Goodbye 2017

55 min readDec 21, 2017

As the year comes to a close, we look at what’s at stake for DREAMers whose future remains unclear, and we examine the ups and downs of 2017. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

A year ago, we were all looking ahead to 2017 wondering what the new world order was going to look like under a Trump presidency, and with the GOP firmly in control of both chambers of Congress. Now, after a whirlwind year of ups, downs, and words we can’t say on radio, 2017 is drawing to a close — and for many of us, not a moment too soon. So this week, Off-Kilter’s taking a moment to look back on the year in review. First, Rebecca speaks with Neera Tanden, President of the Center for American Progress, about what she’s learned as we look ahead to 2018. Next, she talks with Ezra Levin, Co-Executive Director of Indivisible, as the movement spurred by a humble google doc commemorates its one year anniversary. And finally, with the DREAM Act in limbo amid Congress’s end of year funding debate, Rebecca’s joined by Tom Jawetz, CAP’s immigration guru, about what’s at stake for the tens of thousands of immigrants whose futures hang in the balance.

This week’s guests:

Neera Tanden, President of the Center for American Progress
Ezra Levin, Co-Executive Director of Indivisible
Tom Jawetz, Vice President of Immigration Policy at the Center for American Progress

For more on this week’s topics:

Check out Indivisible’s great resources — and read the guide that started it all — at Indivisible.org.
Get up to speed on what’s at stake for DACA recipients here and here and by watching this video
Want to join the fight to pass the DREAM Act? Check out DreamActToolkit.org

And enjoy this extended interview with Ezra Levin:

This program aired on December 22nd, 2017

Transcript of show:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. A year ago we were all looking ahead to 2017 wondering what the new world order was going to look like under a Trump presidency and the GOP firmly in control of both chambers of congress. Now after a whirlwind year of ups, downs and lots of words I can’t say on radio, 2017 is drawing to a close and for many of us not a moment too soon. So this week Off Kilter is taking a look back in the year in review. I speak with Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress about what she’s learned as we look ahead to 2018 and Ezra Levin, president of Indivisible as the movement spurred by a humble PDF or was it a google doc commemorates it’s one year anniversary. And finally with the DREAM Act in limbo amid Congress’s end of year funding debate I’m joined by Tom Jawetz, CAP’s immigration guru to hear what’s at stakes for the 10s of thousands of immigrants whose futures hang in the balance. Don’t go away more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. 2017 has brought a lot of things. Stress, anxiety, increased wine consumption speaking for myself. As Off Kilter looks back on the year in review and forward to the year ahead I’m so pleased to be joined by my boss who is the president of the Center for American Progress.

NEERA TANDEN: Colleague, we prefer the term colleagues.

VALLAS: Neera Tanden, you recognize her voice already I’m sure. Neera, thanks so much for coming back on the show.

TANDEN: Great to be with you.

VALLAS: So I think it’s hard to sum up 2017 is probably fair to say. But was it what you expected post election? And what are some of the lessons you feel you’ve learned now that we’ve survived this year?

TANDEN: You know I actually think it is about as bad as I thought it was going to be. I think this is an interesting point of, it’s an interesting sort of psychological take for people. I think people who expected it to be bad, so I went through the election and thought Donald Trump would be a disaster in every way and an assault on every value I have and he’s pretty much lived up to that assessment and so I feel like I, that actually prepared me better to do, go to war and defend each of these issues that we care so much about because really almost every progressive value is under assault. You know, it any minute and day these days. There are whole ranges of people who are so imbalanced by what Trump does and I think that’s because they didn’t take him seriously, thought, “Oh you know when he sounded like the most right wing demagogue in American history, that was all kind of a joke.” And so I think those people are really sort of driven particularly to distraction by what he does and I think, what I’m proud about our work and just to brag for a moment the work of the Center for American Progress is that I think we’ve had a very realistic assessment from day one of what Trump could do to the country and what it means to fight him and why we need to fight him because we care about America essentially. I think protest against Donald Trump has been the most American thing that I’ve been a part of.

VALLAS: Would you say that Trump is what you expected? I mean you sort of started to get to that in your answer but I think during the campaign there was a lot of disagreement about who he really was and whether anyone really knew who he was. Whether he even knows who he is.

TANDEN: This I find so fascinating. Everyone I talk to, this is just like an ever present conversation is what’s going on with him? He has actually been trying to deliver on his campaign promises as they were. In every arena he is actually doing the things he said he would do. He wanted to take away people’s health care, he wanted a massive tax cut for the rich, he did campaign on this tax cut for the rich. He is trying to build a wall and the appropriations process, he did try to do Muslim bans so you know I think our problem for a lot of progressives is we didn’t take him seriously enough. People thought he was a carnival barker and he was a television performer and not a real person and we didn’t him, too many people didn’t take him seriously. And, or didn’t take what he said seriously and I think that has been a challenge, or had been a challenge. Now the country has really woken up to what each of these policies would really do to people and what I’m hopeful about just to move to optimism is how much the country is repelled. I think Donald Trump has created a large scale progressive response. These issues come under assault and they actually create a bigger backlash than his support. So that’s something to be optimistic about. We didn’t just go to sleep and go away and get depressed. People have come into the streets to defend the issues we care about.

VALLAS: So in the wake of Republicans successfully ramming through this tax scam as it’s been called through both chambers of commerce and now sending it to President Trump’s desk, there’s been a lot of compare and contrast between what happened in the tax fight and what happened in the health care fight given the very different outcomes. What would you say made the two fights different and what do you think progressives have learned from what made those two fights different and what worked and what didn’t work?

