Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced Thursday the creation of his new Spanish language Twitter account.
A press release from Reid’s office said the new account is in response to the growing embrace of social media and technology among the Latino community.
@SenadorReid will “have a special concentration on matters important to Hispanics and the Spanish-speaking community.”
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) today criticized President Obama’s recent string of executive orders aimed at providing economic relief to certain sectors of the public.
In a statement, the Republican presidential candidate accused Obama of ignoring the Constitution by issuing orders intended to lower loan payments for students and mortgage payments for homeowners, and help put returning veterans back to work.
“The current administration has unabashedly stated that Congress’s unwillingness to pass the president’s jobs bill means that the president will act unilaterally to enact provisions of it piecemeal through Executive Order,” Paul said. “Obama explicitly threatens to bypass Congress, thus aggregating the power to make and enforce laws in the executive. This clearly erodes the principles of separation of powers and checks and balances. It brings the modern presidency dangerously close to an elective dictatorship.”
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Representatives Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) and Tom Cole (R-Okla.) sent a bipartisan letter to the Super Committee on Friday urging its members not to incorporate new taxes on employer-sponsored health benefits in their effort to reduce the deficit.
“Efforts to cap or to eliminate these tax exclusions would have far reaching consequences that would not only reduce health coverage for millions of Americans, but would also increase long-term federal spending obligations,” the letter argued.
“Considering these consequences would negate federal tax income generated from the change and would have little impact on reducing our federal debt,” the letter continued, “we would encourage you to reject proposals to scale back or eliminate tax exclusions for employer-sponsored health coverage.”
The bipartisan letter was cosigned by 160 House members.
Super Committee, deficit, health benefits in Congress, Quick News By Adrianna McGinley
A panel of academics and minority rights advocates argued Friday that having police receive behavioral science training to reduce racial profiling will help them gain the trust of at risk communities.
In a hearing with the House Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, David Harris, Law Professor and Associate Dean for Research at the University of Pittsburgh noted that racial profiling breaks down the trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve, which makes policing less effective.
“When people feel targeted, when certain communities feel that they are getting stopped, stopped, and stopped again, all the time, that relationship begins to break down,” Harris said. “People begin to feel that the crime effort is not being done for them but to them, and that has the effect of substituting for trust and for good relationships, fear, and when fear is there, when resentment is there, what happens is communication breaks down, information stops flowing, and you can’t have smart policing unless you’re getting information from the people who are there.”
Witnesses denied claims that minority communities do not welcome law enforcement, but added that police presence needs to be supported by data collection and police must go through behavioral science training in order to curtail racial profiling.
“We do want more police officers, we want them on our streets, we want them visible, but we also want them well trained,” said Hilary Shelton, Senior Vice President for Advocacy and Policy and Director of the NAACP Washington Bureau. “We believe the effectiveness of our police officers is also deeply rooted in the relationship they have with the communities they serve. As long as we allow racial profiling to continue, or the perception of racial profiling as we’re seeing now, without the accountability of measures in which we actually take into account what’s going on in our neighborhoods, we don’t have that trust.”
Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) addressed racial profiling focused on immigrants’ legal status and warned against a wave of civilian profiling.
“Under Alabama HB56, law enforcement is encouraged to profile minorities,” Chu said. “Many Alabama residents are now taking profiling into their own hands and asking minorities for proof of citizenship when they renew their leases, try to open up a utility account, or even go shopping.”
Harris called the new trend “dangerous” because civilians are not trained to take on such policing.
“There’s no training what so ever…the person is not trained to recognize any documents, is not trained what to do if something is discovered, it seems to me like the worst of all possible worlds,” Harris said. “The problem with laws like Alabama and the Arizona law…is that there is nothing they can do to see immigration status. They must fall back on appearance and accent, and that just leads them into profiling. I would not want to be a police officer in those places.”
The Obama administration has threatened to veto a transportation bill championed by Congressional Republicans.
The legislation, an alternative to a $50 billion provision in Obama’s jobs plan focusing on infrastructure spending, would offset costs with $40 billion in cuts.
“The bill’s unspecified rescission of $40 billion in appropriated funds would cause serious disruption in the Federal Government’s basic services in support of critical national goals, such as supporting education, protecting public safety, and promoting economic growth,” a statement from the Office of Management and Budget says. “[Obama’s] senior advisers would recommend that he veto the bill.”
On Thursday, the Senate blocked Obama’s transportation bill in a 51-49 vote, 9 fewer than the 60 needed to override a filibuster.
