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You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / GOP Monsters Open Thread: Stephen Miller Is A Decency Roadblock

GOP Monsters Open Thread: Stephen Miller Is A Decency Roadblock

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(Jim Morin via Gocomics.com)
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Never found the space to post this link when it came out last October, but the GOP shutdown “impasse” means Stephen Miller is in the spotlight again. Jonathan Blitzer, at the New Yorker:

In 1980, the year that Congress passed the Refugee Act, the U.S. accepted more than two hundred thousand refugees. The law created a robust program for accepting people who had been displaced by war and strife, and made refugee policy a new tool of American foreign policy, improving the country’s standing with foreign allies and helping the military and intelligence communities find partners in conflict zones. Since then, the mandated refugee “cap” set by the President has fluctuated; during the Obama Administration, it averaged seventy-six thousand, and, in 2017, Obama raised the cap to a hundred and ten thousand to allow in more Syrians fleeing civil war. Then came Donald Trump. In January, he signed an executive order temporarily freezing the refugee program, barring all Syrians, and slashing the number of refugees allowed into the country for the remainder of the year. Late last month, the White House announced that next year’s cap would be forty-five thousand, a record low. The State Department, the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of the Vice-President, and the Office of Management and Budget had wanted the number to be higher. But they had all been forced to compete with one influential White House official: Stephen Miller, the thirty-two-year-old former aide to Jeff Sessions who has become Trump’s top immigration adviser…

Miller, who has gone from the political fringe to the White House on the strength of his reputation as an anti-immigration ideas man, joined the Trump campaign early. He is close to both the President and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and has had a direct hand in several of the Administration’s most significant immigration decisions, including the travel bans and the cancellation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). “He’s been thoughtful and low-key about overtaking the policy-making process,” one White House official told me. “That’s the reason he survived.”

The chain of events that led to the announcement of the new refugee cap began on June 5th, when Miller met with officials from the State Department, the National Security Council, the Department of Homeland Security, and a policy group called the Homeland Security Council. Every summer, the State Department and the N.S.C. lead a series of discussions to decide the next year’s cap. Officials weigh dozens of different considerations, solicit input from the various stakeholder agencies, and ultimately bring a number to the President for his approval. The process is technical and exacting, a months-long slog through meetings, position papers, and constant recalibrations. Miller’s presence at the June 5th meeting itself was unusual: he heads the Domestic Policy Council, a body staffed by political appointees, which had never before played a role in refugee policy.

“We know how this used to go in the past,” he told the officials in the room. “But we also know that the President views this as a homeland-security issue.” Everyone understood the significance of Miller’s words. “Miller basically made clear that it was not going to be looked at from the typical lens of foreign policy,” a second White House official told me. “It was a domestic-policy issue, an immigration issue. The Department of Homeland Security was going to get involved.”…

When evidence emerged that didn’t suit Miller’s aims, he squelched it. In March, the White House had asked the Department of Health and Human Services to study the costs of refugee resettlement. The department returned with a study, in July, showing that the revenue generated by refugees in the form of local, state, and federal taxes exceeded the costs of resettling them by sixty-three billion dollars. According to the Times, Miller suppressed the study and demanded that H.H.S. recalculate the numbers. Two of the White House officials told me they’d heard that Miller had given H.H.S. strict instructions at the outset. “The President believes refugees cost more, and the results of this study shouldn’t embarrass the President,” he had told people at the agency. (The White House denied that Miller was involved with the H.H.S. report.)…

I asked the officials how Miller, with his limited experience in the executive branch, had become such a formidable bureaucrat so quickly. “Look at who the senior advisers to the President were and are—Bannon, Kushner—Miller’s the only one with prior government experience,” the State Department official told me. “He knows something about government, and it turns out to be useful. He saw how the sausage was made. And he’s smart enough to make his own sausage.” The chaos of the Trump Administration helped. “The White House remains in utter disarray,” the official said. “If you don’t have an established set of procedures in place, it’s very easy to create your own process.”…

In early September, officials at the State Department and N.S.C. were told that the Department of Homeland Security was ready to propose to the President that next year’s refugee cap be between fifteen thousand and twenty-six thousand people. Officials at the other government agencies involved in the process balked. “If we go below fifty thousand, we won’t satisfy the optics that the program was designed to generate, and that functionally hurts national security,” one White House official told me. “We look scared.” Miller and Hamilton weren’t swayed by the arguments, but when Elaine Duke, the interim Secretary of Homeland Security and Hamilton’s boss, insisted that the number couldn’t be lower than forty thousand, they were forced to retreat. (The White House disputed this account.)

