A common complaint expressed about the Democratic party is that they are gutless. They cave at the slightest pressure, too scared of their own shadows to fight. And yet when they do start to show some spine, when they do start to stand firm, to stand for the principles they believe in, the first ones to call for them to surrender are amazingly enough, their own base. And we wonder where the Democrats get it from.
The government has been shut down for two days (both on the weekend), and already some of the base are showing signs of panic. Many people here are calling for the Democrats to just give kicking the can down the road just one more try. Surely, surely, all the issues will be resolved if we give the Republicans just two more weeks. Surely McConnell will schedule a vote on DACA after the government re-opens. Would he lie to us?
Others are saying that DACA is not worth fighting for at all, we should have just taken the deal that had been offered: Funding for CHIP for 6 years (which few people realize contains a poison pill inside that guts Obamacare funding), Increased funding for the military but not social programs (of course), and Trump's Secret Police ( enough of a poison pill to be worth a shutdown for on its own!). We’re told to think of the CHIP kids who are losing funding.
CHIP expired months ago. The Republicans. Did. Nothing. They could have voted on it months ago. They. Did. Nothing. A clean bill would have passed easily, but I don’t think they even put a dirty CHIP bill up for a vote.
The Republicans took both CHIP and DACA hostage. They are threatening to shoot them, and their idea of a compromise is to say “Here’s the deal: we’ll release the sick kids, but we’ll also shoot the immigrant kids and blame you for it”. Does that sound like someone willing to negotiate in good faith to you?
Amazingly, many people here are falling into the trap, saying that we have to choose CHIP and forget about DACA. Do that and you hand Trump, Ryan, and McConnell a winning strategy to repeatedly kill off social programs by taking two hostages and “benevolently” asking us which one we would like to keep. Asking us to choose between CHIP and DACA is a false choice. There is no reason why both cannot be done. Picking one or the other forces Democrats into a losing scenario where their base gets carved up and angered as the particular programs they like get executed to save others. There’s a reason why people say “don’t negotiate with hostage takers”. Giving them all they want, if only gosh golly they just let the hostages go this time, encourages more hostage-taking.
Others have no sense of pattern recognition, and think that maybe this time Lucy McConnell will actually do a deal with a whole 2 weeks of government funding, and won’t yank the football away like he’s done so many times before. There is no reason to believe he is trustworthy at all. He doesn’t even keep promises to his own Senators. The Republicans are the ones who brought us here, to this point, NOT the Democrats. The GOP let us here through breaking all countless norms and traditions of decorum, through perversion of the process of writing legislation, through refusal to co-operate, refusal to do their own jobs, refusal to keep their own word. The Republicans brought us here through an utter unwillingness to negotiate in good faith. Only a fool would trust that they would keep their word this time, if only we just open the government for two more weeks so Trump gets his SotU without embarrassment.
Some of a more “practical” bent say that we should re-open the government and take CHIP because the Republicans will never fix DACA. Speaking from a purely practical point of view, I can think of few worse messages to send to the Hispanic and Latino populations watching than to say when the chips are down, they cannot count on the Democratic party to stand up for them.
But hey — maybe the “practical” people are right. Maybe this is a fight the Democrats simply cannot win. Even if that is true, I have two things to say:
The first is that maybe the Democrats can’t win the fight in the end, but they definitely can’t win it if they give up almost immediately. The line has been crossed, the shutdown is on. We have pushed our chips into the table, it’s too late to fold. All that will do is prove that the Democrats lack the spine needed and that they will blink when pressed. The Democratic party will lose all leverage for future negotiations.
The second is that some things are more important than sheer practicality. Standing up for human decency is important. Standing up for kindness and mercy is important. Fighting for those who have nowhere else to turn to is important.
We don’t always get lucky enough to be able to choose to only fight when all the advantages are on our side. We don’t always have the option of fighting only the easy fights. Sometimes the fight comes to you, ready or not. Sometimes the choice comes about what you believe in, where you can either make a stand, or else show that you don’t really believe in it that much anyway. The Democrats have chosen to make a stand. It’s up to us to choose now: do we stand with them, or do we decide that our principles aren’t really worth fighting for anyway?