Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Thursday, January 25, 2018

Show Me

The Trump White House has released an immigration bill, which is not a bill and hasn't been released.  Rather it's the promise of a bill that will make everyone happy.  As with so many things coming from Trumpistan, it is probably best to assume this is a lie.

The outline of the issues addressed are friendly to Trump's priorities: funding for the border wall, ending the diversity lottery and curtailing family migration preferences (chain migration).  In return there will be a DACA fix of some kind.  Trump gets three things, Democrats and whatever counts as a moderate Republican gets one.  Maybe.

Because we don't know what the DACA fix will look like.  Maybe it allows DREAMers to stay, but only under very tight conditions that suck.  That's the Goodlatte plan in the House.  If it was what the Senate was looking at, maybe you could justify beginning negotiations on the other three items.  But if they start out with a maximalist position on all four issues - Goodlatte's DACA "fix", Trump three items - you're basically negotiating in bad faith.

Plus, who knows what Trump will agree to from any given moment to the next?

No comments: