A little nugget here from a Politico article just shows what a total gutless wonder Speaker Paul Ryan is. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called him earlier this week with a suggestion: Why not put the bipartisan immigration compromise up for a vote to please Democrats and moderate Republicans while also allowing a vote on the nativist immigration bill to please GOP hardliners? In other words, let's just bring them to the floor and let them live or die on their own merits.
That would have cleared the way for Ryan to have Democratic help passing a funding bill. Heather Caygle writes:
Pelosi called Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) earlier this week and urged him to bring two immigration bills to the floor for a vote — a hard-line conservative measure sponsored by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and a bipartisan proposal from Reps. Will Hurd (R-Texas) and Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.).
Democrats think the Goodlatte bill would fail on the floor while the Hurd-Aguilar proposal, which has more than 50 bipartisan cosponsors, could pass. Members of the House Freedom Caucus have also been pushing Ryan to bring the Goodlatte bill up for a vote, threatening to withhold their votes for a spending bill if he doesn’t do so.
Ryan responded to Pelosi's request by saying he “couldn’t do that,” according to two Democratic sources. Ryan’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Ryan: Sorry, I left my spine in the womb.
Anyway, the entire Politico piece reads like a lesson in Democrats' message discipline amid Republicans' bumbling effort to keep the government funded. Perhaps, the GOP could start with tying no-nothing Trumpy's thumbs behind his back.
In the meantime, Democrats are teasing out the angles on how a principled "no" vote on government funding will translate politically, not only for individual members, but for the caucus as a whole and also for their colleagues in the upper chamber.
House Democratic leaders have been preaching a message of unity to their members all week, emphasizing that sticking together is their biggest leverage point to force Republicans into serious negotiations to protect Dreamers. [...]
“We’ve had plenty of time to address the Dreamers; now’s the time,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), whose northern Virginia district is heavily populated with government employees.
Connolly said given the demographics of his district, he would vote for the continuing resolution only if he were the “last vote standing” between a government shutdown or not. [...]
House Democrats say they’re cognizant of how the vote affects their colleagues in the Senate. If many House Democrats supported the spending bill — even after Republicans had enough votes to pass the measure — that could make it harder for Senate Democrats to stand firm in their opposition.
“I think we understand the connections between the two; they’re not separate standalone actions,” Connolly said. “What we do here does have an impact there, and what they do there does have an impact. So we need to be mindful of that.”
About a dozen vulnerable Democrats voted for the last two stopgap funding bills in December — but only after Republicans had enough votes for passage.
Democrats have been clear on protections for Dreamers for months. They held up their end of the deal by piecing together bipartisan compromises in both the House and the Senate and now Republicans are scrambling to find the votes within their own caucuses because their monosyllabic members had trouble comprehending the term com•pro•mise.
And the more desperate Republicans become, the more they point their fingers across the aisle.
That’s not the fault of Democrats—not for even a millisecond.