So how is one to interpret the recent statements and actions of these prominent Democrats? The Democrats can talk until they are blue in the face about their support for stronger border security on the nation’s southern border, but when it comes to the issue of illegal immigration, not only do they have zero interest in getting it under control, they are in fact promoting and incentivizing people to come to the U.S. illegally.

The position of today’s Democratic Party on illegal immigration is a radical departure from its stance just a few years ago. In 2009, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that “illegal immigration is wrong.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi took a similar position on illegal immigrants in 2008 by stating that “we certainly do not want any more coming in.” And there is former President Obama, who in his 2013 State of the Union address vowed to send illegal immigrants “to the back of the line behind the folks trying to come here legally.”

So what explains Democrats’ startling 180 on illegal immigration?

The lazy, short-term answer is that Donald Trump sits at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and a central promise of his 2016 campaign was building the wall. Yes, it is no secret that Democrats want to make him a one-term president by driving a wedge between Trump and his base on a key issue. They will stop at nothing to achieve this goal.

But there is a more sinister long-term answer for the Democrats’ whole-hearted embrace of illegal immigration.  A 2018 Center for American Progress (CAP) Action Fund memo sheds light on this. The memo, co-authored by former Hillary Clinton communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, argues that the Democratic Party needs to protect illegal immigrants brought here at a young age as a result of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program because they are “a critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success.”

This is an astonishing statement. It would seem that — as the Washington Times put it — “[w]ith declining support from white and older Americans, the Democrats have concluded that their future lies in importing a new electorate from south of the border.”

So it is full speed ahead on illegal immigration for the Democrats, and they don’t want Republicans gumming up the works even if their name is not Donald Trump. They will claim their position is rooted in compassion and in upholding American values when in fact it is primarily about naked politics and importing a new set of voters, as their ideas become increasingly too far-fetched for the citizens who currently reside legally within America’s borders.

Read more from Ford O'Connell at The Hill

Democrats are claiming victory after President Trump announced Friday he’s agreed to a deal to reopen the government for three weeks without any funding for his border wall — though he vowed he will ultimately get it.

Trump signed a bill Friday night that will allow federal workers to receive back pay and reopen the government until Feb. 15, while a bipartisan conference committee hashes out a deal on border security.

The announcement came 35 days into the longest government shutdown in the nation’s history, as 800,000 federal workers, who were furloughed or forced to work without pay, were set to miss a second paycheck and airport delays mounted due to a lack of air traffic controllers.

Those employees will receive their back pay “very quickly, or as soon as possible,” Trump said. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she will discuss a date for Trump’s postponed State of the Union address once the government is open.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Trump was bested by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “No one should ever underestimate the speaker, as Donald Trump has learned.”

But Republican strategist Ford O’Connell said Trump has played it right.

“The shutdown was becoming a bigger distraction than the crisis on the border,” O’Connell said. Now, he said, Trump has three weeks to “make his case to the American people.”

“The Democrats say over and over they’re concerned about border security. The next three weeks we’re going to find out exactly how serious they are,” O’Connell said.

Read more from Lisa Kashinsky at the Boston Herald

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s field office on Maryland’s Eastern Shore was closed because of the partial federal government shutdown when George Godfrey Jr. showed up Wednesday, leaving him without a reimbursement check for his grain crop losses.

Despite the setback, Mr. Godfrey didn’t waver in his support for President Trump. In fact, he said he was ready to hang tough indefinitely with Mr. Trump in the shutdown fight over border security.

A Quinnipiac University poll released this week found that 86 percent of Republican voters approve of Mr. Trump’s performance, up from 82 percent in December before the shutdown.

Tim Malloy, assistant director of the poll, called the president’s base “granite strong.” He credited their loyalty with keeping Mr. Trump’s overall approval rating above 40 percent despite his poor showings on honesty, empathy, leadership and fitness to serve.

Republican Party strategist Ford O’Connell said the illegal immigration issue is what unites and energizes Mr. Trump’s supporters, which is why the crowds at campaign rallies in 2016 spontaneously broke out in chants of “Build the wall.”

“Most Republicans recognize that Democrats have no interest in getting a handle on illegal immigration. In fact, Democrats are doing their best to incentivize illegal immigration with the explosion of sanctuary cities across the country, driver’s licenses for illegals, free health care and even voting rights in some cases for illegal aliens,” Mr. O’Connell said.

“Republicans see the writing on the wall, and they recognize that Donald Trump is the last, best chance to get illegal immigration under control.”

Read more from S.A. Miller at The Washington Times

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) contend the crisis on the U.S. southern border is manufactured.

Yet, The Washington Post, no friend to the Trump Administration, disagrees. According to the Post, the situation on the southern border is indeed “a bona fide emergency.”

Record numbers of migrant families are coming to the United States, the U.S. immigration courts have a backlog in excess of 800,000 cases and the holding cells and detention centers are at overflow capacity.

