Democratic leader Sen. Chuck Schumer will meet President Donald Trump this afternoon to talk about a 2018 budget deal, and he will have to repeat or revoke the Democrats’ unpopular threats to block the 2018 budget if Republicans reject his unpopular amnesty for 3 million ‘dreamers.’
The meeting puts Schumer in the awkward position pushing a debate strategy that he denounced loudly in 2013. Back then, Schumer blasted efforts by the GOP to extract Obamacare concessions before accepting the federal budget and insisted that Democrats would not hold up a federal budget to push their immigration priorities. He told ABC’s This Week:
Speaker [John] Boehner comes in [the negotiation room] and he says, basically, it’s sorta like this … [He] goes into your house, takes your wife and children hostage, and then says ‘Let’s negotiate over the price of your house.’ You know, we could do the same thing on immigration. We believe strongly in immigration reform. We could say ‘We’re shutting down the government, we’re not gonna raise the debt ceiling, until you pass immigration reform.’ It would be governmental chaos.
In 2013, GOP leaders were trying to extra concessions on Obamacare in the budget process, but Democrats would not budge an inch and they portrayed their GOP colleagues as hostage-taking fanatics. “I’m worried,” Mr. Schumer told a reporter at a street fair. “These things sometimes get resolved at the last minute, but right now I’m worried because we have a small group of fanatics who seem to have a stranglehold on the Republican Party.” The report continued:
“I’ll give you the basic line,” Mr. Schumer relented after twice declining to comment on the shutdown situation. “The basic line is: No matter how strongly one feels about an issue, you shouldn’t hold millions of people hostage. That’s what the other side is doing. That’s wrong and we can’t give in to that.”
Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi will meet at 3:00 PM with Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to talk about the budget and related issues.
According to the Washington Post:
Previewing the meeting on Monday, Schumer cited spending levels, immigration policy and the need to renew programs such as the Children’s Health Insurance Program as top priorities in the closing days of the year.
“Hopefully we can make progress on an agreement that covers those time-sensitive issues that keeps the government running and working,” he said in Senate floor remarks.
The meeting will also offer Trump the opportunity to blast congressional Democrats for blocking popular policies as they try to win an unpopular amnesty.
Back in 2013, Obama used his media allies to help him pose as a reasonable negotiator even while he unloaded an aircraft carrier’s worth of invective on the GOP for demanding Obamacare changes in the budget. In a rare appearance in the White House press room, Obama portrayed Republicans — including McConnell and Ryan — as kidnappers and arsonists, butchers and deadbeats, extortionists, obsessives, irresponsible lunatics and nuclear blackmailers, and yet also described himself as a generous and responsible partner for good government.
According to the description posted by The Daily Caller, Obama said:
If you’re in negotiations around buying somebody’s house, you don’t get to say, “Well, let’s talk about the price I’m going to pay, and if you don’t give me the price, then I’m going to burn down your house.”
Members of Congress — and the House Republicans, in particular — don’t get to demand ransom in exchange for doing their jobs.
The last time that the tea party Republicans flirted with the idea of default two years ago, markets plunged, business and consumer confidence plunged, America’s credit rating was downgraded for the first time. And a decision to actually go through with it, to actually permit default, according to many CEOs and economists, would be — and I’m quoting here — “insane,” “catastrophic,” “chaos.” These are some of the more polite words. Warren Buffett likened default to a nuclear bomb, a weapon too horrible to use. It would disrupt markets. It would undermine the world’s confidence in America as the bedrock of the global economy. And it might permanently increase our borrowing costs — which, of course, ironically would mean that it would be more expensive for us to service what debt we do have, and it would add to our deficits and our debt, not decrease them.
But Trump’s 2017 task will be much easier than Schumer’s December mission.
In contrast to 2013, when the GOP was trying to replace the unpopular Obamacare, Schumer and his allies are threatening to shut down the government if Trump doesn’t provide a hugely expensive, hugely unpopular, no-strings amnesty to 3 million illegal immigrants plus roughly 15 million future chain-migration relatives just before the 2018 elections.
The last time Schumer tried to strong-arm the GOP on immigration was in 2014 when he lost nine Democratic Senate seats and the Majority Leader’s job. This time, he’s got 23 seats to defend in the 2018 election, including ten seats in states won by Trump’s immigration-reform agenda in 2016.
In this battle, Trump’s immigration principles are very popular in a nation that wants pro-American immigration rules.
Schumer is in a weak position also because Democrats embrace the industry-funded “nation of immigrants” polls which shame Americans to say they welcome migrants. But the alternative “fairness” polls show that voters put a much higher priority on helping their families, neighbors, and fellow nationals get decent jobs in a high-tech, high-immigration, low-wage economy. That political power of the voters’ fairness priority was made clear during the GOP primaries and again in November 2016.
Public support for Schumer’s ‘dreamer’ amnesty is also declining. Giving “children … protection from deportation” is the “top priority” for only 11 percent of American voters who identify as Independents, and “a top priority” for 23 percent of independents in a November poll by Morning Consult and Politico, which was headlined “Polling Shows Waning Enthusiasm for Congressional Action on Dreamers.”
The drop in support for the young illegals comes as a new report shows that only 1.7 percent of the ‘dreamers’ illegals have four-year college degrees. That rate is one-tenth of the 17 percent rate among Americans, and it ensures that nearly all of the migrants will rely on government aid — and on the Democratic Party’s tax-and-spend policies — throughout their lifetimes.
Moreover, Trump’s immigration policies are nudging up wages before the 2018 election. In Chicago, for example, a huge bakery is now hiring Americans at higher wages following an immigration enforcement action which forced the firing of 800 illegal immigrants.
Also, even business groups are giving up hope that they can bulldoze the GOP into approving the cheap-labor amnesty. A November 27 report by the McClatchy news service included an admission by an amnesty proponent that the push for a December amnesty is losing ground:
“Two months have now passed, and I’m sad to report that we’re arguably further away from a solution today than we were then,” said Neil Bradley, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s chief policy officer.
Bradley is a former top aide to Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy and to former Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor, who lost his seat because of pro-amnesty policies pushed by Bradley and other business-first staffers.
The Democrats’ push for amnesty will also be undermined by the sudden departure of the House Democrats’ leading amnesty champion, Chicago Rep. Luis Gutierrez.
Each year, four million Americans turn 18 and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.
But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting 1 million new legal immigrants, by providing almost 2 million work-permits to foreigners, by providing work-visas to roughly 500,000 temporary workers and doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor and spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also encourages discrimination against American workers, drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education. It also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and reduces the work activity rate below the rate in foreign rivals, so sidelining millions of marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
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