The divided and angry Democratic caucus in the Senate has reunited itself by blowing up the few immigration and amnesty concessions it had offered to the GOP.
According to Politico:
The Senate minority leader, through an aide, informed the White House on Monday that he was retracting the offer he made last week to give Trump well north of the $1.6 billion in wall funding Trump had asked for this year, according to two Democrats. And now they say Trump will simply not get a better deal than that on his signature campaign promise.
Schumer “took it off,” said Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Senate Democrat. “He called the White House yesterday and said it’s over…”
“Discussions were had coming up to Friday night are interesting for context,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). But now, he said, “we start from a blank sheet of paper.”
TheHill reported:
“We’re going to have to start on a new basis and the wall offer is off the table,” Schumer told reporters, saying that the offer was initially “part of a package.”
White House officials scoffed at the Democrats’ claim. Hogan Gidley, the deputy press secretary, issued a statement saying:
Chuck Schumer says he’d rescind his “offer” to fund the wall is like me saying I’m going to rescind my “offer” to give all of your viewers a million dollars. I never made a real offer. It never existed. That’s exactly what Sen. Schumer did.
He offered an “authorization” for the funding, not an appropriation and that’s D.C. speak for nothing is ever going to happen.
The Senator is being disingenuous about what he truly offered the president just like he is being disingenuous in blaming someone else for his Party choosing to go to the mat for hundreds of thousands of people here illegally and unlawfully as opposed to hundreds of millions of law abiding American citizens.
The Democrats’ about-face follows their Monday defeat in their effort to block the 2018 budget — and the arrival of new polls showing their amnesty cause threatens their November 2018 candidates.
Now the Democratic leaders have to handle their own splits and also mollify the Democratic Senators — and party activists — who oppose the inclusion of any pro-American offsets or safeguards in the so-called “Gang of Six” amnesty. Meanwhile, the several Democratic Senators facing the voters in red states this November are watching their approval number slide downwards.
The unpopular bill, prepared by Durbin and GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, would offer amnesty to roughly 8 million illegals, and allow at least 2 million chain-migration arrivals to get green cards, according to an estimate by the White House.
The budget filibuster came after the January 11 fiasco when Durbin first blew up the amnesty talks by revealing President Donald Trump’s closed-door brusque dismissal of quotas from “shithole” African countries.
In November, top Democrats also canceled an immigration meeting at the White House when Trump Tweeted:
During the several weeks of talks in December and January, GOP leaders made some unpopular concessions to the Democrats. Notably, White House officials agreed to expand their side of the deal to include 1.2 million young illegals, not just the 690,000 current enrollees in former President Barack Obama’s DACA amnesty.
The Democrats’ decision to zero out the talks will complicate their effort to develop an acceptable and popular amnesty bill by their target date of February 8.
Polls show the Democrats’ one-sided amnesty deal is deeply unpopular with Americans — and GOP leaders seem increasingly aware that Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” policies are very popular.
White House officials have not announced if their current concessions will be withdrawn in response to the Democrats’ move.
The Democrats’ new announcement on 2018 funding for the border wall will likely be a sore point in the pending debates over the 2018 budget, which includes money to build or upgrade 74 miles of border wall.
Polls show that President Donald Trump’s American-first immigration policy is very popular. For example, a December poll of likely 2018 voters shows two-to-one voter support for Trump’s pro-American immigration policies, and a lopsided four-to-one opposition against the cheap-labor, mass-immigration, economic policy pushed by bipartisan establishment-backed D.C. interest-groups.
A January poll showed:
more than 80 percent of Americans support curbing legal immigration levels, a plan that Trump has endorsed to raise the wages of working and middle-class Americans and stem the current never-ending flow of cheaper, foreign competition that burdens the country’s blue-collar workers the most.
Business groups and Democrats tout the misleading, industry-funded “Nation of Immigrants” polls which pressure Americans to say they welcome migrants, including the roughly 670,000 ‘DACA’ illegals and the roughly 3.25 million ‘dreamer’ illegals.