Budget Showdown : DACA, the Military, and Stopgaps, but Nobody Cares about the National Debt

WILL THERE BE A SHUTDOWN? We'll know by Friday. But, DACA seems to be the key. • • • WILL THE PROGDEMS REALLY SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT OVER ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS? Even so-called children? Fox Halftime said on Tuesday that as Democrats consider their relative advantages inside the space of a shutdown : "they ought not forget that President Trump could do a great deal to minimize the pain and, conceivably, could use the crisis as an opportunity to starve programs Republicans don’t like while funding those popular with the general public and the GOP base. Remember, this is an administration that has attempted to make a virtue out of the hundreds of key positions that remain unfilled and a president who likes to brag about his ability to do more with less. That’s not to say that it would work, necessarily, but as we approach the next fiscal cliff it is important to remember at the shape of this unprecedented shutdown could be very different than the ones that came before it because it is the first in which oen party controls Congress and the White House." • Something to think about. Even a shutdown could work for the Trump MAGA agenda." • To step back to the details of the DACA (Dreamers) battle. In September, President Trump announced he would end DACA, the program that provides temporary deportation protection for undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children. Then last week, a judge ruled the administration has to continue accepting renewal applications from people already enrolled in the program -- nearly 800,000 people. But, AG Sessions' Department of Justice wants to appeal that ruling. Normally an appeal would go to a federal circuit court but Sessions said he’s going straight to the Supreme Court, in hopes of getting a faster answer. Meanwhile, Democrats, Republicans, and the White House have been attempting to negotiate a deal to address the status of undocumented immigrants, by including it in the budget bill and a government shutdown is looming if they don’t figure something out by the end of the week. • TheHill wrote Tuesday that : "Lawmakers warned Tuesday that the chances for a government shutdown are greater than at any other time since a 16-day closure in October 2013. Republicans appear poised to offer a plan forward that would fund the government for another month while extending a popular children’s health program for six years. But Republican leaders will need Democratic votes in the Senate -- and possibly the House as well -- to pass that measure. And Democrats are refusing to make any commitments until they strike a deal to shield from deportation hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children." GOP Representative Daniel Webster of Florida told TheHill : "“It’s pretty close to 50-50. It’s like playing chicken and seeing who is going to blink first. It’s a dangerous game.” And, a conservative House lawmaker told TheHill on Tuesday that prospects for a deal on a short-term stopgap are “not looking good” at the moment. There is currently not a policy path to reach 218 votes in the House on funding the government. For the first time since 2013, the possibility of a shutdown is real.” • While ProgDems are trying to use the alleged White House meeting comment of President Trump as an excuse not to deal on DACA, Trump used Twitter on Tuesday to rip into congressional Democrats, arguing they would weaken the Pentagon by refusing to provide votes to fund the government over demands for a legislative fix to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program shielding certain young immigrants commonly known as “Dreamers” from deportation : “The Democrats want to shut down the Government over Amnesty for all and Border Security. The biggest loser will be our rapidly rebuilding Military, at a time we need it more than ever. We need a merit based system of immigration, and we need it now! No more dangerous Lottery.” • And, of course the #NeverTrump Republicans chimed in. When Democrats lashed out at the President during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where the Secretary of Homeland Security defended Trump’s alleged remarks, Senator Lindsey Graham said he confronted Trump over the comment, then criticized the different signals Trump has given during the talks and also blamed White House staff for giving the President “bad advice.” • That is what's known as the shotgum approach to covering all the bases. • • • TIME IS RUNNING OUT. Congressional negotiators are running out of time. The government will shut down on Saturday without a new funding bill, and a short-term measure looks like the only solution since lawmakers and their staffs no longer have the time to write a full omnibus spending bill for the rest of the fiscal year. TheHill says :"Many lawmakers are reluctant to back another stopgap -- which would be the fourth in a row to pass Congress. To try to get them on board, Republicans are mulling sweeteners, including the attachment of a six-year extension of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to the stopgap, as well as delays of certain ObamaCare taxes, sources say. The idea is likely to be pitched during a GOP conference meeting on Tuesday evening." • House Democrats refused to help Speaker Paul Ryan pass the last continuing resolution (CR) before Christmas, though 14 Democrats ended up voting for the extension after Republicans demonstrated they had enough votes to pass it on their own. And, 18 Democrats voted for the December stopgap measure in the Senate. But that measure only included a temporary extension for CHIP. Long-term funding for the program may be more difficult for Democrats to oppose, especially for vulnerable Democrat Senators up for re-election in red states this year. So too could funding to help states deal with last year’s hurricanes and wildfires. GOP Representative Tom Cole, a powerful Appropriations subcommittee chairman, told The Hill : “There are things that can be added to a CR to make it more appealing. CHIP is evidently pretty close. Obviously we got to get emergency aid done. But it’s got to be something that doesn’t cost you votes.” • Some Democrats believe they’re in a better position to make demands for the DACA Dreamers now, with Trump weakened and off balance from the controversy over his remarks, rather than passing a stopgap and waiting until February fpr budget negotiations. But, Democrats running for re-election in states carried by Trump in the 2016 presidential race feel they could be blamed for a shutdown -- Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia said he would back the funding extension even without a DACA deal in place. “We’re trying to find [a deal], but shutting down the government is not going to help them,” Manchin told reporters on Tuesday. House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer insisted on Tuesday that Democrats won’t back another spending bill without protections for Dreamers : “I think it needs to be in the CR.” • But, Democrats aren’t the only ones threatening to oppose the stopgap spending bill. Defense hawks threatened to block the last funding extension because they worry that temporary funding patches hurt the military. While most of them ended up holding their noses and voting for the last short-term measure, many of them want promises for higher defense spending before they agree to back another funding patch. GOP Representative Mac Thornberry of Texas, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told reporters on Tuesday that he’s still undecided and that “we’ll see how the week goes.” But Thornberry added that he “would do just about anything to fix this problem, including vote for things that I might not support otherwise.” House conservatives have also balked at the idea of passing a fourth continuing resolution in five months, especially if it suspends automatic spending cuts known as sequestration, arguing that eventually decisions will have to be made. • The House vote could be critical because if Republicans can’t find the votes in the House to pass the stopgap, some Democrats think that would help shift the blame to the GOP for a government shutdown. After all, Republicans control the White House and both chambers of Congress. But the politics are tricky, and some Republicans aren’t so sure that they would shoulder the blame -- especially after Democrats attacked Republicans for shutting down the government for 16 days over an Obamacare repeal. Representative Cole told The Hill : “They would be taking a big risk, doing what Republicans did on Obamacare in 2013. Democrats thought that was pretty stupid then, and they were right.” • Some lawmakers were still expressing confidence on Tuesday that they would be able to keep the government’s lights on past Friday, citing how unpopular a shutdown would be with the public. Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas told Hugh Hewitt : “If the Democrats want to shut down the government over this, they can. They have the ability to filibuster any bill in the Senate. I don’t think that will work out very well for them, so I suspect they will not.” • • • DEMOCRATS WHO SUPPORT DACA ARE LOOKING TOWARD THE 2018 ELECTIONS. Restore American Glory wrote on January 9 that : "A liberal fundraising organization -- the Center for American Progress Action Fund -- sent out a memo this week that advised Democrats to go to the mattresses on behalf of Obama’s Dreamers. The memo, authored by former Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri, was apparently meant to pressure top Democratic donors to pressure lawmakers into keeping their promise to pass some form of amnesty for the illegal immigrants. In the memo, the CAP Action organization warns Democrats to 'refuse to offer any votes for Republican spending bills that do not offer a fix for Dreamers and instead appropriate funds to deport them. The fight to protect Dreamers is not only a moral imperative, it is also a critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success,'reads the memo. 'If Democrats don’t try to do everything in their power to defend Dreamers, that will jeopardize Democrats’ electoral chances in 2018 and beyond. In short, the next few weeks will tell us a lot about the Democratic Party and its long-term electoral prospects.' ” • The Center for American Progress was founded by John Podesta, Bil Clinton's chief of staff, Barack Obama's senior White House counsellor and Hillary's campaign chairman. CAP is supported financially by George Soros and is alleged to be his chief operations entity in the US. • Restore American Glory states : "We’re reluctant to advise the Democrats on political strategy, but if we were to devise a super-secret, double-agent memo meant to actually sink the party’s chances of mounting a midterms comeback, it would be indistinguishable from this one. How this party thinks that amnesty for illegal immigrants is the key to unlocking their own political future is a mystery. They know these people can’t vote, right? And yeah, we know that they have some pie-in-the-sky plans to fix that, but it’s not going to happen by November, now is it? What the hell are they thinking?" • Well, it is pretty clear that the Democrats are thinking that Dreamers who remain in the US will vote Democratic. It appears that Democrat believe that protecting non-citizens who cannot legally cast a vote for them is good political strategy -- it goes a long way to explaining why Democrats are so adamently opposed to voter reform, voter ID or any other program devised to ensure that those who vote in the US are citizens entitled to vote and not illegals shielded from deportation by the Democrat Party. • • • REPUBLICANS NEED TO FOLLOW TRUMP ON DACA. IT would be dangerous for the GOP to forget that Donald Trump won on a strong anti-illegal immigration platform that does not fit with granting amnesty to Dreamers or any other group of illegal immigrants. If the GOP can get the Wall for Trump in exchange for amnesty, that might sell to the Trump base. But, if the GOP just negotiates peanuts because they they are afraid of a shutdown, the grassroots will not accept that. The best advice for the GOP congressional team would be to take the Democrats to the shutdown 'wall' and let President Trump deal with the ProgDems if they are silly enough to actually permit a shutdown over illegals, while ignoring the security threats of a short term stopgap resolution because of its effect on the military budget -- Trump has a 100% success record in dealing with this kind of nonsense spewing out of the ProgDems. • We have already seen the "carrot" from Trump. His Secretary of Homeland Security Kirsyjen Nielsen told CBS on Tuesday that she is still hoping for a deal to codify into law legal status for Dreamers, but she added that if the talks for such a deal fail, Immigration and Customs Enforcement would not prioritize deporting Dreamers who are in compliance with DACA : ‘It's not going to be a priority of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement to prioritize their removal. I’ve said that before. That's not the policy of DHS.” BUT, Trump himself delivered the "Stick " via a tweet to the ProgDems in the face of the ongoing backlash against President Trump’s alleged “s---hole” comments during a bipartisan meeting on immigration last week. President Trump came out swinging on Monday afternoon, blasting one of his chief opponents in the Senate, the very Leftist and sometimes unreliable Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois. Trump tweeted : "Senator Dicky Durbin totally misrepresented what was said at the DACA meeting. Deals can’t get made when there is no trust! Durbin blew DACA and is hurting our Military." • • • DEAR READERS, for sheer political pleasure, no commentary on the budget-DACA shutdown scenario is better than that offered by the Libertarian Daily Bell last Saturday. The Daily Bell article was titled "We Aren’t Lucky Enough for a Government Shut Down." The Daily Bell editorial staff wrote : "Oh no! Another looming 'government shutdown,' what are we going to do?! We should be so lucky. People talk about bipartisanship like it’s a good thing. But the point of Congress was never to get stuff done. The point was the make sure that only important stuff got done....Bipartisanship got the US $20 trillion in debt. Bipartisanship got wars in the middle east, NSA spying, a trillion dollar per year welfare state, and yearly deficits from $450 billion to $1.4 trillion. (Fun fact: the fiscal year 2017 budget deficit was $666 billion.) If the government actually 'shut down,' the American people might actually get some relief....Members of Congress talk tough trying to strong arm the other side into accepting their preferred version of bloated oversized government. Democrats insist that more disaster relief funds go to states and territories affected by last year’s hurricanes and wildfires. They also want to use their votes as leverage to protect illegal immigrants minors from deportation. Trump, on the other hand, insists on funding for a border wall in exchange for letting 'dreamers' stay in the country. America has the largest military budget on earth....Yet Trump also insists this budget item needs to grow. No one is interested in going through the government and finding redundant and unneeded programs to cut. No one wants to trim expenditures, tighten the belt, or root out waste. This despite trillions of dollars of spending from various agencies spent without any accounting record of what that money paid for....Politicians’ actions betray the truth. Either their behavior is an unacceptable hostage situation of the American people. They are holding the American people, who need the government, for ransom. Or it is the temper tantrum of bratty children. Either way, they should all be fired. They should be sent to their rooms, and never allowed to run for public office again. And we can go on without a functioning government until after the midterm elections. Unfortunately, that won’t happen. They will either reach a bipartisan agreement that is terrible for the American people, or the government will 'shut down' until they do....meaning furlough fewer than a third of government employees, who will all get back pay once the issue is resolved....This government will lumber on no matter what the clowns in Congress do." • What the Daily Bell forgot to mention is the national debt now at $20.5 trillion and counting. Granted that the Trump tax reform is bringing in much-needed increased tax revenues to the federal treasury -- and Apple was a bellweather when it just announced that it will bring back to the US $350 billion, paying $35 billion in repatriation taxes and creating 20,000 new jobs. BUT, who is looking out for the national debt??? Nobody. At least, nobody who wants to talk about it. If the congressional GOP wanted to become instantly beloved by the entire Republican and Deplorable base, all they need to do is put a balanced budget clause into the current budget bill. The ProgDems would have apoplexy -- they do that every day anyway -- but the Republic would be "one giant step" closer to long-term survival.