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You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Open Thread: Defending the DREAMers

Open Thread: Defending the DREAMers

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This meets my criteria for the epitome of ‘mixed feelings’. Anything involving the Kochs, of course, needs to be critically examined for hidden pitfalls. On the other hand, if even these amoral monsters are standing up in defense of young people whose only crime was being born to the wrong parents… well, it is to be hoped that this indicates Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, and Rep. Steve King represent an extinction burst and not a successful revival of racism as a winning political tactic…

… Spokespeople for the Koch network confirmed to The Daily Beast that it will press Congress for a legislative fix to the recently rescinded Obama-era program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, that shielded undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children.

The Kochs’ backing could provide a crucial boost to efforts to preserve DACA, which Trump announced this week he will phase out over the course of six months. Congress has scrambled to find a replacement for those legal protections that are set to be removed. And Trump himself signaled early support for the DREAM Act, which would, essentially, codify the DACA protections that Obama had imposed via executive action…

With its formidable political and policy operation, the Koch network could provide more political cover to Republican members of Congress as they consider a replacement to the DACA program. Koch network alumni are sprinkled throughout Trump’s inner circle, and include White House director of legislative affairs Marc Short and Corey Lewandowski, the former Trump campaign manager who now advises a prominent independent political group supporting the president…

Reader Interactions

60Comments

  1. 1.

    hueyplong

    The Koch Bros winning an issue and Trump looking good for a day add up to a fairly small price to pay for DACA codification.

    Chances are pretty good Obama would agree.

  2. 2.

    Amaranthine RBG

    On the other hand, if even these amoral monsters are standing up in defense of young people whose only crime was being born to the wrong parents… well, it is to be hoped that this indicates Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, and Rep. Steve King represent an extinction burst and not a successful revival of racism as a winning political tactic

    This is just a fantastic sentence. A lot of information conveyed very concisely. A pleasure to read.

  3. 3.

    TenguPhule

    Just a little reminder of what we’re fighting for. And Against.

    A Senate panel on Wednesday considered the judicial nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, a controversial Catholic law professor who once seemed to suggest that one’s religious beliefs ought to take precedence over the U.S. Constitution.

    President Donald Trump nominated the Notre Dame Law School professor to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit earlier this year. Barrett clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

    This woman isn’t fit to be a dogcatcher, let alone a judge.

    In an article she co-wrote with John H. Garvey entitled “Catholic Judges in Capital Cases,” Barrett criticized a Supreme Court justice who once testified that a judge’s oath to the Constitution should “alone” govern how they rule from the bench. Barrett wrote that that was not a “proper response for a Catholic judge to take with respect to abortion or the death penalty.”

    In a 2013 article titled “Precedent and Jurisprudential Disagreement,” Barrett said she agreed with those who say that it is “more legitimate” for a justice to “enforce her best understanding of the Constitution rather than a precedent she thinks clearly in conflict with it.”

    Barrett has also been critical of the supremacy of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision affirming a woman’s right to an abortion, as legal precedent. In a 2013 article, she included arguments as to why the case was not a super precedent, noting litigants have continued to challenge it over the years.

    This is the kind of future the Republicans want.

  4. 4.

    PhoenixRising

    Fucking Donald J Trump, putting me on the same side of the table with the rich evil dudes!

  5. 5.

    TenguPhule

    Anything involving the Kochs, of course, needs to be critically examined for hidden pitfalls.

    They see an opportunity to earn some main-stream credibility at no cost to themselves. Other then pissing off the purity ponies who insist on no contact with evil fucking money, nothing that directly threatens our interests this time.

  6. 6.

    JGabriel

    Anne Laurie @ Top:

    Anything involving the Kochs, of course, needs to be critically examined for hidden pitfalls. On the other hand, if even these amoral monsters are standing up in defense of young people whose only crime was being born to the wrong parents…

    I doubt that’s what the Kochs doing. I suspect they’re just standing up for the rights of employers to hire undocumented immigrants they can exploit without gov’t interference.

    Still, if it gets us to the right place, I’m not going to over-worry about their motives.

  8. 8.

    Mike in NC

    Yesterday and today we attended the famous Brimfield Fair in central Massachusetts. Wife is an antique shop addict, and this thing was billed as the largest open-air flea market in the world. Day One we got drenched, but today was fine. Exhausted before we saw half of the 5000 vendors. She was able to check that off her Bucket List. Spent hardly a penny, though. Then we had a white-knuckle high-speed ride back to Boston along the Mass Pike and Route 128 South, which maybe took a year off my life.

  10. 10.

    marv

    Is it cognitive dissonance if you don’t understand the idea of cognitive dissonance? I’m thinking of Steven “Cantaloupe” King from Iowa.

