The Patriot Post® · McConnell's DACA Strategy: Let Demos Look Extreme

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) made a rare move Monday, opening the floor for debate on immigration. Other than a general proposal based on President Donald Trump’s four pillars of reform — 1) a path to citizenship for 1.8 million illegal immigrants; 2) securing the border; 3) ending the visa lottery; and 4) ending chain migration — the debate is wide open for amendments from all quarters. “Whoever gets to 60 [votes] wins,” McConnell said. That’s because McConnell promised Minority Leader Chuck Schumer that he’d allow such debate in exchange for Democrats ceasing to hold the budget, including military personnel and their families, hostage to their duplicitous DACA demands.

We use the word “hostage” for a reason. Democrats generally despise Trump’s generous compromise offer, and as Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) lectured, “Dreamers should not be held hostage to President Trump’s crusade to tear families apart and waste billions of American tax dollars on an ineffective wall.” Think about that for a moment: According to Durbin and his Democrat cronies, people who are here illegally, in violation of American Rule of Law, are being “held hostage” to demands that the law be enforced.

Indeed, such “logic” motivates McConnell’s strategy. He knows all too well that Democrats will rabidly oppose any Republican plan because of both their Trump Derangement Syndrome and their hope to rally their own base with the immigration issue for the 2018 election. By all means, Democrats should counter Trump’s America First agenda with their platform of putting illegal aliens first. Or, as Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw put it, “It looks to me like McConnell is throwing Chuck Schumer as much rope as he’s willing to take and inviting the Democrats to go hang themselves with it.”

That isn’t to say a path to citizenship for DACA recipients is especially controversial; we don’t think it is. (Expanding it beyond the initial 800,000 or so is another matter.) But it is to say that the vast majority of Americans see Trump’s proposal as eminently reasonable, while Democrats’ steadfast refusal to take “yes” for an answer is exposed as the fanatical and divisive partisanship that it is.