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Here’s the roll call for the Friday House vote to fund the Department of Homeland Security.
Look closely and you’ll notice something telling. The bill passed 220-207, with the help of seven Democrats. Tom Suozzi and Laura Gillen of New York, Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzales of Texas, Don Davis of North Carolina, Jared Golden of Maine, and Marie Glusenkamp Perez of Washington.
Do the math. With party-line discipline, Democrats could have taken the bill down. At least on that day.
Earlier in the week, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had made a big show of pretending to oppose the bill. He and his leadership team announced their collective intent to vote no the day before the bill came to the floor. But they also pointedly declined to whip their membership.
So if you knew what you were watching, you could see the fix was in. They gave away the game, same as the numbers do.
The Associated Press captured this picture of the top Democratic appropriator, Rosa DeLauro, celebrating the completion of the full bundle of appropriations bills—including for DHS—with her Republican counterpart Tom Cole. She went on to “vote no,” like Jeffries, but the clear intent was to ensure passage.
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Now Alex Pretti is dead, murdered in the streets of Minneapolis by an agent or agents of Customs and Border Patrol, and the foolishness of all this kabuki theater is laid bare gruesomely.
Senate Democrats were prepared to take the same dive, but (in the most macabre sense) they were beneficiaries of good timing.
They will now filibuster the DHS bill, along with any other appropriations Senate Republicans attach to it, and we’ll finally have the political fight over Trump’s gestapo tactics that we should have had in March or September of last year. The Senate Democrats who were prepared to enable Trump again, until the most predictable thing happened, will have to live with the knowledge that they are collaborators at heart. Several of them have been living with that knowledge for months.
But for the seven House Dems, and the leadership team that colluded with them, the consequences will be more severe. I wouldn’t be too surprised if it proves to be career-ending for some of them.