Chad’s Morning Brief: Dan Patrick Calls on Texas Leadership to Provide Emergency Spending on Texas Border, More Lost IRS Emails, and Other Top Stories
Here is your Morning Brief for the morning of June 18, 2014. Give me your feedback below and tune in to The Chad Hasty Show for these and many more topics from 8:30 to 11am. Remember, you can listen online at KFYO.com or on your iPhone/Android with the radioPup App.
Important Election Dates:
Election Day for Lubbock City Council District 3 Runoff: June 21
Texas Border
Texas State Senator and current Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick called for emergency funding for the Texas border according to the Texas Tribune.
State Sen. Dan Patrick, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, joined some of his conservative colleagues on Tuesday in calling for “immediate action” to address the surge of undocumented immigrants crossing into Texas.
“The Texas Department of Public Safety has indicated that sustained operations along our southern border will require $1.3 million per week," Patrick said in a statement. "I am calling on the governor, lieutenant governor and speaker of the House to immediately allocate $1.3 million a week in emergency spending for the rest of the year for added border security through Texas law enforcement."
A call placed to the Legislative Budget Board about whether a special legislative session would be necessary to set aside such funding has not yet been returned. Patrick's statement did not specifically say whether he supports calling a special session on border security, which some of his GOP colleagues have suggested.
Patrick added that U.S. Border Patrol has concerns about a possible health hazard associated with the influx of migrants, especially the thousands of unaccompanied minors. Patrick quoted a U.S. Border Patrol official as saying that the agency is worried about chicken pox, staph infections and other viral outbreaks.
“The state is making sure each child is vaccinated, but our overall resources are being stretched to the limit," Patrick said, adding that border security will be his first priority if elected lieutenant governor. "... We are overwhelmed by the current humanitarian crisis and our border is less secure than ever to the drug cartels, human traffickers, and potential terrorist activities.”
The Texas Democratic Party agreed that the situation on the border is dire, but said “election year” politics need to be set aside to address the situation.
“Let's be clear, we have an international humanitarian crisis on our hands and Washington needs to work with Texas to solve it,” TDP spokesman Manny Garcia said in a statement. “We must eliminate the root causes that are fueling this economic and violent crisis in Central America in the first place. State officials need to get the federal government on our side to provide the resources necessary to house, feed, and care for these children.”
Well of course Democrats want to stay away from the politics of the border crisis. It's their policies along with the Obama administration's policies that have caused the crisis that we have right now.
Lost Emails
According to National Review, the IRS now says that more emails from other employees have been lost.
It’s not just Lois Lerner’s e-mails. The Internal Revenue Service says it can’t produce e-mails from six more employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups, according to two Republicans investigating the scandal.
The IRS recently informed Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp and subcommittee chairman Charles Boustany that computer crashes resulted in additional lost e-mails, including from Nikole Flax, the chief of staff to former IRS commissioner Steven Miller, who was fired in the wake of the targeting scandal.
The revelation about Lerner’s e-mails rekindled the targeting scandal and today’s news has further inflamed Republicans. Camp and Boustany are now demanding a special prosecutor to investigate “every angle” of the events that led to Lois Lerner’s revelation in May 2013 that the agency had used inappropriate criteria to review the applications for tax exemption.
The lawmakers expressed particular outrage that the agency has known since February that it would not be able to produce the e-mails requested by the committee yet did not apprise the committee of that fact, and they charged in a statement that the IRS is attempting to “cover up the fact that it convenient lost key documents in the investigation.”
If Lerner is the central figure in the scandal — Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa said Monday evening he believes she was the senior-most official involved — Flax may be an important auxiliary figure. E-mails produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the group Judicial Watchshow Flax giving the green light to Lerner’s request to meet with Department of Justice officials to explore the possibility of criminally prosecuting nonprofit groups — at the suggestion of Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse — for engaging in political activity after declaring on their application for nonprofit status that they had no plans to do so.
E-mails uncovered by the committee last week showed that, in preparation for her meeting with the Department of Justice, Lerner and one of her advisers transmitted 1.1 million pages of data on nonprofit groups, including confidential taxpayer information, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, potentially in violation of federal law.
Other Top Stories:
These and many more topics coming up on today’s edition of The Chad Hasty Show. Tune in mornings 8:30-11am on News/Talk 790 KFYO, streaming online at kfyo.com, and now on your iPhone and Android device with the radioPup App. All guest interviews can be heard online in our podcast section after the show at kfyo.com.
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