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Mississippi was a large supporter of Jacksonian Democracy, which occurred during the Second Party System (roughly 1820-1860s). At this time, Mississippi politics moved from a state divided between the Whigs and Democrats to a solid one-party Democratic state. The Democratic Party strongly believed in states' rights as well as the right to the slave system. Tensions began to build between southern Democrats and northern Republicans and abolitionists.

In the summer of 1860, the Mississippi delegation walked out of the Democratic National Convention as a response to the convention's refusal to allow slavery in the state. Soon after, Mississippi seceded from the Union and joined many other states in forming the Confederate States of America.

After the end of the American Civil War in 1865, Reconstruction began in the United States. Many laws were put in place to allow suffrage for African-Americans, which troubled white Democrats. Democrats overpowered the Republicans to combat these laws by means of force and violence in a method known as the Mississippi Plan, formulated in 1875 and implemented in the election of 1876.[2] This plan was also used in other southern states to overthrow Republican rule. Thereafter, these states became known as the Solid South, meaning that they were solidly Democratic in political nature. This continued for the next seventeen presidential elections, until the elections of 1948.[2] At this time, the national party began to show support for the Civil Rights Movement, which reduced its support in the Solid South.

When the 1948 Democratic National Convention adopted a plank proposed by Northern liberals calling for civil rights, 35 southern delegates, including all Mississippi's delegates, walked out. Southern Democrats sought to exclude Harry Truman's name from the ballot in the South. The Southern defectors created a new party called the States' Rights Party (Dixiecrats), with its own nominees for the 1948 presidential election: Democratic South Carolina Governor J. Strom Thurmond for president and Fielding L. Wright, governor of Mississippi for vice president. (In his 1948 gubernatorial inaugural address, Wright had described racial segregation as an "eternal truth" that "transcends party lines".) The Dixiecrats thought that if they could win enough Southern states, they would have a good chance of forcing the election into the U.S. House of Representatives, where Southern bargaining power could determine the winner. To this end Dixiecrat leaders had the Thurmond-Wright ticket declared the official Democratic ticket in some Southern states, including Mississippi. (In other states, they were forced to run as a third party.) Efforts by the Dixiecrats to paint Southern Truman loyalists as turncoats generally failed, although the 1948 Mississippi state Democratic sample ballot warned that a vote for Truman electors was "a vote for Truman and his vicious anti-Southern program" and that a Truman victory would mean "our way of life in the South will be gone forever."[3]

On election day of 1948, the Thurmond-Wright ticket carried Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama, all previously solid Democratic states.[4] Truman won the national election anyway, without their electoral votes. The States' Rights Party movement faded from the landscape, and its Mississippi leaders resumed their place in the ranks of the national Democratic Party with no repercussions, even though all seven incumbent Congressmen and Senator James O. Eastland had run on the Dixiecrat ballot with Thurmond and Governor Wright.[5]

In the fall of 1954, after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Mississippi politicians in the state legislature reacted by approving and ratifying a constitutional amendment that would abolish the public school system. This provision, on the other hand, was never used.[6][7] Soon, Mississippi became the focal point of national media when in August 1955, Emmett Till was lynched in Tallahatchie County.

In 1957, Congress began to enact the first civil rights laws since the Reconstruction Era. By the time of the 1959 state elections, white Democrats acted to put a stop to this and elected Ross Barnett as governor. Democrats in Mississippi were not challenged in general elections and Barnett too ran unopposed. As a Dixiecrat, or States Rights Democrat, a member of the White Citizens' Council and by law on the board of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, Barnett was a staunch supporter of segregation laws, as had been his two challengers in the primary. By the time of the 1960 presidential elections, he refused to support John F. Kennedy or Richard Nixon. Barnett opted for the traditional route, while many other Mississippi Democratic officials supported Kennedy's campaign. The state party itself had declared, in its platform, to "reject and oppose the platforms of both national parties and their candidates" after the 1960 Democratic National Convention and its adoption of a civil rights platform.[8][9]

As a result of its insistence on maintaining segregation, Mississippi became a focal point for other major civil rights activity. Jackson's bus terminal was a stop for the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who in 1961 rode interstate buses from Washington D.C. to New Orleans on routes through the segregated South to bring attention to the fact that localities in those states were ignoring federal desegregation law. When the buses made it to the Mississippi state line, by an arrangement between Governor Barnett and the Kennedy administration, police and the National Guard escorted them into Jackson where they were arrested and jailed for trying to use the bus station's whites-only facilities.[10]

