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Local Congressman Blames Dems, DACA For Government Shutdown

After a weekend of suspense over the government shutdown, brinkmanship in Washington is on pause, if only for a couple of weeks.

After all the hoopla, North State Congressman Doug LaMalfa, was breathing an exhausted sigh of relief.

“It’s good to finally be past this silly, 72 hour mess,” he said.

But as the ink dries on this latest continuing resolution, the issues surrounding the impasse remain. LaMalfa had little praise for the process.

“This is a pretty bad resolution,” he said. “All you can say is that it’s done. Like, you know, in college if you got a ‘D’ on a paper, like ‘D for done,’ so that’s about how good that is.”

The measure, he said, extends federal spending through February 8th, rather than the 16th. LaMalfa faulted Democratic legislators for the shutdown, saying they unfairly linked the spending deal to resolving disagreements about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program— or DACA — an Obama-era executive order partly shielding undocumented immigrants who arrived as youngsters from deportation.

“Democrats wanted to add the DACA thing to it, which has no business being in or around spending extension,” LaMalfa said. “That’s its own separate subject matter.”

Asked how DACA should be resolved, LaMalfa said he would pair it with improved border security, physical barriers and increased border patrols.

“A lot of people have sympathy for them, yeah, young people that are just stuck here, they went through all the schools, you know, you hear this verbiage about how ‘oh, we’re going to separate families,’ well, when someone came across the border illegally, they made the move to separate from their family from the country they came from. That’s when they made that decision,” LaMalfa said.

The respite for lawmakers concerning federal spending and immigration are certain to be short lived.