Hot Tub Media Time Machine - Remember when and how and why the GOP took DHS funding hostage?

[Fred Sanders]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/12/crominbus-passes-but-no-one-wins.html

"Democrats were going to make an epic stand Thursday night. They were going to draw “a line in the sand,” according to New York Rep. Steve Israel, and make clear that they would not fold over a fight about a provision in the “cromnibus” that would deregulate derivatives trading by big banks. This was the big showdown where House Democrats would show their muscle and establish their populist credentials for the next Congress despite pressure from the White House. And, of course, they caved.

Late Thursday night, the House passed the combination continuing resolution/omnibus spending bill by a vote of 219-206. Fifty-seven Democrats, including Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn, the No. 2 and No. 3 in their leadership, voted for the bill. The consequence of its failure wouldn’t have been a government shutdown but a three-month CR that would keep the government open through Feb. 27, 2015, and set the stage for a new showdown then."

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The Daily Beast of course got it all backwards, because subsequent events showed who really caved.

Republicans were the ones that caved on the budget, in the end clinging to the only thing not funded for a full year - DHS funding set to expire February 28, 2015.

No doubt intending to ramp up the Fear Factor deploying the fear loving mass media, and then blame Obama for the lack of funding.

What they really did was give Obama plenty of time to set up a political strategy predicated on the all so familiar and ever so predictable pattern of prior GOP hostage takings, also all misremembered by the media.

Except this time Obama decided not to play.
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"The result is a partisan stalemate in which neither side will blink.

And once again, this was all by design.

This showdown was set up at the end of 2014 with the debate over “the Cromnibus,” the controversial budget bill that funded the government for most of 2015.

Many conservative Republicans were loath to agree to any measure that funded the government didn’t overturn the executive orders.

Democrats refused to go along with anything other than a bill that funded DHS and omitted the executive order language.

The language would go beyond the controversial executive order that Obama issued in 2014 to allow 5 million undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States and also apply to the “DREAMers,” a subset of illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States while they were underage and have clean criminal records. DREAMers were allowed to stay in the United States in an executive order that the administration issued in 2012.

To avoid another government shutdown, a compromise was reached before lawmakers went home for the holidays.

Most of the federal government would be funded for a year but the DHS would only receive sufficient appropriations to last through the end of February."


http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/17/gop-to-dhs-governing-is-hard.html
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And so here we are, with the Republicans releasing the hostage - getting nothing but shame and derision in return.

Karma.

Obama!