Established in April 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) aimed to challenge discrimination based on race in the electoral process. It consisted of mainly disenfranchised African-Americans, although its membership was open to all Mississippians.[11] The party was formed out of collaborative efforts from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).[12]

In August 1964, a bus of MFDP delegates arrived at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City with the intention of asking to be seated as the Mississippi delegation[12] There they challenged the right of the Mississippi Democratic Party's delegation to participate in the convention, claiming that the regulars had been illegally elected in a completely segregated process that violated both party regulations and federal law, and that furthermore the regulars had no intention of supporting Lyndon B. Johnson, the party's incumbent president, in the November election. They therefore asked that the MFDP delegates be seated rather than the segregationist regulars.[13][14]

The Democratic Party referred the challenge to the Convention Credentials Committee, which televised its proceedings, which allowed the nation to see and hear the testimony of the MFDP delegates, particularly the testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer, whose evocative portrayal of her hard brutalized life as a sharecropper on the plantation owned by Jamie Whitten, a long time Mississippi congressman and chairman of the House Agricultural Committee, drew public attention.

Some of the all-white delegations from other southern states threatened to leave the convention and bolt the party as in 1948 if the regular Mississippi delegation was unseated, and Johnson feared losing Southern support in the coming campaign against Republican Party candidate Barry Goldwater. With the help of Vice President Hubert Humphrey (chief sponsor of the 1948 civil rights resolution which sparked the 1948 Dixiecrat walk-out) and Party leader Walter Mondale, Johnson engineered a "compromise" in which the national Democratic Party offered the MFDP two at-large seats which allowed them to watch the floor proceedings but not take part. The MFDP refused this "compromise" which permitted the undemocratic, white-only, regulars to keep their seats and denied votes to the MFDP. Denied official recognition, the MFDP kept up their agitation within the Convention. When all but three of the "regular" Mississippi delegates left because they refused to support Johnson against Goldwater, the MFDP delegates borrowed passes from sympathetic northern delegates and took the seats vacated by the Mississippi delegates, only to be removed by the national Party; when they returned the next day, convention organizers had removed the empty seats that had been there yesterday.

Though the MFDP failed to unseat the regulars at the convention, and many activists felt betrayed by Johnson, Humphrey, and the liberal establishment, they did succeed in dramatizing the violence and injustice by which the white power structure governed Mississippi, maintained control of the Democratic Party of Mississippi, and disenfranchised black citizens. The MFDP and its convention challenge eventually helped pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The MFDP continued as an alternate for several years, and many of the people associated with it continued to press for civil rights in Mississippi. After passage of the Act, the number of registered black voters in Mississippi grew dramatically. The Mississippi Democratic Party agreed to conform to the national Democratic Party rules, guaranteeing fair participation, and eventually the MFDP merged into the party. Many MFDP activists became Party leaders and in some cases officeholders. There is only one chapter of the MFDP still active, in Holmes County, Mississippi.

After the controversy of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964, Democrats sought party representatives and officials that understood the need to compromise. They looked for a more moderate stance. This was tested during the election of 1968, the first in which African Americans were officially and legally enfranchised. When President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he would not be running for a second term, Mississippians took stock in the independent George Wallace. His campaign was an outlet for white southerners to express their anger and frustration with the civil rights movement. It was also at this time that the Democratic Party went through drastic changes, when the national convention made the decision to award 1968 convention seats to the new "Loyalist" faction of the state Democratic Party, instead of the "regulars" (being "the old guard conservative delegation composed of the governor and others from Mississippi"[15])the first time in history an entire delegation had been denied and replaced. The Loyalist Democratic party became official in June 1968 and encompassed the concerns of such groups as the NAACP, Young Democrats and the MFDP. [16]

In 1972, Governor Bill Waller attempted to unify the "regulars" and the "loyalists," without success. That year, Mississippi sent two delegations to the national convention, but the convention committee once again supported the loyalists. Efforts continued to reunite these two factions before the election of 1976.[17]

After the election of 1976, it was clear that the Democrats were losing speed in the South. It became difficult to merge and force cooperation between the regulars and the loyalists, and conservative Republicans began to make inroads. In 1980 Republican Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign in Mississippi, with the Neshoba County Fair "states' rights" speech, and Southern liberal Democrat Jimmy Carter lost in a landslide to Reagan that year; more of the state began to vote Republican.[18] This was a trend across the South.

