Excerpts
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week’s top news, including the struggle on Capitol Hill to find a resolution to the political division on the border crisis before Congress leaves for August recess, as well as how these events will affect the November election, plus the outlook for ending the war between Israel and Hamas.
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DAVID BROOKS, New York Times: It’s sort of happening on two levels. There’s the political meta level and then there’s the substance level.
The meta level is, this is — nothing is going to pass, nothing is going to happen. This is all negotiating about a bill that has zero chance of actually becoming law. So this is a bunch of positioning. It’s Ted Cruz and some House members positioning against the leadership.
It’s a lot of Republicans saying, at least we passed something, so positioning for the voters. So, it’s all about positioning. As for the substance, I frankly don’t understand the Republican position at all. You have got a refugee crisis. You have got these kids coming here.
There’s a need for some sort of balanced approach. Yes, you have got to secure the border. Yes, there have to be some hearings. Yes, there has to be a sped-up process for that. There probably needs to be some more money for that. Some sort of balanced approach seems eminently sensible.
Securing the border, deporting some of them, yes, who can sent back fairly, but then having some hearings to figure out who’s who. And it seems to me the Republicans have basically their policy — at least the political emphasis that’s come out is deport, deport, deport, wall, wall, wall.
It seems to me to make little sense in the short-term and is extremely damaging for Republicans in the long term.
JUDY WOODRUFF: How do you make sense of this?
MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated columnist: Judy, first of all, these — these kids — and they are kids overwhelmingly — are fleeing chaos, and exploitation and violence, and somehow that’s been lost in the debate here in Washington.
I mean, they view it as somehow this marauding group of invaders, 9, 10-, 12-, 14-year-old kids who are thousands of miles from home and know nobody and don’t speak the language. And the response seems to be from the majority party in the House of Representatives, let’s get tough on the kids.
If a law passed in 2008 signed by President Bush provided them with legal counsel, forget that. Let’s just ignore that and go forward. It just — I sense in them, in the Republicans right now in the House, a political imperative. And that is, they recall 2010, four years ago, in the month of August, which was when that election really changed with the town meetings in their home districts.
And none of them wants to go back, apparently, or very few of them want to risk having somebody stand up at a town meeting and accuse them of amnesty, that you are going to let illegals in, undocumented in. And undocumented is too euphemistic.
So I just think they have labored mightily. David is — I agree with David. They have labored mightily and produced this counterfeit mouse that’s going nowhere. It’s stillborn, and it is not even symbolically impressive.
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