Democratic outrage over DACA is getting ridiculous
Democratic outrage over DACA is getting ridiculous
Sep 22, 2017, 3:17 PM
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The Democrats consistently have overplayed their hands with regard to immigration. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
What if President Trump, who has yet to be able to convince the Senate to pass Obamacare repeal legislation, simply implemented repeal himself?
What if he just deemed by executive action that its remaining provisions no longer were valid and the country was moving in a new direction?
Democrats would react in roughly the same way as they have since two weeks ago when President Trump announced his plan to phase out the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and called on Congress to fix the problem before the nearly 800,000 young people affected would be ordered out of the country.
Former President Barack Obama, who has decidedly not followed President George W. Bush's practice of refusing to comment on his successor's administration, called the move "cruel" and "wrong." House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., deemed it a "despicable act of political cowardice."
Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., a leading advocate for illegal immigrants and open borders, went so far as to call White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, a Marine Corps General and gold star father, "a disgrace to the uniform."
And Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee, topped all of that when he likened refusing sanctuary to DACA recipients – and all other illegal immigrants, for that matter – to refusing to help Jews escape Nazis in World War II Germany. This was a curious choice for a metaphor considering his past association with the radical Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan.
But what none of those critics would admit is that Trump is essentially reversing an edict issued by Obama after Congress rejected legislation that would have protected the Dreamers from deportation. In what he called at the time a "temporary, stop-gap measure," Obama simply changed immigration law on his own and ordered a system established to let the DACA recipients stay.
A group of states, led by Texas, had threatened to sue the Trump administration if they didn't end DACA. The Trump administration expected them to prevail on the merits -- as Bill McGurn pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, Obama likely knew his move was unconstitutional and had said more than six years earlier that "that's not how democracy works." So it moved to shut down the program in an orderly way over two years rather than instantly by court order.
And if protecting immigrants meant so much to Obama, why did he do nothing to push immigration reform when he had control of both houses of Congress in his first two years in the White House and, according to McGurn, actively undermine reform opportunities when he was in the Senate?
The Democrats consistently have overplayed their hands with regard to immigration. A deal that truly would let the DACA people stay is out there to be made if they could move past the hysterics.
Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., has called for honoring the process and "taking care of these kids." Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., now the Senate's leading immigration hawk, has said he would support allowing DACA recipients to stay if the legislation also could be fashioned to favor skilled over unskilled immigration and place limits on chain migration to curb abuses.
Republicans in Congress are under far more pressure to tighten the border, where illegal immigration has increased sharply in recent months, than to provide a fix for the Dreamers, particularly one that smacks of amnesty in any way. They can take their time and get it right.
But for Democrats, the calculus is different. This is their issue – more important, they believe, to their electoral chances than healthcare, the economy, or the opioid epidemic. The farther left they move, the more success they anticipate in 2018 and beyond.
This is why, as Harry Enten pointed out at FiveThirtyEight, Democrats continue to move sharply left. It's been little more than a decade since Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006 and less time than that since Bernie Sanders voted to kill comprehensive education reform. Now, insisting on immigration law being done properly in Congress rather than by presidential edict is cruel, low, and wrong.
Tucker Carlson and others suspect Democrats want Dreamers and their families to stay because they are easier to convert than the middle-class Midwesterners they lost to Trump in 2016, costing Hillary Clinton the election. Democrats want "new and more reliable voters from abroad, and damn the consequences for the rest of us," he said.
Whatever the case, the question remains whether congressional Republicans can rise above intra-party differences and protect America and its citizens before it's too late. Americans respect process arguments as long as process is not used to impede necessary progress. Can they do it? Their track record does not augur well.
Ford O'Connell (@FordOConnell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is an adjunct professor at The George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management, worked on John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, and authored the book "Hail Mary: The 10-Step Playbook for Republican Recovery."
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