Reign of Pain Update: WaPo Asks Nancy to Compromise

A crack in the ranks? Editorial Board: Make a deal. Save the dreamers.

WE CAN recite many reasons Democrats should spurn President Trump’s Saturday afternoon offer to end the government shutdown. He should not be rewarded for having taken the government hostage. Any piece of a wall would reinforce his hateful, anti-immigrant rhetoric. He’s unreliable, having made and withdrawn similar offers in the past. This one isn’t good enough; “dreamers” need a path to citizenship, not merely a three-year reprieve.

Those are serious objections. But here is something serious on the other side of the equation: Real people. Real people, with real lives that depend utterly on what Congress and the president do now.

These are the dreamers, hundreds of thousands of young people who have played by the rules, studied, worked, made lives in this country. They are American in every way but in the eyes of the law, having been brought here as children — as first-graders, on average. Thanks to a dispensation from President Barack Obama, many of them have come out of the legal shadows and are contributing to this country. If no deal is reached, the Supreme Court is likely at some point to end that dispensation, as Mr. Trump has demanded, and they will be sent back into the shadows, or to countries of which they have no memory.
. . .
Mr. Trump’s offer should be welcomed but not accepted as the final word. There should be room to talk about the amount of money; how border security will be defined and enhanced; which categories of dreamers and TPS beneficiaries are covered; what their legal status will be, and for how long. But to refuse even to talk until the government reopens does no favors to sidelined federal workers and contractors.

Unquestionably a deal would contain galling elements for both sides; that’s the nature of compromise. But a measure of statesmanship for a member of Congress now is the ability to accept some disappointments, and shrug off the inevitable attacks from purists, if it means rescuing the lives of thousands of deserving people living among us.

It seems like the obvious first step.

Also the WaPo a truly serious argument from the Style section: Shutdown has federal spouses out of work — and on each other’s nerves

Families throughout the Washington area recently rode the emotional arc of a winter storm. Wonder at the accumulating snow. Elation over school and office closings. Sledding, shoveling, snowman-building. A cozy denouement featuring hot chocolate and movies.

Then: wet socks, crying kids, and a thousand prayers whispered in unison. Please let school and work be open tomorrow. I’ve got to get out of this place.

Many couples felt their cabin fever break when the snow began to melt. But for federal workers trapped in the void of the shutdown, there is no tomorrow. There is only one long today, with walls inching in around them and nothing to do but annoy the people they love most.

As furloughed government worker Jesse Wilinski sat feeding his son lunch at their Fredericksburg, Va., home on Monday and considering plans to fill the next day of nothingness, he admitted the obvious: “I’m very, very bored right now.”

“He needs to be at work!” his wife, Morane Chung-Wilinski, shouted over his shoulder. “He’s in my way!”

Oh, the humanity!

More Airports May Ditch the TSA and Use Private Security Instead. Good. Why should taxpayers in general assume to costs of frequent fliers? Homeland Security and TSA were a scheme by Democrats to get a new crop of government employees who vote predominantly Democrat.

AP: The shutdown today: Trump lashes out after Dems reject offer

“Nancy Pelosi and some of the Democrats turned down my offer yesterday before I even got up to speak. They don’t see crime & drugs, they only see 2020,“Trump wrote. He also accused the California lawmaker, without evidence, of having “behaved so irrationally” and moving “so far to the left that she has now officially become a Radical Democrat.”

Pelosi responded with a tweet of her own, urging Trump to “Re-open the government, let workers get their paychecks and then we can discuss how we can come together to protect the border.”

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer also dug in during an appearance in New York. “If he opens the government, we’ll discuss whatever he offers, but hostage taking should not work,” Schumer said.

So, nothings moving. I'm OK with that. Pirate's Cove, Democrats Blow Their Gaskets Over Trump’s Border Security Compromise. They have gaskets?

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