Don't Forget the Democrats Who Helped Get Us Into This DACA Nightmare
Welcome to WHAT NOW, a morning round-up of the news/fresh horrors that await you today.
Here’s something that bears repeating as we hear heartbreaking story after story about young undocumented immigrants who gained a foothold in this country because of President Obama’s executive action on immigration: We wouldn’t be in this mess, with the fate of nearly one million Americans in the hands of Congress, if it weren’t for five Democrats.
Back in 2010, the House passed the DREAM Act, from which so-called “dreamers” took their rallying moniker. It would have allowed undocumented people who came to the country as children to apply for citizenship, but five “moderate” Democrats in the Senate prevented the bill from becoming law.
As James Hohmann pointed out in The Washington Post on Wednesday morning, only one of those five is left in the Senate: Sen. Jon Tester, of Montana (two lost re-election in 2014 and two others retired).
After voting “no” on the DREAM Act in 2010, Tester put out a statement calling “illegal immigration” a “critical problem” for the country and said “I do not support legislation that provides a path to citizenship for anyone in this country illegally.” In response to Attorney General Jeff Sessions announcing yesterday that the administration was punting DACA to Congress to fix, Tester was much more cautious, saying that while the immigration system is “badly broken…breaking a promise to these children — who are here through no fault of their own — is not the solution.”
Sen. Joe Donnelly, a Democrat from Indiana who voted against the DREAM Act as a member of the House, has also changed his tune, strongly condemning the administration’s action in a statement:
Both Donnelly and Tester face uphill reelection races in states that voted for Trump in 2016.
WHAT ELSE?
- CNN got its hands on a copy of What Happened, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 post-mortem. Clinton, the network says, “does assume ownership [of the loss] where the fault lines are obvious. And in overarching terms, she admits she badly misjudged the environment in which she was running and the candidate she was running against. But Clinton still finds ample blame to go around.”
- Donald Trump tweeted that he would “revisit” DACA if Congress doesn’t act to fix it, which…what? He just canceled it!
- Hurricane Irma is unprecedentedly, horribly bad. (Trump is apparently very excited about this.)