Putting up a modest resistance, the State Department proposed a cap of fifty thousand. “People felt beleaguered and betrayed,” the official there told me. Trump’s original travel ban, in February, had set fifty thousand as a provisional cap for the current fiscal year. “It was seen as a politically safe number to use absent help from the Secretary.” Several other agencies—including, notably, the Office of the Vice-President—formally registered support for the State Department’s number. But in making the discussion about the range between forty thousand and fifty thousand, Miller had already succeeded in shifting the debate. “By the time we talked about splitting the difference, we were already two-thirds lower than where we were previously,” the State Department official told me. “We’d gone from a hundred and ten thousand”—which President Obama had set for the current year—“to around forty thousand, with no evidence to support the decision. It was purely political. The process has never been this corrupt.”

In mid-September, Tillerson lowered the State Department’s desired number from fifty thousand to forty-five thousand. The State Department official said the Secretary’s staff was surprised. “He undercut his deputy,” the official said. “He undercut the recommendation of the staff. He broke with every other federal agency except D.H.S.” The other agencies had all previously said they would back the State Department, so forty-five thousand was the only number that went to the President. “The President would never know that almost all of his Cabinet wanted a higher number,” one of the White House officials told me.

One of the White House officials I spoke to described the process as a harbinger of how immigration issues will be handled in the future. “The Domestic Policy Council is going to influence other processes that involve immigration,” the official said. “It’s going to get worse and worse.” Miller was expanding his influence. “He’s figured out early on that, just being at the D.P.C., he’s not going to be able to make key decisions unless he co-opts the N.S.C.,” the official went on. “He needs the security element attached to it. He’s worked to get himself in traditional N.S.C. decisions so that he can say, ‘This isn’t just me. We ran this by the N.S.C.’ It started with one or two issues. But it’s becoming anything that has to do with refugees, vetting, immigration, or security. Because he’s an assistant to the President, what person is going to say to him, ‘No, you can’t sit in on my meeting.’ The reason Stephen Miller is so dangerous? He’s clearly got a vision. He knows about narrative, about messaging. He’s figuring this out.”

Reader Interactions

55Comments

  1. 1.

    opiejeanne

    Miller is an abomination.

    And social media is full of trolls and bots today, more than I’ve noticed since the run-up to the election last year.

  3. 3.

    schrodingers_cat

    I think its President Kelly that calls the shots in the WH. Miller is the apparatchik.

    ETA: It was he who got the nominal President to reject the last minute deal to avert the shutdown.

  4. 4.

    Corner Stone

    @opiejeanne: I’ve been staying mostly away, just skimming a few regular twit feeds. It does seem like they want to ReleaseTheMemo and also SchumerShutdown like nobody’s business.
    I’ve been busy punching this damn flu bug in the face to try and keep it outta my house.

  6. 6.

    Brachiator

    “If we go below fifty thousand, we won’t satisfy the optics that the program was designed to generate, and that functionally hurts national security,” one White House official told me. “We look scared.”

    I detest all these people. All if them. They have no values, no moral sense. They either want to hurt people, or cover their asses while others hurt people.

    That Miller is close to Kushner is a little surprising, but only emphasizes that none of Trump’s family can be trusted.

    ETA. I also detest people who use the term “optics.”

  7. 7.

    Mnemosyne

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Miller is a true believer, though. He’s like the late unlamented Breitbart — he grew up in a very liberal area (Santa Monica, CA) and decided to set himself apart from his peers by becoming a white supremacist.

    Miller may be Smithers to Kelly’s Mr. Burns, but he’s enthusiastic and devoted to the same program of white supremacy.

