Democratic Senators are worried about an ambush on the Senate floor, according to National Journal.
The Feb. 25 article, which begins by saying “Democrats are worried about an ambush,” suggests the attack may be launched by some Republicans.
“The real concern among members of the [Democratic] minority is that Sen. Ted Cruz or Sen. Jeff Sessions or another immigration hard-liner will force McConnell to stab them in the back,” said the National Journal reporter.
The article includes a large photograph of Cruz, suggesting that he may be the chief planner of the feared stabbing.
The NJ’s worry about an ambush comes one day after Democratic leaders, including minority leader Sen. Harry Reid, warned reporters that the nation is facing a threat of jihadi strikes.
“We need to protect our homeland,” Reid told reporters Feb. 24, during a press conference in which he said Democrats would continue to filibuster the 2015 budget for the Department of Homeland Security until the GOP ends its effort to stop the president from rewriting immigration law.
“We have people being beheaded, people being stacked in cages — one of them has been burned in a cage — we have the direct threat to our malls around America, and we have to be as prepared for these bad people as ISIS and other terrorist groups prepare to do harm to us,” he said.
“Our first responsibility is to protect this country, and protect it against the threat of terrorism,” Sen. Dick Durbin told the reporters.
However, the NJ’s warning about GOP ambushes seems far-fetched, partly because there’e no evidence that McConnell will be able to overcome the heavily armed Capitol Hill police force while trying to stab one or more Democrats in the back.
At minimum, several of the younger Democratic senators should be able to outrun McConnell before he can plunge his knife in their backs, assuming they’re not distracted by reading lengthy briefings.
Also, Washington insiders believe it is unlikely that McConnell would follow Sen. Cruz’s instructions.
The NJ article may have garbled the Democrats’ real worries.
Democrats may be most worried that GOP senators will force them to participate in a Senate debate — complete with amendments and recorded votes — if they end their filibuster of the DHS budget, according to clues buried in the NJ article.
During a floor debate, Republicans may “add in even more egregious amendments… [and Democrats] would be powerless to stop them,” the reporter wrote.
The sentence suggests that Democrats are worried less about a bloody stabbing spree, than Republicans forcing them to publicly vote for or against Obama’s unpopular Nov. 20 amnesty, which would provide work-permits and large tax rebates to roughly 5 million illegal immigrants.
Obama’s tax-rebate plan is so unpopular that it hasn’t been polled, especially by the GOP’s business-backed establishment wing.
NJ’s conflation of debate and terrorism is a common error in the socially isolated population of Washington D.C. progressives, according to Daniel Horowitz, a founder of Conservative Review. “Obama’s political class, including the media… view the Republican effort to force them to go on record supporting the idea that Obama can write his own laws, as an ambush,” Horowitz explained to The Daily Caller.
But, he added “for the average American, this is democracy.”
Horowitz’s s interpretation of the NJ article is bolstered by the Senate’s 226 year-old practice of voting on amendments in budget debates.
The possibility that NJ inaccurately used “ambush” instead of “amendment,” is supported by the 10th paragraph of the NJ article.
“Fifty-one votes, all Republicans, will be all it takes to add new amendments to the bill,” NJ warns readers.
The prospect of amendments is a real problem for Democrats, because the amnesty is both unpopular among 2016 voters, yet is also a top priority for Democrats.
Once Democrats agree to hold a debate, “they’d be powerless to stop them,” warns NJ. Those amendments, NJ adds, may be “worse” than “shutting down DHS.”
The Democrats’ worries, however, were likely calmed Feb. 25, when McConnell agreed to block any amendments from Sessions or Cruz. Instead, there will be only one amendment — to replace the full DHS bill with a toothless version that won’t defund Obama’s planned amnesty.
Presumably, McConnell also postponed, or even cancelled, the planned stabbing spree.
The immigration issue is contentious, partly because Obama has added roughly 5 million working-age extra immigrants to the workforce since 2009. Long-standing law adds another 1 million legal immigrants per year. The annual inflow of roughly 1.6 working-age migrants sharply increases job competition for the 4 million blue-collar and college-educated Americans who enter the labor force each year. In fact, salaries for male college-grads — such as media professionals or accountants or healthcare workers — has drifted down since 2000.
In November 2014, one in every five U.S. jobs was held by a foreign-born worker, up from one-in-six jobs in January 2010, according to federal data highlighted by the Center for Immigration Studies.