Portside

Immigration reform is desperately needed. Dreamers and TPS recipients need their legal status maintained and millions more need legal protection. It should be possible for those millions of immigrants working in this country to gain a route to legalization and citizenship.  Instead, the Trump White House demands a border wall, more ICE, more border guards, and even less legal protection for immigrants.

It takes a special type of hypocrite to accuse your opponents of hypocrisy for following in your footsteps

The House Freedom Caucus, a relatively new group of about 40 Republicans loosely associated with the Tea Party, has an extraordinary amount of power in this process. Any potential speaker needs the support of 218 Republicans on the floor of the House. There are currently 247 Republicans in the House. That’s a large majority but without the Freedom Caucus, no candidate can get to 218.

The left needs a Karl Rove to target the 144 House GOPers and 19 senators of the Default Caucus. Look out, Ted Cruz

Stopping the rightwing, anti-immigrant, poor-bashing Republican juggernaut won’t be easy.

The debt ceiling turns out to be unexploded ordnance lying around the American form of government. Only custom or moral compunction stops the opposition party from using it to nullify the president’s powers, or, for that matter, the president from using it to nullify Congress’s. To weaponize the debt ceiling, you must be willing to inflict harm on millions of innocent people.

Alex Lawson: “In this case,” he says, “it would be trying to substitute out the Obamacare cuts or delays, and substitute in some of these grand bargain approaches. These are ones that are non-controversial, that are seemingly agreed-upon. We think it’s really important to get out in front of any attempts to do that and show that no, these are highly controversial and there will not be support.”

To many Americans, the shutdown came out of nowhere. But interviews with a wide array of conservatives show that the confrontation that precipitated the crisis was the outgrowth of a long-running effort to undo the law, the Affordable Care Act, since its passage in 2010 — waged by a galaxy of conservative groups with more money, organized tactics and interconnections than is commonly known.