3 Stories You Should Read 3/28/2019: Border Wall, William Barr, Parkland Survivors
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In the category of: What happens when the reporters go home.
Two Parkland survivors have ended their lives.
My generation is the generation of mass shootings. We all grew up with regular active shooter drills in our classrooms. The unluckiest of us experienced real violence firsthand. Yet a deeper understanding of mental health lacks precedence in the national conversation. When the shock wears off and the news cameras leave, we can’t abandon the survivors. If we do, we risk more tragedies.
After the Parkland shooting, mental health resources to survivors and students at our school were woefully inadequate. When asked for comment, Broward County Schools told Vox that they “focused on the wellness of students, faculty, families and the community,” which included opening five locations for mental health support, bringing more than 25 mental health clinicians to the school along with two additional guidance counselors, and therapy dogs. But these additions weren’t nearly enough for our school population. Therapists were only available on a day-to-day basis, meaning a student seeking counseling multiple times would likely be working with a different person each time. Students were not able to build the trusting relationships necessary to help survivors feel comfortable talking about trauma.
In the category of: Release the full report for f*cksake.
The Mueller Report Is Hundreds Of Pages Long
Which raises the question: How accurate can a four-page summary be?
The page count suggests the report will be fairly comprehensive, and raises questions about Barr’s four-page letter on the report, which quoted only a few dozen words from the actual document. Barr’s letter was meant to reflect the “principal conclusions” of the Mueller report, which left open the question of whether or not President Donald Trump obstructed justice.
Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Barr’s letter said, concluded that “the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” But there’s reason to wonder if Barr’s conclusion may have been preordained. Less than a year before taking over at the Justice Department, he authored an unsolicited 19-page memo questioning whether Mueller should even be investigating obstruction in the first place.
In the category: The drama continues.
The Ongoing Border-Wall Fight and the Limits of Public Attention
What with crowing over the end of Robert Mueller’s investigation and vowing revenge on his enemies, President Trump seems to have forgotten all about the national emergency at the southern border that he declared just a few weeks ago. Much of the public has moved on, too. The rest of the government, though, continues to deal with the consequences of Trump’s decision. Earlier this month, the House and Senate voted—with what these days constitutes significant bipartisan support—to block Trump’s declaration, seeing it for what it was: a way for the President to run around Congress and grab billions of dollars for a border wall that lawmakers wouldn’t otherwise give him. Trump then countered Congress with a veto. (“VETO!” he tweeted, as if he were Michael Scott, the boss character on “The Office,” declaring bankruptcy.)
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