Shut Down - Show Down

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/this-shutdown-is-different?

Trump and the Border Wall

Barefoot children. In diapers. Choking on tear gas. Mothers running in terror.

Now a 7 year old girl--Jakelin Maquin--has died from dehydration and exhaustion in U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody. The ACLU blamed “lack of accountability, and a culture of cruelty within CBP” for the girl’s death.

This is inhuman. I can’t shake the sense that the ground is cracking under my feet. I want to share what this makes me think and feel - I hope you stick with me here.

Trump gave the order to use CS gas on families and children at the border. I saw the pictures, and felt outrage. Then Trump distracted the media with his personal reality show. The photos were knocked off the front page with the next crisis.

I’m not OK with this. I’m guessing you aren’t either. But we are not powerless.

In June, I 

went to McAllen, Texas with my then-five year old son on Father’s Day. There is another picture that seared into my soul there - toddlers looking out of the armored windows of a bus as it left the detention center and their parents behind. I will never, ever forget the fear in their eyes.

The Trump Shutdown

Duane Campbell

Let us be clear.  The shut down of the U.S. government is  due to a dispute over spending because Donald Trump ordered the end of the DACA program ( Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). The spending bill assumes the end of DACA and demands a vast increase in spending on the border, including a wall.  At present the  critical issue  is restoring DACA.  Note: restoring.  We had a DACA program that protected the lives of some 800,000 young people who came to the U.S. as children.  Trump created this crisis and the Republicans are using the crisis to promote their anti immigrant agenda.

Since his campaign, Trump has doubled down on racism, sexism and bigotry, to the delight of David Duke, the American Nazi Party, and others like them. The control of the Republican Party by hard core anti immigration forces emboldens hard-core racists, Islamophobes, misogynists, and anti-immigrant groups, while promising an assault on workers' rights.

The White House has demanded that an increase of 33 billion dollars in funding for anti-immigrant measures be included as a part of the DREAM act. 18 Billion dollars of this funding increase would be spent on the border wall and the rest on terrorizing immigrant communities in this country. 

 As the Southern Border Communities Coalition says, “The Administration’s  misguided and outlandish proposal would waste $33 Billion dollars of taxpayer money to further militarize border communities, by building walls and deploying more federal agents. This funding request is an affront to the 15 million people who call the borderlands home . The funding proposal  further  fails to address border residents’ true needs including oversight and accountability for abusive Customs and Border Protection personnel.  Increasing the number of agents would have little to no impact on security and would be fiscally irresponsible and unwarranted.”

The demands of the Republican anti immigration forces include more deportations, punishments for cities that protect their immigrants with sanctuary laws, and an increase in  ICE’s budget. 

These demands are unacceptable. If Trump’s version of the DREAM act passes, immigrants in this country will face arbitrary harassment by hostile federal agencies. Trump  claims that this violence is necessary in order to fight terrorism and drug cartels. These threats used to justify their draconian demands are either imaginary or exacerbated by our deportation policy.

Trump  also claim that they want additional measures to punish those who use what the administration calls loopholes in our immigration laws including the preferences for family unification.  He calls this chain migration.  Removing these “loopholes” would uproot thousands of people who know no other home, many of whom are children. Congress must instead pass a clean DREAM act. Anything else will wreck countless lives on both sides of the border."

Update. The legislative deal approved by a vote of 81 to 18 on Jan 22 did not resolve any of the issues listed above.

Government shut down

Government Shutdown Looms as Congress Fails to Reach Budget Compromise
With the federal government on the verge of shutting down at midnight on Friday, budget negotiations intensified between President Obama, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) in the hopes of reaching an agreement on a substantial reduction in spending for the remainder of the 2011 fiscal year. The three leaders have held a series of meetings this week in the Oval Office with increasing urgency as the deadline draws ever nearer.

House Republicans, lead by their tea party contingent, seek $61 billion in cuts to the FY11 budget, a figure that is substantial in its own right but whose impact would be significantly magnified because the 2011 fiscal year is half over (effectively doubling the impact). The White House and Senate Democrats have reportedly countered with an offer of $33 billion in cuts. Already, Congress and the White House have cut $10 billion in FY11 as part of the series of temporary funding extensions known as continuing resolutions (CR) that kept the government operating while work continued on a final budget plan. Among those earlier reductions that have gone into effect are $891 million in cuts to education programs that completely eliminated funding for Striving Readers ($250 million), Even Start ($66 million), and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards ($10 million) among other programs.

Indeed, House Republicans passed another one-week CR late this week in the event negotiations fail. But the price for the one-week extension is $12 billion in additional cuts to federal spending, including $391 million from education programs such as Education Technology State Grants ($100 million) and Teaching American History ($119 million). Such a CR has little chance of being approved by the Senate or president.

Complicating a final deal is the insistence of House Republicans that several policy changes be included in any funding compromise, notably eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood and language prohibiting the EPA from enforcing certain Clean Air and Clean Water Act rules.