Things have turned in a hurry on this scandal. The politics of this have shifted to the Democrats.
I had said yesterday that I thought that Trump would make a legislative push for a Goodlatte style bill w/wall funding but then after that failed he’d start throwing Nielson, Sessions, and Kelly under the bus.
But after Feinstein got the 49th Dem to support her bill, Harris called for Neilson’s resignation, and then the audio came out of those kids wailing (7 minute long audio of which I was only able to get through 30 seconds b/c it’s that fucking bad), the GOP went into panic mode. Some fairly high ranking GOPers called for Sessions to abandon the policy. They stopped carrying water for the Administration line that this was ‘the Democrats’ law’.
Now there are some GOP bills floating out there that are limited to changing this policy. It’s not immigration reform. There’s no wall funding. So what’s going on here?
I think the GOP wants Trump to back down and change the policy. They do not want to be debating this at all. But Trump isn’t ready to back down. He wants some legislation. But the heat is so hot in the kitchen for the GOP right now (looking at a 100 seat loss in the House if this keeps up) that they’re willing to throw anything up there that will end this thing, which means putting up legislation that can get a supermajority, which means ‘no wall’.
It also didn’t help that Sessions went on Fascist News w/Laura Ingraham and then proceeded to find ways to distinguish his policies from those of the Nazis and did a rather poor job of doing so (hint: because this is just phase 1 of a Nazi policy redux).
Trump reportedly reiterated yesterday that he would shut the gov’t down over his wall in late September/October. (I think he’s looking for Dems to win 200 seats or something in the House). They’ll huddle on this and either Trump listens to the Congressional GOP and goes after Nielson/Sessions/Kelly (probability of that is now higher) or they give a try at a Goodlatte bill (possible, but my sense is that the GOP wouldn’t make a big push to win this one at all costs, and I don’t think this gets 60 votes in the Senate nor would Mitch push to get around the filibuster here).
If you take a step back, what is motivating both the nuttiness on trade and this Nazi immigration policy of family separation is GOP/Trump weakness. Trump is convinced that his base is not motivated, that they do not see him as having done very much on the agenda he campaigned on. That is his read, but it’s also in his polling because the whole WH believes this. They also don’t believe the tax bill is going to help them on election day (this one is backed up by public polling).
The GOP believes this Nazi immigration policy is going to kill them all in November. It will be much worse than the Northam-Gillespie result in VA. Trump believes he can’t juice his voters without the wall and that he is too unpopular to get the reach indie voters that supported the ticket in 2016 to turn out and vote GOP.
That’s why Trump and the GOP are at loggerheads.
Democrats should just continue to hang tough, get more information out, get more media coverage and they’ll be able to get these guys to fold and cement an advantage for November.