The next vote in the Senate on the now shorter CR (with a commitment to vote on DACA) to reopen government is at noon today.
Karen Tumulty and Michael Scherer/WaPo have a terrific round up of the issues and stakes:
But that same question reveals an enormous political divide. In the summer of 2017, 84 percent on the Democratic side agreed that immigrants were a strength, compared with 42 percent on the Republican side — a gap of 42 points.
As recently as a decade ago, Democrats were leery of looking too permissive on immigration, and anxious to avoid election-year attacks over giving government benefits to the undocumented.
The Democratic stance on immigration is now defined from the increasingly impatient left. Protesters who support a path to citizenship have in recent years made their mark by disrupting events by leaders like President Barack Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
“It is a remarkable shift to see Democrats are leaning into the issue,” said Frank Sharry, the leader of America’s Voice, a liberal organization that supports a path to citizenship for the undocumented. “The Democratic Party is seeing people of color as full and equal parts of the coalition rather than communities that are more important come election time and less important when it comes to legislation.”
NY Times:
A President Not Sure of What He Wants Complicates the Shutdown Impasse
One thing was clear to both sides of the negotiations to end it: The president was either unwilling or unable to articulate the immigration policy he wanted, much less understand the nuances of what it would involve.
Competence matters. The reason there is a shutdown is Trump.
Check out this thread (click and read) to get the full picture of the House version of “Screw The DREAMers” (even CATO gets it):
Read the above thread with this (Politico) and you’ll see why Democrats don’t trust the House to pass anything:
Fractious House Republicans rally behind Ryan on shutdown
The House speaker is a centrist on the hot-button issue, but he has held the line against a vote to potentially end the government shutdown.
Rick Wilson/Daily Beast:
‘President Miller’s’ Shutdown: Yes, Republicans Will Be Blamed—and They Should Be
People see dysfunction and blame who they know. And who is the most famous person in the universe, and which party does he command like an army of dogs?
This Potus is also now a captive of the monster Steve Bannon and President Miller created for him. Trump recognizes that his hard base is intolerant of any compromise on immigration policy that shows the slightest whit of humanity, decency, or political courage. Leading Senate Republicans and Democrats all blame Miller for personally blowing up a DACA deal. In Trump’s all-about-dat-base world, though, purity on this issue is everything.
It’s a foolish short- and long-term political choice, but the Suicide Party is making a lot of those lately. A bipartisan deal on CHIP and DACA would have let Republicans in Congress breathe a small sigh of relief. In a time of Charlottesville, shitholes, and the rest of the racial arson common in this Administration, such a deal might perhaps open up just a tiny lane where members could go back to their districts and say they weren't on board the Breitbartian campaign of mass deportations.
President Miller is in some ways more pernicious then Bannon. Bannon's constant auto-fellation, absurd desire to play the great man of history and frustration with the boring realities of governance and policy, in the end, helped sink him as a White House power player. Stephen Miller sees racial animus disguised as an immigration fight as the glue holding together the alt-right, the social conservatives, and the blue-collar Rust Belt they-took-our-jobs Trump true believers.
WaPo:
‘Language as a weapon’: In Trump era, immigration debate grows more heated over what words to use
The advocates use the term “family reunification” to describe the process of U.S. citizens petitioning for family members in limited categories — spouses, children, parents and siblings — to come here, a process that can take as long as 20 years. After changes were made to the immigration system in 1965, the family category has been responsible for about half of the roughly 1 million immigration visas the nation distributes each year.
But some newspapers and cable television stations have parroted Trump’s use of “chain migration,” often with limited context.
“It’s a real problem,” Gonzales said. “It’s become so distorted. If you use a term in an incorrect or incendiary way enough times, people start using it that way.”
A reminder from Monkey Cage Blog/WaPo:
Astute observers of politics might be tempted to interpret recent developments as indicators of a spike in negative racial attitudes.
But none of this is new. Our research shows that racial attitudes have been increasingly influencing U.S. public opinion for at least 30 years, long before Trump entered the political scene.
