Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said a majority of Senate Democrats wouldn’t vote for funding the federal government without a deal on DACA. In other words, Democrats are calling Trump’s bluff, and if the government shuts down, it will be Trump’s fault.
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Sen. Coons said:
The majority of my caucus, myself included, we will not fund the government without a DACA deal. The challenge is to make it clear to the American people this is not just about immigration. It’s also about CHIP, community health centers, response to hurricanes. The Republican majority and the Republican president, to put a very sharp point on it, have failed to come up with a way we can fund the government and address the vital needs of states and territories, of families and children all over this country. This isn’t what folks want us to be doing in Washington to have yet another cliffhanger and possibly a government shutdown. No one wants to shut the government to shut down.
I don’t want to shut the government down. When the president has a meeting at the White House at his own invitation and brings together bipartisan leaders and said you go find a deal, I will sign it, anything that helps solve this DACA program, and they come back with a deal, and he blows up the meeting and the deal, it’s hard to understand that this is anything other than intentional sabotage by a good group of bipartisan Senators led by Lindsay Graham and Dick Durbin to solve this longstanding problem. A crisis of the president’s own creating, I’ll remind you. The deadline to the Dreamers, DACA is an artificial one created by the president. Congress should take statutory action to put into law the protections that are previously administrative. I support our making responsible compromises to get there. That’s part of what we have to do in the Senate. We have other important things we also need to be moving forward on. That’s the point I was trying to make. Lots of issues we should not move forward without having addressed and resolved.
As Sen. Coons stated, Trump said he would sign whatever deal Congress came up with. The Senate came up with a bipartisan deal, and Trump blew it up. The president has never wanted a deal on DACA. He is trying to trigger a government shutdown so that he can deport the Dreamers and blame Democrats. Trump is also suffering from the delusional belief that he can shut down the government and get Democrats to pay for his wall.
None of this is going to happen. Senate Republicans don’t have 60 votes to keep the government open.
Democrats are standing firm, and daring Trump to sink Republicans even more by shutting down the government.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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