Onward

- 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.

Temporary CR has been passed, funding the gov’t until February 8th (this date is important, we’ll come back to it)

CHIP has been funded for the next six years. 9 million children, including 1.75 million who would have lost their health insurance starting February 1st, are safely off the hook and will stay insured.

Government workers are getting paid again now that the government is back on - which they wouldn’t have during the shutdown, which would have hurt a lot of them especially if it went on for a while, because how many families do you know that can just afford to lose a month’s pay like it’s nbd? Right.

Military servicemembers are also getting paid again - despite McConnell (Senate Majority Leader, Republican) having led Republicans in a “but why do you hate our military families??” attack on the Democrats, which was total garbage, because the Dems proposed a bill (some sources said two?) specifically to ensure military families got paid during the shutdown, but he rejected it so the Rs could do public relations crocodile tears about it. Because if hell is real that’s where he’s going when he dies.

DACA has not been renewed, but it hasn’t definitively been denied either; it’s still under negotiation, but only until Feb 8th, when the CR expires and McConnell publicly promised to allow a vote on DACA. We don’t expect him to comply because he’s a lying snake, but if he backs out again, the press & Dems will crucify him for it, and the Democrats can refuse to re-up the CR and send us right back into shutdown until DACA gets renewed.

What this means politically is that the Dems temporarily caved on DACA to end the shutdown (which maaany people are not happy about), but in the process of temporarily caving, they:

got CHIP renewed, which takes 9 million hostages and a lot of leverage out of the Republicans’ hands.

Negated the false “CHIP or Dreamers” choice Republicans were trying to set up by freeing one set of hostages so they can’t be played against each other (see above)

Got McConnell to publicly commit to a date for a DACA resolution (!!), so they can still save the DACA recipients

Gave themselves a failsafe in the form of the temporary CR, which expires February 8th, and which they can refuse to renew if McConnell tries some broken-promise bullshit on DACA again (which seems likely).

The Republicans, meanwhile, lost their CHIP leverage, lost their (false) “Dems hate our brave military” narrative when the shutdown ended, and gained nothing except the end of the shutdown. The Democrats won big on CHIP, avoided hurting federal employees by losing them pay, and still have the shutdown option to use as leverage to pass DACA on Feb. 8th.

So, if you’re American, call your reps to thank them for fighting to fund CHIP and demand they support DACA (if they’re Democrats), or call your reps to scold them for waiting this long to fund CHIP* and demand they support DACA (if they’re Republicans). And don’t let anybody give you the ‘spineless Dems caved right away’ narrative, because the situation is awful, but they made a pretty good move under these circumstances, and set themselves up to rescue the other set of hostages (DACA) in a few weeks.