WEST WING READS 06/11/2019 NYT QUESTIONS CONGRESS ABOUT SUFFERING AT THE BORDER!

New York Times: When Will Congress Get Serious About the Suffering at the Border? “It is time for Congress to stop dithering and pass emergency funding to deal with this nightmare” at our southern border, The New York Times editorial board writes. “In May, 144,278 migrants were taken into custody . . . Unequipped to deal with the crush, border facilities and migrant shelters are dangerously overcrowded, and the staff is overburdened. Dysfunction, disease and even death are a growing reality.” The bottom line: “It has been more than a month since the administration sent Congress a request for $4.5 billion in additional border assistance”—$3.3 billion of it for humanitarian aid. “Congress needs to get serious about dealing with that suffering.” Click here to read more.

“The total number of workers hired rose to a new high in April,” Jeff Cox reports for CNBC. “Hirings increased to 5.9 million for the month, a gain of 240,000 from March, the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey indicated. The hiring rate rose to 3.9%, an increase of one-tenth of a percentage point.”

“‘You’re here as a prop. You’re functionally here as a prop because they can’t impeach Donald Trump’: Hand it to Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) for cutting to the heart of John Dean’s testimony Monday before the House Judiciary Committee,” the New York Posteditorial board writes. “Chairman Jerry Nadler has to put on a show of pursuing President Trump because the party’s left wing demands it . . . Thing is, it’s not working: Even CNN didn’t carry the hearing live, because it can’t afford to bore its audience.”

“Voting to approve the USMCA should be a no-brainer, especially for Michigan’s members of Congress. Free and fair trade with Canada and Mexico is creating new, good-paying jobs and helping folks climb the economic ladder,” Andy Koenig writes in The Detroit News. “To keep this train going, Michigan’s lawmakers in D.C. must put politics aside and put our workers first. Congress must approve the USMCA.”

“In small towns, suburban neighborhoods and big cities, our nation is in the midst of an unprecedented crisis of drug addiction. In 2017, nearly 200 people each day died due to a drug overdose. While no corner of our country has escaped the devastation of this epidemic, rural America has been hard hit,” Jim Carroll, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, writes in the High Plains Journal. The Trump Administration “has deployed an all-hands-on-deck approach to make critical resources available to rural communities, to fuel locally led efforts to combat this crisis.”