Trump's Immigration Plan Is Obamacare Repeal All Over - By Jonathan Chait

[DonViejo]

September 5, 2017
1:15 pm

There is an eerie familiarity to President Trump’s position on deporting immigrants who came to the United States illegally as children. It contains the same mix of cruelty and desperate incompetence as his position on repealing Obamacare. There is the alternating of threats and bluster with sweet promises; the repeated delays in hopes a solution will somehow materialize; the lack of interest in programmatic detail (“administration officials privately expressed concern that Mr. Trump might not fully grasp the details of the steps he was about to take, and when he discovered their full impact, would change his mind,” reports the New York Times); and the final lurch into blame-avoidance that we are seeing now (“Congress, get ready to do your job - DACA!,” Trump demands, bluntly framing the policy as something Congress, not Trump, was supposed to have been working on these past seven and a half months.

On immigration, as on health care and other issues, anti-Obamaism has been the glue holding together the Republican coalition. Barack Obama cobbled together ungainly policy compromises as a way of working around the implacability of the Republican Party. Obama’s departure from the scene has dissolved the glue that held the Republican stance together, leaving Trump and his party flailing about for an alternative that is neither heretical to their own ideology nor overtly cruel.

Trump won his party’s nomination by outbidding all his rivals on ethno-nationalist appeal. This innovation was more a brilliant new discovery than Trump’s business technique of not paying contractors for services rendered. It was a short-term leverage play. Trump’s rivals knew perfectly well the power of white racial resentment in the Obama-era party. They held back because they, not he, were attempting to balance their appeal to the base with a viable plan that could appeal to the country as a whole.

It’s noteworthy that the policy Trump’s conventional Republican opponents attempted to articulate against him during the primary is essentially the one he has found his way toward now. Marco Rubio insisted that the Dreamers could not be deported right away, but that Obama’s refusal to deport them was an affront to the Constitution. “You already have people that have signed up for it. They’re working, they’re going to school. It would be deeply disruptive. But at some point, it has to come to an end,” he said at one point. “I will on my first day in office get rid of it because it’s unconstitutional,” he promised at another. Jeb Bush promised, “Let’s give them priority to be citizens. But by the law, not by decree, because that’s like a Latin American dictator.”

This was the Republican opposition to Obamacare all over again. It was vague enough to embrace both the most rigid ideological opponents of what Obama was attempting to do, as well as those who sympathized with his goal. What wrapped it all together was the insistence that Obama’s effrontery in bypassing Congress was the primary issue. Of course, Obama had enacted it because the Republicans Congress could not pass anything. Just how a Republican president might overcome this obstacle was never worked out.

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/trumps-immigration-plan-is-obamacare-repeal-all-over.html

[MineralMan]

1. Trump's DACA initiative exemplifies something simple.

Trump, along with many xenophobes, dislikes immigrants, despite being of an immigrant family, himself. Perhaps he dislikes non-Caucasian immigrants in particular. If he had his druthers, he'd probably look for ways to retroactively deport everyone who is not a Caucasian who is of immigrant heritage.

He can't do that, so he's making do with this incredibly stupid DACA walkback. He can get rid of almost a million people, most with brown skin, with the move. He may also be able to kick out a few more million who came here without papers. Then, he can find a way to jail millions of other, if he really tries hard.

Trump and his right-wing racist supporters have the goal of expelling everyone who is not European in heritage. That's what they want to do. If they can't do it wholesale, they'll do it in dribs and drabs.

It's really simple. He doesn't like people of color.

[elleng]

2. 'Obama had enacted it because the Republicans Congress could not pass anything,'

and still can't. Watch!

[pansypoo53219]

3. butbutbut on NPR the GOpper said obama would not deal w/ the GOP wall.

[Hortensis]

4. Before Obama, I got hate stares here in the South as a liberal,

though more covert expressions of hostility were more common. For me southern conservatives come in two varieties, those who can be friends with us even though they disagree and the hostile anti-liberal bigots.

I believe Chait's absolutely right, but it's by no means all about racism. It grew tremendously with Bill Clinton, our first "black" president. You know, our hamburger guzzler with pasty-white legs who was accused of everything from dealing drugs, to murder, to vandalizing the white house, even raping a white woman.

Most conservatives, after decades now of only listening to right-wing propaganda, are far too ignorant to have a real, defendable ideology beyond the attack-dog role they've been taught. Oh, sure, they claim beliefs and principles, and many are good people who live strong principles in other aspects of their lives, but there's a tremendous dissociation between their nonpolitical and political attitudes and behaviors.

We all see it. I suspect in the depths of their minds many of them do also. Here in the South we've seen a great drop-off in expressions of patriotism, flag displays, and all the "what would Jesus do"s?