Trump is currently holding a bipartisan meeting of leaders in both the House and Senate to discuss the new DACA legislation that Congress is working on.
Trump is insistent that the bill be bipartisan, a bill of love as he called it, and lays out the three basic principles that must be met in this bill. One of them is a wall:
President Trump says any DACA legislation “should be a bipartisan deal. This should be a bill of love.” pic.twitter.com/beNcsfYK1j
— NBC News (@NBCNews) January 9, 2018
Trump explains how this meeting came to fruition, saying he had a meeting with Republicans last week where they all agreed on everything, and Trump said that they needed to do it over again and add the Democrats:
.@POTUS on immigration talks: "Let's have the same meeting but let's add the Democrats, and that's what we've done." pic.twitter.com/SoVFVsI2Xg
— FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) January 9, 2018
Apparently answering a question, Trump says his positions on this will be what Congress comes up with. In other words, he’s not going to force this to be just a Republican bill:
Trump on immigration: "My positions are going to be what the people in this room come up with." (via FOX) pic.twitter.com/ce2b67kw6x
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) January 9, 2018
I’m not crazy about a bipartisan effort especially with these leftist Democrats. But if McConnell is unwilling to nuke the filibuster completely, then there has to be some Democratic votes in the Senate to get an immigration bill through. It’s just a fact.
Which means any bill where we get 8 or 9 Democratic votes in the Senate is probably not going to be a great bill, and perhaps not even a good bill. I just don’t see how we are going to get the border properly secured in a bipartisan bill. If somehow they manage to do that, I’ll be blown away.
Now Trump has a proposal for how they can make this bipartisanship work and you’re going to love it. They did in the room because half of the room broke out in laughter:
President Trump: “Maybe all of you should starting thinking about going back to a form of earmarks,” says the current system “really lends itself to not getting along.” pic.twitter.com/C5NjdN27jV
— NBC Politics (@NBCPolitics) January 9, 2018
Earmarks. In other words, legal congressional bribes.
Trump is blaming the system, saying it’s the reason we can’t get anyone to agree. He says the system is setup to make us hate each other. It is true that Democrats over the decades have changed the system, as it wasn’t designed to operate this way. The Senate was supposed to represent the state legislatures, not the people directly.
But what the problem is really is that we have one party who absolutely hates the constitution, and in the other party we have people who love their power so much that seems to be their driving principle.
The whole thing is really a mess. But at the core they do love their power, so wasting tons of taxpayer money on congressional bribery might actually get this bill through. But it would put us right back where we were when we banned all of this pork barrel spending.
The real solution, unfortunately, is for McConnell to kill the filibuster and for Republicans to just railroad Democrats and get good legislation passed. But I just don’t see that happening.