The editors of the Washington Post are shocked, shocked to find politics going on in the Trump presidency:
AFTER ALL of President Trump’s bluster about his “great love†for “dreamers,†brought to this country as children through no fault of their own, it turns out he’s content to use them as leverage in a high-stakes game of political horse-trading. Mr. Trump seems willing to strip them of jobs, security and homes unless Democrats buckle on a range of Republican immigration priorities, including an even longer-standing object of the president’s ardor: a beautiful border wall.
You use your bargaining chips where you find them. If you like law or sausage, etc.
What in the world do the editors expect? Do they really think that the Democrats aren’t holding the DREAMers political hostages? A deal could be struck any time they cared to. They’d rather have the issue than a solution. That’s the basic problem with our politics today. The two sides despise each other so much there’s very little they won’t do to poke sticks in their opponents’ eyes.
As it is the harder the Democrats “resist” the more extreme Trump’s reactions will be. What a world, what a world.
One mans political hostage is another mans noble concern, or at least thatscwhat they’d have you believe.
The Democrats should tough it out. I’ve seen this game played in California, with Proposition 187, twenty years back.
It was hardly necessary, that law. Most political science types looking at the issue even back then sort of thought Latinos would fit in very happily in a Republican-run state. Religious, hard working, family oriented, generally down on homosexuality. What wasn’t there for Republicans to like about such people?
But it made Republicans so damned happy! to finally show those cruddy brown-skinned Spanish-speaking animals what little regard NORMAL people had for them. Oh God! It felt GOOD!
And now there aren’t any state-wide elected Republicans in all of California, in the 40 million people who make up an eighth of this great nation. Those brown skinned animals could vote and enough of them did so that Republicans lost elections. Many elections.
California’s a very strange place, I know, but there are Hispanics living in other states. And Orientals, who for some weird reason object to white people who hate other races. And some Jews, who have historical reasons for disliking exclusionists. And almost as many Moslems and Hindus and folks in other religious sects.
These people just aren’t likely to start voting for Republicans unless they get the idea that Democrats and Republicans are basically just the same politically, people who agree on building walls between the USA and Mexico for example. Once all the minorities learn that both the major parties are just the same, they’ll probably start to vote Republican.
Democrats shouldn’t try to speed that up.
Illinois’s Hispanic population is about 17%. 28% of Chicagoans are Hispanic. A third of California’s population is Hispanic. Nearly half of the residents of Los Angeles are Hispanic. California’s population is so large and has such a high proportion of Mexican-Americans that they comprise a hefty proportion of all U. S. Hispanics. California isn’t just weird. It’s divergent.
When I was a kid in St. Louis most of the Hispanics were of Spanish descent, left over from when Spain ruled Louisiana. There was only one Mexican restaurant in town. There were so few Mexican-Americans there that they basically all knew each other. I was acquainted with most of them through family connections but that’s a story for another time.
I think the dreamers were clearly held hostage to encourage a bi-partisan immigration reform, and that’s a fairly common practice when legislators weigh incrementalism versus comprehensive change.
In response to the failure of the Gang of Four proposal to even get a vote in the House, Obama cut the knot and left comprehensive reform in pieces. But because his act was an exercise of executive discretion, it didn’t create any permanence and left immigration an issue for the 2016 election, in which the person elected campaigned for a wall with Mexico, a ban on immigration from terrorist countries, and repeal of Obama’s executive orders on immigration.
So we’re somewhat back to stage one, except that now the executive has the names and locations of a bunch of young people that are in the country, and the bargain to be struck is no longer with Marco Rubio, but with Donald Trump.
I agree with PD’s analysis.
Plus, let’s go back to 2010 when the DREAM act failed a Senate Cloture vote as a clean bill. At the time, Democrats had 60 seats yet 5 of them voted against cloture, one did not vote at all and the bill died (Only 3 Republicans voted for and 3 others did not vote). So the cloture vote “only” got 55 votes. It had already passed the Democrat-controlled house.
The House and Senate are now much different. It’s hard to see how this could pass today as anything but one piece in a much larger bill.