{UAH} Allan/Edmund/Pojim/WBK: Democrats and #NeverTrumpers may win the battle on health care and immigration - The Washington Post
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Democrats and #NeverTrumpers may win the battle on health care and immigration
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) watches as House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) hammers in a nail during a ceremony to drive in the first nails to signify the start of construction on the 2017 presidential inaugural platform in September on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Andrew Harnik/Associated Press)Democrats have two concerns — how to repair their party and how to manage a Trump administration with GOP majorities in both houses. For now, we will focus on the latter. They will be surprised, we suspect, in both positive and negative ways. The biggest may be that when your determined foes get into office, they wind up normalizing a great deal of what they once inveighed against.
Republicans will now sign onto a goal that will surely bring a smile to Democrats' lips: providing health-care coverage for people who currently have Obamacare, with as little interruption as possible. Remember, now the GOP will be the party that gets the flak if people get dumped from coverage or if people with preexisting illnesses cannot find insurance. They cannot criticize from the bleachers. They are now responsible.
That's why President-elect Donald Trump already says he will keep parts of Obamacare. Republicans, if they want an alternative to Obamacare, will have every incentive to make their health care work. No more legal and political challenges to end the United States' first attempt at universal health-care coverage. In short, Democrats, you won! Republicans now want tens of millions of people to get coverage and understand that taxpayers in some fashion are going to have to pay for it. That is a huge deal, a repudiation of the "small government" fetish that has driven the GOP for years. Now the arguments will be over the means, but not the ends. You'll be hard-pressed to find a Republican in Congress or the White House who wants to — sorry — let people die in the streets.
Radical immigration exclusionists likewise are about to get a jarring wake-up call. They cannot deport millions upon millions of non-criminal illegal immigrants who have roots in their communities. Trump, not even a week after the election, is only talking about deporting criminals, working on border control and then addressing the status of rest. This is "amnesty" in a prom dress.
Trump's notion that there are 2 million or more criminals among the 11 million illegal immigration population amounts to poppycock. The Post and immigration gurus put the figure at more like 800,000. That's a number the administration will want to embrace, because it won't ever want to concede that it found 800,000 but couldn't root out more than a million people. It may make up some tale (the threat of Trump caused them to self-deport!), but the reality will be the same.
At the end of that criminal deportation process (if he gets that far), Trump will have to start addressing the other 10-plus million. Neither he nor the Congress has the stomach to round them all up. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) already said there will be no deportation force. That means Republicans will have responsibility for figuring out how to deal with 10 million people, give or take, who have committed no other crimes — the grandmas, the parents, the children, the students, the manual laborers, the people paying into Social Security and paying sales tax, the merchants, the consumers and the rest.
You see, this has been the anti-immigrant advocates' con all along. They either never believed we would actually do what Trump promised (mass deportation), or they were snookered. Now a GOP Congress and a GOP president will come face to face with the demise of their fantasy (our nightmare) of banishing 11 million to 12 million people.
This does not excuse Trump's campaign appeals to xenophobia or his lies about illegal immigrants' impact on the economy, but it does illustrate the beauty of the dog that caught the bus. The effect is magnified when the bus-catcher has no real views or positions and desperately wants to be popular. No longer can the talk-show zealots bemoan liberal coddling of illegal immigrants; they'll be singing the praises of (or turning like rabid dogs on) the guy who "solved" the problem (if he accomplishes anything at all) — by sending criminals home and making peace with 10 million illegal immigrants.
And it gets better. Trump, in all likelihood, is going to come under extreme pressure to fix and even expand legal immigration. Michael Barone writes:
Ryan also backed the little-noticed tenth of Trump's ten points in his Phoenix speech: shifting legal immigration from extended-family reunification, mostly of low-skill immigrants, and setting aside many more places for high-skill immigrants "based on merit, skill and proficiency."
That resembles the point systems of Canada and Australia. As law professor F. H. Buckley points out, Canada, with one-tenth the U.S. population, admits about 160,000 immigrants yearly under economic categories — more than the U.S.'s 140,000. As a result, immigrants in Canada, unlike here, have incomes above, not below the national average.
Some serious Democrats agree with Trump. "Our immigration laws should be reoriented to favor immigrants with higher skills," wrote Clinton administration policymaker William Galston in the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 2. Clinton Treasury Secretary and Obama economic adviser Lawrence Summers called for more high-skill immigration in an American Enterprise Institute talk Nov. 4.
Actually, both Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) have advocated shifting to a high-skill-based system as well.
This is also not a recipe for complacency. There will be radicals who really think the deportation force is the way to go. The terms under which millions of illegal immigrants will be permitted to stay, if the exclusionists have their way, could be very onerous. Once again, however, we will be debating the means and the details of implementing something Republicans refused to even consider. It will be up to Democrats and pro-immigration Republicans to highlight the inhumanity of expelling non-criminals, explain the centrality of these people to our communities and our economy and educate the Trumpkins who thought these people were stealing their jobs. There will be plenty of work to do.
None of this is unique to a transition from a Democratic to a GOP White House. In fact, we are reminded of a shift from a GOP to Democratic White House in the war against jihadist terrorism. Obama routinized drone warfare, could not close Guantanamo Bay and sent boots on the ground (they are fighting in Mosul and elsewhere) to Iraq to rout the Islamic State. The National Security Agency surveillance programs were modified, but they were not eliminated. There is plenty he did or did not do that conservatives and allies think harmed national security and contributed to genocide in Syria, but on some counts, the positions President George W. Bush took were made permanent by his successor. That's the way things work in the real world.
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