Schumer seeks to protect Mueller, not DACA immigrants
Patrick Martin, WSWS, Jan 29 2018
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer said Sunday that the Demagogs would seek to introduce a provision to protect Robert Mueller into the budget resolution that is under consideration by Congress. Schumer said in a statement issued by his Senate office:
The most important thing Congress can do right now is to ensure that Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation continues uninterrupted and unimpeded. No one, whether it be admin boxtops, Thugs or the president himself, should get in the way and undermine the investigation, and so Demagogs will seek to add protections for Mueller in the ongoing budget negotiations.
Schumer was responding to press reports claiming that Trump had decided to fire Mueller last June and was dissuaded only when White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to resign rather than transmit the order to the DoJ.Schumer made his statement only six days after he agreed to drop any reference to protecting young immigrants from the same budget resolution, capitulating to the White House and congressional Thugs in the stand-off that produced a two-day partial shutdown of the federal government. Under terms of the deal Schumer struck with McConnell, the Demagogs agreed to abandon their filibuster and permit a short-term budget resolution to pass Congress, ending the shutdown and authorizing federal spending through Feb 8, in return for a promise by McConnell to permit a vote on a stand-alone immigration bill that would address the fate of 800,000 young undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children, who have been protected from deportation under the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Trump rescinded the executive order that established DACA, giving Congress until Mar 5 to take action on the issue. This promise was completely meaningless, since it in no way guarantees any action to legalize the DACA recipients even if the Senate were to pass such a bill. The House will not even take up a DACA bill without the support of the White House, according to Speaker Paul Ryan, while Trump has insisted that any DACA bill must include a raft of repressive and anti-immigrant measures, including his infamous wall along the US-Mexico border.
The Demagogs are well aware that the only way to obtain DACA relief is to tie it to the budget resolution, which the House must pass and Trump must sign to fund the federal government for the remainder of FY 2017. Schumer’s declaration that protection for Mueller should be inserted into the budget resolution, after having just agreed that protection for DACA recipients will be taken out, is a clear indication of the real priorities of the Demagog Party. The Demagogs have focused all their energy on the anti-Russia campaign, in part to pressure the Trump administration to embrace the more hard-line policy towards Moscow initiated by the Obama administration in its second term, in part to divert mass opposition to the Trump administration in a right-wing, nationalistic and militarist direction. Taking the measure of the Demagogs, Trump outlined a revised immigration deal Wednesday and Thursday in a series of tweets and an appearance before reporters at the White House. While offering a protracted “path to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants brought here as children as long as 12 years ago, his plan barred those immigrants from obtaining legalization for their own parents and older non-DACA siblings, who would be deported. The White House plan would provide $25b for the wall and other border security measures, including electronic monitoring, drones and an army of new immigration agents. It would also end the “diversity lottery,” and impose other restrictions on legal immigration. One immigration rights group estimated that the plan would cut legal immigration by nearly 300k/yr. The ACLU wrote:
This is a hateful, xenophobic proposal that would slash legal immigration to levels not seen since the racial quotas of the 1920s.
A United We Dream spox called it “a white supremacist ransom note.” But the two leading organs of “liberal” public opinion, the NYT and WaPo, published editorials urging Demagogs to take the deal being offered by Trump. The NYT wrote:
Every now and then President Trump emits a sensible idea. A solution must be a balance between offering many of the undocumented immigrants and their families, and the Dreamers, a way to legalize their presence, and increasing border security.
The WaPo editorial declared:
Mr Trump’s plan contains the elements of an imaginable deal. Legislators who want to get to yes should seize on those elements and start working. Congress should welcome Mr Trump’s proffer of a 10- to 12-year pathway to citizenship for the estimated 1.8 million undocumented young immigrants enrolled in or potentially eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
The article concluded bluntly that there was a deal to be made along the lines of “dreamers for the wall.” Congressional Demagogs were more cautious than the newspaper editorialists in their initial statements, but it is clear they are moving in that direction and the momentum behind the deal is expected to accelerate after the formal release of the administration’s immigration proposal, initially set for Monday, the eve of Trump’s SOTU speech.
Niqnaq 