We begin today’s roundup with The New York Times and its editorial on Donald Trump’s DACA position, which is hard to pin down:
Now perhaps Congress will finally get around to taking up a bill to protect the nearly 700,000 so-called Dreamers, immigrants who were brought to this country illegally as children — legislation that almost nine in 10 Americans support. […] The spotlight is now where it should be: on the failure of President Trump and Republicans in Congress to take care of the Dreamers, despite their repeated claims that they want to. [...]
So what does this White House want? No one seems to know, including Mr. Trump himself. Mr. Schumer said dealing with the president is “like negotiating with Jell-O.” And that was a key factor precipitating the weekend’s shutdown. One Republican strategist said Mr. Trump’s lack of any clear convictions, combined with his ignorance of basic policy matters, “emboldens all parties to take positions that they won’t compromise.”
Paul Krugman also highlights the president’s inability to keep his word or stick to a single policy position:
On Friday night, something unprecedented happened: The U.S. government shut down temporarily even though the same party controls both Congress and the White House. Why? Because when it comes to Trump, a deal isn’t a deal — it’s just words he feels free to ignore a few days later. [...]
[T]he government of the world’s greatest nation is lurching from crisis to crisis because its leader can’t be trusted to honor a deal. But what did you expect? Trump’s whole business career has been a series of betrayals — failed business ventures from which he personally profited while others, whether they were Trump University students, vendors or creditors, ended up holding the bag. And he hasn’t grown a bit in office, unless you count that mysterious extra inch.
Here is Catherine Rampell’s analysis of the shutdown at The Washington Post:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) are responsible for the completely avoidable three-day federal shutdown that Congress moved to end on Monday. They will likewise be responsible for the catastrophe coming in a few weeks if Congress can’t get its act together to raise the debt ceiling.
And Eugene Robinson explains how Trump, who is uninformed and doesn’t care about policy, is being used by Stephen Miller and others:
Everybody seems to know what President Trump wants except President Trump. [...] Trump, bless his cold little cinder of a heart, remains under the impression that he calls the shots on administration policy. Is he so engrossed in what he obviously views as his most urgent task — watching hours and hours of cable news — that he doesn’t see how he has become marginalized? Is he so dense that he doesn’t realize he’s not being served by friends and supporters, but rather is being used?
Michael Tomasky:
There are 9 million kids on CHIP, and 800,000 DREAMers. The latter shouldn’t be abandoned, obviously, but getting six years of CHIP out of the Republicans isn’t nothing.
And the political reason almost certainly has to do with the fact that Democrats have 10 senators up for re-election this fall in states Trump won. We know about the national polls showing 80 and 90 percent support for the Democratic position on the DREAMers, and that’s great. But we don’t know the numbers in Montana, North Dakota, Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia.
Russell Berman dives deep into the divide on the Democrats’ shutdown strategy:
Schumer’s agreement with McConnell did not have the support of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi or the party whip, Steny Hoyer, according to an aide, because Speaker Paul Ryan has not made the same commitment to put an immigration bill up for a vote. But Pelosi and Hoyer didn’t urge all Democrats to vote no, and despite opposite from three-quarters of their caucus, the bill easily cleared the House with most Republicans on board.
Switching topics, at USA Today, Jill Lawrence chronicles the hypocrisy by those who rail against Medicaid as a government giveaway but got rich off of government subsidies:
The administration and conservatives in general are very interested in making certain people (those without much money) prove they are worthy of receiving certain federal benefits (such as food stamps and Medicaid). The Heritage Foundation articulated it this way: Americans who receive these kinds of government benefits should “engage in responsible and constructive behavior as a condition of receiving aid.” That is, they should work or be looking for work, and they should be drug-free.
If only the worthiness test could be paired with a hypocrisy test, and both applied to beneficiaries of government generosity across the board. Take for instance former congressman Stephen Fincher, R-Tenn., who crusaded for $20 billion in food stamp cuts (“this is other people’s money,” and Washington shouldn’t “steal money” from some people to give to others). He accepted $3.6 million in federal farm subsidies from 1999 to 2016 (“other people’s money”). Now he’s running for the Senate.
There is no end to this kind of thing. There have been “actively engaged” farmers who got government money even though they didn’t actually, well, farm. The system gets gamed, one negotiator on the 2014 farm bill told me — your siblings can become partners and get subsidies, even if they're teachers and accountants.
At The Nation, Sean McElwee pens an incredibly important piece on the suppressive effects of so-called “right-to-work” union-busting laws:
In a new study that will soon be released as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, James Feigenbaum of Boston University, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez of Columbia, and Vanessa Williamson of the Brookings Institution examined the long-term political consequences of anti-union legislation by comparing counties straddling a state line where one state is right-to-work and another is not. Their findings should strike terror into the hearts of Democratic Party strategists: Right-to-work laws decreased Democratic presidential vote share by 3.5 percent.
Josh Gerstein at POLITICO details the Common Cause complaint filed over Trump’s alleged hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels:
A watchdog group filed a pair of complaints on Monday alleging that a $130,000 payment reportedly made to a pornographic film actress who claims to have had an affair with Donald Trump violated campaign finance laws.
In submissions to the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission, Common Cause said the alleged payment to Stephanie Clifford — who uses the stage name Stormy Daniels — amounted to an in-kind donation to Trump's presidential campaign that should have been publicly disclosed in its official reports.
On a final note, here’s foreign policy expert Daniel W. Drezner on Trump’s standing in the world:
It’s been a year since Donald Trump became president, and by International Fellowship of Punditry bylaws I am required to have a take. The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts has many thoughts on this topic, but for today let’s focus on foreign policy. And my take is simple: President Trump has failed candidate Trump bigly.