  11. 11.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    My god the local news here in Ohio sucked. They had a panel of political “experts” and one of them, a Dr of some kind said that if the shutdown drags on, Democrats in states like West Virginia where the immigration issue isn’t a “top priority” for people there, then they might start getting nervous. The only message that seemed to come out of it was the generic “this is a waste of taxpayer money”. Not one mention that the GOP didn’t even have the votes among themselves to pass a budget. Sherrod Brown was a milquetoast over the phone. Oh and the Mahoning County Deplorables put up some billboards about the “Schumer Shutdown”. The only good coverage was the show of local support for Ameri, a man who has been trying to get citizenship for 20 years who was arrested by ICE a week back when attending a hearing.

  12. 12.

    Mnemosyne

    @Brachiator:

    I admit that I am a Gentile, but you would think that even upper-class Jewish men would have a little more self-awareness than to ally themselves with white supremacists. Kushner’s grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, FFS. What makes him think he’s so special that he won’t be up against the wall?

  13. 13.

    gene108

    @Brachiator:

    That Miller is close to Kushner is a little surprising, but only emphasizes that none of Trump’s family can be trusted.

    Why? They are both 30-something Jews, who probably not all that popular with others in their community. There is a natural attraction between jerks.

  15. 15.

    Brachiator

    @Corner Stone:

    It’s weird how everyone in the MSM is somehow *just now* realizing Kelly is a racist POS.

    A lot of people, and especially media types, will give the benefit of the doubt to cops and military officials.

  18. 18.

    gene108

    @Mnemosyne:

    but you would think that even upper-class Jewish men would have a little more self-awareness than to ally themselves with white supremacists. Kushner’s grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, FFS.

    I don’t think Kushner has really allied himself with white supremacists, other than that has where his father-in-laws fancy has taken him.

    I don’t get Miller. I guess he thinks being one of the “good Jews” will save him, if his vision comes to fruition or he believes U.S. institutions he is undermining will still be strong enough to protect him from the “Jews will not replace us” crowd, but I think, if his goal of white America is realized, he isn’t going to escape.

  22. 22.

    Brachiator

    @gene108:

    That Miller is close to Kushner is a little surprising…

    Why? They are both 30-something Jews, who probably not all that popular with others in their community. There is a natural attraction between jerks.

    Their backgrounds are very different in some ways. Miller seemed to be attracted to racism and white supremacists as a teen. He is strangely blind to the anti-Semitism of many of the people he tries to emulate.

    But both are blind to the fact that their parents or grandparents would have been excluded from this country by the same policies that Miller is currently advocating.

  23. 23.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Brachiator:

    A lot of people, and especially media types, will give the benefit of the doubt to cops and military officials.

    The very definition of “irony.”

  24. 24.

    J R in WV

    @Corner Stone:

    So you guys are saying that the optics of optics down’t work for YOU, right? I can get behind that. I think those optics (the optics of optics) are retrograde.

    I have a dive mask with the faceplate cut to match my eye’s abnormal optics. Can we still say that? But when I put it on in the dry kitchen to see if it still works for me, everything is off, because the presence of water changes the optics of a dive mask…. How about that?

  26. 26.

    donnah

    National news says vote tonight over shutdown and giving Trump his wall funding in exchange for DACA.

  28. 28.

    Tazj

    @Corner Stone: Hell, they just realized last week that Trump is a racist. I don’t know what they thought all the stuff he said in the campaign was, showmanship? What was the birth certificate stuff? But it was all forgotten by people like Matthews and Cillizza when he gave what they thought was a good speech. There was a round table on CNN were Michael Smerconish wondered if the shutdown would even be remembered because of the torrent of awful things that Trump says and does each day. He was acting as if the media couldn’t go back and remind people of things that Trump had done. There are certain things you shouldn’t be able to recover from as president, and being a racist and hiring racists is one of them.

  29. 29.

    B.B.A.

    In some cynical moments, I’ve reflected that my ancestors escaped all the horrors that Jews faced in the old country, so that in America we could be white and perpetuate all the same horrors on this country’s hated minorities. Miller certainly fits that to a tee.

