Democrats opted not to make a false choice over the shutdown

Republican leaders would like us to believe that Democrats are responsible for the federal government shutdown that began Saturday after the Senate failed to pass a measure providing the funding necessary for its operations. For example, John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat, is “the person most responsible for creating this unnecessary fiasco.” I like Cornyn, as it happens, and I would certainly be frustrated right now if I were in his position. As the Senate majority whip, he has to maintain a working relationship with the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell.

And McConnell is blaming Democrats for the Senate’s failure. They had insisted that some kind of protection for “Dreamers” be included in the funding measure, which would have required 60 votes to pass.

With that said, Schumer is the Senate minority leader. Republicans control the Senate. They also control the House and — in theory, albeit not always successfully — the president, Donald Trump.

In fairness, Republicans aren’t solely to blame for this unnecessary fiasco. But they clearly bear more responsibility for it than Democrats. According to a Washington Post-ABC poll, released on Friday, 48 percent of Americans see it that way. Just 28 percent blame the Democrats.

Moreover, McConnell should be ashamed of himself. The continuing resolution that he failed to pass also included funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which covers almost 9 million children. Those children are now at risk of losing access to care.

And in McConnell’s version of events, which many Republicans have since seconded, that’s because Democrats decided to throw them under the bus.

“The vote to fund the government and the 9,000,000 kids depending on CHIP should be easy, except the Democratic Leader has convinced Senate Ds to filibuster any funding bill that doesn’t include legislation they are demanding for people who came to the United States illegally,” he tweeted on Friday.

“This should be a no-brainer,” McConnell said in another tweet, which explicitly posited that Democrats had to make a choice between the 8.9 million children covered by CHIP or the 690,000 currently enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

In a sense, I agree. When presented with an obviously false choice, I choose not to play along. But because of what happened in the Texas Legislature last year, I was worried that Senate Democrats might in this case.

Texans successfully thwarted Republican leaders in their quest to pass the “bathroom bill,” Senate Bill 6. But the effort to stop Senate Bill 4 was demonstrably less successful; our state now has a “show me your papers” law. Credit for Democrats

Republicans, to be clear, are to blame for that. It was Gov. Greg Abbott who called for a crackdown on sanctuary cities at the beginning of the legislative session and has now signed SB 4 into law.

Democrats, by contrast, opposed the bill as it made its way through the Legislature. Since they don’t control either chamber, it was perhaps inevitable that their efforts would fail.

Still, the debate over SB 4 was genuinely gutwrenching for several reasons. One of them is that although progressive Texans were against the bill, many of them seemed to see the bathroom bill as a more urgent priority. When SB 4 came to the floor of the House, where Democrats were pleading with their Republican colleagues to consider how much harm it would cause, the gallery wasn’t even full.

In fairness, the state Capitol is in Austin, not Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, El Paso or the Rio Grande Valley. But still — this is Texas. We literally used to be part of Mexico. Those of us who are Anglo should be a little more sensitive to the potential subtext of certain political debates.

And although Cornyn is right to say that the shutdown is an unnecessary fiasco, Schumer and the Senate Democrats deserve credit for doing the right thing this week. I was worried that they would fall for the false choice McConnell was peddling. DACA’s popularity

Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans support the idea of giving DACA recipients permanent protections from the risk of deportation. But we haven’t insisted that Congress act accordingly thus far. And there really are 9 million children covered by CHIP, which Friday’s actions left unfunded.

But Democrats weren’t the ones demanding that we choose between helping them or helping DACA recipients. In fact, DACA recipients are among the taxpayers supporting CHIP, which is an incredibly worthwhile program.

And although it’s true that DACA doesn’t end until March 5, I understand why Senate Democrats were skeptical of the Republicans who insisted last week that they wanted to tackle this issue later. Those Republicans also knew that they would need 60 votes to pass the funding measure, and the group they used as a hostage could also have served as a fig leaf. Nine million children are enrolled in CHIP. It’s hard to think of a better excuse for voting for “amnesty.”