In 1991, the governorship was taken away from Democrats when Republican Kirk Fordice won the election. Republicans consolidated this power between 1994 and 1996. At the end of the 1996 general election, Republicans held three of the five congressional seats in addition to both U.S. senators, as well as a gain in the state legislature. Democrats, no longer the Dixiecrats of the past and "by the 1970s resolutely committed to biracial Democratic Party politics", had lost significant power at both the state and national level.[19][20]

Governors and legislators over the decades have called for rewrites of Mississippi's Constitution. The current Constitution was created in 1890,[21] crafted explicitly to replace the 1868 enfranchising constitution of Reconstruction days.[22] It has experienced many amendmentsas of 2014, 121 approved since 1890, more than 75 since 1960[22]and outright repeals, mostly as a result of U.S. Supreme Court rulings.[23][22] However, according to John W. Winkle III, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Mississippi, "More than a century later, the 1890 Constitution, with its rather severe limitations on government and its antiquated organization and content, still shadows the state."[22]

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Mississippi Democratic Party - Wikipedia

A culture war over immigration replays the racialized debate that dominated the 2016 presidential campaign. As much as it saddens me to say it, the evidence is pretty clear that a racialized debate helps Trump. Its the kind of debate that will make it harder for Democrats to retake the Senate and House this year.

Multiple studies have found that the political views of white Americans drift to the right when they are reminded that the countrys population is slowly becoming less white. And many of these voters are winnable for Democrats. A good number, remember, voted for Barack Obama. They may have some racist views many people do but theyre neither deplorable nor irredeemable human beings. Steve Bannon, the guru of white nationalism, understood this dynamic, once saying, The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got em.

Similarly, some innovative polling by YouGov has found that a large portion of white Americans see prohibiting discrimination against women and minorities as one of the Democratic Partys top priorities. Unfortunately, few white Americans who arent already loyal Democrats say the same issue is one of their own priorities. Theyre more worried about their own struggles, many of which are economic. Its a political liability for Democrats, Doug Rivers, YouGovs chief scientist told me, in the same way being the party of the rich is a problem for Republicans.

I know that many progressives are sick of hearing about white voters, but its extremely hard to succeed in American politics without winning a good portion of them. About 69 percent of eligible voters are non-Hispanic whites. They have outsize power too, thanks to a combination of their turnout rates, their geographic dispersion, gerrymandering and the Senates small-state bonus.

Briahna Joy Gray wrote a must-read essay on this topic for New York magazine, titled, Racism May Have Gotten Us Into This Mess, but Identity Politics Cant Get Us Out. Or as Matthew Yglesias wrote in Vox last week, If you want to help the people most severely victimized by Trumpism, you need to beat Trumpism at the polls.

The best debate for Democrats is one that keeps reminding white working-class voters that theyre working class. Its a debate about Medicare, Medicaid, taxes or Wall Street. The worst debate is one that keeps reminding those voters that theyre white.

To put it another way, if youre a Democrat whos frustrated that Republicans have managed to turn the shutdown into a fight over immigration, ask yourself: Why would they do that?

Democratic leaders are certainly right to insist on protection for the Dreamers. The question is whether the best way to protect them, and the best way to elect politicians who will help them in the long term involves keeping immigration policy in the political spotlight for weeks on end.

The smart move now for Democrats is to accept a short-term funding bill that ends the shutdown and defuses the tension. Republican leaders are open to that solution, because they have their own vulnerabilities. Their party is the majority party, which is often blamed for dysfunction.

That solution feels a bit unsatisfying, I know. But tactical retreats can lead to big victories in the future.

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The Democrats Are Right and Should Settle

As the government shutdown inches closer and closer, lawmakers are busy pointing fingers at who's to blame for the impasse. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

By a 20-point margin, more Americans blame President Trump and Republicans rather than Democrats for a potential government shutdown, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

A 48 percent plurality says Trump and congressional Republicans are mainly responsible for the situation resulting from disagreements over immigration laws and border security, while 28 percent fault Democrats. A sizable 18 percent volunteer that both parties are equally responsible. Political independents drive the lopsided margin of blame, saying by 46 to 25 percent margin that Republicans and Trump are responsible for the situation.

[Read full poll results | How the poll was conducted]

The poll was conducted Monday to Thursday, largely before House Republicans passage of a short-term funding bill Thursday aimed at averting a shutdown starting midnight Friday and putting pressure on Democrats and the Senate to avert a shutdown.

[Government shutdown looms as Senate Democrats dig in against GOP spending plan]

Democrats railed against the House bill for not offering protections for young undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children as well as other issues, and are planning to block the measure if it is brought to the Senate floor.

