The Great 2018 Kick-the-Can-Down-the-Road-on-Immigration-for-Two-More-Weeks Accord

Government shutdowns have consequences, though not always the ones their authors anticipate. Twenty years ago this week, we found out about one such unintended aftereffect: the affair between Bill Clinton and his former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, which began when he asked her to deliver him pizza during his 1995 showdown with the Republican Congress.

A full political generation later, we have no idea yet what may have happened behind closed doors at the Trump White House as a result of the federal government’s abrupt sixty-nine-hour closure this week. But it seems safe to say that the short-lived government shutdown of January, 2018, is unlikely to be long remembered, or even much debated, if only because the resolution of the fight was simply to postpone it for a mere two weeks.

The truth is that real deals are all but dead in Washington. The Great 2018 Kick-the-Can-Down-the-Road-on-Immigration-for-Two-More-Weeks Accord is further proof of it. And no one, not even “Art of the Deal” Donald Trump, can bring them back. In recent years, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and, now, Trump have all claimed to want to do big bipartisan deals, the kind that a President can pin a legacy on. Both Bush and Obama spent months in search of elusive “grand bargains,” in Bush’s case, one on entitlement reform; in Obama’s, on the federal deficit. They didn’t get them. Obamacare happened with Democratic votes alone. The Trump tax cut was purely a product of the Republican-controlled House and Senate. Most other “deals” that are touted as bipartisan breakthroughs recently have tended to be on measures that are not actually controversial, like imposing sanctions on Russia, or about legislation that would have been seen as a technocratic fix in a less polarized atmosphere, which is exactly how the immigration policy fight that triggered this week’s shutdown should have been treated.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-great-2018-kick-the-can-down-the-road-on-immigration-for-two-more-weeks-accord-daca-dreamers