Schumer offers to fully fund the wall, regrets it immediately, retracts offer

Last week, you may have heard rumblings of a last-minute deal. The hope was that we'd all be able to avoid the not-at-all-phony horror of a government shutdown if both sides worked together. We don't know all the details of this supposed detente, but one thing did leak: Chuck Schumer had offered to fund the border wall in exchange for DACA protections. Now, I know what you're thinking. There's simply no way on Earth you could trust Democrats to uphold their end of that bargain. You're right, the offer was probably phony, or came with so many attached strings that construction would never come to pass. Still, that was the word on the street. Schumer was on board with the evil, racist, wall.

As you heard in any one of a thousand panic-stricken news reports, the government ended up shutting down. Last night, news broke that Schumer's offer had been yanked off the table. From CNN:

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer withdrew funding for President Donald Trump's border in negotiations over immigration issues with the White House, according to a Democratic aide. A staffer who works for Schumer called the White House on Monday and said the proposal, which Schumer put on the table during a Friday meeting with Trump, was no longer operative, the aide said. Trump invited Schumer to the White House on Friday over lunch to negotiate a deal for a funding bill, which was being held up over a fight for commitments to address the expiring Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Schumer's people are trying to claim that this is nothing new. They say the offer was revoked Saturday, not Monday, and it was invalidated once it was clear that no deal would be reached. But... is anyone really buying that? Of course not.

I'd be willing to bet that the actual course of events went like this:

• Schumer makes the offer to fund the wall as reported.
• He planned to use this offer to look magnanimous and above-the-fray while simultaneously slinging mud at Republicans. They were supposed to catch all sorts of hell from the shutdown, and Schumer would be in the middle of it saying: "Hey, I offered to pay for the wall in exchange for DACA, but these racist extremists hate Hispanics so much that they didn't take the deal."
• Unfortunately for Schumer, the blame game didn't pan out. Instead of Republicans taking the heat, Schumer ended up under the microscope. Dems freaked out, and his planned Spartacus-style crusade ended early.
• Schumer caved and tossed "Dreamers" under the bus. That, coupled with rumors that he was willing to fund the wall, enraged the very illegals he's sworn to protect.
• So, yesterday, his people made a big show out of having revoked the deal (which had always been a non-starter anyway) as a way of placating his angry base.

It's not going to work. Schumer is learning what we've been saying all along. They've tied their party too closely to an increasingly unpopular immigration movement. Their base, at the party's urging, has moved further and further to the left on the issue, while moderates watch and wonder what the heck is going on. If Hillary had been elected, the radical left wouldn't have been an issue, but they're now a party out of power and their most fervent members have been whipped into an army of Frankenstein monsters. If they don't keep the mob happy, the mob will turn....

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