The Post-ABC poll finds Democrats are more united in blaming Republicans for the situation than vice versa. A 78 percent majority of Democrats say Trump and congressional Republicans are mainly responsible for the potential government shutdown, while a smaller 66 percent of Republicans blame Democrats in Congress. One in seven Republicans, 14 percent, say Trump and Republicans are to blame.

Public opinion ahead of Fridays deadline is similar to attitudes at the end of the 2013 government shutdown. A Post-ABC poll after it ended found 53 percent of Americans said Republicans were mainly responsible for the shutdown, compared with 29 percent who blamed President Obama. The 24 percentage-point margin of greater blame for Republicans then is slightly larger than the 20-point blame margin for Trump and Republicans in the new poll.

The new poll finds Hispanic adults say by a roughly 3 to 1 margin that Republicans are mainly responsible for a potential government shutdown, with 60 percent blaming Trump and Republicans while 19 percent blame Democrats. Similarly, 61 percent of adults under age 30 say Trump and Republicans are mainly responsible for the situation, higher than other age groups.

The Post-ABC poll was conducted Jan. 15-18, 2018 among a random sample of 1,005 adults reached on cell and landline phones with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Emily Guskin contributed to this report.

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More Americans blame Republicans than Democrats for potential ...

Here are some thoughts on todays three-week deal in Congress to reopen the government, take a vote on an unspecified immigration bill, and fund the Childrens Health Insurance Program for six years:

1) Theres a rollicking debate on Twitter over whether Democrats caved. Ill confess that Im mystified by this argument. For the moment, this seems like a good deal but its impossible to say anything definitive without knowing what happens over the next three weeks.

2) Consider what we dont know about what comes next. We dont know which immigration bill, or bills, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will bring to the Senate floor. We dont know if any immigration compromise passes the Senate. We dont know if an immigration bill that passes the Senate will get a vote in the House. Even if it does get a vote in the House, we dont know if itll pass. And if it does pass, we dont know if Trump will sign it.

3) We also dont know what the implicit Democratic position is here. If Democrats get a fair vote in the House and Senate on an immigration deal and it doesnt pass, will they shut down the government again in three weeks? Put differently, is this a deal about a fair process or about a particular outcome? If Democrats dont get a deal and they shut the government back down in three weeks, its hard to see what was lost here.

4) Democratic opponents of the deal believe that an extended shutdown increases the likelihood of a DREAMer compromise. But does it? That is to say that an extended shutdown will cause Trump so much political or personal pain that he will accept one of the immigration compromises he has thus far rejected. Neither dynamic is obvious to me.

5) Politically, Trumps entire brand is anti-immigration politics, and if there is round-the-clock news coverage of a shutdown over immigration, hell think its good for his base. Personally, Trumps goal in life is to be seen as a winner, and to double down when attacked or under pressure, and so its hard to see how a high-stakes battle over a shutdown which would make a deal on immigration look like a cave to reopen the government by Trump helps.

6) Beyond that, shutting down the government should be a last resort in the most extreme situations (if that). And historically, shutting down the government usually doesnt end with the party that forced the shutdown getting the policy concessions it wants it often strengthens the presidents party. To the extent theres an open path in which an immigration deal can be negotiated and brought to a vote with the government still open, thats a good thing.

7) One counterargument: McConnells word hasnt been worth much this year. Just ask Sens. Susan Collins (ME) and Jeff Flake (AZ), fellow Republicans who were promised health and immigration policies in return for their tax votes. In this case, though, if McConnell reneges on the deal, Democrats simply shut down the government in three weeks. They havent lost that leverage.

8) And if Democrats do need to shut down the government in three weeks, theyll do so with the Childrens Health Insurance Program funded for six years, rather than seeing it weaponized against them. Thats a big deal, both substantively and politically.

9) Theres a broader political dynamic worth considering here too. Republicans pioneered a brand of politics in which creating crises in government operations became proof of sincerity, regardless of whether it led to good outcomes or who got hurt along the way. If you didnt employ every tactic in service of your promises to the base, you were a liar it wasnt acceptable to say, We dont have the votes; we need to win more elections.

10) At the time, Democrats angrily criticized that approach, arguing that all-out tactical war would be terrible for the country, that some boundaries and norms were worth preserving, that elections were the proper method of resolution. Now Im hearing a lot of the same arguments from Democrats: If they dont shut the government down, or keep it shut down, it will be a betrayal of their base.

11) Democrats also feel, understandably, that they cant unilaterally disarm. If Republicans are going to use the basic functioning of the government as leverage, then Democrats have to do so too.

