Weekly Recap: Jun 1st - 8th
A recap of the big political stories affecting the United States this past week.
Israel launched a mission to rescue four hostages from Hamas yesterday. The hostages are routinely being moved, which makes these types of missions rare, and Israel had to strike two locations to retrieve just four hostages. Over one hundred hostages are still being held by Hamas.
Hamas claims that more than 270 Palestinians were killed during the mission, and another 400 were injured. Israel claims that less than 100 Palestinians were killed. Neither side gave numbers for how many of those casualties may be combatants.
Hamas has never separated combatants from their death totals, and Israel admits to not being able to conclusively determine fighters from civilians due to Hamas donning civilian clothes and mixing in with non-combatants in order to hide.
While there was near universal relief for the return of four hostages, overall support for the military action was mixed. Some felt that the Palestinian deaths were fully the fault of Hamas because they were holding hostages among civilians. Others felt that Israel should have approached the situation differently in order to minimize civilian casualties.
Another contentious point is that there have been ceasefire agreements in the works, which would lead to many more hostages being released, but both Israel and Hamas have balked at the agreements being presented at different points in time.
Democrats brought forward a Senate bill that would codify a right to contraception in federal law, but Republicans voted against moving the bill forward. Republicans attempted to spin their opposition by claiming that contraception isn’t under attack, so additional laws aren’t needed. Whereas Democrats continue to point out that abortion rights were lost due to not having them enshrined in federal law and how Republicans are actively looking to ban some forms of contraception.
Reproductive rights have won seven out of seven times at the ballot box since the overturning of Roe v Wade. Democrats have the goal of protecting reproductive rights as a foundation of this year’s election campaigns. Republicans continue to support extreme abortion bans and federal pregnancy databases and have even passed a law in one state making it a felony to be in possession of abortion medication.
President Biden announced a new executive order to block most asylum requests between ports of entry when the daily average for border crossings is 2500 or higher. The order also enacts sanctions on individuals connected to migrant smuggling and allows for faster processing of certain migrants.
Republicans attacked Biden’s order as being too little too late, while progressives attacked it as being too restrictive to those who do need asylum.
The border has been an ongoing battle between Republicans and Democrats, including Trump telling Republicans to kill a conservative bipartisan border bill in order to keep the border a problem for now so that Trump could campaign on it and hope to get credit for “fixing it” after the election.
Border crossings have reduced by 54% and have reduced for the last three months in a row.
MAGA politicians, pundits, and voters were fooled by a troll post on social media this week. The post was made a day before the jury reached its verdict of guilty on all counts in Trump’s falsifying records/election interference trial in New York and claimed to know the jury was going to come back with a guilty verdict.
Out of an abundance of caution, Judge Merchan flagged the post for notification of both the prosecution and defense from Trump’s trial to ensure they were aware of it. Several pundits took this notification letter and used it to misinform about what it was saying.
Despite the post being an obvious troll post with no factual basis, MAGA used it as an excuse to claim the trial was rigged and that the fix was in from the beginning.
When the post was debunked later that same day, several pundits and politicians backed away from it, while a few continued to promote the lie to mislead their followers.