Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of February 6

These radically simple changes helped lawmakers actually get things done (Washington Post)

In Congress, there is virtually no drop-in workspace where members from different parties can have a casual conversation without a camera. In the hearing rooms, members sit separately, with Democrats on one side and Republicans on the other. Outside the hearing rooms, the antechambers and cloakrooms are also segregated by party. There are almost no opportunities for members and staff to see each other as complicated humans with families, doubts, questions and regrets. This is dysfunction by design. As Winston Churchill put it: “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”

So the members of the modernization committee did things differently, on purpose. They started the session with a bipartisan planning retreat, which almost never happens. They hired one bipartisan team of staffers together, rather than separate staffs for Democrats and Republicans. That meant they started with twice as much capacity — and everyone rowing more or less in the same direction. They got a lot done in the 116th Congress, which led their colleagues to vote to extend the committee’s life span into the next Congress. “If all of Congress could operate the way that the modernization committee has, the nation would be in a much better place,” Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.) said in 2020.

Then came Jan. 6, 2021, a rupture that felt irreparable, even for the modernization committee. Many Democrats were refusing to work with any of the 147 Republicans who had voted against certifying the election results — three of whom were on the modernization committee, including the new Republican vice chairman, William Timmons (S.C.).

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When people in intractable conflict sit down and listen to each other under the right conditions, they make surprising discoveries. “There were several cases when one party said something, and the other side’s jaw dropped,” said David Eisner, head of the nonprofit Convergence, which helped organize the retreat. “Both sides believed the other side had been acting politically. And something happened where they realized they were all people — people who had been through something traumatic.”

Even as they continued to bitterly disagree about many things, the simple experience of being heard was cathartic. “It felt like someone turned the air conditioner on,” Eisner says. “You saw people starting to be curious about each other again.” Afterward, several members told Kilmer they were ready to work together. Nothing was resolved, but much was illuminated. “It was still pretty raw,” Timmons says, “but it was helpful to understand the degree to which [some members] were legitimately in fear for their lives. It made me understand where they were coming from.”

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Then, as Congress returned to in-person hearings, committee members did something truly startling: they stopped sitting up on high, on a dais, like every other committee and started sitting in a round table format, at the same level of the people who came to testify. Turns out that fixing politics starts by rearranging the furniture. “You can foster more productive conversation when you can look each other in the eye,” Kilmer says when I ask him to explain the obvious.

Remember how, in kindergarten, the teacher wouldn’t let you sit next to your best friend and co-conspirator? Well, the committee also integrated the hearing-room seating so that Democrats sat next to Republicans. And it stopped seating people based on tenure and allotting only five minutes to each member to talk. Instead, members chimed in whenever they felt moved to do so.

This sounds small but it was utterly subversive — and surprisingly popular. “The members truly loved it,” remembers Yuri Beckelman, the committee’s staff director. “It made people more comfortable. It was very conversational.” This was in stark contrast to his experience on other committees, where members glared at each other from opposite sides of the room.

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In January, the committee disappeared, just like Cinderella’s dress. That was always the plan with a temporary committee like this. There is some talk of reincarnating it as a subcommittee to the House Administration Committee. But either way, many of the committee’s recommendations are being rolled out, including new nonpartisan programming that took place during new-member orientations late last year and more bipartisan dinners through the Library of Congress. Others, including a recommendation to create more bipartisan gathering spaces and a particularly clever one to allow dual sponsorship of bills across the aisle, have gone nowhere — so far.

(I did try the Kagi summarizer but it was terrible.)

Not a link, but just a comment. There has been some fascinating geopolitical tensions over the past few days as the alleged Chinese spy balloon traversed above the continental United States and was ultimately shot down just off the east coast. I have my doubts that it was actually a "spy balloon", or at least not a fully functioning one, because it seems pretty ridiculous to think that a nation as sophisticated as China would risk sending real spy equipment when the chance of the balloon ending up in enemy hands is really, really high. It may be true, however, that China misjudged the degree to which this would become a media frenzy. Of course we're unlikely to ever know the real story behind this balloon or the bigger tit for tat underlying it, but the most likely explanation I've seen came from former US Secretary of Defense and CIA director Leon Panetta. He said the US does similarly provocative surveillance over China-claimed territories and this was just China's way of saying knock it off. I am really interested to see where this story goes because I am fascinated by how countries attempt to manage geopolitical events in the media. It has been interesting to watch not only US mainstream media but also social media, and to the extent that we can peek into Chinese media (social media, actually), that's been interesting too.

