Quote:
Originally Posted by BadBoyBenny
What I would add to CuseRounder's summary is the personal aspects related to Trump's narcissism and needing to always 'win' a negotiation and now having boxed himself into a corner by publicly associating the win with getting 5.7 billion for the wall. So, it is a lot more likely the Senate Republicans open the government with a veto override than Donald will cave, but right now the public and media are framing the shutdown as Pelosi and Democrats vs. Trump and not putting political pressure on Senate Republicans.
That's a good point. I'd also add that the pressure is going to be cranked up exponentially in a couple days when workers miss their second paycheck, and if that doesn't end it, the next paycheck another two weeks down the line cranks the pressure up that much more. It could conceivably go up by an order of magnitude at that point.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BadBoyBenny
For Pelosi this would be a great opportunity for Democrats to trade some policy concessions worth much more than 5.7 billion in appropriations, but McConnell and senate Republicans will prevent that even if they can play Donald for a fool, so compromise here is again not likely.
However, if they do that, it could be a great wedge issue. If the Dems pass something in the House that Trump says he'll sign and McConnell won't let it to the floor for a vote, that looks horrible for the GOP and the party could splinter on the issue.
The issue here is, once Democrats start negotiating around the shutdown, they could begin to own it. I think this was a viable strategy at the beginning, but now that they've taken the "No hostage taking, period," stance, they have to stick to it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dinopoker
If all they get from the GOP are immigration concessions then it still gets counted as a loss in my books. They need to go for things that will have people in Iowa and Oklahoma saying, 'wow, Trump really botched that up.'
I think you may underestimate the degree to which Trump's base would view citizenship for Dreamers as a huge loss for him. They consider it amnesty and unacceptable. They want to kick Dreamers/DACA out for good, they loathe them. Ann Coulter was shredding him after his speech the other day in which he offered 700,000 DACA recipients a 3-year reprieve and no path to citizenship.
Keep in mind as well that there are 3.6 million Dreamers, and only around 700,000 enrolled in DACA, and we'd be dealing for immediate citizenship for all 3.6 million. Trump's base would be apoplectic.
That's also probably adding a net gain of 500K to a million Democratic votes in 2020. My best guess would be that about 600-650K Dreamers live in Texas, so if you turn out half of them and win two-thirds of that, you just gained around 100,000 votes in Texas. That's probably a conservative estimate... Beto lost by 215K. Using similar estimates, you might gain 40-50K votes in Arizona. Hillary lost by 91,000 and Sinema won by 56,000.
Now, I'm not saying Democrats should pursue this policy for electoral reasons... They should do so because it's the morally right thing to do. But it certainly has electoral benefits, and that's part of the reason the GOP is so against it and part of the reason we should consider it a pretty big win...
The only way we're going to get citizenship for Dreamers on better terms than this sort of a deal is by having a super majority in the Senate.