Shutdown over not a second too soon

Thank goodness that’s over. On Monday, the Senate voted 81 to 18 and the House of Representatives 266 to 150 to reopen the US federal government and fund it to February 8, as well as to thankfully stop holding hostage the healthcare of almost 9-million poor kids. Government shutdowns may make good partisan theatre but they don’t make any winners.

Now perhaps Congress will finally get around to taking up a bill to protect the nearly 700,000 “dreamers” — immigrants who were brought to the US illegally as children — legislation that almost nine in 10 Americans support. That, at least, was the offer the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, made to break the stalemate. It wasn’t an ironclad promise, of course, and given McConnell’s record it’s fair of many Democrats and other people of good faith to question his word.

Nonetheless, the spotlight is now where it should be: on the failure of President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress to take care of the Dreamers, despite repeated claims that they want to.

The White House is occupied by a man with no evident principles beyond promoting his own brand and chalking up “wins” however he might define them. He’s so uninterested in the particulars of governing that he recently told legislators that he would sign whatever immigration bill they sent him. How do you negotiate with a CE who doesn’t know what a good deal is?

The other stumbling block is more familiar: an antiimmigrant faction of congressional Republicans that has scuttled immigration reform for two decades as it falls further out of step with public sentiment. There’s good reason to worry this will be no different in three weeks; whatever the Senate might agree on, House speaker Paul Ryan has not committed to bringing a bill to the floor.

The nation is stuck with a party that controls the federal government even though its agenda is deeply unpopular with the American people. New York, January 22