One of the Democrats’ favored talking points during the ongoing partial shutdown is that they will not discuss border security until President Donald Trump agrees to re-open the federal government.
They cannot negotiate under duress, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) argued Tuesday, because doing so would create a bad precedent for allowing Republicans to use the threat of government shutdowns as leverage in future negotiations.
There is only one problem with that argument: Democrats shut down the government themselves, exactly a year ago, in an effort to force President Trump to agree to accept their terms on a permanent solution for illegal aliens who entered the country as minors and enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
National Public Radio reported on Jan. 20, 2018: “Democrats, led by [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer [D-NY], pushed to include an immigration measure that would include a pathway to citizenship for roughly 700,000 immigrants enrolled in the DACA program the Trump administration rescinded last year.”
The shutdown lasted for only three days; Democrats quickly capitulated on Jan. 22, 2018. But they had set, or accepted, the precedent of using a potential government shutdown as leverage in negotiations — over the issue of immigration in particular.
On Tuesday, Pelosi again rejected the terms of a deal to end the shutdown offered by the president on Saturday that included a three-year extension of DACA and other protections in exchange for $5.7 billion in funding for border security, including steel fencing along 230 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. She is calling the offer a “non-starter.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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