President Trump tweeted* this the other day:
"Republicans want to fix DACA far more than the Democrats do. The Dems had all three branches of government in 2008-2011, and they decided not to do anything about DACA. They only want to use it as a campaign issue. Vote Republican!"
There are two things wrong with this particular piece of revisionist history:
1. Trump is confused about the three branches of government. They are Executive, Legislative, and Judicial - not Presidency, House, and Senate. How does he not know this? Kids in middle school know this, but POTUS doesn't?
2. DACA did not exist until 2012 and was not in need of fixing until Trump broke it by rescinding it in September 2017. DACA itself has never been adjudicated in court. In 2014, Obama attempted to extend DACA to include the parents of the DACA children in a program which became known as DAPA; that was successfully challenged in court by a group of states, with the decision upheld by a 4-4 SCOTUS tie - thank you, Mitch McConnell - but no court has ruled on the DACA program itself (Source: http://tinyurl.com/y9xb87c8 ).
There are a couple of old sayings that come to mind here: a) if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and b) if you broke it, you bought it. For Trump to now blame the Democrats for not fixing a situation that he created is just another example of his ham-handed approach to negotiation.
* After mistakenly posting a fake Trump tweet last week, I personally confirmed that this tweet is real and does appear on Trump's Twitter timeline. |
