The left still dreams of a "clean" DACA bill

The “DACA fix” debate is still ongoing this week. Will we get either Bob Goodlatte’s bill (which, while imperfect, is probably still the best of the bunch) or Paul Ryan’s “compromise” bill? Perhaps they’ll both fail and we’ll restart the discharge petition process. No matter what happens, Democrats and their media enablers are likely to object. This is in no small part because they feel that they’ve got their hands on a winner for the midterms (lacking much of anything else to campaign on besides a general, seething hatred of Donald Trump) and they don’t want to give that up.

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This race to see who can blame the GOP the most was exemplified over the weekend by the Washington Post editorial board, with their very subtly (/sarc) titled editorial, Right-wingers kill clean votes on ‘dreamers’ — and bring up two worse bills instead. Here’s just a small sample of the nonpartisan goodness.

FOR A moment last week, it looked as though the ever-diminishing moderate wing of the Republican Party would assert itself after years of being pushed around by radical right-wingers and a GOP establishment scared of the extremists. But when the chips were down, the moderate bloc in the House could not gather the last few signatures it needed to force a vote on mainstream bills to protect the “dreamers,” immigrants who came to this country as children and now are at risk of deportation. Among those who failed to sign was Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.), who by sticking with House leadership discredited the moderate image she has cultivated in her Northern Virginia district.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) ended the moderates’ gambit to force a vote on relatively clean dreamers bills, which the vast majority of Americans support, by promising that the House would vote on two other bills more heavily influenced by the Republican Party’s increasingly toxic immigration politics.

Yes, anything that conservatives suggest regarding immigration law is “toxic” while the only virtuous position is a “clean” DACA bill. In this case, “clean” means amnesty citizenship for at least ten million illegal aliens and the President and the GOP get nothing in return except a promise to “study” border security issues at some point in the future. You can detect a definite hint of why this is a Democratic 2018 campaign document by the way the WaPo picks out Barbara Comstock. Her one vote and opinion on the subject isn’t remarkably more critical than any other in terms of going for the discharge petition. So why pick on her? Because particularly in the general Beltway area, Comstock has been identified as “the Number One Target” for flipping a seat in Virginia this November. And apparently, the Washington Post is more than happy to toss her opponents a bone by calling her out as being on the wrong side of history on the immigration issue.

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They go on to refer to Goodlatte’s bill as, “anti- ­immigrant fervor distilled into reactionary policy.” That’s because the bill offers the Dreamers “only” a renewable, three-year legal resident alien status rather than an immediate path to citizenship. The Ryan compromise bill gets a compliment in terms of being “better” than Goodlatte’s but is still written off as a dream package for “Trumpian restrictionists” with a lot of “wasteful” money spent on the border wall. Hey, look! The Washington Post is suddenly concerned about deficit spending… it’s a Christmas miracle, Charlie Brown!

In the view of the WaPo editorial board, money for the border wall is “ransom.” Any change in chain migration or the visa lottery system is “anti-immigrant.” And this chorus, being sung in perfect harmony with the DNC, is rising to the heavens just as we come into the summer months leading up to the midterms. Isn’t it all just wonderfully convenient?

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