One of the core arguments was that the Feds can't pull funds for their stated purpose, which was to encourage/force schools to open ("The government has provided no reason for its abrupt and unexplained shift. That is unsurprising, since... its purpose—as expressed by Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli—is to 'encourage schools to reopen.' In essence, Defendants are using the vulnerability of international students as leverage to force a broad reopening for reasons wholly disconnected from the underlying statute and regulation... Defendants have thus violated the APA by promulgating a policy based on factors which Congress has not intended it to consider.").
I think there's a good chance that the admin backed down here so that there's no pre-existing precedent implying (or explicitly stating) that they can't use purse strings and other extra-congressional-intent mechanisms to force K12 to open in August.
CONGRESS used the threat of withdrawal of highway funds to get all 50 states to lower the speed limit to 55.
From my quote of the amicus brief: Defendants have thus violated the APA by promulgating a policy based on factors WHICH CONGRESSS DID NOT INTEND IT TO CONSIDER
( the all-caps is for emphasis because I can't see italics well anymore and HN doesn't have bold; I'm not yelling :) )
For something like this, it really matters which part of the federal government takes the action.
The important part is maintaining separation of powers... making sure the Executive branch doesn't overstep its authority into the legislative branch territory.
Not quite. What it did was offer highway funds in exchange for the 55 speed limit. The difference is threatening to withdraw pre exisiting funds in exchange for the state doing something is illegal but introducing new funds is legal.
Please cite what you're referencing next time - it was not clear from your comment on a current event if this is something that also happened recently, or in the last century.
I'm not sure about that, I've seen many states with 65mph and 75mph highway speed limits ... but you might be thinking about the drinking age, which was raised to 21 years in all states by withdrawing highway funds if they did not pass such laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...
I think they backed down because the language of the emergency rule lifting the in-person course requirement said it would remain “in effect for the duration of the emergency.”
The Covid-19 National Emergency Declaration is still in force.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump admin is working on an Executive Order. It would get around a lot of the arguments Harvard/MIT were making related to improper administrative rule-making by ICE.
We will find out as the Panda vs Wolf case proceeds. This case was filed today and challenges President's recent proclamation banning entry for some H visa holders.
A well known religious University near me just started offering "in person" (wink wink) classes where attendance would not be taken. I was proud to see it.
Actually, most universities don't take attendance. It's a waste of time, it punishes pro-social behavior (there is no good reason for people feeling sick to go to class), and it's infantilizing. "Attendance required" often means "we will notice if you never attend, and then will feel less bad failing you if you don't do your homework either".
My law school classes took attendance. Rigorously. Because time management is a critical skill for attorneys, judges don't tolerate any amount of unannounced absenteeism, and missing filing deadlines can be and often is extremely costly, not just for you but for your client. (Also, taking attendance weeds out the liars. The ABA has strict attendance requirements and you're not supposed to get a degree if you miss them.)
If was a very tough transition because, of course, both in undergraduate and in professional life lackadaisical attitudes were tolerated, especially so long as you otherwise performed the substantive work.
We all love to rationalize away those things we dislike doing. But there was no wiggle room to rationalize it away in law school. I'm sure the military is similar.
Ironically, Roll Call is a formal concept in the military and rarely used after training. But the concept of accountability certainly exists.
This varies by country, branch of service, and job, but it’s fairly common for young airmen (enlisted troops) in the USAF to be docked pay after showing up late to work a few times. The punishment usually goes something like a stern warning-> light paperwork-> paperwork in your permanent file and formal counseling. The next step is non-judicial punishment (named so because your only option is to accept the harsh punishment or be court martialed), which could mean any combination of confinement, demotion, forfeiture of pay, or several other things. The only things left after that are being discharged or sent to prison. And that’s for being late to work. If you backtalk the wrong person you could be demoted with no warning.
And I know the Air Force Academy takes attendance every class because I had to. The registrar would occasionally audit the attendance system and notify the department chairs of instructors that didn’t log their attendance.
Muster is taken every day, every watch, in the Navy at least. It's a formal process with a formal report that is submitted to the ship's admin department, and then they submit a muster report up to the ship's immediate superior.
I think small classes and discussions (like in law school) are a different breed than large lectures. My view has always been that if the class is less than 10 or so students, attendance can be required. The students should be given the ability to email for an absence, no questions asked. In these cases, the success of the class is entirely dependent on students attending. If they don't, the class fails.
Military you're trying to teach a hundred things besides just the material, so I think it's really fitting there.
I doubt that's why law school classes take attendance. To take the bar you need to graduate from a law school (with rare exception) so the law school has an incentive to pretend they are an essential part of the process and something important is happening in class.
It would be embarrassing to the school and the idea of continued employment of the professors if it was revealed how easy it is to pass the law school classes and the bar without ever attending a lecture.
Is that for all lectures? In the engineering program at my university, attendance as only taken during labs as those have strict attendance requirements.
If my 2000 person intro to computer science class required roll call, not only would everyone not fit in the lecture hall, but attendance would take the whole class period.
This depends largely on the state, and whether it's a public or private school.
Because for some schools, it's all about that FTE (Full Time Equivalent, a measure of how many students are taking how many classes, and how some state schools get their chunk of funding.) And while FTE isn't directly related to attendance more State legislatures/University boards are combining the two and want to make sure that their funds are being spent wisely and students are actually in class.
Also accrediting bodies like to know that students are actually showing up as well.
So while taking attendance is silly for college students, it's not a waste of time or silly for the powers that be.
(I know this because my friends who teach are now being chastised if they don't keep daily attendance records.)
I'm about to graduate from UWaterloo now and have only had 2 courses with attendance - language courses. I really liked the option of going to classes when I wanted as I found that end up being on my laptop during class anyway.
Two CS courses(1st year) had a clicker thing going on where you had to answer questions and it'd be worth 5% of the grade. Some courses also had a key chunk of info taken out of the pdfs so as to incentivize going to class. I definitely wasn't a big fan, but it wasn't hard to learn about the topics from other university's notes available online
Average university that admits lots of foreign students take attendance including biometric attendance. This is especially true for universities where students are in constant crosshair of ICE/USCIS etc. This is done not because University cares about you attending but they have to comply with the law.
If you admit a student from Pakistan in your Santa Clara campus but ICE finds the student working in New Jersey, the student gets deported and University admin might face criminal charges. So any university where this is a risk factor, takes attendance seriously.
In some cases US federal government has setup fraudulent universities themselves, worked actively with Dept. of State to promote these universities in India and to Indian students studying in other universities as "no need to attend" university and then entrapped these students and their employers.
