WaPo:
In spending fight, Republicans embrace Trump’s hard-line stand on immigration
Some Republicans worried, as they did even before Trump’s rise, that this will harm the party in the long term as the country becomes more ethnically diverse. In the short term, it has complicated bipartisan spending talks, revived GOP tensions and left lawmakers without a sweeping deal on an issue that has long vexed Congress.
The fact is, you can’t negotiate with someone so feckless and undisciplined (let alone ignorant and unqualified). And the funny thing is his own party knows it as well as we do.
So in the end 4 Rs (Graham, Lee, Paul, Flake) voted no and 5 red state Ds (Heitkamp, Manchin, Donnelly, Jones, McCaskill) voted yes. Bipartisan thumbs down, and R’s did not have 50 votes. And, of course, this administration is unprepared for this and has not planned.
Two more points: 1. Schumer kept his caucus together. They're serious about this. 2. GOP as a party is hard right on DACA and they just got exposed. That policy will not fly.
On top of the #Trumpshutdown, or #shitholeshutdown, or whatever, there’s the rest of the Trump unpopularity to deal with.
LA Times:
As Trump's first year in office ends, his support base has eroded and the opposition is energized
Donald Trump began his presidency a polarizing figure; he ends his first year a beleaguered one.
As the anniversary of Trump’s inauguration approaches on Saturday, the president’s support has eroded, his opposition has gained energy and his party faces bleak prospects for the midterm elections in November, according to a new USC-Dornsife/Los Angeles Times nationwide poll.
Just under one-third of those polled, 32%, approved of Trump’s job performance, compared with 55% who disapproved and 12% who were neutral. That 23-point deficit represents a significant decline since April and the last USC/L.A. Times national poll, which found Trump with a 7-point approval deficit, 40% to 47%…
The 55% disapproval closely matches the average of other recent, nonpartisan polls; the 32% approval is several points lower than the average, most likely because the USC/L.A. Times poll explicitly gives people the option of saying they neither approve nor disapprove, which not all polls do.
WaPo:
Looming shutdown raises fundamental question: Can GOP govern?
A visibly frustrated Marc Short, the White House’s legislative affairs director who is working to try to avoid a shutdown, placed all of the blame of the current predicament on Congress.
The short answer is no and the long answer is no, they can’t.
Robert Schlesinger/US News:
There's a storm brewing and it's not named Daniels. Neither is it related to matters of the president's waistline so much as his inability to get his arms around more than a bumper-sticker conception of policy.
The government teeters on the brink of shutting down, and doing so under one-party rule for the first time since it became a weaponized practice during the Clinton years. Why? In no small part because the self-proclaimed master of the "Art of the Deal" has proven incapable of actually closing one.
Paul Kane/WaPo on the wishful thinking in DC:
The public has always supported the idea of letting dreamers stay in what is, for many, the only country they have any memory of; a CBS News poll released Thursday showed that almost 90 percent of those surveyed supported that position.
But the issue gets complicated once funding the federal government enters the mix. Just 46 percent of those who support permanent status for DACA beneficiaries say it’s worth shutting down the government.
Moreover, a poll of 12 Senate battleground states conducted for the Senate Majority PAC — affiliated with Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) — produced its own mixed results for Democrats.
Overall in those 12 states, voters would blame Trump and congressional Republicans rather than congressional Democrats if there is a shutdown, by 45 percent to 35 percent.
In my view there's a lot of over-analysis on a government shutdown and who gets the blame.The GOP runs the place, and Trump blew it up. Art of the blown deal.
Example of racist president supported by racist people:
Example of racist president hiring racist people:
Mark Murray/NBC:
Poll: More than half of Americans strongly disapprove of Trump
By party, 78 percent of Republicans approve of the president’s job performance, compared with 8 percent of Democrats and 33 percent of independents.
Trump’s overall approval rating of 39 percent in the NBC/WSJ poll is lower than George W. Bush’s (82 percent), Bill Clinton’s (60 percent) and Barack Obama's (50 percent) at this same point in their presidencies.
Trump’s job rating in last month’s NBC/WSJ poll was 41 percent.
The new NBC/WSJ poll was conducted January 13-17 — after the controversy over Trump’s profane words about immigration from certain countries, during the possibility of a looming partial government shutdown and before the president’s one-year anniversary in office on January 20.
John Harwood/MSNBC:
One is an extension of the Children's Health Insurance Program. The other is continued protection from deportation for the so-called dreamers in Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Polls show strong public support for both.
On Capitol Hill, CHIP has enjoyed bipartisan backing throughout its two-decade existence; Republican leaders themselves have vowed to extend it. Trump says he, like Democrats, wants to protect the dreamers so long as senators from both parties reach a bipartisan compromise on some other immigration issues.
Senators reached that bipartisan compromise. But Trump is now rejecting it.
That's why Democratic senators — and some Republicans — have so far withheld votes needed to prevent a shutdown.
In other words, Republicans in 2011 and 2013 withheld votes in pursuit of goals that were divisive, partisan and quixotic. Democrats are withholding votes now in pursuit of popular goals embraced by both parties.
Dahlia Lithwick/Slate:
More Than Words
Jeff Flake might be all talk and no action. We should still listen to what he’s saying.
It is more than fair to complain that Flake and McCain are spouting empty words about other empty words, talking one way and behaving another. In giving a speech about defending speech, Flake and McCain have gone for a ride on a Möbius strip of meaningless inaction. Whee!
But critics of Flake and McCain are at least somewhat guilty of the same hypocrisy.
The persistent defense of Trump’s reckless tweeting and swearing and racist ranting has always been that it’s all “just words.” Sure, he says one thing but means another. Sure, he tweets something then claims someone else wrote it. Sure, he says “the wall,” and then John Kelly says “not the wall,” and then he tweets “the wall” until it’s less word salad than word smoothie. The aggregate effect is that it’s all just talk and that none of it matters. This is an argument advanced by Trump’s lawyers as a formal matter and by his White House defenders as a rhetorical one.
If lawyers, journalists, and serious thinkers on the left have stood for anything in this past year, it has been for the idea that you can’t Snapchat your way through policy, blurring language and meaning until nothing matters. So, if we are apt to take Trump’s threats directed at the press and intelligence agencies and at the courts as serious and consequential and worthy of redress, it seems just slightly fatuous to dismiss his critics as offering mere words in response.
Tom Nichols/WaPo:
Were President Trump’s critics, then, overwrought in their predictions of doom? PJ Media’s Roger Simon has declared that Never Trumpers (like me) should apologize for their apostasy and get into the trenches to fight the advancing leftist hordes. New York Times columnist David Brooks, although still reluctant in his defense of Trump, suggests that were it not for the president’s bizarre tweets, “we’d see a White House that is briskly pursuing its goals.”
This is nonsense. Trump’s presidency has done daily damage not only to the Republican Party and the conservative movement but, more important, to our constitutional system of government. The president is eroding the unwritten norms that serve as the civic girders beneath our political and legal infrastructure. And his foreign policy, insofar as he has one, is diminishing our global standing and jeopardizing our security.
It is sometimes difficult, in the wind tunnel of noise created by Trump’s most hysterical critics, to distinguish what is merely appalling from what is genuinely dangerous. Not everything the administration has done is wrong or disastrous — it has even gotten a few things right, such as the strike last year against Syria. But it is clear that Trump has already left so much destruction in his wake that it may be hard to put the pieces together again after he’s gone.