| Kommentar | Norbert, are you saying that you want the Dreamers to be deported? To countries they have never been back to, whose languages some of them speak only at a minimal level?
Again, the story is one of far-right Republican intransigence and Democratic despair. Time and again there have been hard-won bipartisan agreements in the Senate, most notably in 2013 and again right now, and each time the ultraconservative Republican House and their white-supremacist friends have scuttled every legislative effort. For people who have strong Christian values, or just golden-rule values -- treat foreigners as you would like to be treated, don't separate families, provide refuge for the vulnerable, protect those who live in fear -- it is an absolute principle of human rights and not a meaningless negotiable detail. (Many evangelical congregations, by the way, are increasingly stepping up in defense of refugees and immigrants, having reread the passages in scripture about widows, orphans, and aliens.)
And again, what has made it urgent -- and it is getting more urgent by the week -- was Trump's decision to end the program as of March 8. Did you read my comment in #10? It takes months to prepare and process a DACA application.
The other factor that has made it not only urgent, but in some cases even a matter of life and death, is Trump's and Jeff Sessions's and Stephen Miller's decision to ramp up deporting people willy-nillly who have committed no actual crimes except being undocumented. Even people seeking asylum from violence in Central America, even people who have worked and paid taxes here for decades, even parents who have minor children who are citizens (whose rights to the care and protection of their parents are still being contested in the courts). Those vicious, toxic decisions have forced the Democrats' hand, because as I explained, they now feel that they, and the Dreamers, have little to lose. The far-right Republicans are determined to persecute and deport them, so the only avenue that the Democrats and moderate Republicans have left is to call their hand, to call the public's attention to what they are doing.
You are of course right that there are segments of the public who just don't care. Certainly those in Trump's base who prefer to believe, against all evidence, that 'foreigners' are taking their jobs, will be among them, even though very few of them want to work in the fields picking vegetables or in meat factories cutting up dead animals.
But there are a lot of other segments of the public who at least have the imagination to see that if the far right can come after one group of people like this, it can come after other groups. Muslims, African-Americans, women -- immigrants are not the only group that Trump has first derided and disparaged, and then actively targeted with policy decisions.
Even many Jewish voters can see through Trump and Pence's shameless courting of the Israeli ultra-right -- which, not coincidentally, is controlled by fundamentalist clerics not unlike those in Iran, who don't even recognize half of American Judaism as Jewish. And most American Jews still remember and retell the events of the Holocaust -- a persecution that also rested on the targeting of more and more minority groups by chipping away at their legal defenses.
It is precisely these kinds of unchecked persecutions of minorities that supermajorities, such as they are, exist to prevent, or at least to render more difficult. The largest ones, such as the 2/3 hurdle to pass new constitutional amendments, have indeed proved largely unworkable in practice.
But if even a 3/5 majority is enough to make half a dozen centrists stop and consult their consciences, then it may yet serve its purpose. I still think, or hope or pray, that there is a possibility of getting from 57 votes to 60 for the bipartisan immigration bill in the Senate -- perhaps all the more so as the White House and the House become even more intransigent instead of more open to genuine negotiation.
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