Senator Chuck Schumer cracked. After the massive wipeouts of the Democratic Party in the House and Senate in 2010 and 2014, respectively, Schumer criticized Obamacare. Last week at the National Press Club Schumer recounted how the Democrats blew their giants leads from 2008 by focusing on Obamacare. The senator stated that their focus should have been on growing the middle class.
Yet, it is the politics, not policy that Senator Schumer is criticizing. And again it’s for politics, not for policy that Senator Schumer is pushing heavily for comprehensive immigration reform.
Senator Chuck Schumer’s comments shook the Democratic Party to its core. The senator suffered an immediate backlash from several others in his party desperately trying to save face. His gripe is not with the law itself; he has absolutely no problem with Obamacare, in his progressive mind it’s what’s best for the country. His problem is it’s bad for his priority, the Democratic Party.
By his statements, Senator Schumer believes that the Democrats should have worked more heavily in 2008 building up the middle class and improving their conditions during the economic recession. He blames Obamacare for the rise of the Tea Party and the maneuvering of the Republican Party to oust the Democrats from their majorities in the House and Senate.
He also noted that only five percent of the registered voters lacked medical coverage, most of them already voted Democrat. In other words, there was very little room to grow to for Democrats from passing Obamacare. Before the passage of Obamacare, Democrats already had a lock on low-income Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. Even though on a national level they were losing working-class whites, they still had many House members who carried their vote.
In 2008, Democrats had a majority of House seats in Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, North Carolina, Indiana, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia, all because there was no populist conservative movement to counter many blue-collar Democrats. Obamacare changed all that when it helped ignite the Tea Party and oust sixty-three Democratic House members in 2010.
The backlash from Obamacare has been harsh and constant; and so the third-ranking Democrat in the now-Senate minority is registering his frustrations.
If Senator Schumer’s believes the main priority of the Democratic Party should be to grow the middle class, why has his main policy objective of the last two years be the Senate’s comprehensive immigration reform?
Despite several Democrat populists whose main concerns are income inequality, access to abortion clinics, or student loan debt, Senator Schumer has been one of the main vocal champions of comprehensive immigration reform. Aside from granting amnesty to over eleven million illegal immigrants the bill also increase legal immigration by thirty-three million new immigrants over the next ten years. This massive increase in mostly low-skilled immigrants will deplete social capital in cities across the country, soak up trillions of dollars in welfare costs, depress wages among working-class Americans, and decrease employment for domestic labor.
It doesn’t faze Senator Schumer about the oncoming strife set to face working-class Americans if this bill were to become law because his concerns are not their concerns. Had Latino, and Asian voters voted seventy-to-thirty against the Democrat Party, Senator Schumer would advocate sealing up the border immediately. Rather than campaigning as an “America First” populist, Schumer is nakedly putting the Democrat Party and their corporate donors ahead of the working-class.
During the next year Democrats, including Schumer, will berate Republicans that unless they pass an immigration bill that includes citizenship for the eleven-plus million illegal immigrants who already live here as well as increasing legal immigration three-fold, they will never win another national election in our lifetime. Nothing could be further from the truth, and you can tell how much Democrats are lying by how badly they want comprehensive immigration reform to pass.