Shut him down
Even as Republicans and Democrats in Congress edge closer to reaching a deal to avert a government shutdown — you know, doing their actual jobs — the childish agent of chaos in the White House tried Tuesday to throw a grenade into negotiations. “I’d love to see a shutdown if we don’t get this (immigration) stuff taken care of,” proclaimed the President at a meeting with law enforcement officials about the MS-13 gang, one of his regular dishonest attempts to try to portray illegal immigrants, writ large, as dangerous lawbreakers.
“If we have to shut it down because the Democrats don’t want safety and, unrelated but still related, they don’t want to take care of our military, then shut it down. We’ll go with another shutdown.”
It all leaves no doubt that the President prefers conflict, in fact craves a fever-pitch culture war in which he can try to cheaply demagogue Democrats as choosing criminal aliens over American citizens, to rational debate and the possibility of steady progress.
This, after Trump last month claimed he wanted “a bill of love” to treat care of so-called Dreamers “with heart” before their deportation protections expire in March.
This, after Trump last week, in his State of the Union address, recited poetic paeans to bipartisanship.
That posturing is all revealed now to be Trump l’oeil, fakery designed to make him look presidential when all he truly wants is to try to force through major changes to legal immigration at the effective point of a gun.
Changes that would slash in half the number of people admitted to the United States based on the absurd slander that those we admit, who are far less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, are likely to be terrorists.
Democrats and Republicans, having learned from mistakes both made last month, explicitly separated immigration — including the rightly urgent drive to protect Dreamers — from a spending plan so as not to drag the entire government over the cliff again.
Members of the House and Senate: Pay no attention to the man in front of the curtain. He’s only the President of the United States, Washington’s biggest obstacle to getting things done.