Uvalde Report, Temporary Funding Bill and why Iran launched strikes on Pakistan

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Friday doesn't have a feel anymore?

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Fatal mistakes were made in the response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

responded appropriately.

Congress passed another short-term funding bill that keeps the government open for now,

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They're going to vote to continue to fund the radical progressive policies embedded

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Iran's role in the region.

It's long back proxy forces to protect its interests.

What's Iran up to now, and how's the U.S. interpreting what it's doing?

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Each week on the Up North Low Down podcast, we bring you stories and interesting conversations

shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

school massacre that killed 19 children and two teachers and left many more injured.

Sergio, the DOJ report is a brick, 500 pages long, lots there.

Anything at all, though, that grieving families can hold on to for answers?

the fact that law enforcement agents who responded to the shooting treated it initially as a

barricaded subject situation and not as an active shooter.

That's huge because when there's a barricaded subject, police are encouraged to negotiate.

But when there's a shooter, police are trained to use all their tools and do whatever they

have to do to stop it.

But in Uvalde, police retreated for a while after the shooter injured two officers and

then waited 77 minutes to confront the shooter and ultimately kill him.

Attorney General Merrick Garland was in Uvalde and he told families of the victims that their

loved ones deserved better.

an hour as they waited for their rescue.

shooter protocols, the tactics in place since the Columbine shooter school massacre nearly

25 years ago.

And he blamed the botched response on the failed leadership of the incident commander,

former Uvalde school's police chief, Pita Redondo.

The Justice Department says Pargas was not trained to be an incident commander and didn't

demonstrate adequate command leadership during the shooting.

But the report doesn't name many other names, and that's something that disappointed many

of the victims' family members.

The fact is there's still deep frustration here with law enforcement.

Here's Vincent Salazar, the grandfather of 11-year-old Leila Salazar, who was killed

at Robb Elementary.

There's no reason this should have happened.

They ignored the training that was supposed to be since Columbine, and they ignored it.

the shooter out and never treating an active shooter as a barricaded situation.

You know how overwhelming the grief is there, and it probably will never end.

But has this investigation delivered maybe a little bit of closure, any at all, for the

people of Uvalde?

loved one at Robb Elementary, and the answer is no.

Kimberly Rubio lost her 10-year-old daughter, Lexi, and you can hear the pain in her voice.

prosecution.

and they're again calling on lawmakers to end future law enforcement failures by improving

police training and passing gun control laws that could help prevent the next mass shooting.

Sergio, nice to hear your voice again.

Good to hear you.

through February.

to pass the year-long bills they were supposed to pass back in September.

Eric, we're kind of getting used to stopgap bills.

Why haven't they passed the full-year spending bill yet?

For a long time, politics was sort of the art of the possible, right?

Compromise was the name of the game, especially in moments like this, of divided government.

But I'd say over the last 15 years or so, there's been a growing number of Republicans

who have sort of a different approach.

They'd rather shut down the government entirely than compromise on policies that they feel

are insufficiently conservative.

And they see bipartisan bills, bills that you pass with Democratic votes, as failures.

And in a Congress with a wafer-thin Republican majority like this one, that group just holds

a lot of influence right now.

and he's new on the job, right?

He's about 90 days in, and he's relied on his sort of early days goodwill to set a bipartisan

top line spending target, which was a big deal in negotiations with other congressional

leaders and keep the lights on with these short-term bills.

But both moves really kind of irked his anti-compromise members, folks like Chip Roy of Texas.

Here's Roy speaking out against the funding bill that they passed last night on the House

floor.

massive omnibus spending bill that all my Republican colleagues, with the exception

of two in this chamber, were adamantly opposed to, and they're going to vote for it.

other Republicans and vote with Democrats to fire Johnson and throw the chamber back

into chaos.

You'll probably remember something like that happening this fall.

So Johnson is busy balancing their demands while still coming up with bills Biden could

sign.

That's a really hard ask, and so far it's just been these spending bills, the short-term

bills, that have been possible.

