The strategic case for — and against — Democrats shutting down the government over DACA

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The strategic case for — and against — Democrats shutting down the government over DACA

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All of a sudden, Senate Democrats are looking ready to shut down the government over immigration. After months of fruitless negotiations over helping to get legal status for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — something President Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan have both claimed to want — they seem to have had enough.

But there’s still division in the party over whether a shutdown makes a deal for DREAMers more likely — or less.

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Dozens of Senate Democrats have said they are withholding their votes from any government funding bill that doesn’t address DACA. If they hold firm, the federal government will shut down at midnight Friday.

These Democrats’ argument, essentially, is that it’s time to take a stand for DREAMers. A show of strength at a high-profile deadline, they think, is the only way to force a recalcitrant White House to get serious on the issue.

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Quietly, some say that a shutdown fight would be downright counterproductive to efforts to help DACA recipients.

These Democrats — let’s call them the “Shutdown Skeptics” — privately worry that forcing a government shutdown could end up torpedoing chances to cut an immigration deal with Trump. “It essentially forces Trump to draw a line,” says an aide to a senator in this camp.

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It’s common to treat the Shutdown Skeptics as having transparently political motivations, and some, especially those in states Trump won big, surely do. (This faction is now being derided by the Pod Save America guys as the “Waffle House” because of their alleged waffling on helping DACA recipients.)

But some of these Democrats truly do seem to want a DACA deal — and they’re making the case that a government shutdown is more likely to kill that deal than it is to save it.

One major problem with the shutdown strategy, from this point of view, is that it transforms the situation into one where Trump will inevitably be viewed as either triumphing over Democrats or caving to their demands. And our winning-obsessed president won’t want to be seen as a loser.

In this line of thinking, Democrats really shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that a government shutdown over DACA will be popular (like Republicans did for Obamacare in 2013). Many people across the country will be terribly inconvenienced by it, at the very least. Plus, the Republican position — a “clean” government funding bill that funds the Children’s Health Insurance Program for several years — seems reasonable on its face.

If the shutdown does prove to be very unpopular — for instance, last time, review of veterans’ disability applications slowed to a halt — and if Trump effectively argues that Democrats caused it by making extravagant demands for unauthorized immigrants, Democrats’ negotiating position will weaken. Republicans and immigration hawks will be emboldened, and the prospects of a DACA deal could well recede even further.

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