disastergeek:

pervocracy:

cuyguy:

pervocracy:

Politically I agree with the Democrats not giving in to hostage negotiations and manufactured emergencies, but personally it’s going to mess up my month if the government shuts down for more than a couple days.

I’m German and my knowledge of US politics comes mostly from reddit and YouTube videos of Stephen Colbert monologues. My understanding is that a bipartisan agreement on a law for undocumented immigrants, who entered the US as children, is being used as a bargaining chip to force the Democrats to agree to funding for Trump’s border wall?
Which seems… kinda weird? And feels very inaccurate. Could somebody explain the actual situation in the house (or senate? Or all of congress?) that is the problem and how the Republicans (with their majority in / control of both legislative and executive branch) can’t just do what they want? And why this is pictured as the Democrats’ fault?

So here’s my understanding of what happened:

– Trump ended DACA, a program allowing 800,000 people who entered the US illegally as children to stay and work here if they meet certain requirements.  He’s been flip-flopping wildly between saying he wants Congress to work out a permanent solution for those people, and saying they should all be deported because they’re mostly not white of reasons.

– Congress failed to reauthorize spending for CHIP, the children’s health insurance program which insures 9 million children.

– (Note that before they became Designated Controversies, both of these programs had pretty broad bipartisan support.)

– Also, Trump wants to build a giant goddamn wall across the southern border because he wants a giant symbol of his racism thinks that immigrants are Lemmings and if they hit a wall they’ll just get confused and walk into it forever.

– Congress needed to pass a budget or at least a continuing resolution (CR) to keep the government open.

– Congresspeople from both parties had a public meeting with Trump in which he basically said “just make an agreement and I’ll sign whatever you come up with.”

– Congresspeople from both parties came to Trump with a bipartisan budget agreement that could pass both houses and addressed both DACA and CHIP, and Trump went on his infamous “shithole” rant and rejected it.

– Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a CR that provides for CHIP but not DACA.  They’re trying to spin this into making Democrats choose between DACA and CHIP, so they can say “Democrats are hurting CHIP kids to protect DACA illegals!”, and hoping the public will forget that Republicans could easily have just done both.

– The Senate did not support this bill, so Chuck Schumer, Senate Democratic leader, went to Trump and offered him another deal that could keep the government open, and this one even included the freakin’ wall.  Trump turned it down because it included DACA.  It is not yet known which racial slurs he used this time.

– The Senate voted on the House bill because it was all they had, and it failed.  (This was mostly because Democrats refused to vote for a bill that didn’t support DACA, but there were some Republicans who voted against the bill as well.) So right now, we have no CHIP, no DACA, and no federal government funding.

– I think Democrats were right to vote against the bill, because the “CHIP or DACA, you can only have one” choice was bullshit, and because it’s worth some sacrifice to save 800,000 basically-American people from being deported to countries they haven’t seen since they were infants.

I hope that’s clear and more or less correct.

Reblogging to emphasize that the republican controlled Congress could have reauthorized CHIP at literally any time in the last 3 or 4 months. That re-authorization didn’t have to be attached to or contingent on anything, but they refused to even mention it, much less discuss it in any way. They kept it in their pocket specifically for this cynical, life threatening, bullshit.