The attendance taking and biometric attendance sounds completely made up. I’ve lots of international students as friends and no one has made any passing mention of this and I’ve never seen this ever.
Most universities don't require attendance, but quite a number of professors do take attendance and count it as part of the grade.
There were plenty courses where at the beginning of each lecture, we were asked to complete a trivial quiz (one question quiz) with iClickr. I believe that it was just a convenient way of taking attendance.
I figured some universities would start doing things like this. You can even make the class special in that it's pass/fail, doesn't affect your GPA, doesn't appear in your transcript, it's a special class that is free and doesn't increase your tuition, etc. Glad to know it's no longer going to be required to pull moves like this.
Elementary school politics. This would be a hilarious sitcom if it weren't for all the thousands of people getting hurt by this dysfunctional joke of a government.
How is this not a bug? A straightforward patch would be the introduction of FPTP and moving the executive role from the office of the head-of-state to a body controlled by congress.
Ranked Choice Voting, which is now the law for all elections in the state of Maine except the Presidency, is a way to help ensure that the winning candidate has been chosen by at least 50% of voters, even if the winning candidate wasn’t the first choice for all voters.
Adopting RCV seems to me like one of the best ways we can improve the health of the US’s democracy going forward.
Any voters Massachusetts can vote this November to have RCV statewide, just like Maine, from local elections up to the US House and Senate elections. I’ve volunteered with the group [1] helping Massachusetts join Maine in leading the way.
My current view is that having districts undermines everything.
Once politicians are elected due to a specific geographical region,
1. they are beholden to that region,
2. You get an all-or-nothing approach to elections.
With respect to 1: the main problem is that such a system will put the interests of the country second to the interests of the district.
But even if you think that is an acceptable trade off, there's 2: all-or-nothing. RCV is one way to partially mitigate this, by letting voters specify more choices.
Of course, ideally you'd want proportional representation.
A simple solution is to abolish districts and have one multi-seat election. All votes count, the N candidates with the most votes are elected.
(Of course, if you prefer to maintain districts, you can achieve the same by increasing the number of electable seats per district.)
RCV is an improvement on FPTP -- almost anything would be! -- but Approval Voting is even better. It is easier to implement (the ballot doesn't change at all, just the way it's counted), simpler for voters to understand (you just vote for every candidate you approve of), much less susceptible to strategic voting and not at all to strategic candidate selection, and therefore much less likely to return an anomalous result.
> A straightforward patch would be the introduction of FPTP
The US uses FPTP for most elections, that's actually central to the problem.
If you mean “a system approximating proportional repreaentation”, that's a valid fix, but problematic, both in terms of choosing the right one and the fact that doing so itself has ideological as well as functional impacts on outcomes, which means that the status quo faction which would ideologically be disadvantaged will be hard to sway no matter what the functional argument is. So you'd need unchallenged control by the opposing faction, which would have to be willing to surrender that control to a multiparty system which might be favorable ideologically, but not organizationally. And even that only is talking about the House. It's outright Constitutionally prohibited, even by Constitutional amendment, for the Senate.
FPTP tends to lead to the same heavily divided two major party politics you already have, it just avoids the possibility of winning with <50% of the popular vote.
> FPTP tends to lead to the same heavily divided two major party politics you already have, it just avoids the possibility of winning with <50% of the popular vote.
No, it doesn't. FPTP is a synonym for single-member plurality, which enables wins with less than 50% of the popular vote when there are more than two candidates.
You may mean majority-runoff (which the US already uses for a fair number of elections) or instant runoff, instead of FPTP, both of which require a kind of majority, but are otherwise very close to FPTP in their incentives and effects.
In the Netherlands, elections for the lower house (150 seats) are nationwide. The 150 candidates/parties with the highest number of votes get a seat.
The party system makes it a bit more complex, but in the end, there's roughly proportional representation: a party with 10% of the popular vote occupies roughly 10% of the seats.
No superwinning like in the UK (where 30% of the vote can get you more than 30% of the seats), no cut-off except you need at least 1/150th of the votes to get a seat.
And, crucially: minority viewpoints actually tend to be accommodated as larger parties lobby smaller ones to support their agenda. Coalition government is a lot better than the see-saw you get otherwise with one party undoing what the previous one did.
I would argue the end-users (voters) mostly consider this a bug while the developers (majority party legislators at the state level) consider it a feature.
Also, the founding fathers famously made it difficult for Congress to change anything, so dysfunction was definitely a feature.
> I would argue the end-users (voters) mostly consider this a bug while the developers (majority party legislators at the state level) consider it a feature.
Voters consider the paralysis a feature when it is presenting a hostile legislative majority or executive from realizing their agenda, and a bug when it is preventing a friendly one.
> Voters consider the paralysis a feature when it is presenting a hostile legislative majority or executive from realizing their agenda, and a bug when it is preventing a friendly one.
Yes, that's what they said: paralysis is always a feature, because the legislative majority is always hostile to the people.
Not so sure about that. I suppose the original intent was to have a healthy debate around major policy decisions. It's a check against wanton liberalism or conservatism. Congress seems eager to pass spending bills and take away our privacy. They move at light speed when doing that.
I am an immigration activist (Indian-national immigration) and closely working with students/h1bs as well as following work of anti-immigrant people.
It is very clear to me that current admin is acting out of malevolence. This is not about protecting American interests or even upholding law. This is about a careful strategy called "attrition through enforcement". Make life difficult of immigrants so they leave voluntarily over time without need for any drastic law, also since the impact of this strategy is felt over time (just like climate change) no big players feel the need to act against it. (E.g. Google might not even realize what is happening by the time it is very late).
There is a reason why most immigration law, processes and regulation exists and not all of them are implemented by "open border" folks in Obama or Bush administration. But the current admin people are operating under that weird assumption. So they look at every immigration benefit as "exploit" and try to close it without understanding its broader impact. Their approach is "lets try and see". They either lose in court or some lobby manages to convince Trump. This is not the first battle this admin has lost in court and it wont be last.
Even though I am pro-immigration, I understand that American people have the 100% right to regulate who comes in, but regulation implies application of law, which must follow due process, should be predictable and in general should honor contract. Otherwise there is simply no incentive to follow law for anyone.
Current admin's "attrition via enforcement" has worked pretty well for students from India.
As of 2020:
Total Indian students in Canada : 172,000 (up from 76,000 in 2016)
Indian students enrollment in USA : 64,000 (down from 86,000) [Note this is new students enrolling. Total students is probably 2.5x and 4x if you count students working on OPT]
Am I the only one thinking fighting to rid the country of the students resourceful enough to study in Harvard and MIT is madness? I would rather give them citizenship without even waiting for them to graduate.