Add in the fact that scores of Americans are killed by illegal immigrantsevery month, the tremendous strain illegal aliens place on the nation’s social welfare system, not to mention the human trafficking, drugs and crime burdening American citizens.

Still crickets from the left.

When we do hear from Democrats, it is because they are expressing outrage over the Border Patrol taking non-lethal countermeasures to protect themselves from a migrant caravan bum rushing the border; a level of contempt we didn’t see from Democrats when former President Barack Obama was faced with a nearly identical situation and dealt with it in a similar fashion a few years earlier.

Luckily for the White House, Americans by and large are not buying what Congressional Democrats are selling when it comes to the southern border. They want strong border security. A recent survey from Morning Consult shows that 79 percent of registered voters see the situation at the southern border as a “crisis” or “problem.”

So what specifically makes this current southern border crisis different than the ones faced by President George W. Bush or Barack Obama? It is not so much the raw number of aliens crossing illegally, but the “make up of the flow” that is different. More migrants hail from Central America, more are coming in family units, and there are more unaccompanied minors. This shift in composition of illegal immigrant groups is key to understanding how our current asylum laws combined with various other immigration loopholes and defects allow them to specifically game the system in a way that unaccompanied adult Mexican nationals, who previously comprised the majority of illegal immigrants, cannot. In other words, once these folks (Central American migrants, family units and minors) arrive and set foot on U.S. soil, they are next to impossible to remove. This is why the Trump administration has gone to great lengths to broker a deal with Mexico to serve as a staging area for Central American migrants until their asylum claims are processed.

But until Congress has the will to change the asylum laws and to fix the other legal loopholes and defects, it would be foolish not to better secure the southern border in the meantime.

Read more from Ford O'Connell at The Hill

White House officials and congressional Republicans are seeking to blame the partial government shutdown on Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), as the standoff over funding for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border appears likely to extend into the new year.

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney in an interview Friday said Pelosi can’t move on the wall because of the Jan. 3 floor vote for House Speaker, repeating an argument first made by President Trump in an Oval Office meeting with Democrats.

The White House is also seeking to portray a split between Pelosi and Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), who leads Democrats in the Senate.

GOP strategists say there is value in the White House trying to exploit potential divisions in the House Democratic Caucus that could cause issues for Pelosi and Schumer.

“What Trump is ultimately trying to do is paint the narrative that in leadership Pelosi will have to fight her own Democratic House caucus more than Republicans,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “In other words, the chaos in government is being spearheaded by Democrats not Trump.”

Early in the process of negotiating border security funding, Schumer and Pelosi were in somewhat different places. Schumer had floated advancing a Senate-committee passed bill that included $1.6 billion for fencing, while Pelosi said that plan was unacceptable. 

Read more from Naomi Jagoda at The Hill

Republicans are keeping their distance from a recent court ruling that struck down ObamaCare, as GOP lawmakers are wary of the political backlash that could ensue from scrapping the law.

Many congressional Republicans remain silent after a federal judge on Friday struck down the Affordable Care Act in its entirety. And those who have spoken out largely steered clear of embracing the decision.

The muted response illustrates how the politics of the 2010 health law have shifted, with Democrats successfully hammering Republicans during the 2018 midterms over GOP efforts to weaken the law’s pre-existing condition protections.

The GOP tack is a stark contrast to previous lawsuits against ObamaCare in 2012 and 2015, which were enthusiastically supported by Republicans.

As the Affordable Care Act has become more entrenched, and after Republicans tried to undo much of its coverage expansion last year, the focus has shifted to the benefits that would be taken away if repeal efforts succeeded, such as popular protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

Legal experts in both parties say it is extremely unlikely that the legal challenge to the law will succeed once the ruling is appealed. While the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, the next stop for the case, is considered a conservative court, some legal experts say the challenge won't go any further, meaning it won't reach the Supreme Court.

Ford O’Connell, a GOP strategist, said he would advise Republicans not to say they support the ruling, but instead talk about the broader issue of reducing health-care costs.

“Regardless of the decision, the costs are still the problem,” he said.

“Why back yourself into a corner” by taking a position on the decision, he added.

Read moe from Peter Sullivan at The Hill

President Donald Trump’s negotiations with Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi Tuesday failed to produce a consensus on much of anything except who will bear responsibility if the parts of the government shut down later this month.

“If we don't get what we want, one way or the other -- whether it's through you, through a military, through anything you want to call -- I will shut down the government... I am proud to shut down the government for border security,” Trump said.

It started to go off the rails when Pelosi referred to a partial government shutdown that would result if they fail to reach a budget agreement as a “Trump shutdown.” Trump interrupted, beginning an extended three-way debate about border security, the legislative process, and the midterm election results that wore on for 10 minutes while Vice President Mike Pence sat silently between them.

In a statement afterward, the White House called the meeting “constructive.”

Funding for a border wall through the Department of Homeland Security remains the biggest sticking point in negotiations, and lawmakers have already delayed an inevitable standoff with Trump on the issue several times. A Senate DHS appropriations bill would provide $1.6 billion for border security, which is what the White House initially requested, but the version of the bill under consideration in the House includes the $5 billion Trump has demanded more recently.