12) The logic of that is inarguable, and the consequences disastrous. If hostage-taking becomes normalized in American politics, then theres really no end to the cycle of escalation, and its going to finish with a global economic crisis because we breached the debt ceiling, or worse.

13) The central political problem in American life, for years now, has been that the Republican Party is a dysfunctional institution that has abandoned principles of decent governance in order to please an ever more extreme base. I dont have an answer for fixing that. But it would be doubly bad if their outrageous behavior drives Democrats to use the same tactics in response. American politics is, hopefully, an infinite game, not a finite game, and that means doing everything possible to steer away from retaliatory loops that clearly lead to the system crumbling.

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Government shutdown deal: Democrats didnt cave on the ...

Late Tuesday, the GOP gave up on 2018 budget talks and drafted a new temporarybudget plan, dubbed a Continuing Resolution, which would keep the governmentopen for another month until February 16. That date will mark almost five months after the 2018 budget was slated to begin October 1.

If the CR passes the House and Senate, the GOP and the Democrats will get another month to develop a 2018 budget while Democrats gain another month to wear down GOP and Trump opposition to their amnesty-plus plan.

The amnesty talks are being overseen by the four deputy leaders of the Senate and House , including GOP Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy. Democrats negotiations tactics include emotional public claims of racism, televised sob stories from migrants, skewed polls, as well as intense back-room lobbying by illegal immigrants, open-borders advocates and by the CEOs whose stock-options would be reduced if a shortage of labor drives up wages.

If the amnesty does get approved by an exhausted Trump and GOP, it would wreck Trumps Buy American, Hire American presidency, 2018 turnout and his reelection. The approval would prove that Democrats, the establishment media,and business lobbies have the political power to simply raise the supply of cheap imported labor whenever companies are forced to pay higher wages to Americans, regardless of Trumps stunning victory in 2016.

If the Democrats amnesty push is foiled, then voters will be able to decide in November if they want a Congress to reduce or raise the immigration which has helped freeze Americans wages since 2000.

The GOPs short-term CR plan may get a vote in the House on Thursday, leaving the Senate little time to accept the plan by Friday night, after which the government starts closing down many non-essential functions.

Democratic leaders suggest they are willing to oppose a short-term budget and to force a government shutdown. For example, the House Democrats deputy leader, Rep. Steny Hoyer, told reporters on Tuesday:

We want to keep the government open. But I will repeat, were not going to be held hostage to do things that we think are contrary to the best interests of the American people because we will do the right thing and [Republicans] dont care.

House Democrats will not block the CR, predicted Virginia Rep. Dave Brat.I dont think anybody has any appetite for a shutdown the Democrats dont want to go there . the Democrats polling looks terrible for them, he said.

Democrats can block any budget because their minority of 49 votes in the Senate is enough to prevent passage of any budget through the Senate.

House GOP leaders have tried to win some Senate Democratic votes for the short-term plan by including several Democratic spending priorities, including a six-year extension of the CHIP health-care program for children.

GOP leaders may also need Democratic votes in the House because the GOPs defense-industry members threatened to vote against the leaders budget because it does not guarantee a big increase in defense spending for the rest of the year. The extra defense money is not in the budget because Democratic leaders are demanding that any defense increase is accompanied by a similar increase in non-defense spending.

In response, some of the budget hawks suggested they will approve giveaway-amnesty in exchange for a defense increase. Frankly, I think its not that hard to get a DACA deal, but the question is do [Capitol Hill leaders] want to? Rep. Mac Thornberry, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told reporters.

GOP leaders have tried to separate the amnesty fight from the budget, partly because any separation would minimize Democratic leverage in the dispute.

But Democrats are keeping the two issues linked by claiming that the budget dispute is about several spending priorities while also all saying those budget issues could be solved if the GOP surrenders on the amnesty.For example, Montana Sen. Jon Tester, who is facing election in November, is trying to portray himself as a Trump ally while he blocks a budget deal by demanding extra funding for health care centers. Politico reported:

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) also declined to commit to voting for a stopgap spending bill this week that didnt address his key priorities, citing community health centers rather than DACA. Any funding bill has to have those priorities included, he told reporters.

