For Third Time This Week, Senate Tries and Fails on DHS Bill Loaded Up With Anti-Immigrant Poison Pills
Only Path Forward is a Clean Funding Bill – ASAP
Today, for the third time this week, Senate Republicans failed to advance a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill that includes House-passed riders to block President Obama’s immigration executive actions. Meanwhile, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) is floating a new proposal that she calls a “compromise.” Her proposal is to stop the new executive actions announced by the President last October – to expand protections for DREAMers and to help upwards of 5 million parents of American children – while keeping in place the original DACA program that has benefited almost 700,000 DREAMers. Yet this so-called “compromise” is nothing of the sort. It’s yet another desperate GOP attempt to maximize the deportation of long-settled, hardworking immigrants, wastes more valuable time and, given the President’s promise to veto any such proposal, will never become law. As the nation careens closer to a partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, Republicans need to realize that the only path forward is a clean bill, stripped of poison pills that stop long overdue common-sense steps to fix our broken immigration system.
The following is a statement from Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice assessing the current dynamics:
In baseball, it’s ‘three strikes and you’re out.’ Let’s hope the Senate under GOP leadership follows the same rule. After all, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
By playing Russian Roulette with homeland security funding, Republicans are failing to live up to their stated pledge to govern responsibly and to not be ‘scary.’ Destabilizing homeland security funding at a time of increased concern over terrorism is unconscionable. Do the thought experiment: imagine what the conservative echo chamber would be doing today if the Democrats had hatched such a boneheaded strategy.
Now, Senator Collins is floating a so-called ‘compromise.’ The Collins proposal would put up to 5 million parents of U.S. kids at the front of the deportation line while also blocking the expansion of DACA for DREAMers who have been in America for the longest time. Fortunately, the President and Democrats in Congress will oppose it. Remarkably, the most rabid restrictionists in the GOP will, as well, but for very different reasons. It seems they are determined to take a lesson from Mitt Romney’s ill-fated 2012 campaign – by lurching further to the right. Self-deportation seems to be losing out to mass deportation.
Time is short. The clock is ticking. The nation’s homeland security funding is in jeopardy, Congress is hurtling towards a partial government shutdown and the GOP is entirely responsible for this reckless strategy. It’s time for a clean DHS appropriations bill.