Let’s be more particular. White racial resentment has remained remarkably stable over time. But that racial resentment has become much more highly correlated with particular political attitudes, behaviors and orientations. More and more, white Americans use their racial attitudes to help them decide their positions on political questions such as whom to vote for or what stance to take on important issues including welfare and health care.
Republicans obviously have calculated that hard right immigration is the best way to consolidate and rally their flagging base, but there are problems with doing that. One is holding CHIP hostage, a nakedly cynical move now exposed.
Another is putting to the test the "I hear the rhetoric but he won't really do that" Trump voters. Guess what, he'll really do that. now what? Another is traditional American preference for divided government. They all clash with a simple 'rally the base' strategy.
Matt Grossmann/Politico:
Losing a presidential election often stimulates activism, and a new president usually provokes a backlash, but the size of the Democratic resurgence is unprecedented. Democrats have more than tripled the usual number of serious candidates challenging members of Congress. They have competed everywhere in special elections, winning in unlikely places. This—after reaching a low in federal and state offices the party had not seen since the 1920s.
What’s particularly astonishing is how Democrats have accomplished this outside the formal structures of the Democratic Party, which has often seemed irrelevant. Explicitly copying the Tea Party, they founded grass-roots organizations in nearly every district to regularly call legislators. They held large protests on women’s issues, science, climate and racism. More Democrats even started identifying as liberals, coming closer to mirroring the Republicans’ unified conservative identity.
Instead of facing a factional challenge allied with Bernie Sanders, Democrats integrated his young, left-wing supporters with their traditional identity-based constituencies. Elected Democrats of all stripes unified against Republicans’ major two legislative initiatives: tax cuts and Obamacare repeal. All of the party’s allied interest groups have remained stridently anti-Trump.
USA Today:
Polls suggest Trump and GOP could bear the shutdown blame
Any one event happening in January may have no meaning for voters in November. But Democrats say a shutdown would feed perceptions of chaos under GOP leadership.
Trump is a chaos agent. We have chaos. And/but there's an election in November, if you want to register your opinion about it.
Sahil Kapur/Bloomberg:
“If Democrats don’t force Republicans to come to the table and keep their promise to protect the dreamers, 800,000 people could be deported,” said Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama who’s been using his media company to fire up a hard core of activist Democratic voters. Once they’re gone, “There’s no going back.”
Democratic elected officials are propelled by their growing reliance on Hispanic voters and their belief that they’ll be rewarded by if they take a hard line in favor of dreamers, who are mostly of Latino origin. Hispanics make up about 18 percent of the U.S. population and one of the fastest growing demographic groups in the country.
“The dreamers are members of our community who have been with for as long as they can remember and don’t even know another country,” said Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat. “We don’t like people abusing our community members, which is exactly what the president has been doing.”
ABC:
Amid record low one-year approval rating, half of Americans question Trump’s mental stability: POLL
That question aside, a lopsided majority, 73 percent of those polled, rejects Trump’s self-assessed genius. Seventy percent say he fails to acquit himself in a way that’s fitting and proper for a president. Two-thirds say he’s harming his presidency with his use of Twitter. And 52 percent see him as biased against blacks -- soaring to 79 percent of blacks themselves.
Michael Tomasky/NY Times:
What the Shutdown Says About the Future of the Democrats
For now, liberals should cheer this unreservedly. For one thing, the cause of these young undocumented Americans is a good one. But more broadly, the Republicans have been playing this way for years. If Democrats won’t, they’ll just lose. You can’t bring a squirt gun to the O.K. Corral.
At the same time, there are longer-term concerns that citizens should keep in the back of their minds — not about the Democratic Party, but about the republic. I believe the Democrats are still several years away from becoming a movement party in the way the Republicans are. And it’s not necessarily fated to happen, for a host of reasons, ranging from psychological differences between liberals and conservatives to the simple fact that there just aren’t as many liberals in the United States as there are conservatives.
But if it were to happen — if we were to have two movement-subsumed parties — we would be in for some pretty big changes. We would move inexorably toward a more parliamentary system. New parties would pop up in the center — at least one, and I think probably two. Eventually the Constitution would get a revisit. It’s a potentially ominous road. But for now, the Democrats have no choice but to walk it.