The General US Politics Thread

Better than not fight at all, they showed they cared about dreamers, but it just wasn't viable to have a government shutdown every month because Trump wouldn't sign a bill with protections for them.

Life is unfair...

"Backing down?"

For god's sake, they're the minority party and they still managed to squeeze a concession out of the GOP.

You measure success against such intransigent stupidity in inches, not miles.

Literally everything the Democrats do short of just gunning down enough Republicans until a budget with DACA passes will be seen as taking an L optically because the public, both for and against us, is determined to see the party as losers.

edited 9th Feb '18 6:56:49 AM by CrimsonZephyr

"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

In this case I can sort of get that; they forced this, at least appearance wise because of DACA, even if getting other things through was obviously always also important.

That's an emotional issue and it affects a fair number of people so I get it. At the same time, everything else also affects a large number of people even if it isn't as tearjerking/inspiring, and it's frustrating that that gets overlooked.

Longer term, if they flip congress somehow, this means that the Republicans can't use the debt ceiling as a weapon next year.

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Sen. Leader Mitch McConnell begins procedures, so that next Friday a vote on Immigration Reform and Dreamer Protections can begin.

At least McConnell kept his word. I don't know how far it will go, especially in the House, but at least McConnell kept his word.

Literally everything short of passing DACA protections will be seen as an L because it will be an L. If we don't get protection for DACA recipients, then that's a loss, because it means all those people lose legal status and may be deported.

The fact that Democrats are the major underdogs in this fight doesn't mean they don't lose if they fail to get what they want.

Thankfully, it looks like McConnell is actually holding up his part of the deal, and Paul Ryan has said things that suggest he'll at least consider something rather than 100% stonewalling. That's progress, at least, but nothing's certain until Trump signs it into law.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I couldn't disagree more, DACA isn't the only thing that matters and focusing on it like you are is myopic and irrational. Getting funding for infrastructure and Puerto Rico is a win by any reasonable standard for the opposition party (because guess what those are also things the Democrats want).

"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn

The problem is that DACA was the priority that we made a public fuss about. There weren't passionate speeches about infrastructure funding, the opioid crisis, or the debt ceiling. DACA was the line in the sand that we drew at the start. No DACA, no deal, period. We refuse to abandon DACA, we refuse to abandon the Dreamers, we will fight for DACA above all else!

And now there's a deal, there's a budget, and there's no DACA. In the public eye, this is a clear and visible loss. We said we'd never abandon DACA and then we abandoned DACA. We said no budget would pass without DACA and then we passed a budget without DACA. We failed, we lost, we caved in, and in the end, we gave up the Dreamers.

The message this sends is that the Democrats don't really care about the Dreamers, the Democrats can't stop the Republican agenda, and the Democrats aren't even really trying. This is a huge loss for us that is going to make our voters feel discouraged and hurt our turnout in the midterms.

Especially once Dreamers start getting deported. The moment the first story hits about Dreamers being sent away from the United States, the public narrative will be that the Democrats let it happen, because they never really cared about minorities in the first place. They just lied and said they did for votes.

Choosing the spending bill as the hill to die on for DACA was a mistake. We got a lot of stuff we wanted but we didn't get the one thing that matters to the narrative, the one thing we swore up and down in public in front of cameras that we would get at all costs.

Didn't. The spending bill had Democratic votes helping it pass.

edited 9th Feb '18 8:07:07 AM by TobiasDrake

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

Haven't there already been stories of dreamers being deported, or is there distinction dreamers still protected by DACA bring deported.

Of course, if people were smart to realize that the Democrats can't stop the Republican agenda (you need to win elections to do that...) we wouldn't have this issue. The Dreamers were probably screwed once the GOP seized control over all 3 levers of federal power, nothing the opposition can do but maybe delay until they take them back. Cause no way are you getting a veto proof DACA bill to Trump.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

So a spending bill gets passed that favours Democrat priorities more than Republicans...

And McConnell is keeping his end of the bargain for some inscrutable reason, which means a lack of progress on this can be squarely blamed on the Republicans/Trump...

But it's a failure because it didn't become an unproductive tantrum that gets nobody's priorities and shuts the government down. God, I hope not all people are as miserably pessimistic as this attitude.

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What evidence do you have to support any of this, because I am very skeptical of the idea that the public is definitely going to react like this. Yes the public cares about DACA (thus making the speech a victory and brilliant decision) but they also don't want the government to be shutdown.

, I could not agree more.

edited 9th Feb '18 8:12:56 AM by Fourthspartan56

"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn

Basically this. Talking about this in terms of "the Democrats not trying" or "giving up" presumes that they 100% could have protected them all if they really wanted to, which strikes me as very naïve.