I was talking recently to an Indian colleague whose son was admitted to McGill as an CS undergraduate. He had a very smooth transition through Canadian customs. Then was met right on the other side by representatives from McGill who provided a phone (to call his mother in India), a meal, and then talked him through the process of working with Canadian immigration to apply for permanent residency in a few years if he wanted to stay. The contrast with the US approach could not be starker.
For the sake of circumspection, I suppose a counterpoint to your thinking might go like this......
These institutions receive an abundance of high-quality applications every year and choose only a few; for every admitted international student, several amazing domestic applicants are rejected. The government does not need to bend over backwards for the international students who won the admissions lottery, because they already have a huge advantage. Rather, it might prefer to fight for the interests of its own citizens, whose advancement is in their personal best interest as well as that of the nation.
If an international student follows the established legal processes whereby a foreign person can become an American citizen, he, too, can benefit from a system that protects the interest of American citizens.
Just fix the system the way more students can be admitted and graduate. As many as possible (while maintaining the quality).
This can be especially easy now as the universities target to become 100% online and the number of students whom you can let attend a lecture is virtually unlimited.
Is the guy who decides visa policy not able to understand the plan coming from the guy who decides defense policy? We need the smart people here, not there.
> They cited time zone differences, unreliable or state-managed Internet and armed conflict in some of the students’ homelands.
I think it would be enlightening to see transcripts of the moments where each side said something convincing to the other.
Like...did Harvard representatives walk in and say "You know that this shit matters, right?" and then did the US representatives say "Oh shit. You're right. We never even thought of that." ? Or was there more to it?
There has to be more to it than that, right? "Struck a deal" implies that both sides gave something. So what did both sides give? Or did the US just walk back a move made without any foresight whatsoever when someone asked if they'd thought about the consequences?
It's pretty plausible IMO that someone in the administration just told SEVP "hey, colleges are gonna reopen in the fall" and they didn't check to see if it was true.
The ideal me hopes it was because someone at ICE had a humane heart. Someone who read through the outrage and uproar, internalized the problem and convinced everyone that they needed to rescind this.
But given their actions over the past 4 years and the general cruelty of Trump administration, I'm leaning towards "a deal" or rather someone in Trump admin realizing its hurting their voter base.
I'm honestly displeased with this ending. Universities that want to commit 100% learning online should not charge full price.
Universities that are 100% online before Covid should not be able to grant visas as they have no campus.
There is a LOT unregulated, unlegislated here and a lot that needs to be organized now. Many organizations will continue to set unacceptable standards for education and in my opinion need to be reigned in. MIT, Harvard's global relationship, albeit special by influence and money, should have to follow what the government sets. Government should have edified that universities without campuses cannot grant visas as well as a variety of other things.
In short this is a missed opportunity and a waste of time, much like many/all plans of this administration.
I do not disagree with your opinions about tuition or universities that were 100% online prior to the pandemic, but the original rule and subsequent retraction little to do with either point. None of these rules (directly) concern tuition money and it would be nearly impossible at the moment for a foreign student to work through the U.S. visa program to study at remote schools that do not have a history of issuing student visas.
By the far the largest group of students effected by the policy are foreign nationals that did not return to their home countries in the spring and would be subject to immediate deportation in the fall depending on their school's form of instruction. This was a purely vindictive and xenophobic move by the administration. I was extremely happy to hear of this policy reversal. It (at least temporarily) removes some pointless stress on millions of students who already have more things to worry about than they should.
Another example of the haphazard throw-it-against-the-wall approach of what our country has chosen to have as our national experiment.
This cannot be good for either side. Do we want to live in a system where if you hadn't been paying attention to the news for 1 week, we might have kicked >100,000 people out of the country?
Is this ADD-style, whoever yells the loudest, social and political system working well for anyone? How do we get past this?
Executive branch is overpowered partially because the senate refuses to do its job. The original intent was for the senate to be slower moving and "cool" house legislation leading to slower moving governing structures. Over time, the executive branch was given additional power to "get stuff done", and we find ourselves in the situation we have today.
It's not really the Senate's fault. Opposition parties almost never vote with government parties in any democratic legislature, so you shouldn't expect them to in the US.
The real problem is the outdated system that is set up to (1) only allow two major parties to exist, so a European-style coalition government isn't possible, and (2) require both major parties to agree in order to pass any legislation.
Why outdated? Coronavirus stimulus pckage became law on 27th March in both the US and Germany (Europe’s model democracy). So it’s arguably a good thing, consensual things happen quickly, controversial things take a long time.
The laws may have passed on the same date, but they were not the same laws. In functioning democracies, laws passed in response to health and economic emergencies have something to do with health and economics. In USA, Congress just unanimously (well, except for Thomas Massie) gave rich people trillions of dollars.
Look at the COVID-19 statistics in the US compared to almost every other country in the world and tell me that we have a functional federal government.
> the overreach of the executive branch is a response to the political deadlock in the legislative branch.
Disagree. The political deadlock of the legislative branch is by design. Only things that are truly broadly supported should pass through the legislature.
The overreach of the executive branch is a response to complete and utter inaction by the states to reign in the federal government.
If I understand correctly, this was always the policy, and they just took a few months longer than they should have to make an adjustment removing the rule for special pandemic circumstances.
they had already made an exception for F1 students to attend remote classes at the start of the pandemic. They were planning to end the exception for the fall semester, hence the outcry.
- 4 year term length for House elections instead of 2 so that representatives can get stuff done instead of having to spend every second year in election campaigns
- reform campaign financing to a government funded model like in Germany (and entirely ban PACs) so that the influence of big money on government is eliminated
- if possible, get rid of the Presidential election by the population and have the President elected by Congress to prevent the situation of having a President without his own legislative majority
- get rid of FPTP and introduce proportional voting to reduce polarization and create more diversity in politics
- get rid of voter suppression and gerrymandering, make Sunday a voting day (or alternatively, a federal holiday), enforce universal mail-in voting across states
Same with 2 year cycles for the House. If the newly elected government acts in a way that the public doesn't like, we can partially replace it pretty quickly.
Four year cycles for the house would mean we would have no way of changing course for four full years (other than impeachment, and we've seen how ineffective of a check that is if the president's party controls the Senate)
> Is this ADD-style, whoever yells the loudest, social and political system working well for anyone? How do we get past this?
