The compromise that Congress reached on Feb. 9 will keep the government open until March 23 and it raises the debt ceiling until March 2019. It also provides money for community health centers, health care for children from low-income families, funds to fight opioid abuse and $90 billion in disaster relief for Texas, Florida, California, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, as well as an additional $165 billion to the military, but House Republican leaders refused to promise action on a bill to resolve the situation of the nearly 800,000 immigrants who had been brought to the US as children and signed up for protection under DACA since President Barack Obama issued the executive order in June 2012. President Donald Trump announced last September he would end the program in March.
DACA was created after the DREAM Act, which would have granted legal status and a pathway to permanent residency to undocumented immigrants who have grown up in the US, ran up against roadblocks put up by Republicans. The bill first passed the House, which then had a Democratic majority, in 2010, but Republicans blocked it in the Senate. Obama then set up DACA as a temporary order until Congress could pass the DREAM Act. In 2013, language allowing Dreamers to stay in this country and work or attend school was included in a broader immigration package that passed the Senate with 68 votes. DREAM Act supporters believed they had the votes to pass the bill in the Republican-dominated House, but it died there as right-wing “teabaggers” intimidated House Speaker John Boehner against letting the bill come up for a vote.
The dynamic changed after Trump was elected in 2016 with strong support from his white supremacist base. In September 2017 he announced plans to rescind DACA, but he gave Congress six months to take care of the matter, as he called for lawmakers to “do something and do it right.”
Some Republicans indicated they were interested in a bipartisan solution. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she believed there is “widespread bipartisan support for legislation that would provide some measure of protection to children who are brought to this country through no decision of their own.” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., who chairs the House Republican Conference, said that while she has long said she did not agree with the way President Obama enacted his program, Congress “must protect” the Dreamers who are currently shielded from deportation. She added, “That principle is fundamental for me.”
But Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin granny-starver who followed Boehner as speaker in 2015, also has bowed to the will of the teabaggers, such as Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, who said Obama never had the authority to create DACA; King tweeted that delaying an end to DACA so Republican leadership “can push Amnesty is Republican suicide.”
So Democrats faced the prospect of withholding support for the spending compromise and finding themselves on the same side as the teabaggers in the “House Freedom Caucus,” who wanted to see the government shut down anyway.
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi stood her ground on the House floor in four-inch heels for eight hours Feb. 7, calling for protection for Dreamers. She said she would not vote for the deal, but she let other House Democrats vote their will.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus were split over the spending bill, which meant billions of dollars for their districts. ”I cannot in good conscience go home and say to my [hospitals that serve low-income patients] that I didn’t vote for this because of DACA,” said Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), a member of the CBC, according to Politico. “Or I can’t go home and say to health centers that have already been handing out pink slips, ‘I didn’t vote for this and they gave me money for a permanent fix for your problem.’ I can’t go home and say to union people, ‘Look, they’re going to try to take care of your pension problem, but I didn’t vote for it.’”
Ryan said he would hold a DACA vote, but only on a bill that has Trump’s support, and Trump won’t support a bill that doesn’t have the teabaggers’ support. Democrats can’t place much trust in Trump after he called on Congress on Jan. 9 to put together a bipartisan deal and he then rejected the bipartisan bill Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., brought him Jan. 11, telling them there already are too many immigrants from “s***hole countries.”
The Senate passed the continuing resolution 71-28 shortly before 2 a.m. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., held up the vote until after the midnight Feb. 8 funding deadline because he didn’t get a vote on an amendment to keep Congress under strict budget caps and strip the increase in the debt limit from the package. He expressed outrage at the “hypocrisy” of his Republican colleagues who supported deficit spending, but Paul was oblivious to the fact that just six weeks earlier he had voted for the tax break for billionaires that blew a $1.5 trillion hole in the budget.
Back in the House 119 Democrats joined 67 teabaggers in voting against the stopgap spending bill. But 73 Dems voted with 167 Republicans to pass the bill, 240-186, at 5:30 a.m. on Feb. 9.
“Well, there was no deal,” Reyna Montoya, a DACA recipient from Arizona, bluntly told Julianne Hing of The Nation, when asked how she felt about the overnight agreement. She said Democrats got everything they wanted, except help for young people like herself. Montoya has spent the last few months lobbying Congress, and isn’t giving up on the fight yet.
“They go in front of the camera,” Montoya said. “They say they are champions of us, that they want to protect us? But their words are not going to protect me from deportation.”
Among the “borrow and spend” Republicans who voted to keep government open was Ted Cruz, R-Texas. Normally you can count on Cruz to grandstand as a fiscal hawk on a vote like this, but in this case there are plenty of Republican homeowners in the Houston, Beaumont and Corpus Christi areas who were counting on getting that disaster recovery assistance, and US Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-El Paso, threatens to make Canada-born Cruz sweat in his re-election effort this fall. O’Rourke also disappointed some Dreamers when he voted for the spending bill, including those Texas disaster funds, leaving the Dreamers in the lurch. But the chances for getting a reasonable compromise on immigration reform would be greatly enhanced if Texas Latino voters turn out in November to oust Cruz and other Republican officials who have vilified those who support a path to permanent residency for longtime immigrants.
The best hope for Dreamers to get the immigration agents off their backs and let them stay in this country is if they help Democrats take over the House and Senate, take Paul Ryan out of the process and demonstrate to President Trump and the Grand Oligarch Party that there is a price to be paid for pursuing racist policies. Keep hope alive. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2018
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