We begin today’s roundup with Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post and his analysis of Donald Trump’s shutdown and his cruel approach to the presidency:
Imagine going a month without a paycheck. Imagine lining up the bills and deciding which get paid and which don’t — mortgage or rent, electricity, heating. Imagine having to commute to work at an “essential” government job and trying to scrape together enough money for gas or bus fare. All of these hardships, and many more, are being inflicted on hardworking public servants for no earthly reason. From the beginning, Democrats have taken a reasonable position: Keep the government open, and let’s have a debate and a negotiation about border security. Trump agreed — until far-right pundits accused him of abandoning his border wall, which everyone knows will never be built. [...]
Meanwhile, we learned last week that the sadistic policy of separating would-be immigrants from their children has been far more extensive, and more shocking, than anyone suspected.[...]
Above all else, Trump is a bully. Like all schoolyard tyrants, he tries to project great strength to mask internal weakness. But remember the one universal truth about bullies: The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
In an important piece, Elie Mystal at The Nation explains why Trump’s offer of a DACA “deal” to build his wall is just a scam:
Remember, DACA recipients were the first people that Trump tried to take hostage for his wall, and Democrats were willing to give Trump $25 billion to free them. But… his racist base didn’t like “amnesty” for children who were brought to this country through no fault of their own, and Trump turned down the deal. Instead, Trump decided to let the courts weigh in on his executive order to end DACA.
Since then, lower courts have ruled that DACA cannot be rescinded by executive fiat in the way Trump has tried. And on Friday, the Supreme Court did not agree to hear the Trump administration’s challenge to those lower court rulings. Friday was almost certainly the last day this term that the Supreme Court would agree to hear new cases. What that means, at a minimum, is that the lower-court rulings preserving DACA will remain in place for another year. Nobody needs Trump to agree to that. Trump’s offer to extend the thing that’s already been functionally extended is irrelevant.