As a guy with inattentive-subtype ADHD, I've long suspected there are fairly strong curb-cut benefits[1] to re-structuring organizations to work better for ADHDers. Might this be true of American political life? Initial suspicions:
1. Reduce the interface-complexity of government. Improve encapsulation. This may mean that government does _more_ in certain domains. I moved from the US to the UK in 2016 and the impact that a cross-cutting interface simplification like the NHS's "free at point of care" has just astounding. Income taxes over here are also much more clear, even if you are running a 1-person small business but especially if you are just an employee. I think is worth paying some higher monetary taxes if government can impose a lower tax on Working Memory.
For more on the idea of "Interface Complexity", see A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout.
2. Improve baseline health outcomes with some more wholistic (yet still evidence-based) interventions. A broad swath of Americans are stressed and often sleep-deprived. This is not conducive to thoughtful decision-making. Or epistemically-sound interpretation of information.
3. Improve access to mental health care. A whole bunch of Americans are descended from people who...
A. were so excited by the prospect of extravagant wealth that they would abandon their community and kinship group to live and work among strangers.
B. belonged to physically (sometimes sexually) abusive households for multiple generations until 1865. And then they got married to people who grew up in abusive households. (some of my own family history)
C. escaped from abusive & traumatic situations and traveled across an ocean to a land of strangers.
D. were so willing to break with social norms (or join social-norm-breaking subcultures) that they would abandon most of their possessions and travel across an ocean to a land of strangers.
E. were so fearful about the prospect of a government, regional, or neighborhood conspiracy that they decided to move across an ocean -- before there was sufficient evidence for most people around them to try to flee!
Those who chose to come here weren't necessarily wrong. My wife's branch of their her broad family has a bias toward distrust and falls into group E. The rest were murdered by a massive German government conspiracy in the early 1940s. Some psychological variation is genetically heritable. Abuse gets passed down from parent to child (My maternal grandfather falls into group B and...yea...). Much of America's demographic history has acted as a giant filter some traumatized and scared people.
4. Reduce the social norms that promote catastrophizing. Currently, those who seek a return to specificity, clarity, or ask "is this reflected by the observable facts" in political discussions are often told they are pedantic, privileged, or tone-policing. We need a culturally-accepted way to return to a calm, measured way of thinking about policy -- not because policy is some intellectual game that doesn't matter. The stakes are genuinely life-or-death, because the stakes are life-or-death and that requires a calm mind with an eye seeking a clear understanding of a possibly-horrifying reality. It is good to be willing to say whatever will return to clarity and fact-focus with conviction and counter those who shame people for saying it.
5. Reduce the incentives to nuisance alarms in the news. Not sure how to do this.
6. Improve the number and quality of resources available for people of many professions to learn honest rhetoric and in particular to learn the how to clearly describe the "why" of their profession's policy recommendations. "Start with why" is the interpersonal version of well-regulated dopamine signals.
The election of the current president is part of a currently-elected congress, and an appointed judiciary, emerging from larger cultural and economic trends, that all play their role in giving rise to our current situation.
This moment was caused by more than the election of Trump; it will need to be resolved by more than the election of non-Trump.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." - HL Mencken
“Lobbying” as the reflexive reason for all political ills is tiresome, especially considering aggressive lobbying by universities is likely what caused this reversal.
That it's tiresome does not invalidate the argument. In fact, if the policy change was made because of university lobbying and not because of the public outcry, that's downright depressing. It means we still had no control over this outcome, we're just lucky that some people in power agreed with us here.
One way public outcry is expressed is through lobbying. Honestly, I think the issue here is that people mistakenly believe lobbying consists of shadowy groups slipping bribes under the table to elected officials when in reality it’s just people coming together to advocate for issues they care about.
Have you ever called an elected official to express support for a bill? Congratulations! You're now an official member of the Plutocratic Lobbyist Upper Class(TM). Branded monocles and top hats are available for purchase on our website.
Literally no one was "lobbying" for this policy. This was a nativist reflex, designed to seize an opportunity to expel a few foreigners who would otherwise not be removable. It's very much in keeping with the anti-immigration stances the administration has taken in other areas.
Taking a look at all the agency websites under the Executive branch gives a pretty incredible overview of how out-of-control it's gotten [1]. And the number of czars have been growing [2] under both Obama and Trump (though I guess this administration doesn't use that title)
> And the number of czars have been growing [2] under both Obama and Trump (though I guess this administration doesn't use that title)
That list is "executive branch officials who have been described by the media as a czar of some kind", not anything official or affecting the duties of that person in any particular way.
Excellent. The system worked this time. People challenged executive branch action through the judicial system and the executive branch backed down.
But this should never have been an issue to begin with, think of all the unnecessary stress and anxiety this has caused for the hundreds of thousands of international students impacted by this.
I view the phrase "the system worked" as a red flag indicating that things went wrong in a way they shouldn't, not a positive thing. A successful outcome doesn't necessarily indicate things are fine.
A canonical example is the Space Shuttle boosters. The O-rings were supposed to block all the hot gases, but there was some gas leakage and erosion of the O-rings. Nothing bad happened and officials said this showed there was a sufficient safety factor. In other words, the system worked. They kept launching shuttles until an O-ring eroded all the way through and Challenger blew up. They should have recognized that erosion shouldn't have happened at all; successful launches despite erosion were an indication that things were dangerously wrong, not an indication that the system was working.
(I hope I haven't gone too far on a metaphorical tangent here.)
As it turns out, there were in fact engineers who recognized that the O rings were eroding and that this was dangerous. They even tried to communicate this fact to the people with launch cancelling authority. But they weren’t able to communicate it effectively enough to prevent the launch.
Apparently, all of the engineers knew intuitively that the problem was real and critical, but weren’t able to communicate it to their superiors, who lacked the same intuitive grounding. They failed to visualize the data convincingly, and the launch went as planned.
It was an example of the system working, until people ignored the warnings about the O-rings. That decision to move on, rather than to investigate critically, was the moment when the system shifted from working to failing.
Edward Tufte wrote a really convincing treatment of this in “The Visual Design of Quantitative Information, and Envisioning Information“, to motivate the importance of proper visualizations.
You can read a blog with the visualizations here [1] but I really recommend the book!
I think in this case, however, the system also worked as designed. O-rings aren’t designed to erode. The government, on the other hand, has designed power checks to prevent exactly what happened: a well meaning but ultimately idiotic decision from adversely impacting peoples’ lives in ways that weren’t initially accounted for. In no way am I giving credit to anyone here, just pointing out that the analogy doesn't quite hold.
If I remember correctly, the problem was that O-rings were designed to not erode at particular humidities and temperatures, which were subtly but critically different from the launch conditions.
