First thing’s first, the new “immigration bill” introduced this week by a retiring Virginia Congressman Bob Goodlatte and two other House Republicans is not a serious one. The Center for American Progress: “The Goodlatte bill—a laundry list of enforcement provisions that Trump senior policy adviser Stephen Miller puts under his pillow each night—is designed to move the conversation backward rather than forward; something this extreme can only be read as an attempt to try to throw a wrench into efforts to forge a true bipartisan compromise.” The solution, as always, is already sitting in both the House and the Senate: the DREAM Act. Second of all, is the New York Times smoking some of that stuff that’s now legal in California?
Prominent House Republicans stepped forward on Wednesday with a vision of immigration policy that clashed fiercely with President Trump’s recent overtures of bipartisanship and highlighted how difficult it will be for Congress and the president to reach accord in the coming weeks.
Coming one day after Mr. Trump held an extraordinary meeting in which he laid out the parameters for a bipartisan immigration deal, the House proposal highlighted the uncertainty surrounding negotiations that are supposed to coalesce before the government runs out of money on Jan. 19
“Recent overtures of bipartisanship”? Trump has not backed off the ghoulish Stephen Miller’s white supremacist wish list, because he remains in favor of lashing the number of lawfully admitted immigrants to the U.S. by half, he has not backed off his attacks on family-based immigration (derided by the White House and anti-immigrant activists as “chain migration”), he has not backed off canceling the diversity visa program, and he has certainly not backed off the stupid border wall that will cost American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. And when Trump did seemingly agree to Senator Dianne Feinstein’s proposal to pass a clean DACA fix now and take up other issues later, he had to be reined in by GOP lawmakers and forced to tweet out stuff about his delusional wall. “Overtures of bipartisanship,” indeed.
The only actual story emerging here is how fucking low the bar has been sunk for the most unqualified president of our lifetime. It was a meeting where Donald Trump showed zero understanding about immigration policy. Suddenly it became “an extraordinary meeting” because he managed to remember lawmakers’ names (they were printed on name tags), and a meeting where he seemingly “laid out the parameters for a bipartisan immigration bill” even though he basically said he’d said whatever immigration bill members of Congress put on his desk, no matter what’s in it. Gimme a break.