  12. 12.

    efgoldman

    @Mike in NC:

    Yesterday and today we attended the famous Brimfield Fair in central Massachusetts.

    I always meant to go; I don’t think I could handle it physically any more.

    @Mike J:

    Obama was always willing to let people describe an action any way they wanted

    He never cared who got credit, either.

  13. 13.

    Jado

    Boy, Obama would really hate if DACA became a law. Oooo, he would seethe if Trump was able to sign DACA into law when he couldn’t.

    Or, you know, he would rejoice that kids were getting a shot at the only lives they’ve ever known. Cause Obama’s not a petty toddler like Trump.

  16. 16.

    tomtofa

    Glad all that alt-right, white supremacist, neo-Nazi silliness (when was that – last year, last month, yesterday?) is behind us and we can move forward with our new partner. Even the Kochs seem to agree.

    Haven’t seen any media comment on how much yesterday’s WH meeting resembled the last scene in an Apprentice episode.

  17. 17.

    Mnemosyne

    I checked in with my nieces in Florida and their mom has already taken them to North Carolina to get away from Irma. Phew!

  18. 18.

    Hill Dweller

    Obama ultimately “wins”, because he created DACA, and it’s so popular with the public, ending it would be political suicide for Republicans. Dumbass Trump thought he was ending DACA, but he actually painted himself(and Republicans) into a corner.

  22. 22.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Hill Dweller: I never bought it, but I keep thinking of J Chait’s book about how Obama’s legacy would endure, how many people were mocking him through the winter and spring… don’t look so funny now, does it trolls?

  24. 24.

    FlyingToaster

    @Mike in NC: Amateur.

    An actual white-knuckle ride is barrelling down MA Route 2 from Greenfield to Cambridge. And none of this slowing down where the road narrows by the paper mill in Hudson.

  26. 26.

    Smiling Mortician

    Open thread? I am collecting the most outrageous shit Trump has said/done, from calling Ivanka “a piece of ass” to the “I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue” thing to calling Nazis “fine people” — this is for the final scene in the play I’ve been working on (I mentioned it here maybe a month or two ago in a conversation about comedy & anger — anyway, auditions are now just two weeks away and I’m still revising the finale!). Anyway, if y’all have some favorites, I’m trying to put together a very long list of brief but appalling Trump words/deeds . . . I know I could just Google, but I have a feeling you guys will do a better job of remembering the truly deplorable stuff.

  28. 28.

    phein55

    Really? Is it really that simple?

    Here are the other things Obama never could get done:

    Raise the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation.
    Raise the ceiling on social security taxes to keep pace with inflation.
    Run the KKK out of the US.
    End the racial disparity in criminal prosecutions.
    Stopping MLB from using the All-Star Game to determine home field in the World Series (OK, Obama did do that).

    Your entry?

  36. 36.

    Patricia Kayden

    @efgoldman: Because he’s an adult. If Trump works with Congress to pass DACA, that would be fabulous. Doesn’t negate the need to impeach Trump but it would be the only thing he’s done right.

  44. 44.

    rikyrah

    Whiteness Is Useless Without the Nigger

    Damon Young

    Today 3:38pm

    “What would white people do without the nigger?” It’s a question that courses and bleeds through Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The First White President.”
    It’s never asked explicitly, but it lurks beneath each point, ensconced in the piece’s premise: a fundamental and connective marrow. And it’s been with me since Sunday afternoon after I visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture for the first time.

    …………………………………..

    We weren’t able to get there until after 2:30 p.m., which meant we wouldn’t have time to view the entire museum and eat there. (And yes, eating at their cafeteria was one of our primary objectives. Perhaps the primary objective.) So we just decided to take in the bottom two floors. Which, for those unfamiliar with the construction of the Blacksonian, are the floors devoted to America’s inception, the Middle Passage, slavery, segregation and the fight for civil rights. I’m still not quite sure how to synopsize that experience. I knew what I was going to see. And while certain facts and acts might have been new to me, none of the themes and stories present were. But it still shook me. And, now, four days after visiting the museum, the thought of it still shakes me. I am still fucked up. There were several times while reading the texts describing the horrors in the bowels of the slave ships and while seeing depictions of babies ripped away from hysterical mothers at slave auctions that I began to feel light-headed—only to realize that I was light-headed because I wasn’t breathing.

    And even as I already knew of the creation of whiteness and why the creation of whiteness was necessary for those who wished to deem themselves white, the museum’s brilliant reiteration of the brutality of this intentionality was still shocking. Whiteness cannot and does not exist without the nigger. This is made plain in every picture, every voice-over, every artifact, every page, every scroll and every shackle.