This was actually observed by engineers at the time, who tried (unsuccessfully) to raise the observation to their superiors. The launch went on anyway, and the rest is history.
This is akin to a safety system taking over and restoring stability, despite a major component failure. From the outside, things "worked" but backups are designed for extraordinary and rare circumstances, not for continuous use.
> But this should never have been an issue to begin with, think of all the unnecessary stress and anxiety this has caused for the hundreds of thousands of international students impacted by this.
More importantly, the long term damage is done. The noise was heard loud and clear that America is only as competent as its leader. Prospective future students are likely going to be ultra careful before choosing this country.
Until the next judge -appointed by the President —gets to decide and rubber stamps his decision.
Depending on judges with lifetime appointments isn’t a good system.
Why could this decision be made in the first place by non elected officials? Why didn’t such a drastic decision have to be passed via the legislative process?
Is the US set up such that the executive can do anything they want unless the legislative branch has put in restrictions?
I'm not that familiar with the structure of the US government, but I thought it was the opposite, and the executive has an approve list of powers rather than a deny list
There are laws and there are regulations. Laws are created by Congress and signed by the President.
Most of the time, laws are very vague and the specifics of the laws - the regulations - are written by government regulatory agencies. The president appoints heads of the regulatory agencies that are approved by the Senate (upper house).
Congress can pass a law that overrides a regulation or it can be struck down by court.
So the President by himself has limited power but he has a lot of influence over regulatory agencies based on who he appoints.
That isn’t very reassuring. He shouldn’t have had the power to unilaterally make this decision in the first place. While the legislature might have not passed a law that overrode his decision. I doubt they would have passed a law saying it was permissible.
The executive branch has the power to execute laws and regulations. I think what they're doing here is choosing to execute a law/regulation that they should've waived due to the pandemic.
That's why it's not necessarily an overreach, but instead just an inhumane choice to not take special circumstances into account when choosing to execute a particular regulation.
> The courts proved exactly the opposite. The system of checks and balances worked. I don't follow your assertion.
The courts worked as a balance. But they can only do as much as the laws allow. The tendency of the executive is heard loud and clear. No serious student would want to jeopardize their lives in an environment and society that displays xenophobia.
I'm not disputing that it's bad, but I'm not really convinced it's the death of American international student programs either. A student looking for a country with no xenophobia is bound to be disappointed no matter where they go. The article you referenced seems to largely agree with my perspective, noting that "there are still millions of people who’d do anything to come to this country".
> The number of international students enrolled in U.S. universities declined again in 2018-19, extending the slide in enrolled international students to a second year in a row.
> That’s one of the main takeaways from the 2019 Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange, which was released today by the Institute of International Education (IIE) and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
> The number of international students in the United States set an all-time high in the 2018/19 academic year, the fourth consecutive year with more than one million international students.
> The total number of international students, 1,095,299, is a 0.05 percent increase over last year, according to the 2019 Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange.
I think you are being downvoted because... well, exactly what other methods did you have in mind? Using trend data to predict future data seems pretty run-of-the-mill to me.
I love these wikipedia experts! Read your own link; Park is in prison. (Where the last five USA presidents should also be.)
The only Germans who worry about this so-called "migrant crisis" are those who make a living writing schadenfreude pieces for conservative American websites. You have been misled.
Besides, don't change the subject. We are talking about USA's massive failure. All three of these other nations have succeeded in dealing with this problem that has totally beaten us. Observing that they aren't sufficiently cruel to immigrants for your tastes doesn't change that fact.
I think it's more a case of the Trump administration momentarily forgetting the Harvard is basically a hedge fund that runs a college and that their revenue stream is not to be messed with.
If they added a clause that the rule only applied to colleges with an endowment of less than $1 billion it would continue along just fine.
Actually, in the case of Harvard it affected far more PhD students than tuition-paying undergrads. Also, dozens of universities, cities, and states signed on to this lawsuit. It has little to do with Harvard's bottom-line.
Harvard's endowment was not built from undergraduate tuition. 20% of undergrads don't pay tuition, and half pay reduced tuition, anyway. [0] You're correct, though, that Harvard's actions in this situation have nothing to do with a "revenue stream". Occasionally Harvard does the right thing, simply because it's the right thing to do.
> 19. Plaintiffs have standing to bring this case. Defendants’ actions will cause an imminent, concrete, and irreparable risk to Plaintiffs’ ability to achieve their educational missions unless halted by this Court.
> 20.Plaintiffs also have standing to assert claims on behalf of their F-1 visa-holding students, who face the imminent, concrete, and irreparable risk of harm to themselves, their families, their educations, their short-term and long-term health, and their future education and employment prospects if Defendants’ actions are not halted by this Court.
Others gave you good answers but also consider this. There are thousands of PhD students who create value for these universities. They not only do research, help research being made, they also teach others. Kicking all these people out of US due to whims of ICE harms universities' financial interest as well. Universities are not making their education remote because they choose to do so. They're doing precisely to protect students and faculty. It's capricious for ICE to see this and conclude "if you do that then I'll kick all your students out of this country". Universities invest in PhD students, they're part of faculty.
FWIW, it is helpful to understand that this isn't ICE making policy randomly but in fact just enforcing the regulations surrounding student visas. The existing regulations were relaxed in March but the underlying regulatory idea is that you don't need a visa for online education and online education is not sufficient for a visa to be issued.
I tend to think that it was premature to rescind the temporary waiving of the oversight regulations, but that isn't the same thing as saying the underlying regulations don't have a rationale basis.
(AINAL) No I don't think you're correct, which is what I (and others) were trying to explain. Which is also why MIT and Harvard (and many other universities) sued ICE. Here, copy paste from another comment:
> 19. Plaintiffs have standing to bring this case. Defendants’ actions will cause an imminent, concrete, and irreparable risk to Plaintiffs’ ability to achieve their educational missions unless halted by this Court.
> 20.Plaintiffs also have standing to assert claims on behalf of their F-1 visa-holding students, who face the imminent, concrete, and irreparable risk of harm to themselves, their families, their educations, their short-term and long-term health, and their future education and employment prospects if Defendants’ actions are not halted by this Court.
What you're missing is universities are making their classes online not because they're offering online education, but because they're forced to do so in order to protect students and faculty (including F1 students) from a pandemic. F1 visa specifically gives students right to protect themselves from such risks.
If universities switched to remote education e.g. to cut cost or to experiment with online education methods, then you'd be right. But the argument here is that universities do this because students and faculty face irreparable damage or death, and therefore there is no basis to deport to F1 students.