That's what we're looking at?

Yeah, yeah.

March 1st and March 8th are the two deadlines.

Immigration, Ukraine deal, a lot going on.

on an immigration and Ukraine aid deal.

And in all the ways the House hasn't been working toward compromise, the Senate really

has been.

Democrat Chris Murphy, independent Kyrsten Sinema, and Republican James Lankford have

been hammering away at an immigration part of this deal for months.

Senate leaders from both parties agree with Biden on the need for Ukraine aid.

This is all linked together.

But even if the Senate does get a deal done, right, the question is back to the House,

where Speaker Mike Johnson has so far backed his faction of anti-compromise folks, and

he controls what comes up for a vote.

So unless he has a change of heart and is willing to put forward a compromise deal,

I'd say immigration reform is probably still going to stagnate.

And that's been the story in Congress for more than three decades at this point.

The last reform was 1986.

I mean, I'd like to be positive about stuff, Eric, but it doesn't sound like there's going

to be a lot of hope of getting any more legislating done this year, right?

But, you know, I suspect we'll see more political stunts and other kinds of inquiries.

For one, the president's son, Hunter Biden, has just reached an agreement with Republicans

to give closed-door testimony in the House.

He'd previously refused to appear behind closed doors, but acquiesced just as the House Republicans

were preparing to hold him in contempt.

So a lot to come.

Eric, thanks.

between Iran, a main sponsor of Hamas, and Pakistan.

Then Pakistan carried out its own strikes inside Iran, which killed nine people.

It adds even more uncertainty in a part of the world central to U.S. interests.

To help sort this out, we turn now to NPR's Peter Kenyon in Istanbul.

Peter, this is a part of the world that has seen attacks in the past.

What has happened so far this week on a considerably larger scale?

What's happening?

Shalatl, and that's in Balochistan, a large territory.

It straddles southwest Pakistan, Iran, parts of Afghanistan.

Tehran says it was concerned about the possibility of escalating cross-border violence by the

group.

Pakistan swiftly responded with a deadly strike inside Iran's Sistan Balochistan province,

and Iranian officials say there were children among the dead there.

There are signs that both sides would be interested in de-escalating the situation at this point.

But with tensions running high, it might not take much to set things off again.

I mean, Israel continues its war on Hamas.

The Iran-backed proxy militia in governing power in the Gaza Strip.

And Israel is exchanging fire with Hezbollah.

That's the Lebanese militant group backed by Iran.

What might all of this mean for the U.S. and Western approach in Iran?

I spoke with Ali Vayez.

He directs the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group.

He says the Hamas attack that left some 1,200 people dead in southern Israel last fall

effectively rules out any diplomatic improvement in relations with Iran.

Here's how he put it.

the de-escalatory understanding that Iran and the U.S. had negotiated over the summer

and has completely shut the door on the prospect of any resumption of negotiations

about the future of nuclear diplomacy between Iran and the U.S.

there's another potential front to worry about.

by the Hamas attack on October 7 as everyone else.

Does that hold water outside of Iran?

but that doesn't absolve Tehran of responsibility.

Iran has financed and armed these proxy militias for years.

It's hard to see how the October 7 attack would have happened were it not for that.

But on the narrow question of whether Tehran was behind this attack,

analyst Sanam Vakil at the U.K.-based Chatham House think tank says there is this general

assumption that Iran plays some kind of role of a puppet master.

But that doesn't mean it ordered this attack.

Here's a bit of what she said.

capacity-building support over a long period of time and deferred to these groups to manage

relations and politics within their own entities that they operate.

So it's not a command and control relationship.

It's the one that gave these groups the means to commit bloodshed

in the name of resistance to the U.S. and Israel.

And she says it should be held accountable.

Peter, thanks.

I'm A. Martinez.

Today's episode of Up First was edited by Kelsey Snell,

Eric Westervelt, Mark Katkov, Reena Advani, and Alex Wolfley.

It was produced by Ziad Butch, Ben Abrams, and Nina Kravinsky.

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