Perhaps it is time to award Vanity Fair contributor T.A. Frank a kewpie doll for experiencing a brief moment of mental clarity.
Although his January 21 column takes the requisite liberal shots at President Donald Trump and Republicans over the current government shutdown, when you get past that and dig into his details it amazingly suggests that Trump was correct in holding firm on the DACA conditions he clearly set forth which must be met for any negotiations to go forward on that issue. Frank's strange encounter with the truth begins with his recognition that despite the obfuscation by the Democrats and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, DACA is indeed the reason for the shutdown in WILL DEMOCRATS LOSE THE GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN?
Neither party wanted this shutdown—because no one knew how it would play out. At the same time, both parties knew, deep down, that it had to happen—precisely, again, because no one knew how it would play out. The bases of both parties were too far apart on one of the most divisive issues in the country, that of immigration, to compromise, and each side suspected it had the upper hand. Sometimes, the only way to know if you’re going to win a war is to fight it.
A very quick summary: Democrats, and many Republicans, want to grant citizenship to about 3 million “Dreamers,” people who came to the United States illegally before they reached the age of 16. After negotiations with the White House over the Dreamers collapsed, all but five of the Democrats (joined by four Republicans) voted to block a Congressional Resolution to keep the government funded for several weeks more. Each side now blames the other. Democrats say that Donald Trump broke his word and allowed the White House to be hijacked by immigration hardliners. Republicans say that Democrats are holding government funding hostage to an issue unrelated to the budget.
Despite the wish of congressional Democrats for the public not to be aware of this, Frank admits that this shutdown is in reality a Dreamer Shutdown as was confirmed in the January 21 Washington Times:
Democrats called it the Trump shutdown. Republicans labeled it the Schumer shutdown. But in reality, it was the Dreamer shutdown.
The recipe for the current congressional gridlock is complex, but at the top of the list of ingredients are the illegal immigrant Dreamers who pushed Democrats to launch the filibuster that sent the government careening into a partial shutdown.
With that reality check on the reason for the government shutdown out of the way, Frank then admits that Trump's DACA stance has been clear all along on certain basic issues:
For all his shifts, Trump generally reverts to the line taken by immigration hawks, because he knows his base will accept nothing else. As galling as it is to Democrats to have to hear Trump depart from his own positions only to retake them, they also know that the White House is officially asking for the following: 1) Funding and construction of a border wall; 2) The use of E-verify, a centralized system to determine legal status, for all hiring; 3) The abolition of the “Diversity Visa,” a lottery that picks 50,000 people from around the world, annually; 4) An end to so-called chain migration, meaning the granting of visas not just to spouses and small children but also to parents, adult children, and siblings, who in turn can (over time) bring over their spouses, children, parents, etc. If those are granted, then the White House is willing to grant legal status to the 800,000 DACA recipients.
Even more amazing than the admission that Trump was clear in his DACA conditions is Frank's criticism of the "compromise" by Senators Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham:
Even hardline Republicans accept that they won’t get their way on all of these things, but the bipartisan bill presented by Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham offered almost none. There would be no E-verify. There would be no change to chain migration, apart from a condition that the parents of legalized Dreamers would be not be eligible to be sponsored by their children (but they would get authorization to stay). Half of the diversity lottery visa would have been devoted merit-based immigration from the same countries, while the other half would go to people who were granted temporary status to stay past their initial visa period (for instance, Haitians who were here when the earthquake of 2010 struck). Trump would get only $1.6 billion for his wall, subject to “environmental review,” something that could hold it up indefinitely. And the number of people eligible for legalization would not be 800,000 but, according to some outlets on the right, closer to two million. Had he signed off on it, Trump would have lost his base immediately and irrevocably.
Frank goes on to weigh the advantages of both sides on this issue including the admission that immigration means Democrat votes:
... time is on the side of Democrats, in the long term. Each year, the United States takes in about a million new people legally, and foreign-born Americans overwhelmingly vote Democratic. Immigration will flip more and more states from red to blue, much like what happened with California.
He follows up by revealing that shutting down the government over DACA is probably a losing issue for Democrats:
But Republicans have advantages of their own. At the most basic level, the law, as it stands, is against DACA recipients, since they are here illegally. Changing that requires an act of a majority-Republican Congress, and action is harder than inaction—and certainly not without concession. Also, most of the concessions that Republicans want in exchange for legalization are, polls suggest, favored by voters, including a merit-based system (60 percent) and E-Verify (around 80 percent). A plurality supports ending chain migration. Finally, DACA has nothing to do, technically, with the question of whether to fund the government. The limited polling so far suggests a hefty majority (56 to 34 percent) consider funding government to be more important than shutting it down over DACA.
Finally, T.A. Frank reveals a not so secret Democrat weapon with which Newsbusters readers should be familiar:
On the other hand, most news outlets and editorial pages are more sympathetic to Democrats on this matter...
And on every other matter.