TANDEN: I think there’s a bunch of ways to disaggregate that. First, the fact that they lost health care made passing tax cuts an even greater imperative for them. So the idea that they couldn’t really go back and say no twice to their supporters. So Collins and Murkowski and others I’m sure, but we have a sense of Collins and Murkowski were definitely much more anxious to get to yes and since they’ve been a no. That’s a steep hill to climb. I also think that we are dealing with just a phenomenon on tax cuts that there’s been part of the debate but I don’t think really people really appreciate it. Essentially Republican donors have invested billions of dollars into the Republican Party with the hope that one day there would be Republican control of all branches of government and they would get a return on that investment. I mean billionaires like the Koch brothers have been flooding Republican senate members, House members, conservative institutions and many people who didn’t like Donald Trump voted for him and supported him because they wanted to get to the moment where that investment would pay off and they would reap their bonanza which as we’re seeing in this tax plan a giant payoff to the super wealthy at a time where there is no reason to do this. So that has been very head. Obviously when we started our work on the tax plan our goal was to make the tax plan unpopular with the public by giving them facts. Just really providing them information and then be able to impact Republicans. Now we’ve really overshot the runway on the first goal because two-thirds of the American people recognize this plan for what it is which is a giant sop to the wealthy with pennies for the middle class.

VALLAS: And become the single most unpopular piece of legislation in modern history.

TANDEN: Absolutely, so we’ve been effective in that run but what we, it’s that we you know, we underestimated we knew it all along, it was very hard to get Republicans to not basically pay off their supporters and you know when people are really cynical about politics I would just remind people that progressives have fought a tax plan tooth and nail that rewards the wealthiest Americans, some of whom are their donors but on the progressive side we are doing what’s right for the country and donors wealth be damned. A lot of progressive donors hate this tax plan too. So I appreciate the defeat but I think the most important thing for us is to not get distracted. Donald Trump is going to move the debate off what this tax plan does every day of 2018. They know, his numbers came down around the health care debate, his numbers came down around the tax debate. People do not like what they see and he’s going to try to distract Americans by doing his next version of the NFL or his next attack on people of color and what we need to do as progressives is to remind people every day of the votes these incumbents took to essentially eat at the trough of the federal government for themselves, for lowering their own taxes, for a lot of these senators and house members but more importantly to just pay off the donors who have given them money in their campaigns.

VALLAS: A year ago at this time there were a lot of folks saying that facts didn’t matter anymore. The campaign proved it, the presidential election proved it, we are no longer in a society where facts matter and you run a think tank where facts matter. [LAUGHTER] Frankly, your business, mine as well since I work here too, do you think 2017 proved that true or false?

TANDEN: That is a great question. I will admit to feeling some existential crisis after an election in which Donald Trump said crazy things every day. But you know what I actually think and I think this question is really a great one, what I actually think is we showed in 2017 that facts do matter. For a majority of the country, it doesn’t, they don’t matter for everybody, still have some challenges, but for the majority of the country facts are super relevant and if we look, it can take just a bunch of examples, I’ll just focus on one. During the health care debate Republicans knew the Congressional Budget Office were going to say that their health care plans lost health care for 23 million people. So they had a concerted strategy of actually denigrating the CBO and saying it doesn’t, the Congressional Budget Office doesn’t work and it’s ineffective and its predictions are always off. But when the Congressional Budget Office issued its findings it made front page news of not just the Washington Post or the New York Times but newspapers in Oklahoma and in the panhandle and all throughout Ohio and ultimately people came to a view which is that millions of people lose health care under the health care bill. Same thing on taxes, Donald Trump has called this tax plan a middle class tax cut every single day for months and people think he’s lying and they think he’s lying because they actually have heard the facts of this bill which are the vast majority of the benefits go to the uber wealthy, it gets worse with each version, 83% of the benefits of this tax plan go to the top 1%. Whatever goes to the middle class basically is taken away in a few years and so I think the facts have mattered a great deal. What I would say we haven’t proven is those facts can stay with people. And that is really the most important thing for 2018 which is we will face an onslaught of fake news and distracting events and progressive need to keep an eye on the ball that Donald Trump has hurt the most vulnerable Americans at one turn after another. For the people who voted against him and the people who voted for him, he has been a president for the uber wealthy and not for actually everyday Americans.

VALLAS: There are two things that feel very relevant as we look ahead to 2018, a lot more than two but two that I’ll name. One of them is the recent Alabama special election which changes a lot about the Senate, bringing in Doug Jones to be seated as the next senator from or the junior senator from Alabama. The other piece that I would say is that it’s an election year and I’m stating the obvious here but those are two very, very big factors that Republicans are going to have to contend with as they decide how they want to run things in 2018 for as long as they still control all the chambers of congress. What do you think those two factors are going to do to what we see in 2018.

TANDEN: Well as an organization and as different teams can [a]ttest you have to fight tooth and nail for three votes in the Senate. We have to fight tooth and nail for three votes in the Senate on health care and we tried on taxes so limiting that to two votes makes things a lot easier. So I think that Doug Jones’ election is really important for that but I also think it’s obviously critical to the tone of the congress. I think one explanation for what happened with this tax bill is I think Republicans may think they’re going to lose congress and they’re basically raiding the treasury while they can. I hate to be so cynical but the plan is so unpopular, it does so little for people who actually need help, so little for the people who actually elect them and so much for their donors that it’s almost like and for companies it’s almost like they’re looking at what their next jobs are or something like that because the obviously the tailwinds are so negative for them. The big question for 2018 is whether Donald Trump changes in any way, shape, or form. I think that’s impossible for him to do. He has a strategy of how he won and he is not going to change that strategy which is to continually go after the base and I think that’s, I mean go after his base and support his base and I think that we’re going to see more of the same. How much the Republicans can be impervious to public opinion as you closer and closer to an election I think is an open question because I imagine some of those people have some level of desire to continue to serve and so perhaps they’ll probably slow down the pace of legislation but we have to see.

VALLAS: Well, and a third X factor in there is Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House who, is he retiring? Isn’t he retiring? I don’t think anyone really knows, he may not even know but he certainly hasn’t finished with completing all of his kegger days dreams right, and seems to be wanting to come back and do some more of that while he’s still there.

TANDEN: Yeah one of things that are so interesting is about where we are and what the Republicans are trying to do is essentially Donald Trump is governing like the Republican party was in the 1990s. So in the 1990s it was really college educated whites and pretty well off people who were supporting the Republican party. Donald Trump campaigned as this candidate for the every man or I would say the white every man since he definitely attacked working class people of color. But they’ve governed with a far right agenda basically from the robber baron age. Donald Trumps to seeded his entire economic strategy to Gary Cohn, the NEC director, National Economic Council director from Goldman Sachs and Paul Ryan who’s an Ayn Rand adherent. Which was so in conflict with the way he actually campaigned. So one of the big question will the attacks on entitlements or the push for quote, unquote welfare reform, will that really run into any reality which is that a bunch of the people who voted for Donald Trump are working poor people and use government services and rely on the Earned Income Tax Credit and use the Medicaid program and don’t want to lose the little economic security they have and basically I think the question is whether Paul Ryan will accomplish, will basically hurt those people that just voted for Trump.

VALLAS: In the last 30 seconds I have with you because I know you have somewhere you have to be and there will be people I will be in trouble with if I don’t get you there, if there’s one thing you know now that you wish you had known in the beginning of 2017 that you get to bring into 2018 what is that?

TANDEN: The singular thing is the power of the resistance. I mean right after this election it was reasonable to worry about what kind of country we’re all in. and I think all of us have this experience which is doubting some of our core beliefs about what America is and whether we believe in a country for all Americans or whether we believe that the country was really only here for a few people and the thing that I’ve been most optimistic about and truly I feel actually, I mean it sounds corny but I feel a privilege to be in the resistance. There are people who wake up every day and commit to do something to save the country from the abyss. And those are the people who are powering Doug Jones’ victory and powering victories at the ballot box but even more importantly those are the people who help save health care for 23 million people and of course what the Republicans did on the individual mandate was terrible but at the end of the day a year ago no one expected us to save the Medicaid expansion and it is for this moment safe because of the hard work of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people to say I have health care but I believe other people should have it too and I’m going to use my voice and we can’t get distracted by this tax fight which had some many array of forces to forget that the power of our voice and the power of democracy is to actually make sure that at the end of the day we have representation and we have people that actually represent us and if they don’t they get a new job in 2018.

VALLAS: Neera Tanden is the president of the Center for American Progress and my boss so be nice to her.

[LAUGHTER]

TANDEN: Thanks for having me.

VALLAS: Neera, thanks so much for coming back on the show and I’m sure we’ll have you back on to talk about so called ‘welfare reform’ in the new year.

TANDEN: Great, thank you.

VALLAS: Don’t go away more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. A year ago a PDF document written by former congressional staffers started to make the rounds on the internet. Almost overnight it was no longer just a guide it was the movement that came to be known as Indivisible. To continue the year in review look back at 2017 I’m so thrilled to be joined by my good friend Ezra Levin. He’s one of the co-authors of that guide and co-executive director of the organization that it spurred that’s called of course Indivisible. Ezra, thanks so much for coming back on the show.

EZRA LEVIN: Hey Rebecca, always a pleasure to join.

VALLAS: So I have to say, it’s absolutely mind boggling to me that it’s almost been a year since I had you on the show for the first time in the role that is no longer your new role that is the role you’ve filled for the past year running this organization that I know you’re going to tell me next is not something that you run but that you sort of facilitate. But I would love for you to tell the story of how the guide came to be. Remind people of where all this came from.

LEVIN: Yeah it’s been a wild ride this past year and quite unexpected. The guide came about in the aftermath of the election so about a year ago. Our birthday was actually December 14th, just a few days ago. And we were going through the stages of grief like a lot of progressives trying to figure out what exactly we could do. My spouse Leah Greenberg was also a congressional staffer as I was during the rise of the Tea Party and as dark as everything was back last November after the election there was this really bright silver lining. There were folks all across the country who were suddenly getting engaged they wanted to figure out what they could do to resist the Trump administration agenda. And seeing all of that energy, Leah and I thought well what can we do to help? And we kept on getting questions because we were former congressional staffers about hey what actually works? Folks were seeing whose [INAUDIBLE] Paul Ryan or calling various agencies or getting in touch with their members of congress. But they wanted to know how do these individual actions actually contribute to overall the huge goal of resisting the Trump administration’s agenda.

And so we put out this guide we drafted then reached out to other former congressional staffers that tried to demystify congress. Basically took a lesson from the Tea Party minus the racism and violence and said hey if you form a local group in your own community you can focus on your two senators and your one representative and pressure them, tell them to resist and the reason why this works is because Trump’s agenda doesn’t depend on Trump. It depends on Congress, it depends on whether or not your actual members of congress go along with it or not. And so you as a constituent in your community have a particular power here. You can effect what is possible nationally you just have to get engaged and that was all we wanted to do. We put out that 23-page guide just to encourage people and tell them you’ve got power in this situation. As dark as things are you are not powerless and had hoped that maybe some people will use it, maybe a few months later somebody would say hey I went to my district office of my local member of congress or I went to a town hall and asked them good questions, thanks for the guide. That was the aspiration a year ago.

VALLAS: And how did it go from becoming a guide to becoming this amazing movement where now there are multiple chapters of Indivisible in literally every congressional district?

LEVIN: To be clear there was energy out there long before we wrote some Google document. There was a resistance that had been forming after the election and before the election of course there were folks organizing and doing good mobilizing advocacy work on economic justice and racial justice and immigrant rights and every issue you could think of. So it’s not as if there was nothing and then there was Indivisible. There was quite a work that had already been done but after the election what we found was that there were a lot of folks who were newly engaged, who they had voted before, they hadn’t really knocked on doors. They’d never called their member of congress and they weren’t just looking for one individual action to take, they were really looking to invest their whole selves in this. They were looking to take on a pretty time consuming project so counter intuitively the fact that what the guide proposed was not easy, the fact that it required a huge investment made it more attractive is what we saw with folks.

And so pretty soon after the guide went online we started hearing from people all over the country saying I want to implement this. I just got 20 of my friends together and we’re Roanoke Indivisible or we’re Rodchester Indivisible. We want to get more people or I’m looking for a group. I’m in Alabama how can I find other progressives who want to implement this. And so we started registering groups on the internet, really simply forms that says you have to agree the Trump administration’s agenda is an abomination that ought to be resisted so pretty low bar, that you will implement the strategies and tactics outlined in the guide and that you’ll found a progressive group that models progressive values, practice nonviolence and be inclusive. And then all of these folks all across the country started registering groups and it was amazing to see within a few days we had a hundred or two hundred groups and we were just overjoyed and overwhelmed. It was amazing to see people all across the country do this to get engaged and we were thinking then, how on earth are we going to get in touch and help one or two hundred groups and now like you said there are 6,000 that are registered.

They’re literally in every congressional district in the country and these are fundamentally independent groups of folks who are implementing the strategies and tactics outlined in the guide and then some. So yes, they started focusing on their members of congress but they got involved in elections, they’re doing voter registration to get out the vote. They’re focusing on their city council or state legislature, they’re running for office. One of our Indivisible group leaders in Virginia was just elected to the House of Delegates and that’s happening all over. So it really kind of spontaneously evolved as a result of a whole bunch of people all across the country looking for something productive to do in this brave new world we live in now.

VALLAS: And the energy in the streets has been unmistakable. There’s been a tremendous amount of very well deserved attention for not just Indivisible but for really the resistance writ large to the Trump agenda, to a lot of the policies that have been deeply unpopular that the Republican party has been trying to ram through without a single Democratic vote. And one of the fights that has been perhaps exhibit A of the power of the resistance and of the power of these Indivisible groups has been without question the health care fight. The fact that we still have the Affordable Care Act as the law of the land. That Medicaid has not been ended as we know it. Was that something that you expected might be possible when you were writing that guide and starting to see these groups form? Did you really think that it was going to be possible to defeat Republican efforts that were as top of their list and repealing the ACA?

LEVIN: So and I’m pausing, that was the hope. I can’t say that we were positive that we were going to be able to win every battle. In fact we were pretty sure we were going to lose some. But what we heard back in November and December, even in progressive circles the common knowledge in D.C. which I’m sure you heard as well is the Affordable Care Act is dead. As of a year ago we thought it would be dead possibly on the first day, first week, first month of the Trump administration. And the fact that that didn’t happen immediately was amazing and the way that it didn’t happen was equally amazing. The first congressional recesses in February I think certainly the images of that are seared into my mind and the amount of press coverage it got possibly seared into the public consciousness, folks all across the country from deep red Arkansas to deep blue San Francisco were out at congressional town halls telling people if you take away the Affordable Care Act I will be dead or bankrupt. My child will suffer. My family will be harmed, do not do this, and that really scared members of congress.

That was the theory of change in the guide. The idea that if you bring a group together, if you tell your members of Congress that you are watching them and that they ought to stand up for you and not Donald Trump, that will scare them away from doing something they might otherwise do. Did we hope we could delay or prevent repeal of the Affordable Care Act? Absolutely. Did we imagine that after the Republicans ran on repealing the Affordable Care Act for seven years, after they had done it dozens of times in the house and actually forced President Obama to veto the bill once after they had promised for years and years that as soon as they took power they would do it and after actually taking power, after having unified control of the house, the senate and the presidency they would fail to do it not just immediately but at all in the first year, that, we would have had to been pretty darn optimistic to guarantee that and the fact that the resistance and the broader progressive community and Americans in general regardless of their ideological persuasion has risen up and pressured their members of congress again fulfilling that prophecy is a phenomenal victory and a really a validation of that theory of change that constituent power exists not just during elections but during the legislative process. We’re pretty happy with that.

VALLAS: Now on the flip side we’re talking literally hours after Republicans managed to finally pass their tax scam through both chambers of congress. They’re going to now head it to the president’s desk. There’s rumors that he may even sign it while he’s in Mar-A-Lago which would not be, I can’t imagine a more perfect place for him to sign a huge set of giveaways to the wealthy and corporations. A lot of people particularly in the media have been looking at the tax fight and sort of doing compare and contrast with the health care fight and saying you know the reason that the resistance was successful at beating back ACA repeal and Medicaid decimation but not in beating back this tax scam was that there’s been movement fatigue, there hasn’t been as much energy in the streets. The resistance hasn’t been quite there in the same way in the tax fight. Do you think that that’s a fair appraisal and what do you think that portends for the fights ahead in 2018?

LEVIN: So I’d say a few things on this, one that’s just worth saying you already said it, this bill is really, really bad. And it’s not just the tax bill that got through. It’s a mistake to treat it just a tax bill. This is an attack on our health care. There are there legs to the Affordable Care Act stool. It’s the guarantee for folks who have pre-existing conditions, you can still get insurance. It’s then the requirement that everybody get insurance so that the pools don’t get overly expensive and then it’s the support for folks who need it to actually purchase that insurance. And this takes out on of those legs of the stool. The intent of this as Donald Trump himself has said is to repeal the Affordable Care Act and it does to damage and it’s going to result in 13 million Americans not having health insurance, it’s going to result in 10% premium cost increases for everybody else and there are going to be long term impacts from this. So this is going to be, this is a bad tax bill, this is a bad health care bill and it is really just a tragic occurrence that this managed to get through the House and the Senate as quickly as it did and with as little input from the public.

There is a reason why they did that. There is a reason why they jammed it through as quickly as possible and it’s the same reason why they tried to jam the original repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the Trumpcare bill through. And it’s because they knew with additional public attention, with additional sunlight this thing would rot. This thing would be unpopular and it would be defeated. Ultimately what we saw was that in this moment Republicans in the House and Senate cared more about their own pocketbooks and their donors than they did about what their constituents thought. We had two national days of action on the Trump tax scam or GOP tax scam. And we had somewhere between 80 and 100 events across the country at both of those. During our national day of action on the Trumpcare fight we had 173 events so it is, there was a comparable level of backlash across the country and there was comparable or even more backlash in key states like in Senator Collins’ state of Maine, groups were outside her office over the several weeks and months protesting the tax bill. In Senator Corker’s state of Tennessee the groups in East Tennessee and middle Tennessee were out of his offices asking him to vote against this. In Arizona we had folks in McCain’s district offices and in Senator Flake’s district offices.

There was pressure out there and so I am absolutely not convinced by the idea that if you 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 more events, if you had 10% or 20% more pressure from the field that somehow the outcome would have been different here. There is no evidence that the senators who voted for this or the House members who voted for this were paying attention closely to the number of events. They had decided to simply listen to their donors. And when you’re facing elected officials like that, elected officials who are completely and publicly ignoring their constituencies honestly [INAUDIBLE] to win. There have been some reporting on this that this is not how American democracy normally works. Normally what happens is both folks in the House and Senate wake up every morning thinking about how am I going to get reelected? And one really really bad way to get reelected is to vote for something that has an incredibly low approval rating and that folks in your own district or in your own state are coming to your district offices to protest. That’s a good way to convince the folks who put you in office that you shouldn’t be in office anymore. That’s not how this played out this time. The donors won and that’s why this is a tragic event. It’s something that is going to cause a lot of pain and suffering for a long time to come. Yes, I think this will result in many Republicans losing their jobs next year. But that’s cold comfort in this moment because we’re going to have to dig ourselves out of this and there’s a lot to dig.

VALLAS: You can find my full conversation with Ezra as a bonus episode on iTunes.

Ezra Levin is one of the co-authors of what was the indivisible guide that launched the indivisible movement. He’s one of the co-directors of that organization today. Ezra, thank you so much for coming back on the show, thank you so much for the amazing work that you and Leah and everybody else are doing and I also just want to give a special shout out to one of my favorite people at Indivisible who is Chad Bolt who’s been on this show who folks will know well from being on Off Kilter but also from his twitter. He’s been one of the tireless champions throughout the tax fight. Thank you for everything that all of you do every day and for everything that all of the Indivisible members on the ground who make up what has become an amazing movement are doing every single day.

LEVIN: Rebecca, thanks for having me on and especially thanks for spotlighting everything that’s going on around the country I think we need folks to know that there is resistance out there that is fired up and this is how we’re going to win.

VALLAS: Lots more to come in 2018, Ezra Levin is co-director of indivisible you can follow him @EzraLevin on twitter. Don’t go away more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Every day that Congress fails to act on the DREAM Act from now until March 5th, 2018 122 people will lose protection from deportation under DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. To unpack what’s at stake I’m joined by Tom Jawetz he’s the Vice President for Immigration Policy at the Center for American Progress. Tom, thanks so much for joining the show.

TOM JAWETZ: Sure, thanks so much for having me.

VALLAS: Well just to kick off, DACA is yet another one of those acronyms, we have plenty of those acronyms in Washington, D.C., help us understand what is DACA, what is the story behind it, what does it mean?

JAWETZ: Sure, so 17 years ago Senator Durbin, Senator Hatch introduced a bill on the Senate side called the DREAM Act and the idea was to provide a path to legal status for immigrants who were brought to the country as children and basically know no other country than this one as their home. There have been efforts over the years to try to get DACA, DREAM Act into law in 2010 back before I was at CAP and I was working for congress. The House passed the DREAM Act but it didn’t pass in the senate despite the fact that it got a majority of support, it didn’t get to the 60 vote threshold. About two years later in 2012, President Obama issued what’s now called DACA and technically it was a memorandum issued by the Secretary of Homeland Security at the time, Janet Napolitano which essentially said that if you are a young person who came to the country more than 5 years before that date, before 2012 and you have played by the rules, you haven’t committed any crimes you could come forward and affirmatively apply for DACA and DACA would then provide you with 2 years of protection from deportation and the ability to work lawfully in the country. And so at this point now, more than 5 years into DACA and by definition all of the individuals who have DACA and there have been more than 800,000 young people who have been approved for DACA over the years have been in the country for at least 10 years, these are young people who we know are in the workforce, who are in schools, they are doctors, they are nurses, they are lawyers, they are actors and they basically have the ability to live and work in this country free from the fear of deportation solely by virtue of DACA.

VALLAS: Now take us to present day. Why are we in a moment right now where folks are at risk and what’s going on with DACA?

JAWETZ: Yeah, great question. So where we are right now is that in September of this year, September 5th, the Trump administration announced it was going to be ending DACA. And so on that day the Attorney General Jeff Sessions held a press conference and he essentially announced the administration had decided to terminate the memorandum that authorized the program and to begin the process of ending DACA. And so what that means in practice is that the administration said that about 150,000 DACA recipients had a 30 day period of time within which to come forward and apply for an addition two years of protection. All the other DACA recipients out there, more than 600,000 would not have an ability to come forward and apply to renew their protection, their protections were going to begin expiring on March 6th, 2018 and over the next year and a half after that basically.

Now, of those 154,000 people who had a chance to apply for an additional set of protection, their last set of protection about 22,000 of them were unable to do that for a variety of reasons. Its’ important to focus on the fact that they were only given 30 days notice. The administration made absolutely no effort to reach out to the individuals to let them know who they were and that they were eligible to apply for renewal. All this happens in the middle of some pretty devastating hurricanes that were causing devastation throughout the south and southeast and yet the administration made no effort to actually extend the deadlines and actively resisted any requests to extend the deadlines. And so you have about 22,000 people who until March 5th of 2018 will be losing their protection from deportation and that comes with a whole host of really negative consequences.

VALLAS: So there are real similarities it feels I would be remiss to make this observation between what we’re seeing here and what we have seen on the health care front with the Affordable Care Act and what the Trump administration did to shorten the open enrollment period and really to do nothing to inform people about the need to make sure that they have health insurance.

JAWETZ: So that’s one great comparison. The administration basically for no real good reason whatsoever actually to sabotage the process for people to remain protected, remain covered as a result we’re seeing real people’s lives getting effected negatively. The other strong comparison to it frankly is that for years, going back to when I was in congress years ago, as a staffer I should say, there was all this focus on repeal without replace. They were so focused on repealing the bill and didn’t really care about replacing the bill. That’s really where we are right now on DACA. The administration in September just decided it was going to end the program and the president said at the time in September that he was going to give congress 6 months to act until March before anything would happen. But there wasn’t, for starters, any replacement whatsoever and so they didn’t actually put anything in place to protect these individuals going forward and we still don’t have anything today that the leadership in the House or Senate or the White House is willing to publically back and actually put on the floor for a vote but also in terms of what I think is the big lie about the idea that congress has 6 months to act. We know as I said earlier that there are 22,000 who lost protection. So just given the 181 days between September 5th when this decision was made and March 5 when theoretically the deadline to act is going to come up, there are about 122 people per day on average who are losing protection. That’s 851 per week, that’s 13,000 already today have lost protection.

And the consequences of losing DACA, we should really be clear about that are really quite severe. People who lose DACA on the day they lose DACA they lose the ability to live free from detention and deportation. People who lose DACA, when the door, when they get a knock on the door their first thought is going to be whether or not that is Immigration Customs Enforcement officers there ready to rip them away from their families and deport them to a country they may have left when they were 2, 3 years of age. Because employers have the information that is provided to them through the I-9 process of every single one of their employees, they know the date on which your work authorization document expires. And when it comes to DACA, your work authorization expires the day your DACA expires. So for these 13,000 people who have lost DACA already, their employers know that they have lost work authorization. They don’t have another document to give them, they are being fired every single day, 122 people have the potential to be fired if they are in the work force. I mean we know from a nationwide survey we did that around 91% of these young people are in fact in the workforce.

Drivers licenses, again in almost every single state are tied to your work authorization. So if you’re trying to drive your children to school or get yourself to the doctor for instance and you’re pulled over and it turns out you’re driving without a license, that’s the kind of thing that absolutely can and will bring you into detention of Immigrations Customs Enforcement and could result in your detention. And we actually just saw that last week from a DACA recipient who lost his protection over the last couple weeks and because he was driving without permission ended up getting placed in detention.

VALLAS: So I’d love to kind of continue that thread of helping to put a face on this. Because there’s a lot of the debate sounds very political, and I want to get into the politics of this as well, a lot of it gets described in terms of people being protected from detention which maybe sounds like a technical legalistic concept if it’s not something someone has himself or herself faced. Who are the people that we’re talking about here? Who are these DACA recipients, so-called DACA recipients? What do their lives look like and what are they experiencing now because of this loss of this protection?

JAWETZ: It’s a great question. So who are these DACA individuals? They are quite literally just like you or me. The average DACA recipient came to this country when they were 6 and a half years old, this population that has DACA today has been here for by definition more than ten years. They are in every state, they are in every industry, they are in some of the colleges throughout the country. They are indistinguishable in virtually every respect that you imagine other than the fact that you don’t have the same paperwork that you or I have. Now one example of a person who I should have hinted at a second ago is Osman Enriquez. So Osman Enriquez is a young man, he has a one-year-old child, Not quite yet one year old, and he was one of those 154,000 people who did have the opportunity to apply to renew his work authorization, renew his DACA before October 5th. He filed his application, it was received but because of a glitch in how the U.S. Postal Service delivered the mail believe it or not, he and hundreds or thousands of individuals had their DACA renewal applications delivered to USCIS after the deadline. Although the administration has sort of signaled after a lot of pushing that some of those individuals could be allowed to reapply, he was apprehended while driving before hearing anything further from USCIS and found himself in detention separated from his child.

We saw something similar happening to another woman, Brittany Aguilera. This woman was in New York City who similarly she had applied and she applied I think a month before the deadline basically because she failed to sign a single one of the signature lines on her application it was rejected and sent back to her to be filled out again. The problem is they only sent it back to her on October 5th itself. So by the time she even knew she had an error to correct they had already closed her out of the program by saying that she had failed to file on time. This was a person who was in the workforce, was providing critical services to a family including a child with special needs and is now not able to work because she’s lost her DACA.

VALLAS: Now part of the reason we’re talking about this right now is because in this moment there’s a debate happening her in Washington around whether as part of the end of year business that congress needs to do literally to keep the government open, not something that people have forgotten I’m sure from the last several years where there have been debates around government funding that have resulted in government shutdowns, especially government employees will remember having been sidelined at home while folks in Washington tried to figure out how to reopen the government. Part of that conversation now involves whether there should be action taken to protect these DACA recipients. Where does that stand and what do you think is going to end up happening?

JAWETZ: Well it’s a really great question and it’s a really open question. Trying to figure out how to break it down in different ways. And one thing I’ll say is it’s not that surprising frankly and it’s certainly not unusual and it’s certainly not unique to the issue of DACA or DREAMers that we’re talking about them in connection to this end of year spending package. Congress frankly and I spent almost 7 years working there just doesn’t work the way that people historically are used to it working. And I think people in their gut know this at that point. In a functioning congress, in a functioning government you would have issues handled in an appropriate manner. They would work their way through committee they would find their way to the floor. They would be debated and you would make law that way. It hasn’t been that way for a long time and it’s very much not the way right now. Again and thinking through how efforts to pass immigration reform in the past have essentially stalled largely because not withstanding the fact that there were enough votes to pass it, the leadership simply didn’t have the political will or the courage to allow for a vote on those things explains in many ways why we’re here right now on not just this issue but so many others.

So we’re coming up to the end of the year and yes a very basic thing the government has to do is find a way to fund the government but the other kinds of things they have to do, they have to reauthorized the Children’s Health Insurance Program which expired so long ago and is critically important for providing health insurance to vulnerable children and pregnant women. If you look at also other requirements like the emergency supplementary request, so states like Texas, Florida, California, Puerto Rico as well were devastated by natural disasters and are in need of critical funding to support their recovery efforts and yet congress months after the fact still hasn’t got its act together to bring these things up. So there are a lot of different things that I think congress is looking at when trying to figure out what bill will actually have to get passed and if it has to get passed how can that thing be the vehicle on which other priorities can ride, and the DREAM Act finds itself as one of those things as well.

VALLAS: So if I had to ask you to look into your crystal ball which is deeply unfair of me because there is so much uncertainty right now around whether the government is going to stay open past December 22nd let alone what happens in 2018. What do you think happens in the weeks and months ahead? Do we see congress take action here whether as part of this particular continuing resolution to keep the government open or as another piece of legislation and what does it mean for conversations around immigration reform which used to be called comprehensive immigration reform and people were even really thinking about it. What does that do to these conversations in 2018?

JAWETZ: So I guess I have a couple of different thoughts on that. One is in terms of the question of how does this work out with the possibility of funding the government going forward? That is very much up in the air. So we’re recording this for people who are listening on Wednesday the 20th and although Republican members of congress are headed to the White House to begin their celebration over the tax scam bill that they just shoved through the house and the senate with absolutely no Democratic support and no process at all. They literally have no idea how they’re going to keep the government open. Taking Democrats completely out of the equation for a second because that’s what I think the media always loves to focus on how Democrats are approaching the situation, literally House Republicans and Senate Republicans right now cannot agree on a simple bill that would keep the government open past the 22nd.

And so even if you take out what role Democrats will take in this conversation, there’s a lot of dysfunction. That’s important because that also means that given how disorganized they are with their ability to organize their caucus that provides leverage for Democrats who want to make sure that if their votes are needed to ultimately allow for something to move forward the thing they’re voting on is something that matches their values. You can’t expect a bipartisan outcome without having a bipartisan product. And so there absolutely is in the next day or two some real opportunity for Democrats working with likeminded Republicans. There are, I will say on this issue not only is the strong support across popular opinion for offering protections to DREAMers, [INAUDIBLE] Republican support as well is very strong, there are dozens of members of congress on the Republican side of the aisle who are desperate to see a solution for this population. Many I think motivated because they know a lot of these DREAMers and they’re moved by their stories and many because I think they’re looking at electoral map that was complicated even before Donald Trump was the least popular president in a first term administration of all time.

And they’re trying to save their political careers. And so you just last week for instance or two weeks ago saw 34 Republicans in the House sign a letter saying they want to get a fix before the end of the year. We just had again this is Wednesday but just today 11 bipartisan governors came out saying they want to see a fix for DACA recipients. So there is strong bipartisan support for getting a deal done here and we’re looking at these spending bills because frankly at the end of the day whether it’s going to be the bill that’s coming up for funding on the 22nd or if they end up kicking the can down the road into January at some point it’s sort of like a you can run but you can’t hide moment. They’re going to need to actually come up with a bipartisan package that can keep the government open, that can raise the caps which is a big priority both on the non-defense discretionary side for critical programs that Americans rely upon and also on the defense side that’s a very, very top priority for this administration and many of the more hawkish members. And so if they want to get some of these packages across the end of the day they’re going to need to work across the aisle and passing the DREAM Act is an extremely important priority for Democrats and frankly for many Republicans as well.

VALLAS: Our listeners are engaged people, they like to know what they can do on these issues beyond just knowing what’s going on and what’s at stake for their neighbors and their communities. What can people do if they want to weigh in on this debate?

JAWETZ: I will say the best thing you often can do for starters is if you can’t make your way into D.C. for large actions is to go to your own district offices. Wherever you are in the country, if you can reach out to your member of congress and make sure they can hear your opinion on the need for Congress to take action on this issue you should set up those appointments and get in there. If you want to see a list of targets, people that we’re sort of focusing on, CAP does have a tool online; it’s the DREAMActToolKit.org and that provides you with both a list of the members that we are focusing on and easy ability to call or click to tweet at them as well as the general hotline number that you can use that will direct you to your member of congress if you don’t see your member of congress there.

And the other thing I’ll say is again, if it’s before the 22nd, we really do want to make sure that members of congress on both sides of the aisle including leadership for both sides is hearing that this is a top priority. But if you’re listening to this and congress has already kicked the can down the road maybe to January 19th, that’s currently what we’re hearing at least, that does give us another 3 weeks basically to organize some serious response and we’re going to need to be cranking up the energy in the same way that we saw in the fight against the efforts to repeal Obamacare, the same way we saw people around the country rally to try to stop this terrible tax bill. We need people to be turning all their attention onto this because it’s a very, very short timeline and literally everyday does count. It’s hard to say what 122 people per day means but again when you’re talking about them losing their jobs, losing their drivers licenses in some states like South Carolina being kicked out of their public university, in other states like Virginia losing in state tuition and being forced to leave your university or college. And frankly just living in fear every single day that you need to get into the car and drive your kids to school. It’s a really really important thing for us to be rallying around now and the kind of impact that we’re seeing right now is going to multiply more than ten fold in March when you’re going to be seeing huge numbers of individuals every single day losing their jobs and being forced to once again lose their DACA and being placed into undocumented status.

VALLAS: And we’ll have that tool kit and all the information that you just mentioned available at our nerdy syllabus page which our listeners know and love and use. I’ve been speaking with Tom Jawetz, he’s the Vice President for Immigration Policy at the Center for American Progress. Tom, thanks so much for joining the show.

