Yazmin Juárez, whose 19-month-old daughter died weeks after being released from ICE detainment in 2018, testified during the hearing, describing the mistreatment she faced while seeking asylum. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), who was brought to tears at times during the day’s proceedings, asked Juárez a series of empathetic questions, creating the emotional highlight of the hearing.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/07/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-cries/

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday she has “no regrets about anything” after a swipe at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other freshman congresswomen’s following in a New York Times article.

Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, or “The Squad,” voted against a bill that aimed to provide emergency funding at the border. Pelosi told the NYT Saturday the four newer members “have their public whatever and their Twitter world,” but “they’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”

Pelosi stood by her comments Wednesday, saying she doesn’t “do” regrets.

“I have no regrets about anything,” Pelosi told reporters after being asked if she was worried about her remarks dividing Democrats, The Washington Post reported. “Regrets is not what I do.”

More at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/regrets-is-not-what-i-do-pelosi-defends-her-comments-about-four-house-women/2019/07/10/df49af82-a320-11e9-a767-d7ab84aef3e9_story.html?utm_term=.cec73a6c7e47

Newly elected Democrats in the House of Representatives spent June 27 with the sinking feeling that it was happening again: Their party was going to cave to President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on a viscerally emotional issue. Just after a searing photo circulated of a father and his young daughter who had drowned in each other’s arms while fleeing for the sanctuary of U.S. shores, Democrats in Congress let a GOP-drafted spending bill go through that did nothing to address conditions for detained immigrant children — abandoning a House version that would have ordered improvements. House leaders blamed Senate Democrats for capitulating; Senate Democrats attacked the House for poor negotiating.

The new insurgent class of Democrats put the fight in sharp moral terms. “A vote for Mitch McConnell’s border bill is a vote to keep kids in cages and terrorize immigrant communities,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar (Minn.). “If you see the Senate bill as an option, then you don’t believe in basic human rights,” declared Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.). “Hell no. That’s an abdication of power,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.).

Frustration with the refusal to stand up for principle is boiling over among younger Democrats. On issue after issue — impeachment, Medicare-for-all, a $15 minimum wage, free public college, a Green New Deal — the answer from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and other Democratic leaders is consistent: Now is not the time; the country isn’t ready. Push too fast or too far, and there’ll be a backlash. For newer members of the party’s caucus, the older generation’s fear of a backlash is befuddling. “Leadership is driven by fear. They seem to be unable to lead,” said Corbin Trent, a spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez and a co-founder of Justice Democrats, the insurgent political organization that powered her rise, while also backing Omar and Tlaib. “I’m not sure what caused it.”

The answer, in short: the Gipper.

The way the older and younger House members think about and engage with the Republican Party may be the starkest divide between them. Democratic leaders like Pelosi, Joe Biden, Steny Hoyer and Chuck Schumer were shaped by their traumatic political coming-of-age during the breakup of the New Deal coalition and the rise of Ronald Reagan — and the backlash that swept Democrats so thoroughly from power nearly 40 years ago. They’ve spent the rest of their lives flinching at the sight of voters. When these leaders plead for their party to stay in the middle, they’re crouching into the defensive posture they’ve been used to since November 1980, afraid that if they come across as harebrained liberals, voters will turn them out again.

The Ocasio-Cortezes of the world have witnessed the opposite: The way they see it, Democratic attempts to moderate and compromise have led to nothing but ruin...

More at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2019/07/05/feature/haunted-by-the-reagan-era/?utm_term=.c334ee3f229b&wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1

Washington(CNN) The most dramatic showdown during the first Democratic debate was between Sen. Kamala Harris and former Vice President Joe Biden over his decades-long opposition to desegregation busing. But on the sidelines of the re-litigated fight over busing -- and off the stage that second night -- was another candidate who waded into the busing debate in the 1970s on the opposite side of Biden: Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

In her first law review article, published in 1975 in the Rutgers Law Review and recently unearthed by CNN's KFile, Warren sharply criticized a Supreme Court ruling in the case Milliken v. Bradley, writing that it made it easier for school districts to stop busing students in northern cities.

...In the article, Warren predicted that de facto segregation -- segregation that occurs not because it was institutionalized by the government but because of social norms, prejudices and self-selection -- and de jure -- segregation that existed because of laws that mandated racial segregation -- had been silently "reaffirming" by the court and would take over American public schools.

The isolation of minorities in urban centers, Warren wrote, and a shrinking tax base to finance public education would lead to facilities that are inferior in "student-teacher ratios, and other educational advantages" for minority students. For Brown v. Board of Education to have meaning in northern urban centers, Warren said that "effectively separate schools, even if equal, and certainly if unequal, are condemned by the Constitution, regardless of the reason for the separation."

...Warren also seemed to recognize the significance of Milliken in her law review article. She argued that without proper oversight from the federal court system, she wrote, the burden of desegregation has fallen on to black communities.

"It has been black parents, children, and organizations committed to desegregation who have shouldered the major part of the burden...Clearly, the burden for enforcing the Brown right has been misplaced," Warren wrote.

More at https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/07/06/politics/elizabeth-warren-busing-desegregation-kfile/index.html

A group of NYPD cops surrounded a woman who’d been stopped by security for putting items in a bag at Union Square’s Whole Foods on Thursday — then paid for the goods, prompting the lady to break down in tears.

