the 300 detainees, most of whom are families with children. Described by Customs and Border Protection spokesman Ralph DeSio as a “thing” in a “very fluid state,” federal decision-making appeared to change in the face of local opposition to the flight scheme in the San Diego area.

Although only a small group of no more than a few dozen citizens turned out for a Temecula protest decrying the transfer plan, they earlier found an audience in Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Corona. After meeting with the protestors last week, Calvert released a statement echoing their concerns. He said, “It is simply outrageous and completely irresponsible for the Obama administration to transport illegal immigrants to facilities, like the Murrieta Border Patrol Station, that are not equipped or prepared to handle them.” 

The Murrieta station seems to have been considered specifically as part of the Border Patrol’s search for accommodations adequate to detain families with children. Part of the confusion stems from the complex of bureaucratic authorities involved in such a process. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for instance, chooses which families are detained and which are released — not Customs and Border Protection.

Federal follies

Yet ICE only counts among its physical assets one detention center designed for families, according to The Washington Post. Boasting just 85 beds, it is located in Pennsylvania, far from the U.S.-Mexico border.

A family-specific detention center over seven times that size is in the works at an Artesia, New Mexico location. But the Post reports that Rep. Steve Pearce, R-New Mexico, has revealed even this location would not be able to house unaccompanied minors.

In a clumsy move that drew howls from Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, border agents flew some 400 families with children detained in Texas to Tucson, where ICE took them into custody. But ICE officials then ran busloads of detained families to the Tucson Greyhound station — switching to the bus line’s Phoenix station only when the Tucson location had been overrun with the would-be immigrants, who had not been given any food or child care supplies.

“State and local governments, law enforcement agencies, health care providers and nonprofit organizations are all stretched to the breaking point attempting to manage the enormity of these challenges,” Brewer wrote, in a fiercely-worded letter to President Barack Obama.

The lead story on the top right of the page was a news account of President Obama’s Tuesday “victory lap” press conference in which he said that the fact that 7.1 million Americans had allegedly enrolled under the Affordable Care Act was proof that he was right and everyone who criticized the ACA was wrong. The headline pushed readers to accept this view; the subhead made the case that only selfish people opposed the law.

In the story itself, the first half by David Lauter and Christi Parsons of the Times’ Washington bureau gave no larger context at all — it was all “victory lap.” Among the 40 relevant things it didn’t mention, most significant was the fact that it chose not to say that so many past claims about Obamacare proved wildly in error. Nor did it emphasize that it appears that there were more people signing up for the ACA through government exchanges because they lost their coverage due to ACA rules then there were of people who previously had no health insurance.

The whole point of Obamacare was supposed to be to get health insurance to the uninsured — not to create churn among the insured that pushed them into having to use government alternatives. Yo, David! Yo, Christi! Isn’t this, yunno, news?

‘Trust the prez’ side-by-side with ‘Don’t trust the prez’

But the patheticness of this cheerleading for Obama was triply underscored because just underneath the story was another piece that also had as a core element the question of whether the White House could be trusted: LAT reporter Brian Bennett’s detailing of the dishonest way the Obama administration had reported deportation numbers to buy it political cover. The (pathetic) headline: “Figures Skew Numbers Obama Deports.” Not “Obama Skews Numbers Of Deportations.”

However painfully biased the headline was, the story made plain the duplicity of Obama’s White House:

“WASHINGTON — Immigration activists have sharply criticized President Obama for a rising volume of deportations … But the portrait of a steadily increasing number of deportations rests on statistics that conceal almost as much as they disclose. A closer examination shows that immigrants living illegally in most of the continental U.S. are less likely to be deported today than before Obama came to office, according to immigration data.

“Expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40% since 2009.

“On the other side of the ledger, the number of people deported at or near the border has gone up — primarily as a result of changing who gets counted in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s deportation statistics.

“The vast majority of those border crossers would not have been treated as formal deportations under most previous administrations. If all removals were tallied, the total sent back to Mexico each year would have been far higher under those previous administrations than it is now.

“The shift in who gets tallied helped the administration look tough in its early years …”

So next to an article that says Obama grossly manipulated the numbers for years for political advantage on a huge national issue is an article that says the numbers Obama cites on another huge national issue somehow offer confirmation that he’s right and others are wrong.

The Los Angeles Times has never looked dumber.