DL Open Thread: Saturday, March 28, 2026

Meyer Addresses Houghton Firing.  While I’m all in on the Governor’s move to replace Houghton, who pushed all his chips in for BHL and went bust, I have to emphasize the functionally toxic nature of Meyer’s relationship with the General Assembly.  I cannot recall a single worse such relationship.  The closest was Carper, as many legislators felt that his promises were often not honored. (Not to mention that all the career Carperites who came with him walked around Leg Hall as if this whole gig was beneath them.)  But nobody comes close to Meyer’s antagonistic bedside manner.

While some of this is no doubt due to residual legislative support for Bethany Hall Long, most of it is due to unforced errors on Meyer’s part.  I see little effort to mend these frayed relationships.  In fact, Matt seems to double down on dismissing legitimate pushback.  You can see it in the linked article.

It’s time to ask the question–were the election held today, would Meyer beat BHL?  Also, when he’s up for reelection in 2028, can he even win a primary?  Not too late to–well, this riddle should answer the question I have:

Q:  How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?

A:  Only one, but the light bulb really has to WANT to change.

Does Matt?

The Rethugs Really Own The Homeland Security Shutdown.  House and Senate R’s engage in intraparty food fight:

House Republicans angrily rejected a bipartisan deal to reopen the Department of Homeland Security and pushed through their own plan late Friday, putting themselves on a collision course with the Senate and extending the agency shutdown that has crippled U.S. airports.

Revolting over an agreement their own party struck with Senate Democrats to end the crisis, which had passed the Senate before dawn on Friday, House Republican leaders — with President Trump’s backing — refused to take it up. They derided the Senate plan for hewing too closely to Democrats’ position by omitting money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, the two agencies responsible for carrying out Mr. Trump’s deportation crackdown, which are operating under previously approved funds.

“House Republicans are not going to be any part of any effort to reopen our borders or to stop immigration enforcement,” Speaker Mike Johnson said at a news conference on Friday afternoon. “This gambit that was done last night is a joke.”

Mr. Johnson called the Senate-passed deal engineered by Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, “ridiculousness,” and instead teed up a stopgap measure to fund the entire department until May 22.

The House passed that measure on a 213 to 203 vote late Friday night, before leaving Washington for a scheduled two-week break.

The vote left funding for the Department of Homeland Security up in the air, with competing bills pending in each chamber — both controlled by Republicans — and neither apparently willing to approve the other’s proposal.

How Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Obsession Is Hurting Us All.  From Paul Krugman:

And this will hurt all of us. There has already been a thorough debunking of the false claims that immigration hurts the native born. But I will add two more points.

First, let me address the claim that Trump’s anti-immigrant vendetta led to a surge in native-born employment. As everyone who actually understood the numbers realized from the beginning, this surge wasn’t real — there was a quirk in the way the numbers were estimated that created a phantom bulge in native-born employment that would vanish once new Census estimates were in. Justin Fox has a good explanation.

And sure enough, official numbers show a plunge in native-born employment over the past few months. Both the surge and the plunge were statistical artifacts, not reality.

So, no – waging war against immigrants is not resulting in higher employment of the native-born. In fact, it’s contributing to a stalling of the economy in construction and in the service industries. And even the Trump administration has admitted that the immigration crackdown is hurting America’s farmers and the food supply.

Immigration expands the base of taxpayers, which means more people to share the burden of paying taxes to pay for defense. This includes undocumented immigrants, because their employers collect payroll taxes out of their wages, with the added fiscal payoff that they will never collect benefits. And because immigrants are relatively young and healthy, they increase the amount going into government coffers while having a delayed impact on outlays. The Social Security Administration does sensitivity analysis of factors affecting its projections, and consistently finds that higher immigration improves the system’s financial health, while lower immigration worsens it.

War’s Not Going Well.  Let’s see–Saudi Arabia and Yemen involved now.

Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis have confirmed that they launched an attack on Israel for the first time since the outbreak of the Israel-US war on Iran, marking their entry to the conflict just hours after Marco Rubio said the US expected to conclude military operations within “weeks, not months”.

While Israel was again hitting targets across Iran’s capital on Saturday, it identified what it said was a missile launched from Yemen. The Houthis said the attack came after continued targeting of infrastructure in Iran, Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territories, adding that their operations would continue until the “aggression” on all fronts ends.

Houthi involvement in the war could risk broadening the conflict, given their ability to strike targets far beyond Yemen and disrupt shipping lanes around the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea, which they had done in support of Hamas in Gaza after the 7 October attacks on Israel.

Speaking to reporters on Friday, after meeting G7 foreign ministers in France, Rubio – the US secretary of state – said of Iran: “When we are done with them here in the next couple weeks, they will be weaker than they’ve been in recent history.”

But soon after, US media reported an Iranian attack on a base in Saudi Arabia wounded at least 12 American soldiers, two of them seriously. The attack on the Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia included at least one missile and several drones, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported, citing unidentified officials.

The soldiers were inside a building at the base when it was struck, according to reports. Several aerial refuelling planes also suffered damage in the attack.

Pretty sure where this is going–Trump turns TACO and runs, leaving the conflagration he caused in place.

What do you want to talk about?