    The idea of a nigger existing, the metaphysical and existential presence of the nigger, the memory of the nigger, the pity of the nigger, the dread of the nigger, the loathing of the nigger, the envy of the nigger, the theft of the nigger, the threat of the nigger, the thought of the nigger and the fabricated terror of the nigger is as essential to whiteness as grain is to grits. It’s the foundation white status sits and stands on. The mattress white self-esteem lays its head on. The mirror white pride smiles at. The restorative balm white souls are soothed by. Without the nigger—without a nigger—whiteness loses its endoskeleton and collapses into dust.

  45. 45.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Smiling Mortician: only appalling or are you including “My god, he’s dumber than I thought he was” moments? “Not many people know Lincoln was a Republican” and “Frederick Douglas is getting more and more well known”

  46. 46.

    rikyrah

    What Happened to Jason Whitlock to Make Him Hate Himself So Much?

    Damon Young

    Yesterday 11:07am

    …………………………..

    We know who he is. We know that he is the type of black man
    to carry and continue a vendetta against Colin Kaepernick; a grudge so freakin’ bizarre that Whitlock thought dressing up Christopher “Kid” Reid from Kid ’n Play in Kaepernick Afroface
    for a skit was a good idea. We know that he exists in a singular bubble of low information and ill-fitting hats, and that he frequently escapes from said bubble to say strange things about hip-hop and Serena Williams’ weight.

    But why is he who he is? How did he become such a paranoid and self-loathing weirdo? Was it a conscious choice? Or perhaps it was predestined; a fulfilling of a century-old prophesy about a man in a porkpie hat who’d emerge to deliver the hottest of takes about blackness, Ball State, feminism and barbecue.

    Of course, the easiest—and perhaps the best—answer is that he is who he is because it’s financially and socially lucrative. He presumably makes in the midsix figures (perhaps more) and has been able to create a comfortable and relevant life by becoming the Black Best Friend of the White Guy Who Claims He Has a Black Best Friend and Therefore Can’t Be Racist.

  47. 47.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Major Major Major Major: No, the conceptual structure of congress was designed by Madison with some assistance in order to solve a problem the Founders and Framers perceived with English governance at that time, and the failure of the national legislature under the Articles of Confederation. It is a very strange creature, made more so by the compromises that created the Senate and then the so far successful attempts by rural power in the House in the 1930s to lock that in permanently. This type of legislative structure makes little sense in the 21st Century. And in a functional and reasonable America would be replaced with a parliament.

  48. 48.

    Adam L Silverman

    @rikyrah: There is an old saying among Jews that if there were no Jews, Christians would have to invent them. Though in the 21st Century I would add Muslims as well. I think what Damon Young wrote, which you’ve posted here, is the racial parallel. If Africans didn’t exist, especially Africans and then their African American descendants didn’t exist within the contexts created as a result of slavery then white people would have to invent them.

  52. 52.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Citizen Alan: No argument here. I debated adding the following: It is only because there were African slaves in the American colonies and then the US that the Irish were considered white. And then just barely.

  53. 53.

    chris

    @Adam L Silverman:

    This type of legislative structure makes little sense in the 21st Century. And in a functional and reasonable America would be replaced with a parliament.

    Thanks for saying that, few Americans would dare. Keep saying it and maybe in a generation or two it might happen.

  54. 54.

    Adam L Silverman

    @chris: I doubt it would ever happen. But there is a reason that when the US assists other countries transition to democracy we don’t have them replicate our systems.

  56. 56.

    chris

    @Adam L Silverman: It’s always about the Benjamins isn’t it? If the money were removed from politics people might see some sense in a parliamentary system with 30 to 60 day election campaigns. Good luck with that one ;-)

  58. 58.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @chris:

    If the money were removed from politics people might see some sense in a parliamentary system with 30 to 60 day election campaigns.

    We have 230 years of living with our system. One can’t expect that we suddenly switch to a parliamentary system. BTW, if we do something like a Constitutional Convention, do you think we will get a better system?

  59. 59.

    Mandarama

    @rikyrah: Thank you so much for posting this. The Coates piece has been reverberating in my head all day, and Young’s commentary on it made me feel like weeping. The bloody heirloom; the forgetting to breathe. ?

  60. 60.

    J R in WV

    @rikyrah:

    DeVos to rewrite Obama-era school sexual assault policy to better protect the accused

    Obama was against Rape, and so Betty DeVos must be in favor of Rape, at any time by any male of any female. This is the Republican/Evangelical position on Rape – it MUST be a good thing because that Ni**er president was against it so strongly !! Perhaps it should be required?

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