    The first practicing Jew in Congress was Senator Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana, who was a leading Confederate and served in several positions in Jefferson Davis’s cabinet. This is something that neither Jews nor neo-Confederates are particularly eager to acknowledge.

  30. 30.

    gene108

    He shut down the U.S. government’s democratic approach to decision-making,” a State Department official told me. “He suppressed evidence that was important to consider in determining a refugee number that would be beneficial to our national-security interest. We’re not talking about reports written by outside groups. We’re talking about evidence being generated from within the federal bureaucracy, documents generated from within the government.” Miller and his team at the Domestic Policy Council heavily edited several discussion papers outlining policy considerations, according to one of the White House officials. Statistics were cherry-picked. “We’d get them back from D.P.C., and they were eighty-five-per-cent different,” the official said, referring to papers generated by the N.S.C. staff. “D.P.C. would just sit down and write their own paper. They put in a lot of spurious statistics.

    The President believes refugees cost more, and the results of this study shouldn’t embarrass the President,” he had told people at the agency. (The White House denied that Miller was involved with the H.H.S. report.)

    From “The New Yorker” article. I think the longer the Trump reign of the New Cruelty drags on the more a few people are going to cherry pick info to please Trump. Trump himself has no interest in the rule of law or the work the federal agencies do. If he could become a totalitarian dictator, he would.

    And The Miller’s and Kelly’s realize this and approve of it and will bully the under staffed agencies, whose heads are either on board with dictator Trump or are just don’t care enough to do anything about it.

    I think we are going to see Grover Norquist’s dream of drowning the government come to fruition, over the next three years. And it will not be a glorious free market paradise, he envisioned, but a kleptocratcy, where loyalty to Trump is the only path for survival.

  31. 31.

    sdhays

    The comic could have been shorter: “Give us your wealthy, English-speaking Norwegians and others of similar complexion.” If those boxes are checked, the Republicans don’t care about the rest. Even “English-speaking” is of secondary importance. If they’re white, they don’t need to know what they are saying.

  32. 32.

    Brachiator

    @Mnemosyne:

    I admit that I am a Gentile, but you would think that even upper-class Jewish men would have a little more self-awareness than to ally themselves with white supremacists.

    These are strange times. You see some Jewish people who support Trump and the Republicans because they foolishly believe that it will help Israel. They also foolishly believe that they can safely consort with racists and antisemites and remain unaffected.

    But you also see this in other people, such as the Republican representative of Haitian descent or Log Cabin Republicans.

    I am also reminded of some of the diaries of Anais Nin. Written while she and friends were in Paris, she knew about and approved of Communists executing artists and intellectuals to help bring about the perfect society. But she magically believed that she and her circle would be exempt.

    There are some white liberals who believe that Trump’s belief that he can single out who is worthy and unworthy will never touch them. Some fools will never wake up.

  33. 33.

    Anne Laurie

    @gene108:

    I don’t get Miller. I guess he thinks being one of the “good Jews” will save him, if his vision comes to fruition or he believes U.S. institutions he is undermining will still be strong enough to protect him from the “Jews will not replace us” crowd, but I think, if his goal of white America is realized, he isn’t going to escape.

    Like many of his RWNJ fellows, he realized at an early age that he’ll never be happy or loved or respected by the people closest to him… so as an alternative, he wants to punish every one of them.

    Sure, he’ll be murdered along with the rest, but at least he can dream of seeing all those uppity bitches, undeserving untermenschen, and other happy people made to suffer the way he does!

  34. 34.

    sdhays

    @gene108:

    And it will not be a glorious free market paradise, he envisioned, but a kleptocratcy, where loyalty to Trump is the only path for survival.

    This is a common misconception. A kleptocracy where loyalty to Trump is the only path for survival is the glorious free market paradise that Grover Norquist envisioned.

  35. 35.

    Anne Laurie

    @Brachiator:

    But both are blind to the fact that their parents or grandparents would have been excluded from this country by the same policies that Miller is currently advocating.

    Oh, Kushner’s blind to this, because he’s stupid. But I suspect Miller honestly believes that his being a member of this specialized offshoot of the Lucky Sperm Club means that Fate is in his corner. Like other Great Men, he has a destiny!

  36. 36.