It's still bad looking because they're the ones who pushed the issue like this, but the fact remains that losing doesn't mean they weren't trying, and they shouldn't be blamed for it since they're not the ones who wanted it to expire in the first place.

edited 9th Feb '18 8:13:27 AM by LSBK

Also, anyone who says they want to help Dreamers but then doesn't vote for Democrats (or worse, vocalizes this and encourages others to abstain as well) should be laughed out of the goddamn room.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

They actually could have, given that 67 Republicans in the House voted against the spending bill. Were it not for the fact that 73 Democrats voted in favor of it, allowing it to pass 240-186, we'd still be in shutdown.

We can't even say, "We did everything we could to stop it but we don't hold power in Congress," because it passed with bipartisan support. And without DACA, the one line in the sand we insisted it wouldn't pass without.

edited 9th Feb '18 8:16:48 AM by TobiasDrake

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

Also, it's worth reiterating that the budget having Democratic votes to pass is something that's impossible for the leadership to fix when our system has no meaningful mechanism to enforce party discipline.

edited 9th Feb '18 8:17:45 AM by CrimsonZephyr

"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

Assuming that voting for the spending bill is a bad thing, which is ridiculous considering that it continues government funding and funds various good things. Yes DACA matters but your focus regarding it at the expense of all else is not rational.

"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn

It's a failure because we didn't get the only thing people care about, the thing we were making speeches about and talking about in public constantly for the past few weeks. We made a big deal out of one thing and only one thing, and we got a bunch of other stuff, but we lost the one thing we swore we would get at all costs. Can you not see how that influences the public narrative?

People aren't talking about infrastructure reform. They're talking about the Dreamers. That's the hot-ticket agenda item that the entire country is embroiled in discussion of. That's where the narrative sits. Everything we gained is great for governance, but the election won't be decided by who won more governance points, it will be decided by who tells a better story about what they've been doing these last two years.

Unless you can show me Nancy Pelosi's eight-hour record-breaking speech on the undeniable importance of infrastructure reform, this is a loss for us in the public eye.

edited 9th Feb '18 8:20:48 AM by TobiasDrake

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

The public supports DACA, but doesn't support a shutdown over it. Politically, it wasn't a good move, and when the Republicans took border crap off the table, the PR of a shutdown became untenable.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

I notice you are rather tellingly ignoring my request for actual evidence, you don't get to declare that it's a loss in the public eye without proper evidence to support that claim. Yes the public cares about DACA but they also care about the government shutting down and I don't see any evidence the former is more important than the latter.

Exactly this.

"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn

I agree that it wasn't a good move. It was a terrible move. But it's one we made. We wrote ourselves into a corner where we either publicly abandon the Dreamers or we piss everyone off with a shutdown.

Like I said before, choosing this as a hill to die on was a mistake in the first place.

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

The Democrats in Congress made DACA the big-ticket agenda item, but I'm honestly not sure Democratic voters, at least the ones that aren't part of its intelligentsia, think the same way. The government shuts down too many times or for too long, all the gutter rats won't give a damn about Dreamers either way. When all those meaningful government services dry up, they'll be too busy scouring the absolute bottom of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to care what happens to immigrants and that'll cost us the hoi polloi vote.

"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

Your refusal to acknowledge my posts and provide evidence is extremely telling, fine enjoy your uncritical alarmism and I'll withdraw from this conversation.

"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn

"Abandoned" = "moved to a debate the next day where all failures can be blamed on the other party, much like any failures in the budgetary stage, but without fucking the entire country up in the process".

Considering that there was no real way to stop the Republicans eventually just pushing something far more abjectly terrible in the long run...

Well, next week, but close enough.

edited 9th Feb '18 8:27:49 AM by RainehDaze

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I don't think that Tobias is completely wrong sadly, we made it seem like we were willing to shut down the entire US government to protect Dreamers when we weren't, that's going to cost us.

It won't cost us as much as shutting down the government would have however, I think that trying to doing a shutdown could have cost us 2018 completely and possibly given the Republicans a filibuster proof majority in the Senate.

Shutting down the government is incredibly unpopular, the blame normally falls on the non-presidential side (538 did analysis and the non-presidential party has never done better than a draw during a shutdown) and we'd have failed, even if party leadership had stayed firmed enough democrats would have defected over this to pass the budget, which would have been much more damaging.

If we'd forced a shutdown we could have strait up split the Democratic Party in two, things may be able to get bad but they could have gone worse.

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran