Ting Shen/Xinhua via ZUMA

Tracy Jan notes today that the Trumpies are claiming an end to DACA will give jobs back to red-blooded Americans:

It’s a long-running talking point spouted by Trump administration members and the president himself: Undocumented immigrants are taking jobs away from black and Hispanic Americans. Hours after President Trump dismantled an Obama-era program that had granted 800,000 young undocumented immigrants permission to live and work in the United States, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders again made the claim.

“It’s a known fact that there are over 4 million unemployed Americans in the same age group as those that are DACA recipients; that over 950,000 of those are African Americans in the same age group; over 870,000 unemployed Hispanics in the same age group,” Sanders said during Tuesday’s press briefing. “Those are large groups of people that are unemployed that could possibly have those jobs.”

What Sanders leaves out is that those 800,000 DACA recipients also buy lots of stuff, creating jobs for other people. In fact, the amount of stuff they buy is almost exactly equal to the wages of the jobs they take. In other words, if every DACA recipient got deported tomorrow, GDP would decrease by about the equivalent of 800,000 jobs. It would help nobody.

This is why immigration doesn’t generally have a big effect on employment. It can have a small effect, because the economic activity of immigrants might not precisely match the wages they take out of the economy. This is why you see studies showing that undocumented workers are responsible for tiny changes in employment and wages, usually somewhere between -2 percent to +2 percent, mostly clustering around zero.

The moon is playing hide-and-seek with the clouds in today’s picture. I’m curious about where the rust color comes from. This was late enough at night that it wasn’t residual light from sunset. I don’t think it’s an artifact of the camera either. Could it be a streetlight reflecting off the lens hood or something?

Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via ZUMA

Nancy LeTourneau  explains why Republican leaders were so upset about yesterday’s 3-month deal on the budget:

Rather than clearing the deck for Republicans to be able to work on tax reform, the short-term extension means that they now have to contend with yet another round to deal with the budget and debt ceiling before the end of the year. That clogs up the whole business, while providing Democrats with the ability to maintain their leverage. That is precisely why the Republicans were trying to bargain for a longer time horizon—they wanted to get these two things off their plates for at least a year and be able to move on to the one big thing they all want to accomplish…tax cuts.

This isn’t quite right. Sure, Ryan and McConnell wanted a longer horizon on the debt ceiling. This risked scuttling the whole bill, but they figured that tying the debt ceiling to Harvey aid gave them a decent shot at passing it even though the ultras would yell and scream. It was a risk they were willing to take.

But the continuing resolution on the budget was never going to be longer than three months. This means that Ryan and McConnell were always going to be hip deep in budget negotiations all the way through the end of the year. I can’t imagine they ever entertained the prospect of clearing this off their plates.

In other words, the only thing they lost yesterday was the fight over the debt ceiling. But that costs them very little. If they can put together a budget that gets Democratic support—which they’ll need if they want to bust the sequestration cap on defense spending—they can almost certainly get Democratic support for raising the debt ceiling too. This does make things harder for them, since they need 60 votes in the Senate to raise the debt ceiling, but a budget agreement would come with assurances of enough Democratic votes to get it through.

This is why I don’t think Republicans lost much yesterday. The rest of the year was going to be tied up with budget negotiations no matter what, and tying the debt ceiling bill to the budget only makes things slightly harder. The debt ceiling gives Democrats a little more leverage, but only a little.

Unless I’m missing something, that is. Am I?

A couple of weeks ago I read Frances FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals, and I was a little surprised to learn that the evangelical movement has been in pretty weak shape for the past decade or so. One reason is that the old warhorses—Falwell, Robertson, Dobson—are either old or dead, and very few new warhorses have taken their place as leaders of the movement. What’s worse, many of the new ones who have developed high public profiles, like Rick Warren, are less interested in the old social hot buttons and prefer to devote more of their time to things like helping the poor. This partly explains why evangelicals were so eager to support Donald Trump, even though he’s pretty obviously the least godly president in recent memory. They were looking for any port in a storm, and their followers liked Trump. So they jumped on his coattails in hopes that some of his popularity would rub off on them.

The chart below shows their problem. After years of gaining followers, evangelical strength began to decline during the Bush years and then fell off a cliff in the Obama years, dropping from 21 percent of the population to only 17 percent:

This decline is heavily age dependent—and not because of abortion. Young people feel about the same way toward abortion as older people. The real fault line is gay marriage. As the old evangelicals became ever more strident about it, they lost the loyalty of young people who just weren’t willing to buy the anti-gay hatred. Among 18-29 year-olds, only about 8 percent currently identify as evangelicals.

(Apparently the whole issue of gay rights did damage on a broader scale too. Old-school hardliners like James Dobson were absolutely manic about it, and as it became clear they were losing the battle it did serious spiritual damage. Some of them began to think America was doomed. Others just gave up. This spiritual crisis at the top contributed to the decline of white evangelical churches as a whole.)

Here are two other interesting things from the report. First is a map of American states ranked by diversity of religion. The authors use the HHI scale, which is normally used to measure concentration within industries, so you can think of this as representing how much of a monopoly a single church has in each state:

The least diverse state in the country is Mississippi, followed closely by Alabama and Arkansas. These are states where Southern Baptists rule. The most diverse states are New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and California.

And since this here is a political blog, this chart shows which parties are most popular within various religions. I don’t think there are any big surprises.

Especial/Notimex/Newscom via ZUMA

Hey DREAMers! Donald Trump has your back:

For all of those (DACA) that are concerned about your status during the 6 month period, you have nothing to worry about – No action!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 7, 2017

As always, keep in mind that this is a message to Trump’s base, not to anyone else. The message is: I’m anti-immigrant but I still have a heart. This is precisely the message they want to hear, because it is precisely how they think of themselves. They’re sick of people accusing them of being racist or xenophobic or just plain nasty because they’re opposed to the brown hordes coming over the border. Trump is the only one who understands this, and that’s why they love him.

Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

This morning I suggested that President Trump’s deal with Democrats to extend government funding and the debt ceiling for three months was, in fact, something of a relief to Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. They wanted a deal that solved their near-term problems, but because the ultra-cons in their own party opposed any kind of compromise, they also wanted to keep their fingerprints off it. Having Trump do the dirty work was perfect for them.

I think it’s safe to say that no one on the planet agrees with me:

• Wall Street Journal: “Trump stuns GOP…likely to inflame tensions between the president and his fellow Republicans…Senate Republican aides said the deal registered as a rebuke.”
• Washington Post: “Trump confounded his party’s leaders…upended sensitive negotiations over the debt ceiling…follows a summer of presidential stewing over McConnell and Ryan.”
• Politico: “Republicans seethed privately and distanced themselves publicly from the deal…doesn’t appear to help Republicans at all…undercut leadership.”
• New York Times: “Reflected friction between the president and his party…an extraordinary public turn for the president…Republican leaders looked grim but resigned afterward.”
• LA Times: “Caught Republican leaders off guard and severely undercut their legislative strategy…left several Republican lawmakers seething…McConnell made clear that the deal was Trump’s, even as he agreed to support it.”

I suppose Occam’s Razor supports this view. Trump was most likely being his usual dickish self. He’s mad at McConnell and Ryan right now, so he decided to screw them over with a clumsy warning that he might team up with Dems if they don’t start toeing the Trump line.¹ Anything more complicated than that is probably beyond Trump’s emotional and cognitive range.

And yet…there’s still something odd about this. Two somethings, in fact:

• Here’s what McConnell said after the Oval Office meeting: “The president agreed with Sen. Schumer and Congresswoman Pelosi to do a three-month [funding extension] and a debt ceiling into December, and that’s what I will be offering based on the president’s decision, to the bill.” Since when does McConnell just roll over and do whatever Trump says? And since when does he make it very very clear that this isn’t his fault, no how no way, it’s just what the president wants to do?
• The reason Republicans are “stunned” is because this is supposed to be a terrible deal for them. But is it? Right now Democrats have a lot of leverage because Republicans need to get so much done between now and the end of the month. Even routine dilatory tactics would kill them. Now McConnell has the opportunity to clean up a few things and then spend a couple of months negotiating the budget. That works in his favor. And what does he lose? Supposedly, he could have pushed through a longer debt ceiling increase if it was tied to Harvey aid because Dems would have been unwilling to vote against it. I have my doubts about that, but in any case, a longer debt ceiling increase is precisely what the conservative ultras were against. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were plenty of Republicans who would have voted against Harvey aid if it included a 2-year debt ceiling increase. That was leadership’s big problem, not Democrats.

I’m no legislative guru, but if I didn’t know better I’d say that today’s outcome sounds like a preplanned bit of McConnell kabuki. OK, we’re agreed. In the morning Paul will call a 3-month increase ridiculous. We’ll pretend to argue about it in the Oval Office. Halfway through you’ll cut us off and agree with the Democrats. Be sure to make it look real, Mr. President! Then Paul and I will come out looking whipped, and I’ll make it clear that we hate this and are only doing it because the president laid down the law. We’ll even manage a few leaks to make it look more authentic. Everybody loves it when anonymous sources deliver some dirt. Everyone in? Good.

I know, I know. There’s no way. This kind of stuff only happens in bad movies, and Trump is incapable of playacting like this anyway. But damn. This whole deal still looks so good for McConnell and Ryan that I’d swear it was choreographed.

¹This has never made any sense, since Republicans control the floor of Congress. Trump can work with Democrats all he wants, but their bills are going precisely nowhere unless Ryan and McConnell let them. For some reason, though, this possibility seems to be taken seriously by a lot of people.

Since I was yanking Steve Schafer’s chain yesterday, today’s photo is for him. This is my friend Helga’s beautiful falcon, Dreki. (That’s Icelandic for dragon.) Apparently he’s eagerly waiting for October 1, when rabbit season opens. I think I’m glad I’m not a rabbit.

Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA

President Trump has “sided with Democrats” in approving a 3-month deal that raises the debt ceiling, funds Harvey relief, and includes a continuing resolution to fund the government through December:

Trump made his position clear at a White House meeting with congressional leaders, agreeing with Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) by voicing support for a three-month bill to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling for the same amount of time.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he would add provisions extending government funding and the debt limit through mid-December to legislation passed by the House on Wednesday that would provide $7.85 billion in Hurricane Harvey relief.

“The president agreed with Sen. Schumer and Congresswoman Pelosi to do a three-month [funding extension] and a debt ceiling into December, and that’s what I will be offering based on the president’s decision, to the bill. And we’ll try to get 60 votes and move forward,” McConnell told reporters Wednesday afternoon. “The president can speak for himself, but his feeling was that we needed to come together to not create a picture of divisiveness at a time of genuine national crisis. And that was the rationale.”

I suppose all the outrage theater this morning was basically in service of this: pretending that this bill is all Democrats’ fault. That’s not because the Republican leadership has any real objection to it—all of this stuff was inevitable eventually—but because they needed a scapegoat to placate the ultras in their own party. So they pretend to get dragged into this, even though it’s what they wanted all along.

In fact, it’s better than they could have hoped for. Congress has a ton of stuff on its plate in September, and getting three big things off the table right away is terrific news for them. This gives them some breathing room to consider other things, like FAA reauthorization, Obamacare stabilization, and immigration. I’m not sure how much good it will do them, considering the fault lines in their own party, but honestly, Mitch McConnell must be breathing a huge sigh of relief right now. He’ll never admit it, but he is.

Joel Marklund/Bildbyran via ZUMA

I’m going to replay a Twitter conversation about DACA with Amanda Marcotte from last night. We were talking about Donald Trump’s claim that Obama enacted executive orders with no respect for legal boundaries, and I think it raises an important point:

Marcotte: Trump accusing Obama of overreach is always rooted in a belief Obama was never a rightful president….Obama didn’t win every court case. But the knee-jerk assumption that he acted without regard for the law is so dumb only racism explains it.

Me: No, it’s not the only possible explanation. One alternative is that…Obama is a Democrat….Republicans were complaining about Obama’s lawless executive orders long before Trump came on the scene.

Marcotte: I really think digging one’s heels into the “Trump’s not a racist it MUST be something else” argument is unwise.…First of all, racism is endemic to the GOP. Second, you are conflating cheap point scoring with Trump’s single minded obsession….Third, as Sagittarius points out, Trump’s role as chief birther is the linchpin here. Trump refuses to accept Obama’s legitimacy.

As always, Twitter is a lousy platform for a conversation. This one definitely needs a little more breathing room.

Is Trump a racist? I sure wouldn’t argue otherwise. There’s not much question that he spends a ton of time appealing to racist sentiments, and this means either that he’s a racist himself or that he’s so cynical he doesn’t mind inflaming white racial resentment in order to maintain political support. Frankly, I don’t think there’s enough daylight between those two possibilities to care much about it. Trump is a racist in practice no matter what’s actually rattling around in that gray matter he uses for a brain.

It’s also true that the Republican base is full of racists. Trump wouldn’t bother appealing to white racial resentment if this weren’t the case.

But that doesn’t mean racism is the primary explanation for every bit of opposition to all things Obama. Pretty much every Republican in Congress opposed everything Obama did, and that’s not because every Republican in Congress is a racist. It’s because they’re conservatives and Obama was doing liberal things. Their strategy of unconditional obstruction would have been the same no matter which Democrat had won the 2008 election.

In the case of DACA, there’s not much question that Obama’s executive action was open to legal question. I happen to think he was on pretty firm ground, but that’s not a slam dunk. Other presidents have also made unilateral decisions about immigration law, but DACA really does go further than anything previously. The same is true of other Obama executive orders, and long before Trump ever came onto the scene this gave Republicans an opening to complain about presidential overreach.

Was this just a handy argument (i.e., Marcotte’s “point scoring”)? Sure, but that’s politics for you. You pick the argument that has the most oomph, not the one that’s technically what you feel most strongly about. Democrats made similar overreach arguments about George Bush’s signing orders.

In this case, it’s not that Trump’s argument about DACA representing presidential overreach must be about something other than racism. Who knows what’s in his heart? But there are other explanations. The most likely one, by a mile, is that Trump is an idiot and he’s just parroting something he was told by someone else.

As for his obsession with Obama, that’s most likely because Obama is his predecessor. Trump’s personality demands that he attack his enemies relentlessly in order to build up his own ego, and in this case it means dismantling Obama’s legacy. Obama’s blackness may or may not play a role in that, but what clearly does play a role is that Obama’s legacy is the only one open to him.

I think it’s unwise to tiptoe around racism, but I also think it’s unwise to make it the go-to explanation for everything. Trump has plenty of reasons to disparage Obama. If I had to guess, I’d say the main one is Trump’s obvious awareness that Obama was a far better president than he’ll ever be. Likewise, Republicans have plenty of reasons to dislike DACA. Race underlies some of this, but the fact that Obama is both a liberal and a Democrat—and that DACA reduces their leverage in any future debate over immigration reform—plays a much larger role.

Race is a powerful political weapon. It should be used judiciously.

Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

Politics has gotten to the point that I literally don’t understand it anymore. This is from the Washington Post this morning:

The House bill does not include language to raise the debt ceiling ahead of a late-September deadline, a relief to conservatives who oppose linking the two issues. But that doesn’t mean the lower chamber will ultimately avoid such a vote: Senate Republican leaders said they plan to attach a debt-ceiling hike to Harvey aid despite conservative opposition.

Democratic leaders offered support for a combined package on Wednesday provided it only raises the debt ceiling for three months, a plan that would allow the minority party to maintain leverage on issues like government spending, health care and protections for immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children, known as “dreamers,” before the end of the year.

….Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) called the offer a “ridiculous idea”….“Let’s just think about this: We’ve got all this devastation in Texas. We’ve got another unprecedented hurricane about to hit Florida, and they want to play politics with the debt ceiling? … I think that’s ridiculous and disgraceful that they want to play politics with the debt ceiling at this moment when we have fellow citizens in need, to respond to these hurricanes so we do not strand them,” Ryan told a news conference on Wednesday.

Let me get this straight. House Republicans don’t want any debt ceiling increase at all tied to Harvey aid. Senate Republicans do want a debt ceiling increase tied to Harvey aid. Democrats are offering to support the Senate bill as long as the debt ceiling increase is only for three months.

What exactly is Paul Ryan outraged about? Does he think Democrats should reject any debt ceiling increase? Does he think they should accept a longer debt ceiling increase? What would constitute not playing politics with Harvey aid?

Maybe my brain has turned to mush, but I don’t get this. I can only assume that Ryan is pretending to be outraged because it makes good theater. Nothing else really makes sense.