Democratic leaders were not consulted before the speech, so Trump’s proposal appeared to be a compromise with Vice President Mike Pence and First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner. Anyway, it was a non-starter. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called it “simply more hostage taking,” but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he would bring up the bill with Trump’s proposal for a vote in the Senate. McConnell had refused to let the Senate vote on bills passed by the Democratic House to reopen the government.
As a practical matter, Democrats would gain little by accepting the temporary relief Trump offered for young immigrants and refugees, since the Supreme Court on Jan. 18 declined to review lower court rulings that kept President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in effect for at least one more year. And a trial in federal court in New York challenging Trump’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status for thousands of Haitians concluded Jan. 10 with internal government emails showing the administration was so determined to end the program that it ignored its own government’s research flagging health and safety concerns. A decision is expected after March 1.
Perhaps to allow Trump to pose as a moderate on immigration, right-wing commentator Ann Coulter criticized Trump’s proposal for a three-year extension of protection for DACA recipients and refugees who hold Temporary Protected Status. “Trump proposes amnesty,” she said. “We voted for Trump and got Jeb!” Coulter was largely responsible for getting Trump to renege from his agreement to accept a bipartisan continuing resolution that would have prevented the government shutdown in December.
Democrats see no incentive to reward Trump’s strong-arm tactics, particularly as recent polls show a majority of the public doubts the need for the border wall and blames Trump and the Republicans for the closures that left 420,000 “essential” workers toiling without knowing when they would get a paycheck, 380,000 other employees “furloughed,” without knowing when they would get back on the payroll, and millions of employees of federal contractors laid off with no prospects for getting paid.
Trump has tried to harness chaos in his business career, and the shutdown distracts from Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s corrupt campaign and ties with Russian oligarchs, but polls show the public is getting tired of Trump’s antics. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released Jan. 13 showed 53% of Americans say the president and his party deserve the blame for the government shutdown, while another 29% point their finger at the Democrats in Congress.
In the Post/ABC poll, conducted Jan. 8-11, support for the wall has increased over the past year, from 34% in January 2018 to 42% this January, but a majority (54%) still oppose the wall. And only 24% are buying Trump’s line that there is a security crisis at the border. Nearly half (47%) said there is a serious problem but not a crisis.
Trump’s chronic bad faith frustrates attempts to build compromises. He is, after all, a notorious liar with, at best, a reckless disregard for the truth. The Washington Post has three reporters in its Fact Checker department working full time analyzing Trump’s false claims. They have tallied 8,158 false or misleading claims by Trump in the two years he’s been president, as of Jan. 20, including more than 6,000 such claims in the president’s second year — and many of the false claims have been repeated, in some cases, more than 100 times after the misstatements were pointed out. (That compares with 18 false or misleading claims the New York Times found President Barack Obama had made over eight years.) And Trump already has reneged on at least two deals he has made with Democrats on protecting young immigrants who were brought to the US as children, and he has flip-flopped on other offers.
On Sept. 13, 2017, after Trump said he would end DACA, and he called for a comprehensive immigration reform bill, he reportedly agreed with Senate Democratic Leader Schumer and House Democratic leader Pelosi on the broad strokes of a DACA-border security deal that didn’t include Trump’s wall, only to see the White House walk it back the next day.
Trump on Jan. 9, 2018, at a bipartisan meeting in the White House, called for a bipartisan agreement on DACA, family-based migration, the diversity lottery and border security. On Jan. 11, Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) informed Trump six bipartisan senators had reached a compromise, which included a path to citizenship for eligible young immigrants, the first year of Trump’s border wall funding, ending the diversity visa lottery and reallocating those visas, and restricting the ability of former DACA recipients to sponsor other family members. Trump invited them to the White House, but in the meantime he was talked into rejecting the deal, and in the meeting he made his now-infamous “s**thole countries” comment.
Feb. 14, 2018, a bipartisan group of senators unveiled a compromise plan, which included $25 billion for the border and a pathway to citizenship for young immigrants, but the White House lobbied against the compromise, which got 54 votes in the Senate, but fell short of the necessary 60 votes.
As we’ve said before, if Republicans were serious about stopping undocumented immigrants from taking jobs from Americans, Republicans would support reinstating laws making it a crime to hire undocumented aliens. They won’t do that because the Chamber of Commerce won’t allow it, and farmers who provide lip service to the need for a wall along the southern border aren’t looking forward to replacing their undocumented workers who tend their crops and livestock. And Trump’s properties allegedly have hired undocumented immigrants to build and run those properties — including two women who reportedly cleaned Trump’s room at a golf resort in New Jersey.
Ever since Newt Gingrich led a Republican insurgency to power in the House in 1995, closing down the government has been a feature, not a bug, of their budget policy — and Trump has embraced that practice. Seeing 800,000 federal workers going without pay is clearly causing him no distress, and reflects his own business practices.
USA Today June 9, 2016, noted that Trump was involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades — and a large number of those were ordinary Americans who said they had to sue to get Trump or his companies to pay them. Trump told USA Today if a company or worker he hires wasn’t paid fully, it’s because The Trump Organization was unhappy with the work.
Trump on Jan. 14 retweeted an article from the conservative Daily Caller, attributed to an anonymous senior official in Trump’s administration, arguing that 80% of federal workers do “nothing of external value” and that “furloughed employees should find other work, never return and not be paid.” The writer argued the shutdown is an opportunity for Trump to greatly reduce the size of government.
There is need for a good-faith compromise on immigration reform, but we don’t see it happening under Donald Trump. Republicans must join with Democrats to pass a continuing resolution — with a veto override, if necessary — and get those 800,000 federal government employees, as well as more than four million people who work for contractors, back on the payroll. — JMC
Editor's Note: After government employees had been forced to work 35 days without pay, Trump on Jan. 25 announced he would accept a stopgap bill to reopen the government for three weeks while Democrats and Republicans negotiate over border security. Call your senators at 202-224-3121 by Feb. 15 and demand that they stop this nonsense and finally pass the spending bill, regardless of whether there is money for the wall.
From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2019
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