I tend to agree with you but I don't think your argument contradicts my statement. You are basically arguing that the health emergency still exists and the exemption should remain. I think that is a defensible argument, but that doesn't mean that the underlying logic (you don't need a visa to take an online course load) is invalid. If the health argument went away you would still be left with that underlying logic.
You can't just sue because you are displeased with something - you need to have suffered, or will suffer direct harm from the thing(this is called locus standi). I'm guessing OP is saying that Harvard/MIT would not be harmed from this, only the students would be harmed(so they would need to be the ones to sue, not the college).
It kind of makes sense - if everything is online courses, it doesn't matter to Harvard whether the students are at an apartment in Cambridge St or in the middle of the Mongolian steppe, as long as you have internet access.
On the other hand, if students are deciding to attend some other university(say, one in their home country) and Harvard can show that harms them, then they would have standing
> It kind of makes sense - if everything is online courses, it doesn't matter to Harvard whether the students are at an apartment in Cambridge St or in the middle of the Mongolian steppe, as long as you have internet access.
It makes a massive difference.
1. Students need good internet access, which a lot of them don't have in third world countries.
2. Students can't be expected to attend lectures and participate in class when they are in an opposite timezone (i.e. all of India and China).
It's a pretty easy decision for all of these students to just skip a semester rather than pay ridiculous tuition and not even be allowed to stay on campus, hence causing problems for the university.
Foreign students are big money for the Industrial Education Complex and the loss of that revenue presented a real threat. Since the alumni of the IEC, no matter what political party, run, well, everything, the idea had no chance. At best it was political theater to agitate the base.
I was under the impression that the law that was already in place was that purely online courses were not allowed. And that it had been in place for a long time. After coming out and stating "this is already the law", and resulting pushback against it, the thing changed by this administration was to allow purely online courses for visa students.
Are you saying that allowing purely online learning for students with visas is a blunder, or am I misinformed about this?
The blunder was retracting the special exception made during Spring 2020 that allowed F and M visa students to take online classes.
The pandemic is far from over, especially in the US, a fact which is obvious to everyone. The retraction is pure stupidity. Of course it would be unreasonable to ask int students to attend in person classes given the situation.
I have been on the fence about this policy, for the following reason.
On the one hand, it seems overtly xenophobic and anti-intellectual. On the other hand, I don't see why an international student needs to be in the United States in order to participate exclusively in online classes.
Even if the issue is a lack of human welfare (eg unsafe neighborhood) or necessary infrastructure (eg slow/inconsistent internet) back home, an international student could live somewhere else and probably save a ton of money in the process.
Why make them leave? This gives them a sudden 10 day window to pack their shit and gtfo.
People have year long leases. People have commitments. Even if they choose to leave, no doubt they would prefer to do it on their time, not with ICE breathing down their neck.
Airplane tickets are expensive and rare. It's fucking hard to just uproot yourself in 10 days if your school becomes online only.
Also, having your visa revoked ducks the OPT process, in case you ever wanted to work in the US in the near future.
Why should someone who is already living in the US for the purposes of studying have to move somewhere else during a global pandemic and then move back to continue studying when the pandemic is over?
The problem isn't the original rule, or the possible retraction of the temporary exemption of that rule. Of course at some point it will be retracted. It was, however, instituted for the purpose of dealing with a state of emergency, which is still officially in place. The government has some leeway in policy making, but capricious & unreasoned decisions can be struck down, and this could fall into that category given the circumstances that produced the policy still obtained. (Regarding capricious/unreasoned decisions, see also the Supreme Court's recent ruling on DACA: It was not because the SC said DACA couldn't be eliminated, it was because the policy change did not go through the legally mandated process for such changes)
The problem was also the timing. Students under an F1 visa must remain enrolled in an eligible program. If they are not, they have 60 days to leave the country. College semesters often end around mid-May, we're in mid-July, meaning as of the date of this announcement last week, students in online courses had already failed to be enrolled in an applicable program for nearly 60 days and would have a week or three to pack their bags and leave the country.
Before that, they could try to figure out if their mix of online or hybrid courses qualified as sufficiently "in person". This was without formal definitions from the administration of what constituted a sufficiently "in-person" course with respect to hybrid courses: The general policy was announced but there was never any official posting to the Federal Register that detailed the definitions, limits, exceptions, etc. In the announcement, such details were promised, but never materialized.
So, students had 1-2 weeks to panic and determine if their schools:
1) had any in-person courses
2) if so, determine if any applied to their program
3) If 1 & 2 were a "no", find, apply, get accepted, and register at an alternate school with applicable in-person courses
4) Having spent time on 1,2 & 3, vacate the country within a handful of days.
This was election year red meat for Trump's base, which his campaign has explicitly made their sole focus. It lets them tell the true believers that Trump tried to keep the evil foreigners out but the liberal deep state traitors stopped him, that's why they need to keep supporting Trump. That's what's behind all of these absurd attacks on immigrants, queer people, etc that instantly get struck down.
Yeah, in some ways this was the perfect outcome for that kind of posturing.
Anecdotally, it seems to me that an actual drop in international student numbers would likely have hurt colleges in Republican-controlled states worse than Democrat-controlled ones. American students armed with student loans would still flock to top universities to make up for the international student shortfall, and I can't think of a top 10 [1] university off the top of my head that's in a state with a Republican governor.
Setting aside blue states with moderate Republican governors, I see:
1/10 (Duke)
5/20 (Duke, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Rice, Wash U)
15/45 (Duke, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Rice, Wash U, Emory, Ann Arbor, Wake Forest, UVa, Georgia Tech, UNC-CH, UF, Case Western, College of William and Mary, Tulane)
I doubt the split would be at the top 10 because they're simply too small to absorb all the domestic demand. I'm not sure how far down the list, however, would be the switch point between benefit and harm (or if it would be determined purely by rankings vs. some other consideration).
I think those count as "blue states with moderate Republican governors," in quadrifoliate's mind. Very recently, Illinois the state trumped Chicago the city and successfully elected Bruce Rauner (Republican businessman) as governor in 2015. The result was the Illinois Budget Impasse. [1] Rauner was swiftly succeeded by a blue Governor in the next election.
I think the above poster's point is states like Massachusetts (Deval Patrick->Charlie Baker) or Illinois tend to zigzag between blue governors and red governors, which shows they aren't "Republican controlled" like truly red states.
> I think those count as "blue states with moderate Republican governors," in quadrifoliate's mind.
Yeah, that's dead on, clearly I have a lot to learn about US politics :) I didn't even think of checking, how does Massachusetts elect a Republican Governor?
