BLN anchor Pamela Brown raised concerns to Rep. Rich McCormickR-Ga., Tuesday that Head Startan early childhood educational program that also provides food to low-income children, could be affected by President Donald Trump’s attempt at a federal funding freeze. McCormick responded with the head-spinning suggestion that the country’s child labor laws are too restrictive and that plenty of kids are freeloaders who ought to work for their lunch.

There has been a lot of confusion and changing information surrounding Trump’s attempted freeze and the potential impact on programs such as Head Start — I’ll discuss more about that later. But McCormick’s remarks still matter, since they demonstrate how Trump’s political strategies echo the old-school GOP playbook for abandoning the poor.

Right-wing “populism” seems to value children based on how useful of a cog in the capitalist machine they can be.

In the interview with Brown, the 56-year-old McCormick responded to the question of whether he supported getting rid of school lunch for vulnerable kids with a jaw-dropping rant:

When asked if all the kids in his district who get free lunch or breakfast should be cut off, McCormick said, “Of course not.” But he suggested that some of them should. “Who can actually go and actually produce their own income? Who can actually go out there and do something that makes them have value and work skills for the future?” McCormick queried. He added that getting kids to work for their lunch would induce them to think “about their future instead of thinking about how they’re going to sponge off the government when they don’t need to.”

The status of Trump’s order freezing huge amounts of federal funding is unclear. The freeze, which seems illegalwas temporarily blocked by a federal judge. And on Wednesday the Trump administration said it was rescinding the Office of Management and Budget memo initiating the freeze. But according to NBC Newsafter the announcement of the rescission, “White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday that while the broad OMB memo was being pulled back, the administration’s other efforts to halt federal spending would remain.” It’s unclear what this means, but it suggests the Trump administration is trying to plow ahead in some fashion.

Complicating things further, initially it appeared that Head Start and other programs that provide children with cheaper or free meals could be affected, based on a document from the Trump administration obtained by NBC News. But subsequently, a senior Trump administration official told NBC News that Head Start is exempt from the freeze.

While it’s hard to know who to believe or how things will unfold, Head Start is already reporting trouble. “While we understand that this is an evolving story, this disruption, at best, will slow down Head Start agencies’ ability to pay hundreds of thousands of staff, contractors, and small businesses who support Head Start operations in every corner of the country,” Yasmina Vinci, executive director of the National Head Start Association, said. “At worst, this means that hundreds of thousands of families will not be able to depend on the critical services and likely will not be able to work.”

Regardless of how all this shakes out, McCormick’s language underscores right-wing rhetorical strategies for justifying moves that could jeopardize the well-being of some of the most vulnerable members of our society.

McCormick’s lament that not enough children work for their supper and his belief that children can prove their “worth” through labor makes him sound like a 19th-century factory owner. Sadly, he also  sounds like other Republican lawmakers who in recent years have pushed back against labor laws that restrict what kinds of jobs children can take and how long they can work. McCormick is simply furnishing more rationales to permit the American right to leave children behind. Apparently, making children pay for their meals would build their character. Never mind that school does plenty of that, and that priorities for kids outside of school should be on being active, developing socially and emotionally, doing homework, and, you know, being children.

Reducing funding for programs to help children get access to meals wouldn’t result in children flocking to the labor market and competing with adults for minimum wage jobs. It would result in increased food insecurity, which in turn would not only cause them gratuitous suffering, but also reduce their academic performance. Right-wing “populism” seems to value children based on how useful a cog in the capitalist machine they can be.

The way that the GOP is pursuing this vision is telling. Regardless of what happens with Trump’s freeze, he has already made his political strategy evident: In his memo detailing the funding freeze, the Office of Management and Budget’s acting director, Matthew Vaeth, objected to using federal money “to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies” and listed “DEI” and “woke gender ideology” as among the activities that should serve as a basis for retracting funding. This kind of language echoes the way the Republican Party used racist caricatures of Black people as parasitic and lazy to stigmatize the entire idea of assistance to poor people — and reduce funding for it. In this case, Trump is saying that the existence of equity measures and the idea of fighting “reverse racism” should serve as a basis to shrink the federal government’s offerings of social services.

Just days into his second term, Trump’s renewed “populist” vision is coming into view. And in many key respects it doesn’t look all that different from the old GOP.

Zeeshan aleem

Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for BLN Daily. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Blue Light News, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter here.

