Last Call For Killing The DREAM

Greg Sargent notes that Donald Trump's first major plans in 2017 will almost certainly involve making good on GOP promises to dismantle President Obama's protections for those brought to the US as undocumented immigrants as children.

Trump has repeatedly pledged to cancel all of Obama’s executive actions right away as president. That includes a promise to scrap Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which grants work permits and temporary reprieve from deportation to the DREAMers. Obama’s executive deportation relief has been widely denounced by Republicans for years, and Trump’s immigration plan vows to “immediately terminate” DACA, describing it as an “illegal amnesty.” 

It will be fully within Trump’s power to act on this promise on Day One of his presidency, immigration lawyer David Leopold tells me. Because DACA was granted by executive action, it is subject to revocation at the discretion of the president — or any of his successors. (Obama’s effort to expand this protection to other classes was halted by the courts, but DACA remains in force.) If Trump cancels DACA on Day One, Leopold says, it would revoke the work permits of its beneficiaries in short order and leave them subject to deportation. 

“Many of these people are young, starting off, and heavily invested in participating openly in the American system,” Leopold says. 

This could have a disruptive impact on hundreds of thousands of people, as well as their families and communities — whether or not they end up getting deported later. After vowing mass deportations throughout the primaries, Trump modified this plan during the general election, promising to deport only the criminals first. But Trump’s modified plan would create no meaningful path to long-term legal status and would leaveundocumented immigrants targets for deportation at some unspecified later date. Revoking protection for the DREAMers would raise the prospect of them getting deported later and effectively drive them underground in the short term. 

Immigration advocates are already organizing to fight Trump, should he make good on this and other promises. “There’s no way these young people are going to walk quietly back into the shadows,” Leopold says.

So here's the question: does the GOP actually want to do this?  Will the Trumpies give them the choice not to?

The question is whether other Republicans will want this story to unfold. Congressional Republicans have voted to defund DACA in the past. But they did so secure in the knowledge that they could rail angrily at Obama’s lawless amnesty without facing the political consequences of actually ending it, because they knew President Obama would never allow that to happen. 

But now President Trump can end DACA himself with the stroke of a pen, and produce all of those consequences right away. If Trump does not go through with this, he may be castigated by immigration hardliners for breaking a promise on an issue that appears to have been central to his appeal to the “forgotten men and women” who elected him and make up Donald Trump’s America. If he does go through with it, we will be provided with an early and vivid illustration of what the xenophobic promises Trump made to His America actually mean in the real world.

You should absolutely expect President Trump to start moving to round up and start mass deportations, starting with reversing DACA.  We've already got an America where DREAMers are terrified and white Trump voters are openly taunting them, saying they'll be deported.

Of course this is going to happen.  And it's just the start of the brutal Trump regime.

The Missing White Voter Showed Up?

And they were furious.  The kind of voter that sat out with Bush, McCain and Romney showed up for Donald Trump in the same way Barack Obama motivated young voters of color to show up eight years ago.  Real Clear Politics pundit Sean Trende has been predicting this for years.

This will probably sound a little odd if you were watching TV on election night 2012. Romney won 59% of the white vote in exit polls, better than President Bush’s 58% in 2004. Unfortunately for Romney, the white share of the electorate declined from 79.2% to 73.7 % over the same period. The result: Obama won by an even bigger margin than Bush did thanks to blowout margins with minorities.

But conservative commentators are convincing themselves they can find a few million more whites tucked between the couch cushions–at least enough for one more election. Two columnists have been particularly influential in this regard. Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics has argued that census data shows about 5 million mostly poor and rural white voters were “projected” to vote in 2012 based on population growth and past turnout but didn’t show up to the polls. Byron York, a columnist at the Washington Examiner, published a related piece noting that Romney would have lost even if he had racked up a majority of Latino voters.

“Recent reports suggest as many as 5 million white voters simply stayed home on Election Day,” York wrote in May. “If they had voted at the same rate they did in 2004, even with the demographic changes since then, Romney would have won.”

The Missing White Voter sure as hell showed up in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Iowa.  But as Trende himself points out today, in no state did these voters supposedly show up more than in Ohio.

In 2013, after all the votes had been counted, I was able to perform a more thorough analysis. It became apparent to me that these voters were blue-collar, rural and lived in areas with strong showings for Ross Perot. This reinforced my view that if Republicans softened their economic libertarianism and nominated the right candidate, this bloc might turn out and help the party win with only modest improvements among nonwhites.

This provoked great controversy. To this day I am a bit perplexed, as I was effectively saying to Democrats, “You were correct, the GOP has to make some changes to its approach in order to win.” Part of the backlash was plainly inspired by people who did not read the article. More importantly, my observation was expressly limited to the idea that missing whites could help the GOP win. People interpreted this as advocating for a “whites-only” GOP, which I expressly disclaimed, both in that article and in a subsequent piece.

It is far too early to say for certain, but what happened Tuesday certainly looks consistent with the missing-whites thesis. First, there’s very little doubt that Trump’s vote share soared when compared to Mitt Romney’s in northern rural areas. But turnout seems to have been robust as well. We once again will have to wait until all the votes are counted to conduct a more robust analysis, but consider Ohio once again:


For this iteration, the darkest red counties are ones where turnout was up or the same as 2012 levels, while lighter shades suggest turnout was down. As you can see, the Columbus and Cincinnati suburban counties – Delaware and Union, Clermont and Warren – were dark red. This is expected, given the population growth there. Notice, however, that the urban counties – Hamilton, Franklin, Cuyahoga, Stark, Summit, Lucas and Montgomery – are light. Turnout was down substantially there.

