Trump puts issue where it belongs
To date, President Donald Trump’s relationship with Congress has played out in public with the same diplomacy and subtlety as a Taylor Swift song. Like the delightfully vengeful pop queen, Trump can’t help but use his megaphone to settle old scores —earlier in August, he even used a presidential signing statement attached to a bill relating to Russia sanctions to throw shade at the legislature, saying “Congress could not even negotiate a health care bill after seven years of talking.”
(Or as noted political philosopher Swift recently put it, “I don’t like your little games / Don’t like your tilted stage / The role you made me play / Of the fool, no, I don’t like you.”)
Of course, Trump’s dig at House and Senate leaders was to distance himself from the disastrous health care reform collapse that happened on his watch. The American president, perhaps unaware he was speaking aloud, actually said that when Obamacare collapsed, he wouldn’t “own it.”
But despite believing Congress to be too inept to pass a health care bill he sought “on day one,” Trump suddenly has a new task for the House and Senate: take the heat off of him for repealing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.
On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Trump’s plans to rescind DACA, a program that protects children of illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. But Trump’s proposal leaves DACA in place for six months, pushing the responsibility off on congressional Republicans to find a solution during that grace period. If they don’t, Trump can then blame Congress for throwing innocent children out of the country.
It’s obvious why Trump would suddenly trust a legislative body that he clearly believes is a pack of inept jackanapes; the president is dumping the issue squarely in Congress’ lap so he can keep his campaign promise to rescind the program, but so he can also eventually sign something that saves him from that same promise.
But if Trump’s ultimatum to Congress gets the House and Senate to approve a legal framework for determining who stays and who goes, it actually will have been a success.
The DACA program itself was created by an executive order by President Barack Obama back in 2012, without any input from Congress. Now Democrats are learning that an executive order’s greatest strength is also its primary weakness — when a president writes sweeping immigration reform on his own, the next executive can just as easily rescind it. In a sense, Obama’s actions on DACA are akin to the U.S. Supreme Court decreeing same-sex marriage to be the law of the land; it’s a positive outcome from a deeply flawed process.
Yet if Congress remains constipated and can’t produce an immigration reform bill, Trump will have made a tremendous mistake. In conservative circles, the entire backbone of the pro-life community relies on the idea that pre-born children are “innocent” — the same presumption of innocence should be applied to young children who have been born and then carted to America by their undocumented parents. These children are in many ways completely indistinguishable from any other children who grow up in America, and banishing them to countries they have never known would be unconscionable.
But if the prospect of the deportation of innocents provokes Congress into passing a bill that protects the status of so-called “DREAMers,” then Trump’s bluff will have been worth the temporary national indigestion it caused.