Is Our Democrats Learning? Reply Hazy, Try Again.

What's up, Chuck?

It does us good when we see Chuck Schumer call them ‘fucking liars.’

Following Saturday’s murder in Minneapolis of ICU nurse Alex Pretti at the hands of Border Patrol thugs, Senate Democrats are demanding changes in how the Department of Homeland Security operates before they’ll approve funding for the agency. It’s a huge change from last week, when seven Dems in the House voted to allow continued DHS funding.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted a video to social media Wednesday in which he castigated DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and President Stephen Miller as “fucking liars,” adding that allowing them to remain in their jobs proves the Trump administration is “rotten to its core.”

Schumer also promised Democrats would not pass the DHS budget unless ICE is “reined in and overhauled.”

We like Cussy Chuck. We like seeing Democrats finally listening to Americans like the folks in Minnesota who are demanding real action against Trump’s brutal ethnic cleansing program.

If the Senate fails to pass a package of six funding bills by Friday night, the government would partly shut down at 12:01 a.m. Saturday. Any changes to the funding bills would have to be approved by the House of Representatives, which is out of session, in one of those charming little power plays meant to pressure Democrats to accept the budget bills as they are.

It’s starting to look like a deal is emerging to split off the DHS appropriation from the rest of the bills, so both parties can vote to fund the rest of the government through the end of the fiscal year. DHS funding would get a short-term continuing resolution that would keep funding for DHS at last year’s levels while negotiations over reining in ICE are worked out.

OK, but now for the other shoe, which you by now were already expecting to drop: Schumer met Wednesday with the Senate Dems and announced that DHS funding can only go forward if Republicans and the White House agree to a list of … well, some small reforms that are far short of truly reining in or overhauling ICE.

The demands are all good, as far as they go, but that’s just the problem: They simply don’t go terribly far. Let’s take a look.

The most significant reform is a call to end “roving patrols” where federal agents go door to door, or to parking lots where day laborers gather, or just start pulling over anyone who “looks like” they might be undocumented — like that Family Guy meme. To achieve that, the proposal would require ICE to get real judicial warrants — not the fake “administrative warrants” DHS has considered good enough since last summer. The proposal would also require DHS to coordinate federal goons’ operations with local law enforcement.

In addition, as the AP explains,

Democrats also want an enforceable code of conduct so agents are held accountable when they violate rules. Schumer said agents should be required to have “masks off, body cameras on” and carry proper identification, as is common practice in most law enforcement agencies.

The other major demand would require federal immigration thugs to follow the same use-of-force rules that currently apply to state and local cops, which could also require independent investigations when agents are accused of using unnecessary force, not allowing DHS to investigate itself.

Again, these are all exactly what Schumer says: “common sense and necessary policy goals.” Unfortunately, even if Senate Dems manage to force through such common-sense guardrails, there’s little reason to think the administration would pay any attention to them. The ICE agent who murdered Renee Good completely ignored the agency’s existing rules against getting in front of vehicles or firing at vehicles that flee an arrest, after all.

For that matter, ICE agents already don’t mind threatening people, even when they’re on camera and not wearing masks, as this clip of an armed goon in Minneapolis demonstrates. Sure, it’s a phone camera, not a colleague’s body cam, but this schmuck felt compelled to pass along a witty threat all the same: “You raise your voice, I erase your voice.”

As David Dayen points out at the American Prospect, the items on Schumer’s list fall well short of more serious measures several Democratic senators have floated since the murders of Good and Alex Pretti.

Ideas like requiring cooperation with state and local investigations into ICE and CBP misconduct, returning CBP personnel to the border rather than interior enforcement, preventing enforcement in “sensitive locations” like schools or churches, and ending mass quotas for immigration arrests are not present in the Schumer list. And Schumer also doesn’t touch funding levels, nor does he attempt to claw back the surge funding for ICE that enables operations like those we’re seeing in Minnesota.

We’d also add, “hey, how about if ICE goons stopped arresting people who are here legally,” which seems to us to have somehow slipped everyone’s minds, but it strikes us as important.

With the prospect of a government shutdown, Democrats have some real leverage to force real policy changes, but even with polling showing widespread support for forcing ICE to follow the law, Schumer isn’t playing hardball. Goddamn it.

Worse, the White House has already made clear it will just swoop in and weaken any restrictions it wants to, as happened last week with the House version of the DHS funding bill. Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) added an amendment to the bill banning the arrest or deportation of US citizens.

As Rachel Maddow reported Monday, Escobar actually managed to persuade Republican negotiators to include that simple limit in the version of the bill that was voted out of committee. But before the bill made it to the House floor, Escobar learned that Stephen Miller pressured House Republicans to strip the amendment out of the bill. No protections for US citizens, sorry. After all, Miller wants to denaturalize and deport new citizens when possible.

We would like to believe that Democrats will show some spine, and follow up tough language with real actions, like demanding that fucking liars like Miller and Noem be fired.

We’re even encouraged that some Democrats, like former Sen. Jon Tester (D-Montana), are pushing their colleagues still in Congress to actually capitalize on Americans’ disgust at Trump, not only on immigration, but to fight back against Republicans who are busy dismantling the parts of the government we all like. Tester says Schumer is on the right track, at least when it comes to making clear that changes are needed.

[Tester] said Schumer’s decision to play hardball is the only real choice on the table – even though a DHS shutdown wouldn’t prevent the administration from spending billions of dollars on ICE from its tax cuts law.

“I don’t know that it’s going to do anything, because the president has the ability to move stuff around, whether it’s legal or illegal. He has done it in the past and he’ll do it again. What I say is, it sends a message,” Tester said.

“It sends a message to the folks in the agencies and on the ground that Congress is going to start holding people accountable.”

But Jebus Christ on a carbon-free moped, could we please please have more than messaging?

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How Did Any Democrats Vote To Fund DHS Nazis? Just Asking For Liam, Age Five.

ICE Arrests, Tear-Gasses, Deports First, Fourth Amendments

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[Guardian / The Hill / Politico / AP / NYT (archive link) / American Prospect / Semafor]

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