Donald Trump’s federal criminal cases are dead and his state criminal case in Georgia might be dead, though Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is trying to revive it. But there’s impending action in his New York state criminal case, which the president is appealing while he runs the country.

Trump had to get new lawyers to represent him in the so-called hush money case, because he tapped much of his defense team for high-ranking Justice Department posts. The new lawyers from top law firm Sullivan & Cromwell have appellate experience, including at the Supreme Court on behalf of the government during Trump’s first term. That experience may come in handy as the case climbs the appellate ladder. To be sure, it may be a while before the case reaches the high court, and which issues present Trump’s best chance at overturning his conviction could become clearer over the coming months and perhaps years as the appeal develops.

That experience may come in handy as the case climbs the appellate ladder.

At trial last year, a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree, for covering up a hush money scheme in connection with the 2016 presidential race. Earlier this month, Judge Juan Merchan sentenced Trump to an unconditional discharge, which was basically a sentence without any real penalty due to his then-impending White House return. The guilty verdicts did not require incarceration under state law, though relatively brief incarceration or probation are other sentencing options for that crime.

Trump pleaded not guilty in all four of his criminal cases; the New York case is the only one that went to trial before the election.

The Supreme Court declined to block Trump’s Jan. 10 sentencing before he took office, but while doing so the court left open the possibility of eventually ruling on his behalf. For one thing, the court split 5-4, so it almost didn’t even let the sentencing go forward. Republican-appointed Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh dissented, but didn’t explain why.

The majority, which in addition to the three Democratic appointees consisted of Chief Justice John Roberts and Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett, said it refused to halt the sentencing because “the alleged evidentiary violations at President-Elect Trump’s state-court trial can be addressed in the ordinary course on appeal.” The majority also said it was permitting the sentencing because of the lenient unconditional discharge that Merchan signaled ahead of time that he would impose.

So the court that previously granted Trump broad criminal immunity in the federal election interference case may yet have the final word on his New York conviction, but it could be a while before the “ordinary course” of that appeal unfolds.

Subscribe to theDeadline: Legal Newsletterfor expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in Donald Trump’s legal cases.

Jordan Rubin

Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined BLN, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed the Laken Riley Act into law. The legislation expands the federal government’s mandatory detention rules for unauthorized immigrants to include theft-related crimes, like shoplifting, and grants state attorneys general the right to sue the federal government over what they deem as insufficient immigration enforcement.

The bill, named after a Georgia woman killed by an undocumented immigrant, tracks with Trump’s tendency to politicize murders and has been used by right-wingers to engender racist anger toward immigrantsas I wrote last year.

The bill received bipartisan support in the House and Senatedespite civil rights groups and various Democratic lawmakers highlighting its risks of increasing racial profiling and suspending due process for people accused of crimes. Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., for example, voted against the bill, telling MSNBC’s Chris Hayes the law means “people are going to be targeted because they’re brown.”

Given how Trump’s immigration officials already appear to be engaging in disturbing profiling — and ensnaring legal U.S. residents in their anti-immigrant round-ups — that seems like a fair prediction.

In a speech to the House last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., (who also voted against the bill) spoke out about its potential risks to due process. “In the wake of tragedy, we are seeing a fundamental erosion of our civil rights,” she said. “In this bill, if a person is so much as accused of a crime — if someone wants to point a finger and accuse someone of shoplifting — they would be rounded up and put into a private detention camp and sent out for deportation without a day in court.”

And New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, another Democrat who opposed the bill, offered a personal anecdote to BLN host Chris Hayes to suggest that those who supported the bill — including fellow Democrats — have made a decision that will tar their legacies.

He said:

Watch the clip here:

Indeed, Democrats who supported this bill seem to have acquiesced to conservatives’ fear-mongering for the sake of political expediency, and in the process they may have subjected many of their constituents to racial profiling.

Because Republicans now control the Senate, the House of Representatives and the White House, they didn’t need Democratic votes to pass this bill. Democrats could have collectively denounced the bill and advocated for the bipartisan bill they negotiated earlierwhich sought to address problems with U.S. immigration laws without seemingly opening the door to the vilification and abuse of immigrants.

But in what was arguably the first test of congressional Democrats’ willingness to confront the conservative movement’s dubious politicking, I think it’s fair to say they failed.

Ja’han Jones

Ja’han Jones is The ReidOut Blog writer. He’s a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include “Black Hair Defined” and the “Black Obituary Project.”