“I saw the woman opened up her bag, and one of the officers looked in the bag,” said documentary filmmaker Paul Bozymowski, who had gone to the store for cookout materials and witnessed the scene, later posting details and a photo on Twitter.

“And [the cop] said: ‘I’ll buy your food.’ Just really simply and plainly.”

Expecting a far worse outcome, the woman began to cry, the witness said.

“She was just overwhelmed with gratitude for these officers,” he said.

The officers eventually accompanied the woman to the customer-service counter and purchased the items for her, Bozymowski said.

More at https://nypost.com/2019/07/04/nypd-cops-buy-food-for-woman-caught-shoplifting-at-whole-foods/

Last week, twenty Democratic candidates for President debated in the course of two nights in Miami. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren appeared to bolster their campaigns, with Harris, in particular, making headlines for her criticism of Joe Biden’s past opposition to school busing. Later in the week, Harris explicitly announced that she supports a return of school busing to ease segregation in education. This followed all of the candidates at Thursday’s debate coming out in favor of government-funded health care for undocumented immigrants, Elizabeth Warren supporting the decriminalization of border crossings, and Harris initially seconding calls from Warren and Bernie Sanders for the abolition of private health insurance. (Harris claimed that she misunderstood the question; earlier this year, she appeared to take several different positions on the issue.) Joe Biden’s unsteady performance, meanwhile, weakened the candidacy of the Party’s highest-profile moderate.

With President Trump and his team delighted by the Democrats’ leftward turn, a central question emerges: Will running on a more explicitly progressive platform energize the Democratic base, or will it cost the Party the 2020 election? To consider this question and others, I spoke by phone with Dave Wasserman, the U.S. House editor for the Cook Political Report and a contributor to NBC News. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed whether voters are less ideological than people think they are, the ways in which the Electoral College presents a challenge to Democrats winning Presidential elections, and the true lesson of the 2018 midterms.

Do you think Democrats whose primary desire is to see Trump defeated should be concerned or excited that their party seems to be moving leftward?

I don’t think Democrats would be wise to run against Trump on a platform of completely open borders and abolishing private health insurance. There are limits. But, generally, the tiny sliver of voters in this country who are still persuadable are not highly ideological people. They are fundamentally anti-élite in nature, and they are looking for three characteristics in a candidate for President that don’t have much to do with left-versus-right. And those characteristics are authenticity, being a credible agent for change, and empathy. In other words, does this person understand my daily struggles? And a common thread between Obama and Trump was a common touch.

It’s all relative, but, whether it was having been a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago or a billionaire who ate K.F.C. and went to professional wrestling matches, it struck a chord with those voters.

More at https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/what-the-democrats-turn-leftward-means-for-the-partys-chances-in-2020

There’s a new whisper on Wall Street -- maybe Elizabeth Warren isn’t so bad.

The Democratic senator, who rose to national prominence by calling for tough regulation after the financial crisis, is winning respect from a small but growing circle of senior bankers and hedge fund managers. As the presidential candidate from Massachusetts takes aim at the “rich and powerful” with a slew of tax-raising policy proposals, some financial types who fit that description say she’s proven capable and makes some good points.

“If she ends up being the nominee, I’d have no trouble supporting her at all,” said David Schamis, chief investment officer of Atlas Merchant Capital, where he’s a founding partner alongside former Barclays Plc head Bob Diamond. While Warren isn’t Schamis’s top choice, he said: “I think she is smart, hardworking, responsible and thoughtful. And I think she thinks markets are important.”

Schamis said people in his network who studied under Warren, a former professor at Harvard Law School, think highly of her, including some conservatives

...“I clearly don’t agree with everything she says, but I do give her credit for getting things done,” said Tom Nides, a Morgan Stanley vice chairman and former deputy secretary of state under Barack Obama, said of Warren. He didn’t share which candidate he’s supporting.

Warren’s work to set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the wake of the crisis was “impressive,” Nides said. “You can’t argue with that. Having an idea, driving it to fruition, and having set it up is really hard to do.”

More at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-03/elizabeth-warren-wins-respect-in-unlikeliest-place-wall-street

ASHINGTON — Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday called for Scott Gottlieb, who resigned as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration in April, to leave Pfizer’s board of directors.

In a letter, the Massachusetts Democrat applauded Gottlieb’s tenure at FDA but suggested his decision to join the drug giant “smacks of corruption.” Gottlieb’s decision to join a corporation he once regulated, Warren wrote, “makes the American people rightfully cynical and distrustful about whether high-level Trump Administration officials are working for them, or for their future corporate employers.”

Warren is among the leading candidates for her party’s presidential nomination in 2020. Many of her legislative priorities in recent years have fallen under FDA’s purview, including an aggressive bill aimed at lowering drug prices and a $100 billion proposal to counter the opioid epidemic.

...In the letter, Warren also touted anti-corruption legislation that she said “would shut the revolving door and prohibit giant companies like Pfizer from wielding undue influence.” That bill would prohibit many private companies from hiring or paying senior government officials in the four years following their departure.

More at https://www.statnews.com/2019/07/02/warren-blasts-gottlieb-pfizer-board/