It may have started with DACA, but it's the Border Wall and our immigration system (chain immigration).
Trump called on Senate Republicans Sunday to go totally “nuclear,” changing the rules so they can pass any legislation with a simple majority of 50 votes, plus Mike Pence’s tiebreaking vote. Hard-liners like Ted Cruz, the architect of the 2013 shutdown, endorsed the idea. But McConnell and other old bulls who have spent decades in the minority continue to resist this push because they understand that, over the long-term, turning the Senate into a majoritarian body like the House would benefit liberals much more than conservatives.
A big reason that the prospects for putting points on the board this year are so poor is that Trump is an unreliable negotiating partner. “Negotiating with President Trump is like negotiating with Jell-O,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer complained Saturday. “It’s next to impossible.”
He’s not alone in feeling this way. Republicans were freaked out that Trump would cut a deal with Schumer when the two met alone on Friday. McConnell publicly expressed frustration last week, before the shutdown, that he didn’t know what Trump wanted: “I’m looking for something that President Trump supports, and he’s not yet indicated what measure he’s willing to sign.”
Trump even undercuts his own staff. During a bipartisan meeting at the White House led by the president two weeks ago, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen passed out a four-page document on the administration’s “must haves” for any immigration bill. The list included $18 billion for a border wall, eliminating the diversity visa lottery program and ending “extended family chain migration.”
“But one person seemed surprised and alarmed by the memo: the president,” Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey and Ed O’Keefe reported on the Sunday front page. “With Democrats and Republicans still in the room, Trump said that the document didn’t represent all of his positions, that he wasn’t familiar with its contents and that he didn’t appreciate being caught off-guard. He instructed the group to disregard the summary and move on, according to one of the lawmakers in the room … ‘It’s like the wedding where someone actually stands up and objects to the wedding,’ the lawmaker said. ‘It was that moment.’”
The uncertainty that Trump creates makes it hard to hold coalitions together. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) declined to say, for instance, that he would vote for any immigration deal that the president negotiates. “I can’t make that commitment at all,” he said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Trump’s own aides have privately diagnosed the president with “defiance disorder” to describe his apparent compulsion to do whatever it is his advisers are most strongly urging against, forcing them to clean up the chaos he creates. That’s according to a book by Fox News host Howard Kurtz that will come out next week. Two other nuggets from “Media Madness,” via Ashley Parker:
“In late July, the White House had just finished an official policy review on transgender individuals serving in the military and President Trump and his then-chief of staff, Reince Priebus, had agreed to meet in the Oval Office to discuss the four options awaiting the president in a decision memo. But then Trump unexpectedly preempted the conversation and sent his entire administration scrambling, by tweeting out his own decision — that the government would not allow transgender individuals to serve — just moments later. ‘Oh my God, he just tweeted this,’ Priebus said …
Steve Bannon told Trump when he left the White House in August that his main goal back at Breitbart would be “to bring [McConnell] down.” “Trump said that was fine, that Bannon should go ahead,” Kurtz writes.
Trump’s reelection campaign released a web video accusing Democrats of being responsible for “every murder” committed by an undocumented immigrant. It opens with a clip from a courtroom outburst by Luis Bracamontes, an undocumented immigrant accused of killing two California cops four years ago. “Now Democrats who stand in our way will be complicit in every murder committed by illegal immigrants,” a narrator says. “President Trump will fix our border and keep our families safe.” White House legislative affairs director Marc Short said the video was made by an outside group when Chuck Todd pressed him about it on “Meet the Press” Sunday, but the video literally ends with the president saying: “I'm Donald Trump, and I approve this message.”
-- David Nakamura notes the different terminology deployed by conservatives and liberals in the immigration debate reflects how entrenched each side has become: “On the right, Trump and his allies have warned of the dangers of ‘chain migration,’ railed against ‘amnesty’ for lawbreakers and urged a shift toward a ‘merit-based’ system. … On the left, advocates have defended a tradition of ‘family reunification’ and cast undocumented immigrants who arrived as children as ‘dreamers’ and ‘kids’ in need of special care — even though some are in their mid-30s. … The starkly different terms show why it’s so hard for Washington to agree on major immigration reform. For years, over several administrations, the two sides have accused each other of being unable or unwilling to accurately name the problem with a system they agree is broken.”
But the liberal base is ginned up. Weigel reports from a women’s march in Las Vegas this weekend: “In Democratic thinking, Nevada had become Exhibit A in how the party could overwhelm Republican voters by activating the base. It started with [former senator Harry Reid’s 2010 reelection win], the first time that a Democrat had raised the profile of ‘dreamers[.]’ … The lesson Democrats and activists took from the race was that they could force fights on complicated issues, like immigration and gun violence, if they gave them human faces. … At Sunday’s rally, and around Las Vegas, organizers were working once again to make dreamers famous.”
-- If this shutdown follows the pattern of the past two, neither party will suffer long-term consequences. FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten notes: “[After the 1995/1996 shutdown,] Republicans recovered on the generic ballot by February 1996, just a month after the final shutdown of that period ended. And in the elections later that year, they held onto their majorities in both the House and Senate. Clinton, meanwhile, recovered his lost support by March 1996. He would go on to easily win reelection later in 1996. Basically, America put the same people who shut the government down back in office.”
-- The president’s son, Eric, said on Fox News that the shutdown is “a good thing for us.” “The only reason [Democrats] want to shut down government is to distract and to stop [the president’s] momentum,” he said. (HuffPost)
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