Heartless Politics

"I have a great heart for these folks we're talking about. A great love for them and people think in terms of children, but they're really young adults… I have a love for these people and hopefully now Congress will be able to help them and do it properly."

Donald Trump after Rescinding DACA, September 5^th

Fiscal conservatives just tell us we do not have the money to provide significant social benefits for the lower strata of our nation. Obamacare (ACA) had to be repealed completely, they screamed, but three Republicans – including the refusal to repeal by one dying Senator (John McCain, R-AZ) – showed that America does have a heart even if the President doesn’t, and the Affordable Care Act survived… forcing the GOP to express a willingness to work with Dems to fix an act that has been begging for a fix since passage in 2010. But not populist Donald Trump, who had once promised his lower-income constituents a better healthcare plan, was now railing against Republicans for not repealing the only coverage so many of his supporters could get. He continues to undermine the surviving ACA as much as he can.

No money for these basic social programs? But no real money for education, infrastructure and job-creating research either? Then why is the next highest Trump-priority domestic program massive tax cuts for the wealthiest segment of American society? The GOP continues to rely on the rather dramatically disproven Laffer Curve to tell us that tax cuts mean more and better jobs. Remember when Ronald Reagan’s corporate tax moratorium on overseas cash holdings led to a flurry of now-well-funded corporate mergers and acquisition… and instead of new jobs, triggered a flood of layoffs that almost always accompany such activity? How about the complete and total recent failure – a disaster that almost bankrupted the state and decimated public primary and secondary education – of a corporate tax cut policy in Kansas? Still, tax cuts are flagrantly and falsely touted – wink, wink – as “job creators.”

We have no problem spending more money on a military (already sucking up 41% of the aggregate global military expenditures) that hasn’t won a major conflict since WWII. North Korea doesn’t seem too impressed with our huge military as the North seems to have detonated a mega-powerful hydrogen bomb. And Trump is dedicated to wasting a needless estimated $26 to $46 billion to build a wall with Mexico – when immigration statistics tell us the number of people cross northward has dropped like a stone (a reality that began in the Obama years)… a wall that Mexico will not pay for. A wall that is globally viewed as a mean-spirited reflection of newfound American arrogance and heartlessness.

GOP/Trump’s disdain for the “little guy” – well beyond Donald Trump’s open mocking of a disabled journalist and personal attacks against a gold star family – continues as workplace safety, wage equality, consumer protection from large financial institutions and the safety of water, air and land from toxic pollutants are sacrificial lambs (facing repeal, defunding or a simple refusal to enforce the underlying laws) that interfere with the ability of the one-percenters to make even more money.

There was also the earlier particular Republican disdain for helping those in blue states suffering from a massive natural disaster – reflected in the number of GOP Congressional votes against Super-Storm Sandy aid – just as Donald Trump and those same anti-Sandy-aid GOP cronies now lined up (with uniform Democratic Congressional support) to authorize aid for Hurricane Harvey victims in red state Texas. Florida is right behind with Hurricane Irma slamming into its climate-change-vulnerable shores. It gets worse.

As if his religiously-directed travel ban were not enough, Trump’s post-Charlottesville litany of responses, his pardon of a man held in contempt of court for racist profiling, and his resulting groundswell of support from neo-Nazis, the KKK and white supremacists in general have established Donald Trump as the globally-reviled poster-boy for 21^st century racism. But wait, there’s more.

How about a program – impacting nearly 800,000 undocumented aliens (an estimated 200,000 live in California, while 100,000 are in Texas) referred to as “dreamers” – who on average were six years old when they were brought to the United States (like they had a choice?) by their undocumented parents? For all practical purposes, the United States is the only country they have ever known. They are completely assimilated into our culture, and for most English is their primary language. They are Americans in every sense of the world with most of those of college age… in college. They were accorded special immigration/driver license/Social Security/work permit status – a program that would prevent US immigration authorities from deporting them to countries that are actually foreign to them – under President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive order. The attorneys general of ten red states have recently threatened to sue the Trump administration unless it voided the DACA.

Apparently unwilling to address the nation on the rescinding of the DACA program directly himself, on September 5^th, President Trump turned over that announcement to unabashed hardliner, Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Effectively labeling the Obama executive order that created the program as defiant of the will of Congress, “the people” and the courts, an “unconstitutional” act as he put it, Sessions went on to talk about the jobs lost to American citizens to these undocumented Dreamers. So many Dreamers have voluntarily applied for the program, giving their names, addresses and contract information to the government. Bad move?

Sessions noted: “To have a lawful system of immigration that serves the national interest, we cannot admit everyone who would like to come here. It's just that simple. That would be an open-border policy and the American people have rightly rejected that.” Sessions obviously ignored the prevailing polling that showed most Americans in favor of continuing the DACA program.

As for that big heart Donald Trump spoke of, it apparently wasn’t about the innate unfairness of children brought to this country at a young age and then growing up as Americans: “We are people of compassion and we are people of law. But there is nothing compassionate about the failure to enforce immigration law,” Sessions added.

This announcement very much leaves in limbo how immigration and law enforcement officials will treat Dreamers when they come in contact with them. I suspect there will be a very big difference between red and blue state actions. More than one Republican shared John McCain’s (R-AZ) belief that this decision was simply “wrong.” The Dems were uniform in the condemnation of the termination of that Obama executive order.

The Trump administration is deferring the DACA rescission for six months to let Congress address the issue. That six month tail was also the President’s notion of “heart.” Joining with the entire Democratic Congressional contingent, many Republicans, House Speaker Paul Ryan had said during a radio interview before Labor Day weekend that he didn’t think the president should terminate DACA, and that if he did, Congress should act on the issue. Do these pockets of GOP support for a DACA program (like Arizona Republican Senator John McCain), this extra six months, mean reform is about to happen, at least as far as the Dreamers are concerned?

The GOP has consistently blocked immigration reform (over ten failed attempts to implement Congressional DACA legislation) over 16 years during the administrations of both George W Bush and Barack Obama. With the extreme right wing of the Republican Party clinging to a GOP rule that no bill gets introduced by their party that does not have majority GOP support, and with a lot of red state representatives sworn to oppose any form of tolerance or legalization for any undocumented aliens – even the innocent Dreamers – there are no guarantees that Congress – even though such a bill would have a clear majority vote in both houses – can even get such legislation out of committee. And if there is an appetite among these GOP extremists to entertain DACA reform, will they tie passage to some ultra-obnoxious requirement like funding Trump’s folly: the wall?

“The [six-month delay] compromise, which could lead to legislation superseding President Barack Obama’s executive order, is intended to address a growing chorus of Republican lawmakers, led by the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, who have implored the White House to keep some form of the program… The temporary solution has been the subject of quiet negotiations between Mr. Trump’s legislative staff and members of Mr. Ryan’s staff, according to an administration official familiar with the talks.

“But administration aides concede that Congress may be unable to agree on a legislative fix, given the headwinds that previous legislation has run into for years. It is unclear exactly what would happen after six months if Congress does not act.” New York Times, September 3^rd. At least blame-meister The Donald would have someone to blame. So what if a young Dreamer died in his efforts to save lives during the Hurricane Harvey disaster? For a country with little heart and fading empathy, that almost 800,000 innocent human beings are left to twist in the wind is pretty consistent with other Trump-practices.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I ask you to put yourself in the shoes of a young college-educated man or woman brought to the United States as a very young child by their parents, being told that they face “deportation” to a country they do not know and never really lived in for any relevant time in their lives.