But look at the rest of the state, especially the southeast. There is a lot of red there, which is all the more surprising given population declines. It isn’t yet clear that whites there turned out in increased numbers, but they clearly avoided the decreases we saw in other areas of the state, and nationwide. Again, we need more data, but for now the best indications are that these voters were, in fact, inspired by a Republican candidate with more blue-collar appeal. Donald Trump did do better with nonwhites than Mitt Romney, which played a significant role in his victory. But there’s little doubt that a strong showing with these rural whites, who are disconnected from the global economy that increasingly defines urban and suburban environs, played a major role in his win.

That's a pretty solid explanation, and it's the Bernie Sanders/Michael Moore explanation for why Clinton lost this election: the Democrats abandoned the Working White Class Voter.

Except there's one little problem with that explanation.  It doesn't explain everything.

Here's what actually happened.

Voter suppression efforts by the GOP in NC, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, combined with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act three years ago by the Supreme Court, turned into the most successful "ground game" in Republican history.  Trende's argument is this:

1. Overall turnout was down, as evidenced by Clinton's numbers being down about 5 million from Obama's 2012 total.
2. Trump's numbers should have been just as bad and should also have been down about 5 million from Romney's 2012 total,
3. But they weren't because White Working Class Voters showed up and he won.

If that's the case, if that's a national trend where Clinton turnout was down in all states, then Clinton should have also lost states like Maine, New Hampshire, Nevada and Colorado.  She didn't.

But states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina, states where GOP Voter ID laws and efforts to end early voting (PA doesn't have early voting) were in effect?  These are the key states Clinton lost.

Pennsylvania is the one state where Trende's theory does work because Clinton got more votes than Obama did in 2012, and by a lot in Philly and its suburbs.  But she got *crushed* in Appalachian counties and didn't get the votes in places like Eire and Scranton.  But Trende's theory doesn't hole water in Wisconsin or North Carolina or yeah, even Ohio.

And we know exactly why.  Yes, overall turnout was down.  But Clinton's turnout was down more, because Republicans made it harder to people to vote especially in these key states, and that's why Donald Trump won.  Please remember that if was really the issue with economics, then Trump would have easily won voters making under $50,000 a year.

He lost voters making under $30K by 12 points, and those making $30-$50K by 11 points and split the rest with Clinton.

The Missing White Voter is nonsense.  GOP voter suppression was the most successful screwing of the American voting system since Jim Crow.

Dispatches From Bevinstan, Con't

If you thought Kansas's economy was the laughing stock of the country, wait until Matt Bevin makes sure Kentucky is about to get the full Brownback.

Unhindered by a state Democratic Party reduced to rubble on election day, Republican Gov. Matt Bevin claimed a bold mandate from Kentucky voters Wednesday and vowed to overhaul state government in ways he couldn't during his first year in office.

Bevin's to-do list after Republicans seized control of the state House of Representatives for the first time since 1920 includes overhauling the state's tax code, making it illegal for companies to force employees to join a labor union, letting parents send their children to private schools with the help of public dollars and getting rid of the Common Core educational standards.

And late Tuesday night, Bevin said he expects the new Republican majority to pass laws reversing several court decisions that blocked some of his executive orders — including one that abolished and replaced the board of trustees at the University of Louisville.

"The people are already seizing this chance before them," Bevin said during an appearance on WHAS radio. "Over the next generation you will see Kentucky become a beacon to America for what it means to be open for business."

Kentucky has long resisted becoming a right-to-work state because of coal miner unions.  That's dead and gone, along with what's left of the the state's public school system, Bevin will raid the education budget for the same type of charter school scam John Kasich is running, currently tied up in Ohio's courts over blame and fraud accusations for losing tens of millions of taxpayer dollars.

And tax reform?  That will be the big one.  And nothing can stop him now. Especially not "courageous" Democrats like these.

Democratic state Rep. Brent Yonts blamed the abrupt end of his 20-year state House career on a trend in his western Kentucky district to vote straight Republican, spurred by the unpopularity of Hillary Clinton atop the Democrats' ticket.

"We had the worst presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket we've ever had," Yonts added. "The believability factor was what killed her and killed us."

The Brownback Plan is coming.  And it will end this state's economy just as surely as Kansas is on the edge of transferring billions in corporate tax liability to the backs of citizens.

StupidiNews!

• Hillary Clinton delivered her concession speech to President-elect Donald Trump and America yesterday morning in NYC, beginning with the simple words "I'm sorry".
• Thousands of anti-Trump protesters in dozens of cities took to the streets across the country to demonstrate against the President-elect and his stated policies.
• President Obama will meet with President-elect Trump at the White House today to begin a "smooth transition of power" in the way Obama says he was grateful for eight years ago.
• Markets reacted in mixed fashion to Trump's win yesterday as the Dow rose to a record high, but global bond markets lost a third of a trillion dollars in value.
• Trump's expected science and space policies will most likely mean major cuts to NASA's Earth science and climate change monitoring programs.