    Mnemosyne

    @Brachiator:

    In the French Revolution, I’m reminded of Louis XVI’s cousin, “Phillippe Égalité,” who found out the hard way that when you’re a royal who foments hatred against royalty and the aristocracy, you’re quite likely to end up on the chopping block yourself.

  39. 39.

    chopper

    @gene108:

    I don’t get Miller. I guess he thinks being one of the “good Jews” will save him

    eh. he was raised jewish but went nuts around high school. i doubt he really identifies at all anymore with Judaism. I mean shit, I’m sure the only shuls he could go to where people don’t spit on him are gonna be pretty hardcore orthodox and I don’t think he has it in him to live that kind of life.

  40. 40.

    Brachiator

    @Mnemosyne:

    In the French Revolution, I’m reminded of Louis XVI’s cousin, “Phillippe Égalité,” who found out the hard way that when you’re a royal who foments hatred against royalty and the aristocracy, you’re quite likely to end up on the chopping block yourself.

    Funny. I was just reading about him in a National Geographic Magazine article about the trial of Louis XVI.

  41. 41.

    mike in dc

    Miller, Kelly, Sessions and Nielsen(Kelly’s chosen replacement at DHS) are essentially the white nationalist/nativist wing of the administration. Although even if you got rid of all 4 of them, you’d still be stuck with the Racist-in-Chief.

  44. 44.

    Sab

    @? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: Well, we seemed to have turned our congress critter Tim Ryan around on immigration.

    A year ago he was in favor of blocking Syrian refugees. Now he is tearful on twitter about deporting productive, law-abiding fathers of American children. That’s a huge and very public change in his position. Pressure from constituents gave him the impetus to follow his own better instincts.

  48. 48.

    opiejeanne

    @Corner Stone: I don’t expect the really obvious Russian trolls on Facebook so much, and these were remarkable. Also, a couple of bots on Facebook, not very good ones. They were joining conversations of friends who rarely have these infestations.

  49. 49.

    opiejeanne

    @Baud: Yes. Senator Patty Murray’s posts were especially filthy with them. Plenty of misogynists butting into discussions of the Women’s March to tell us that if we don’t like it here we should leave, one really obvious troll pretending to be an American woman telling us women who protested aren’t real women and belong in insane asylums. Also, women have it much worse in X country so we should just suck it up and appreciate that we aren’t them. Then there were the guys telling us that if we want equality we should join the military and/or get STEM educations, and insisting that there are no barriers to doing these things. Lots of straw men in the equal pay arguments.

    Too exhausting, I just shut them all down. If they aren’t going to show me cat pictures, who needs ’em?.

  51. 51.

    Mnemosyne

    @chopper:

    i doubt he really identifies at all anymore with Judaism.

    There were a whole lot of people who ended up in concentration camps despite being secular Jews. Being non-observant or converted is no protection once you get the anti-Semites all riled up.

  52. 52.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Mnemosyne:

    What makes him think he’s so special that he won’t be up against the wall?

    You’ve put your finger on the key word: ‘Special.’ Kushner thinks he’s an inspired perfect genius destined not by God, but simply by his own total superiority to succeed at a legendary level in everything he attempts, however casually. He has the ego Trump pretends to have. Mueller is going to skin Kushner alive and make a key chain out of his testicles, because Jared believes he can play with fire and can never be caught, and if someone even gets close Jared will pull a brilliant solution out of thin air and humiliatingly defeat his opponent. Jared Kushner is the kind of idiot who probably signed something ‘Deraj Renhsuk’ and thought it was a masterstoke of legal defense.

  54. 54.

    Bill Arnold

    NY State residents will now be footing the bill for keeping the Statue Of Liberty open for visitors, AND the new Republican tax-the-blue-states law will tax the New York State income taxes used to pay for it!!! (SALT deduction has been effectively eliminated for upper-middle income and up.)
    New York State to pick up the tab to keep the Statue of Liberty open during government shutdown
    (Linked by NotMax in a previous thread.)

    Seriously, though; this might not (should not) play well among many of those differently-ethical people that have a view of the Statue of Liberty from their workplace or nearby e.g. Battery Park.

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