The Senate Democrats relinquished their idiotic refusal to negotiate a stopgap spending bill on Monday, clearing the way for the full services of the Federal government to resume. The vote on the Senate floor to end the filibuster was 81-18, clearing the way for the passage of this spending bill. The House was expected to follow through in much the same fashion later Monday.
This appears to have been a major miscalculation by Senate Democrats, most notably the minority leader Charles “Chuck” Schumer, who caused the filibuster in an effort to secure non-deportation for illegal immigrants who were brought into the United States as children. The expiration deadline for former President Obama’s executive order for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was set by President Trump to happen in early March of this year.
US Senator and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
Schumer and other liberal Democrats tried to seize this opportunity to hold the federal government and a large number of its employees hostage so that people who are breaking the law can continue to break the law. That is really about the scope of this. Illegal immigrants are people who are in the United States illegally. Further, the DACA program has been in place since 2014, and it is actually illegal itself. Further still, in the last three-plus years, although 1.5 million people were enabled to receive DACA protection, only 780,000 did the paperwork to get the deferment. The other 720,000, apparently, have done nothing. In almost four years, they have done nothing.
And this is the group of people, who are willful lawbreakers by remaining in an illegal status when a golden opportunity – indeed, practically an AMNESTY, was offered to them, if only they do a few simple steps?
Schumer and Pelosi and other liberals have definitely gotten this issue completely wrong. The Washington Examiner reported that fewer than 30 percent of Americans, surveyed on this issue last December, supported shutting down the government for the sake of these DACA people, many of whom, as noted before, still remain completely illegal in terms of their status of living in the United States.
Even though the Senate moved to re-open the government pending a new round of negotiations on immigration, Mr. Schumer gave a speech in which he continued to blame President Trump for the shutdown, and this speech angered some of the very people he needs to have as allies if the Democrats were to get their victory on this. His language was so corrosive that even Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), who helped broker the deal to end the shutdown, muttered quietly to her colleagues, “please, stop” as Schumer was speaking.
Senator Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, gave a rather unusual but probably accurate remark:
If we learned anything during this process, it’s that a strategy to shut down the federal government over the issue of illegal immigration is something the American people did not understand.
This is certainly true, though the MSM hype on both sides of this debate pointed at the issue of the loss of services caused by the partial shutdown of the Federal government. With all the hype and hullabaloo about the cessation of a relative few services, the media managed to make something that is relatively innocuous a major drumbeat headline over the last three days. In much of that hype there was precious little discussion of exactly what the immigration issue was, and why it was so important that many people got docked pay (temporarily, but inconveniently, for sure) for the sake of protecting people who are breaking the law by being here illegally and doing nothing about it.
Hopefully the facts get more press and perhaps the renewed immigration debate to come will be better served by intellectual honesty and a strong sense of sovereignty under the rule of law.
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