I wanted to kick out the students but I wasn't able to convince the deep state so re-elect me isn't the most compelling campaign message under any scenario.
That's assuming that the way things work is you appeal to voters who desire certain policies and someone to implement them. Whether or not you agree, it seems to be a thing these days to argue that the Republican party has transcended that.
Show of hands, who looks around today at the biggest challenges and problems we face, the ones that affect the greatest numbers of people the most perniciously, and that need swift & decisive solutions at almost any cost, and concludes that they're the ones having to do with foreign students being in the country taking online classes?
Yes the government can do more then one thing. However the US government has finite resources so why should it expend resources on kicking students out but not on more useful things.
When right-thinking people despise populism, who will be left as populists? I'm more worried about a Congress that unanimously passes trillions in handouts to rich people during a health emergency (and the feckless orange moron who didn't veto such public theft) than I am about "demagogues".
Can someone explain how foreign students taking online classes gives them ‘full rein’ and is a threat to national security?
> ICE also contends that a full slate of virtual coursework compromises national security by giving foreign students free rein within the U.S., and says a freeze would undermine “the deference afforded administrative agencies in complex and interrelated fields like immigration enforcement.”
ICE stated they would have "free rein" not "full rein."
The argument is essentially that by allowing students to take online classes, they are free to travel anywhere within the united states. With mandatory in person classes, they would be restricted to being near campus.
The federal government would have a harder time keeping track of students, as their schools would no longer really have an idea if the students are nearby or not.
Which as others have pointed out, really grasping at straws, and if there is a a legitimate concern here, I'm certain that schools could come up with a system to keep tabs on their students visa holders.
> they are free to travel anywhere within the united states.
Theoretically that's true for on-campus courses too. Most (at least that I know of) universities don't track attendance. So the students are still free to travel anywhere as long as they keep submitting online assignments and are physically present for any exams.
This is so obviously wrong. Source: I went to a public state school less than 10 years ago and I (along with many other students) received federal aid.
90% of the classes I took didn't require attendance, and the ones that did were mostly general studies courses for freshmen (like basic lab sciences or language classes). None of the major-related courses required attendance or had it as a component of the final grade (which in my case would be maths and CS classes). Obviously, you still had to attend midterms and final exams. And each of those classes would have a couple of prodigies who would attend zero lectures and still end up doing very well in the class (with many more who attempted that and failed massively, but still).
The only way of legitimately interpreting the meaning of your reply is that universities receiving federal aid are required to submit the list of students registered for each course. That has nothing to do with attendance though.
I'm downvoting you because you seem to be missing the asymmetry of the two claims. TheAdamAndChe implies that attendance is always required at schools offering federal financial aid. filoleg says approximately "Not always, here's an example where it wasn't". filoleg is not making the absolutist claim that no universities require attendance, merely providing an example that disproves the absolutist claim.
My claim is that not all schools receiving federal aid are required to check attendance. My example proves that claim, because my school didn't.
The parent comment's claim is that all schools receiving federal aid are required to check attendance. But his example doesn't prove his claim and doesn't disprove mine, because my claim allows for schools to have attendance checks, it is just that they are not obligated to. And his example aligns with my claim just fine, while his is disproven by mine.
Tl;dr: my claim is that schools are not required to check attendance, not that all of them are required NOT to check attendance.
You're probably thinking of universities submitting the number of students registered for each course. Attendance, how many students physically attend each class on a given day and which students do, is never tracked except by the occasional oddball professor who base grades on attendance.
In the absence of the disruption to existing educational plans caused by the COVID-19 health emergency, why would foreign students (or any students) want to pay the regular tuition for 100% online instruction, and why would that require them to be physically in the US (i.e. to have a visa)? And why would a educational institution want to have the responsibility for keeping track of the physical location of students taking a 100% online instruction?
> In the absence of the disruption to existing educational plans caused by the COVID-19 health emergency
But there is disruption caused due to the health emergency.
> why would foreign students (or any students) want to pay the regular tuition for 100% online instruction
They wouldn't and embassies are closed, so no new students are coming to attend the online courses. The students we are talking about are already in the US. The choice they have is drop out or continue with online courses. Whether they should pay 100% tuition or not is a separate argument.
> and why would that require them to be physically in the US (i.e. to have a visa)
They are already in the US. Would the US government be willing to cancel their home leases, car loans or leases, so on and so forth? If not I don't see any reason to kick them out. Educational programs are typically between 2-6 years. These people have their life in the US right now. I don't see any reason to kick them out.
> And why would a educational institution want to have the responsibility for keeping track of the physical location of students taking a 100% online instruction?
They don't have to is what my previous comment you replied to is implying.
Right, we want them to come here and like it so much they settle down and become professors or researchers or entrepreneurs. It's kind of the secret to our success!
It's not a threat to national security. Unfortunately Congress has given the President the power to do pretty much whatever he wants for whatever reason with regard to immigration enforcement.
The Immigration and Nationality Act gives the president authority to do whatever he wants:
> "Whenever the president finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants..."
No, and I doubt ICE can either. It's normal in this stage of a lawsuit to just throw out every argument you can brainstorm regardless of whether it makes much sense.
Is this administration very incompetent, or very sadistic?
If they rescinded the order, means they:
1) Didn't think through the consequences, or the legality of the order.
2) They just wanted to crate some chaos, and mess up with the foreign kids, while posturing to their base
3) Force universities to stay open in the middle of the pandemic in order to help Trump's reelection bid... (not sure how breakouts of covid infections at colleges will help him)
2 is the answer. They probably hardly cared whether the rule was successfully implemented. They succeeded in spreading FUD and in the future, prospective international students will think twice before deciding to study in the US. The damage is done.
Lots of top tier universities are already opening foreign campuses. Future students will just end up there. This move accelerated the rise of foreign top tier mind work at the expense of that work in the USA. Couple this with the antagonistic stance by the administration to foreign highly capable workers and you have a recipe for a tech softening in the USA.
This is good for the world. Part of me sees this as a cynical ploy to tear down others' futures to support the base. I do think the US needs massive education reform, costs are through the roof and large universities are farming foreign students but this isn't the way to do it.
Those foreign campuses are also known to be a joke and cash grabs. Foreign governments pay universities basically to use their brand, they pay some professors to visit for a month and put that campus's affiliation on a few papers, and claim that they are publishing state-of-the-art research and training their own students. Meanwhile, none of those students are prepared, and the campus doesn't attract any students besides local students, so it's just a local institution with a foreign brand.