The Democrats hide-the-amnestystrategy is acknowledged by a variety of pro-amnesty advocates and makes political sense because polls show the public strongly opposes wage-cutting mass immigration. According to CNN:

If Democrats stay united on all issues, and (DACA) doesnt get isolated the way it was in December, then theres a better chance that Democrats have leverage to compel the kind of negotiations that might produce a deal in time, Frank Sharry, executive director of Americas Voice Education Fund, a pro-immigration reform group, told reporters

Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia said he would reject any characterization of Democrats shutting down the government over DACA or anything else, saying it was essential for Democrats to stay united and keep all their issues together.

Right now, theres a lot of linkage with a lot of issues, and Democrats are doing, I think, the right thing in highlighting the unfinished business and the linkages, right? Connolly said, citing childrens health insurance, veterans benefits, surveillance reform and DACA. And youve got to use all the leverage youve got while youve got it.

The Senate GOPs deputy leader, Sen. John Cornyn, however, says the Democrats are holding up the budget to win the amnesty. Democrats are holding [a budget] deal hostage for a DACA negotiation, he said Monday.

Aided by favorable media, Democrats in the Senate are playing so tough that they plan to formally introduce their amnesty-plus plan on Wednesday.

That amnesty-plus has already been rejected by Trump on January 11 in a meeting where Trump opposed migration quotas from shithole countries. Since then, Democrats have repeatedly claimed that Trump can partially expiate his sins by endorsing their amnesty.Extortion would be a good word for it, probably better than blackmail it seems, said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations at NumbersUSA.com. She continued:

PresidentTrump is the is only one who is focused on how do we bring people back into the labor market hereare these Democrats saying youre a racist if you dont do what we say which will actually hurt poor Americans, including African-Americans

Trump and some GOP immigration experts oppose the Democrats amnesty-plus because it offers only token changes to the visa lottery program and to the chain-migration rules, and only offers one years worth of wall-building money.

The version of the amnesty-plus plan slated for announcement on Wednesday does not seem to include any additional proposals to meet Trumps election-winning, poll-approved immigration priorities.

The amnesty-plus plan would cover roughly 3 million youngerillegals, plus millions of their parents, plus roughly 400,000 Temporary Protected Status migrants, plus millions of their future chain-migration relatives.

GOP leaders are formally opposing the amnesty but are doing very little to alert thepublic to the Democrats wage-cutting amnesty. For example, GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell denounced the amnesty push as unneeded pending a court battle which has restarted the DACA amnesty but has declined to make any emotional or wage-related PR argument against the Dmeocrats amnesty.

Similarly, the GOP leadership in the House has done nothing to promote the combined reform-and-amnesty plan developed by judiciary chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte.

On Tuesday, House members at a caucus meeting pressed their leadership to push the Goodlatte bill through the House.They were nodding yes in conference today, but they have not given any firm commitment, said Brat. He continued:

Goodlatte stood up and spoke, [Rep. Raul] Labrador spoke at the caucus meeting. That bill has widespread support We think we can get all Republican votes, 218, for real They needtosupport it, whip it, and push it.

[Polls show] we have the leverage now, and want to see our leadership take command, not only with the Democrats but with the Senate. It is time for them to take some votes, not us, as always.

In 2014, House and Senate GOP leaders adopted a strategy of failure theater to disguise their unwillingness to oppose former President Barack Obamas DAPA amnesty for several million illegal-immigrant parents of native-born children. In a series of step-by-step retreats, GOP leaders wentfrom arguing in November 2014 they would fight the amnesty tooth and nail to shrugging their shoulders in March 2015.

Without GOP backup, Trump will come under greater pressure from the media and the Democrats to surrender the amnesty in exchange for some wall-construction funds but without any legal changes to prevent people using legal loopholes in the wall, and without any changes to chain-migration and the visa lottery.

If Trump keeps his policies firm, however, the GOP will be able to use the Democrats pro-immigration, anti-American behavior to win more seats in Congress in the 2018 election.

The Democratic base is rewarding that kind of [pro-amnesty] behavior, said Brat. I think the country will differ when they get the chance to vote on the Democrats refusal to develop popular policies on health care, the economy, and immigration, he added.

Polls show thatTrumps American-first immigration policyis very popular. For example, a Decemberpollof likely 2018 voters shows two-to-one voter support for Trumps pro-American immigration policies, and a lopsided four-to-one opposition against the cheap-labor, mass-immigration, economic policy pushed by bipartisan establishment-backed D.C. interest-groups.

Business groups and Democrats tout the misleading, industry-funded Nation of Immigrants polls which pressure Americans to say they welcome migrants, including the roughly 670,000 DACA illegals and the roughly 3.25 million dreamer illegals.

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Democrats Block 2018 Budget, Gain Another Month to Push ...