Edit: And let's not forget entertainment media as well.

Busing migrants was a partisan lightning rod. Here's why Democrats have embraced it (NPR)

Democrats criticized the tactic as dehumanizing, especially when migrants were misled about where they were going. But some cities and states led by Democrats later warmed to the practice, most recently Arizona's new governor, Katie Hobbs.

"If we're spending money to bus people, why just not get them to their final destination?" Hobbs told reporters at a recent press conference.

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A couple of Greyhound buses depart Del Rio each day. The local airport recently lost service after American Airlines pulled out. The non-profit also works directly with a private transportation company. VVHBC would typically help recent arrivals figure out where they needed to go, and then a family member would purchase them a ticket.

But in 2022, the non-profits and aid groups at the border had trouble meeting basic needs for the record number of people trying to come to the U.S., per federal data.

Buses operated by the state are "incredibly useful," says Burrow.

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That reality has helped shift the politics of transporting immigrants. "Something that looked like a punitive thing towards immigrants done for political gains suddenly turned itself on the head because migrants are rational people," says Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.

Not only could they get a free ticket to a family or a shelter, but "they found these cities were actually quite hospitable to immigrants," says Chishti.

Government agencies and nonprofits in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Chicago and New York have welcomed tens of thousands of immigrants bussed from the border. In many cases, they provide food, shelter, legal services and help with transportation.

Some arrivals move on quickly. In Philadelphia and D.C., between 5-10% of the arrivals remained in shelters or subsidized housing as of mid-January, according to data provided by city officials. Chicago officials did not provide enough data to make the comparison.

In New York, where there is a "right-to-shelter" law, more than 26,000 asylum-seekers are staying in city-run shelters as of Jan. 8, according to a city spokesperson.

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Then in December, thousands of people started showing up in Denver on their own. The city set up emergency shelters as temperatures dipped outside. But, it also bought individual bus tickets for 1,900 people, helping them get to 35 states, according to data provided by local officials.

"It goes along with food and shelter and clothes and toiletries. Those bus tickets are part of this huge humanitarian effort," says Josh Rosenblum, a city and county spokesperson.

Busses are cheaper than housing and it's morally acceptable to help people by buying them bus tickets to where they want to go. Solve for the equilibrium.

With Chinese balloon, a hidden Cold War contest drifted into the open (Op Ed in the Washington Post)

Two weeks ago, it would have been hard to find anyone, even at high levels of the U.S. government, who knew much about China’s balloon-surveillance program. But it turns out that China’s effort has been underway for more than a decade. According to a declassified intelligence report issued Thursday by the State Department, it involves a “fleet of balloons developed to conduct surveillance operations” that have flown over 40 countries on five continents.

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Let’s start exploring this balloon backstory by examining China’s efforts to develop this technology. They’ve hardly kept it secret. A 2019 article by two Chinese law professors on “utilization of the near space” noted that operations in this zone, above 18 kilometers (or 59,005 feet) “represent the future of activities in the airspace.”

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China’s CCTV captured Kuang-Chi’s 2016 launch of a balloon from New Zealand, posted on YouTube. The link was sent to me by the same amateur researcher who noted the 2019 law review article. He also sent a link to a 2016 story in China Daily about Kuang-Chi’s launch of a balloon capsule carrying a live tortoise.

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Let’s look at another tit-for-tat motivation: China claims in its internal media that the Pentagon has aggressive plans to use high-altitude balloons, in projects such as “Thunder Cloud.”

It turns out the Chinese are right. Thunder Cloud was the name for the U.S. Army’s September 2021 exercise in Norway to test its “Multidomain Operations” warfighting concept, following a similar test in the Pacific in 2018, according to the Pentagon’s Defense News.

“We are looking to operationalize the stratosphere,” one of the Army officers involved in the Thunder Cloud exercise was quoted by a U.S. Army news release. A video shows the Army launching one of its potentially warfighting high-altitude balloons.

“It’s just phenomenal what we’re able to do with high-altitude balloons,” Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler, commander of the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command, told Defense News in 2020.