I see, a new NYU campus in Abu-Dhabi, but is it still NYU if it's based in in Abu Dhabi? Wouldn;t that be more like ADU (funded by NYU)?
I wonder how they'll compare tuition wise and whether that would incentivize foreign students to stay home. New York is a very expensive city but it is also a different experience.
Mostly 3. (or more charitably they hoped the covid emergency would be winding down by now)
Here, ICE attempted to rollback the current emergency rule and put in place a new rule that was broader and more flexible than the pre-covid-19 rule. They have pulled that back now.
But, as soon as the Covid-19 national emergency order expires, the current emergency rule can be easily reverted to the stricter pre-covid-19 rule if that's what the Admin wants. Otherwise, a new rule (following administrative law rule-making requirements) can be made to implement the broader/flexible policy ICE was seeking here.
edit-to-add: Trump could probably issue an Executive Order directing ICE to change its rules.
It's just red meat for the base. The administration doesn't actually want to restrict immigration, they just know that they were hired to restrict immigration, so they have to appear to be working on that. Notice that every single time they've done any kind of immigration restriction, they either walk it back within 72 hours, or allow themselves to be stopped in court. It's all just a sham for the voters in an election year.
How about we start requiring proof before we just endlessly allow unnamed sources to dictate our outrage? The Russian Bounty story has all sorts of problems.
This is a theme of the media: use unnamed sources with no ability for stories to be independently verified and then create an anti-Trump scandal over it. Over and over we go through this.
Do you not see a problem with media outlets requiring sources name themselves when speaking out against someone in a position of power? I'd much prefer the current situation of corroborating a scandal through what is often multiple sources in multiple publications if the alternative is not hearing about scandals that do exist.
It's a combination of #2 and #3. The Trump administration has a strategy that should be very clear by now: implement or propose outlandish policy, then use it as leverage for gains in some orthogonal area while walking it back. This is deal-making 101, Trump (or his ghost-writer) writes about it in all his books, and it's an obvious trend. He uses this tact in domestic policy and trade deals, and tbh it's pretty effective.
The Trump campaign vaulted to the top during the 2016 primary with his hard line immigration proposals. The border wall promise was his political breakthrough. Immigration is the key issue for many of his voters. He has been consistently strict on immigration accordingly. The decision maker was probably just following that policy line, and then got overruled by the details. In particular I assume Trump's lawyers predicted a bruising, losing court fight.
Kind of strange that the Trump administration would pull back on this one considering they locked up kids of illegal immigrants in cages ... there must be lots of GOP Harvard alumni then.
> To me this adds to the picture of an administration who is about to loose the forthcoming election
I wouldn't be so sure, there is still a lot of time before now and the election. We saw the lengths the administration is willing to go to in order to win. Blackmailing the Ukraine to make up lies about their political opponents is just the worst thing we know about, and as disgusting as it was, the aftermath of that shows that half the country supports this type of behavior as a means to an end. I seriously doubt we'll see a transition of power during this election.
I'm American and I have no idea what's going on either. The admin is behaving very erratic and POTUS is always talking about peripheral issues and doesn't address the current crisis (i.e. COVID, 20% unemployment, depression etc). I don't know if it means they're very confident with themselves that they'll be reelected, or it means they're in a crisis mode trying to find new ways to get more vote.
The thing is, sitting Presidents usually get re-elected.
Last election seemed like there was a Trump-related controversy every week, and he still managed to win.
They say cats hit terminal velocity after falling only about 3 stories, so they are just as likely to survive a 10 storey fall. If Trump can get elected after dozens of questionable statements and actions, why not hundreds?
People keep saying things like this, but is there any proof it works? Sure, the 24 hour news channels will bounce around, but as a vote-winning strategy it's done very poorly. The Republicans lost the House in 2018. Trump's never had to contend for reelection himself, so his "distraction tactics" haven't been proven.
I use quotes because I've stopped believing he has tactics. At most, he does things impulsively, hears how it's spun by lackeys, then adopts their rationalization himself. Maybe he'll keep it in mind the next time he decides something.
Yeah this isn't a viable way to formulate public policy. It isn't new either, happened with the travel ban early on. Soft power, and even the viability of a country, depends on certain long-term guarantees, guarantees that the current administration has blown away completely.
I'm pessimistic that even if a change in administration occurs early next year (and that is a major if), there would be anything any administration can do before the next Donald Trump takes office 4 or 8 years from now. I'm betting that the next "Trump" will be far smarter and won't make this one's mistakes. And if the Republic falls, no place on Earth will be safe.
That's not a reason to lie down and die. It's a reason to fight back with the frenzy of despair. I hope a quarter million dead by December will be enough. Enough for folks to remember that elections have consequences.
Death rate has been falling steadily for several weeks and then this past week increased significantly. New cases and hospitalizations are continuing to rise in several states now, along with deaths there. The epidemic is certainly not over yet.
This is genius. If you assume that the Trump Administration did this to show their base that they're serious about deporting foreigners to garner election votes, then you can conclude that they've managed to do that with as much publicity as possible at virtually no cost financially.
It's likely they knew this would never go through and didn't want a knockdown drag-out fight in the courts. However, they still capitalized on a situation and should be congratulated for that, regardless of whether or not you agree with the politics.
I would hope that the DNC would learn this tactic and employ it equally as well in the future.
I'm sorry, what? You think it's a good thing for our politicians to waste everyone's time by pushing policies they know will never pass / will be struck down in court, just to win political points? IMO this sort of thing is exactly what's wrong with the political climate right now. This sort of behavior makes it all about "us vs them" and shuts down any sort of nuanced discussion about what's best for the country.
Dude, you have no idea what happens behind closed doors. It’s absolutely a common political move to fight for something you don’t really care about and then use it as a bargaining chip to get what you do want.
At this point the Trump admin is likely to do everything possible to try and drive the news cycle away from the pandemic. Everything the current administration does until the election should be understood through that lens.
One of the core arguments was that the Feds can't pull funds for their stated purpose, which was to encourage/force schools to open ("The government has provided no reason for its abrupt and unexplained shift. That is unsurprising, since... its purpose—as expressed by Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli—is to 'encourage schools to reopen.' In essence, Defendants are using the vulnerability of international students as leverage to force a broad reopening for reasons wholly disconnected from the underlying statute and regulation... Defendants have thus violated the APA by promulgating a policy based on factors which Congress has not intended it to consider.").
I think there's a good chance that the admin backed down here so that there's no pre-existing precedent implying (or explicitly stating) that they can't use purse strings and other extra-congressional-intent mechanisms to force K12 to open in August.