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Dealmaker Donald Trump had a deal. It was deal he said he would sign just two days earlier on live TV. It was a deal he said he would "take the heat" for if it came to that, then he buckled—and for no reason at all.
The deal would have been an all-around victory for him. It gave him $1.6 billion for the border wall he so badly wants. It gave him a DACA fix for Dreamers, the "bill of love" he'd asked Congress to give him. And it would have given him the votes to pass a long-term spending bill to both fund the government and the military, a top priority for Trump and the White House.
But Trump looked that deal in face and spit at it. Almost literally spit at it, because he had been primed by his nativist aides and the nativist lawmakers his aides had summoned to the White House to kill the deal. Mission accomplished.
Trump not only killed the deal, but he did so in terms that left the deal's brokers—Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin and GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham—speechless.
“After Lindsey and I left the room and got in the car together to come back to Capitol Hill, it was silence in the car,” Mr. Durbin, of Illinois, recalled in an interview on Thursday, describing their mutual distress at the ominous turn the negotiations had taken as well as the president’s conduct. “We had just witnessed something that neither one of us ever expected.”
Given the force with which Trump rejected the deal, he also backed Democrats into a corner. By referring to "shithole countries" and wondering why we needed "more Haitians"—he left Democrats no room to negotiate. Bottom line, this is no longer a discussion just about Dreamers, even though that's what Republicans are claiming. This is a discussion about fundamental principles and whether Democrats are willing to let naked racism drive immigration policy to the point where we as a country are willing to let some 800,000 people who were brought here as kids—many of whom know no other country as home—be left to dangle in the political winds.
Republicans say there is no urgency. They are not the ones in danger of being deported in two months and seem to be suffering amnesia about how incapable they are of passing anything, let alone something as fraught as a bipartisan compromise on immigration.
Democrats have held up their end of the deal. They have been clear for months that if Republicans wanted their votes to pass a funding bill, they would need to include a fix for Dreamers and fund the Children's Health Insurance Program. Democrats listened to Trump's desire for a DACA deal and they worked out one in both the House and the Senate, neither of which Republicans are willing to bring to the floor for a vote.
When White House aides Mick Mulvaney and Marc Short were faced with questions Friday morning about Trump's culpability for a shutdown, they had no answer whatsoever.
"It seems that the whole process was blown up by the president's comments," one reporter observed.
Mulvaney responded with delusional flashback to 2013: "When Republicans tried to add a discussion about Obamacare to the funding process in 2013, we were accused by Nancy Pelosi and chuck Schumer of inserting a non-fiscal, non-financial issue into the spending process in order to shut the government down."
Obamacare was a divisive, partisan-driven topic. Not deporting Dreamers and funding health insurance for the kids of low-income families are both broadly popular. Journalist John Harwood does a good job explaining the differences between today's shutdown dynamics and those of 2013.
Republicans in 2011 and 2013 withheld votes in pursuit of goals that were divisive, partisan and quixotic. Democrats are withholding votes now in pursuit of popular goals embraced by both parties.
Mulvaney also claimed at Friday’s briefing, "We don't want a shutdown." That falls a little flat from a former Freedom Caucus member who cheered the 2013 shutdown and explained earlier this year that a "good" shutdown would be one that drove "the message back home to people that [Washington] really was as broken as they thought it was when they voted for Donald Trump."
In fact, Mulvaney couldn't name a single thing the White House was willing to concede to avert a shutdown. Not one solitary thing.
“Are there any concessions that this White House is willing to make to try to get support from those Democrats that you need?” queried a reporter.
"[Democrats] don't oppose anything in there," Mulvaney responded, referring to the current short-term spending bill, ignoring that what's not in the measure is the real issue at hand. Shorter: No, we're not willing to make any concessions.
Donald Trump had a deal—border security funding, wall funding, a fix for Dreamers, votes to avert a shutdown—and he spiked it. Axios obtained a leaked memo that revealed just how vehemently opposed Trump and his White House were to that deal. The spirit of the memo totally betrays the deal Trump said he wanted at the nationally televised meeting last week—a relatively limited bill providing a fix for Dreamers and beefed up border security. After that, the Phase 2 would address immigration reform more broadly.
The president said he would insist on construction of a border security wall as part of an agreement involving young immigrants, but he said Congress could then pursue a comprehensive immigration overhaul in a second phase of talks.
So while Trump and Republicans point the finger at Democrats and say vote for this now, we'll get to the Dreamers later—they have amassed zero credibility. Democrats have engaged in good faith negotiations on DACA time and again, and Republicans continually kick the can down the road in spite of what they say.
As Democratic Sen. Chris Coons noted on MSNBC Friday morning: "It is hard for Democrats to believe that there is seriousness on the part of Republicans about addressing it at another time."
That’s because Republicans have proven they’re neither capable nor serious.