However, Republicans said Trump got what he wanted from the meeting by showing how obstinate Democrats are about building a wall to secure the border and prevent illegal immigration.

“They are more interested at this stage in denying Trump a campaign promise than they are in protecting the border,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell.

Read more from Stephen Loiaconi at WJLA

Democrats say Americans’ access to Obamacare is at risk with the next Supreme Court justice, though some legal experts say they’re exaggerating the issue to try to defeat President Trump’s eventual nominee.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer and his troops don’t have the votes to stop Mr. Trump’s nominee, but they are eager to use the pick for political purposes, hoping to rally liberal voters ahead of November’s elections and perhaps make life uncomfortable for several centrist Republicans.

While abortion and the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling have taken most of the focus, Democrats insist the next justice could play a deciding role in striking down the Affordable Care Act should another case reach the high court, even though the retiring Justice Anthony M. Kennedy had already voted to strike it down.

Protect Our Care, a pro-Obamacare coalition, released a TV ad on Monday driving home that message.

But Justice Kennedy wasn’t part of the 2012 case majority — the key swing vote in the 2012 Obamacare case was Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who sided with the court’s four Democratic-appointed members.

Legal experts doubted a new justice will change that.

Mr. Schumer says Democrats can’t take any chances. The specific question around severability at this juncture in Obamacare’s history hasn’t been tested — so in his view, the chief justice’s ultimate position is as an open question.

His strategy is also just Politics 101 — much as immigration is animating the GOP base, Democrats are fired up over health care heading into November’s elections.

“He is, without question, trying to pull every lever to fire up the Democratic base ahead of the midterm,” said GOP strategist Ford O’Connell. “He’s also, interestingly, trying to turn the heat up on Collins and Murkowski — because if they bless the nominee, this is over.”

Read more from Thomas Howell Jr. at the Washington Times

Ironically, President Trump – a dealmaker in his past life – was nowhere to be seen when the deal to reopen the government was struck.

Mr. Trump had spent the weekend holed up in the White House, talking with friends, aides, and key Republican lawmakers, watching his surrogates speak for him on television, and perhaps most important, steering clear of top Democrats. Even his Twitter account stayed on message.

This was all by design, stage-managed by advisers who sought to prevent the chaos of the past few weeks from spilling over into the high-stakes arena of a partial government shutdown.

The gambit worked. Democratic leaders quickly concluded that Trump wasn’t going to address the plight of Dreamers – unauthorized immigrants brought to the US as children – as part of a short-term spending bill, and so most Democrats voted to reopen the government. In exchange, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky pledged to take up immigration issues, including Dreamers, by early February.

The president’s defenders say Trump’s hands-off approach was, in fact, in keeping with his past as a businessman. He was doing what CEOs are supposed to do: delegate.

“There’s no question that Trump is still learning how to govern,” says Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “In this instance he was smart to let his lieutenants – in this case, Senator McConnell and [House Speaker Paul] Ryan – work it out themselves, while saying essentially, I’m not giving in on Dreamers.”

Illegal immigration was a central issue for Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and “Republicans on Capitol Hill are willing to fight for him and do what he wants,” Mr. O’Connell says. “But he needs to be clearer about what it is he wants.”

Read more from Linda Feldmann at The Christian Science Monitor

Upending the political order in the nation’s capital for the second time in a week, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and her Senate counterpart, Chuck Schumer of New York, said Wednesday night that they had reached an agreement with President Trump to shield undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children from deportation and to increase border security, but without building a wall.

The two Democrats made the announcement after dining on Chinese food with Trump at the White House. The deal came just one week after Trump, Pelosi and Schumer stunned Republicans by announcing a three-month agreement to raise the federal debt limit without attaching conservative budget reductions.

“We had a very productive meeting at the White House with the president,” Pelosi and Schumer said in a joint statement. They said the discussion focused on the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, the Obama-era rules that now protect 690,000 immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children without legal documentation. The Trump administration said last week that it would phase out the protections and handed the issue to Congress to resolve.

“We agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a package of border security, excluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both sides,” Pelosi and Schumer said.

“Donald Trump said from the beginning that his job is to get things done for the American people, not just the Republican Party,” said GOP strategist Ford O’Connell. “If Republicans can’t muster the votes in Congress, he’s going to work with Democrats.”

O’Connell said one of the big misconceptions about Trump is that he is “an ideologue. He’s about accomplishments.”

Still, any deal on immigration in Congress will require some Republican support, and conservatives reacted harshly to Wednesday night’s news.

O’Connell said Republicans would have to get a substantial boost in border security in return for legalization . “Democrats are going to vote to legalize the ‘Dreamers’ (DACA recipients) and a lot of moderate Republicans are,” O’Connell said. “Republicans are just nervous about making sure they get the most out of that.”

Read more from Carolyn Lochhead at the San Francisco Chronicle