“President” Donald J. Trump, through Jeff Sessions, his white supremacist Keebler Elf lackey pretending to be the Attorney General, announced the phasing out of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals act, for seemingly no real reason other than “playing to his base.” It’s not otherwise a popular move, or one with much actual policy reasons: that I’ll get into later.
Seriously, he dumped dealing with this problem on a Congress that’s presently trying to deal with Hurricane Harvey, their tax reform plan (something that’s set to die the same death TrumpCare did for more or less the same reasons), the debt ceiling, and the budget they’ve been putting off for a while now.
Back in 2012, Obama extended protection from deportation to illegal immigrants who fell under several specific categories. They had to have been younger than 16, been in the U.S. since 2007, had a clean criminal record, and either be in school or have graduated from high school. They also have to pay taxes, and present themselves to the federal government.
They were the lowest possible priority targets for deportation you could hope to have outside of literal babies, which fit with the Obama Administration’s overall goal to take the pressure off relative innocents in favor of the nasty cases in both criminal justice reform and immigration policy. What real reason would one have for throwing 100 percent squeaky–clean exemplars of the American Dream except to excite the kinds of people who seem to refuse to know any of this?
What’s strange to me is that a sizable chunk of the Republican voter base seems to have locked themselves into an alternate reality where Obama, the Kenyan Muslim usurper, saved a bunch of Mexican rapists, and his hunchbacked successor Hillary “I Literally Took All Your Peanut Butter M&M’s” Clinton killed 50 people with weaponized emails. And then both of them, along with their Jewish conspirators (who also took your Christmas cups), were vanquished by the Sun King Donald Trump, to whom they’d willing hand over absolute power so he can rule over them forever.
That’s the only plausible explanation I can give for why this unending sewer pipe of a presidency has rendered the Congress under Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell so damned spineless. Trump has all their primary voters, and thus the party proper, by the balls. They simply don’t know what they should do, even when what they need to do for the sake of the country is essentially flashing them in the face 24/7. And what’s worse, unless we can get rid of the Republican majority in 2018, through a map heavily gerrymandered in their favor and guaranteed voter suppression, it’s going to stay that way.
Unless something changes, it's likely a lot of innocents will get stepped on to the material detriment of everyone in the country.
Logan Graham is a senior studying media arts with a focus in games and animation at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. How do you feel about the recession of DACA? Let Logan know by emailing him at lg261813@ohio.edu.