JAWETZ: Cool, thanks for having me.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.

Transcript of bonus interview:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. A year ago a PDF document written by former congressional staffers started to make the rounds on the internet. Almost overnight it was no longer just a guide it was the movement that came to be known as Indivisible. To continue the year in review look back at 2017 I’m so thrilled to be joined by my good friend Ezra Levin. He’s one of the co-authors of that guide and co-executive director of the organization that it spurred that’s called of course Indivisible. Ezra, thanks so much for coming back on the show.

EZRA LEVIN: Hey Rebecca, always a pleasure to join.

VALLAS: And how did it go from becoming a guide to becoming this amazing movement where now there are multiple chapters of Indivisible in literally every congressional district?

VALLAS: So a lot of folks have been looking at the outcome of the tax fight and saying, yes Republicans have been successful at what they’re now terming this huge legislative victory. They’re all running around being very excited about having finally done something this year after being stymied on health care and other fronts. But then there are a lot of folks who are saying well wait a second this is actually a win because this is going to be what seals the fate of Republicans heading into the midterms. Do you see it that way, is it fair to characterize this as some kind of win for progressives or for Democrats, is that a fair appraisal?

LEVIN: Yeah so I think this is a loss for everybody. It’s a loss whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or an independent. This is going to harm us all and cause a lot of pain and suffering for years to come and there’s no way around that. That’s why this is tragic. The, as we’ve discussed already the bill has major impact not just on our tax code and our deficit and the level of inequality in our country but also on the healthcare that everybody depends on. So the GOP has decided unilaterally to change the rules of the game and force this legislation through and it’s something that we have to live with. Now I think what folks are saying when they’re saying it’s a win is that this is going to help us in 2018, in the 2018 elections. And the responsibility we have right now now that this loss has occurred is to do what the Tea Party did back in 2010. When we were writing the guide we were reflecting on the Tea Party tactics and the Tea Party didn’t win every fight. They won many things they were able to sink key parts of President Obama’s agenda but the stimulus passed, the Dodd-Frank bill passed, the Affordable Care Act passed. And when the Affordable Care Act passed in March of 2010 the Tea Party said OK, we are going to retake power. We are going to not let any single Democrat appear in public without having to answer questions about our health care. This is what we need to do right now. I do not think that any Republican member of the House or Senate ought to be able to appear in public without being asked why did you raise my taxes, why did you raise my premiums and how much did you personally benefit, how much of a tax cut did you get? This should drag them down. This is a despicable bill, it has incredibly low popularity, they did it in the dead of the night for a reason and that there needs to be accountability. So we do have the opportunity to retake power if we ensure that they whole population knows exactly what happened and that these senators and representatives’ constituents know exactly what happened.

And then there is real opportunity here for us. It doesn’t mean longer term there aren’t going to be losses, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t going to be pain and suffering but there is an opportunity to not just repeal this as we should but build something up. The Republicans have decided that historic wide sweeping multi-trillion dollar legislation requires only 50 votes in the senate to get done. They have rammed through something and upended decades of congressional procedure to do it. And I firmly believe that is not going to work out well for them. They are a minority party. They do not have the population with them and if and when Congress reflects the will of the people, when we have a progressive house and senate and presidency we’re going to have the opportunity to make real changes that’s going to be repealing this terrible, terrible legislation but it’s also going to mean that we can accomplish a lot of the things that we failed to accomplish in the past.

And so there is an opportunity right now, if there is a win right now if there is a silver lining at this incredibly dark time it’s that there is a door open to determine what our first bill is in 2019 and 2021. There is a door open to determining who will be introducing those bills. We can start envisioning a progressive vision for the future and because of this change that Republicans brought today, because of this short term win that they have achieved, we have an opportunity to change this country and the work we do in the weeks and months to come will determine what that change looks like.

VALLAS: In the last minute or so that I have with you I want to ask you a question that I also asked Neera earlier in this episode which is if there is one thing that you didn’t know at the outset of this whole adventure and the early days of what has become Indivisible, that you now know and that you get to take into 2018 with you what would that be?

LEVIN: Oh, there are a thousand things that I know.

VALLAS: Well I’m making you pick one, I’m being a huge jerk!

[LAUGHTER]

LEVIN: Oh my gosh yeah, so many things. So I think there’s not a non-corny way to put this but I feel this every time that I go and meet with Indivisible groups all over the country and it really doesn’t matter how blue the district is or red the district is. There is an incredible strength throughout the country and a willingness or eagerness to fight back and make this country what they want it to be. It is incredibly hard to be cynical when you’re going out and taking to a group of Indivisible leaders who are school teachers or IT technicians or nurses who have never been politically active before and aren’t just reluctantly making calls or sometimes attending meetings or sometimes going to town halls for their member of congress but they’re really owning this. They are really building it up themselves. There is a level of, an amount of untapped power that has been untapped up to this point that is incredibly inspiring. And so the thing that I know now and that I only hoped for a year ago is that we’re going to win. This is going to happen and it’s going to happen because people across the country are rising up.

VALLAS: Ezra Levin is one of the co-authors of what was the Indivisible guide that launched the Indivisible movement. He’s one of the co-directors of that organization today. Ezra, thank you so much for coming back on the show, thank you so much for the amazing work that you and Leah and everybody else are doing and I also just want to give a special shout out to one of my favorite people at Indivisible who is Chad Bolt who’s been on this show who folks will know well from being on Off Kilter but also from his twitter. He’s been one of the tireless champions throughout the tax fight. Thank you for everything that all of you do every day and for everything that all of the Indivisible members on the ground who make up what has become an amazing movement are doing every single day.

VALLAS: Lots more to come in 2018, Ezra Levin is co-director of Indivisible you can follow him @EzraLevin on twitter.

Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.

Goodbye 2017

This week’s guests:

For more on this week’s topics:

Transcript of show:

Transcript of bonus interview:

Written by Off-Kilter Podcast

No responses yet