General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: gops are already saying there wont be a daca vote. [View all]appal_jack
(3,813 posts)Quoting (former DU'er) Will Pitt, "if you're going to do something like this, you stick it out longer than a goddam weekend, or you leave the club in the bag. With this, they failed on both a moral and tactical level. Just stupid self-damage."
I agree with Will here. As far as I am concerned, the DREAMERS are Americans, and deserve a pitched battle by all of us on their behalf. There really can be little debate about the morality without veering into Stephen Miller hater-land.
If a government shutdown was the right tactic, we should have been willing to stick it out for weeks. If it was the wrong tactic, why did we start here? I'll answer my own question at least partly: the CR was the first opportunity for leverage that Democrats had, and they chose to go to the mat over CHIP and DACA. There are about a dozen other issues I think are every bit as important as these two, and could have also been demanded, but I respect Democratic leaders' choice that these two deserve priority. Of the two, Democrats got CHIP for six years, which is no small potatoes (although a later Repub Congress could of course again de-fund it).
The problem with folding on DACA with no real progress on the issue is that there are 800,000 DREAMERS, and their families, AND the larger Hispanic and immigrants' rights communities who now have strong reason to think that Democrats will abandon them the minute the going gets tough. That's bad electoral politics, as well as being moral and tactical failures.
-app