At a campaign rally in Minnesota, President Donald Trump was expected to defend the reversal of his administration's policy of separating parents and children who cross the U.S. border illegally. And he did that. From the Associated Press:
Trump downplayed the crisis that has threatened to envelop the White House amid days of heart-wrenching images of children being pulled from their immigrant parents along the nation's southern border. He made only a brief mention of his decision to sign an executive order after spending days insisting, wrongly, that his administration had no choice but to separate families apprehended at the border because of federal law and a court decision.
"We're going to keep families together and the border is going to be just as tough as it's been," Trump told the cheering crowd in Duluth on Wednesday night.
But 50 minutes into that speech in Minnesota, Trump also revived his talk of a 25 percent tariff on imported luxury vehicles, a matter of great concern in the South – and metro Atlanta, which serves as the North American headquarters for both Mercedes-Benz and Porsche. Said Trump:
"You look at the European Union. They put up barriers, so that we can't sell our farm products. And yet they sell Mercedes, and BMWs, and the cars come in by the millions, and we hardly tax them at all. They don't take our cars, and if they do, the tax is massive.
So they're basically saying, we're going to sell you millions of cars, and by the way, you're not going to sell us any. Not going to work that way anymore, folks."
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Delta Air Lines sidestepped what could have been another testy political debate on Wednesday. As four major competitors - America, Frontier, Southwest and United - declared they would refuse to fly immigrant children separated from their parents at the U.S. border, the Atlanta-based company took refuge in President Donald Trump's timely reversal of his policy.
“Recent reports of families being separated are disheartening and do not align with Delta’s core values," the airline said. "We applaud the administration’s executive order resolving the issue of separating children from their families at the U.S. border.”
Delta’s more cautious approach comes from experience. The airline provoked a backlash from Georgia lawmakers after cutting business ties with the National Rifle Association.
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Steve Schmidt, a longtime Republican strategist who advised John McCain during his 2008 presidential run, renounced his GOP affiliation on Wednesday, and urged Americans to support Democratic candidates in November. This quote, via Dan Balz of the Washington Post, was an eye-popper:
"Trump's election did not spell doom for the Republican Party," Schmidt said by telephone Wednesday while traveling. "The reality is that our Founders always predicted that one day there would be a president like Trump, and that's why they designed the system of government the way they designed it. What they never imagined is the utter abdication of a co-equal branch of government, which we're seeing now. . . . The definition of conservatism now is the requirement of complete and utter obedience to the leader."
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We may be witnessing the dissolution of that valuable partnership between the state of Georgia and the city of Atlanta – the alliance built by Gov. Nathan Deal and erstwhile Mayor Kasim Reed. Consider:
Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms on Wednesday signed an executive order blocking the city jail from housing more federal detainees facing deportation, citing her objections to the separation of immigrant families on the southwest border.
Her announcement came just minutes after President Donald Trump signed his own executive order reversing his policy – and we don’t know how that will affect Atlanta’s behavior. But in a sense, that won’t matter for the next four-and-a-half weeks.
Both Casey Cagle and Brian Kemp, the two candidates in the GOP runoff for governor, have made illegal immigration and “sanctuary cities” a major turnout motivator in their campaigns.
Also on Wednesday, Cagle filled out the membership of the "Senate Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport Operations and Authority Creation study committee." The chairman will be Burt Jones, R-Jackson, who introduced the resolution, SR 882, to create the committee. The motivating language of the legislation:
WHEREAS, Hartsfield -Jackson Atlanta International Airport is an invaluable resource to the economy of the State of Georgia; and
WHEREAS, in the interest of public welfare, national security, and economic stability, the transfer of operations of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to an authority might best serve and protect the citizens of the State of Georgia; and
WHEREAS, study is needed to determine what federal laws and regulations must be complied with in order to accomplish a transfer of the airport to an authority and what financial obligations must be considered in making such a decision.
Neither SR 882 nor Cagle’s Wednesday press released acknowledged that Hartsfield-Jackson, one of the state’s primary economic engines, is owned by the city of Atlanta.
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said that he would oppose a state takeover. From our AJC colleague Kelly Yamanouchi:
"No question that the issues around corruption and some of the political challenges of managing a large municipal commercial operation require further improvement," Bastian said. "I'm not certain why the state is not going to have the same issues on that that the city has."
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Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and former Sixth District candidate Jon Ossoff traded sharp words on social media.
Cagle noted that Wednesday was the one-year anniversary of Republican Karen Handel’s victory over Ossoff, a Democrat, in the most expensive U.S. House contest in history, calling it a “huge victory for conservatives!”
Ossoff shot back, invoking the secret recording of Cagle saying he backed “bad public policy” to undercut a rival.
"It's been two weeks since @CaseyCagle was exposed backing an education bill he thought was bad for Georgia's kids in order to curry favor with big money lobbyists," wrote Ossoff.
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Marshall Shepherd served as president of the American Meteorological Society in 2013 and is currently director of the University of Georgia's atmospheric sciences program. He also has a blog on the website of Forbes magazine. And he is African-American. On Wednesday, Shepherd wondered how a post he wrote on climate change became a racial issue among some of his commenters. One passage:
"Their comments suggested that I was not worthy of being a Fellow or former President of the American Meteorological Society (AMS). One comment argued that I am "a black" (actual wording) that has used tokenism somehow to toe the party line on the consensus climate narrative for personal gain."
