After a week of stalled immigration negotiations, Mollie Hemingway at the Federalist suspects Democrats aren’t actually all that keen to strike a deal on DACA. So far, she notes, Democrats have been essentially unwilling to offer anything by way of negotiation to find a permanent fix to the expiring Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows undocumented immigrants who were brought the U.S. as young children to remain. “[Democrats] were unwilling to offer any concessions to get it—no wall, no drawdown of random visa lotteries, no de-emphasis on chain migration, no move to a Canadian- or Australian-style merit immigration system,” Hemingway writes. “In fact, one of their proposals would actually expand chain migration, by which family members can get an easier path to U.S. residency and citizenship than other applicants.” If Democrats wanted to find a solution to the problem of immigrants who arrived as undocumented children, she surmises, Democrats would have done it early in the Obama presidency when they had control of both the House and the Senate. So why didn’t they? (The Democrats nearly got the mountaintop on creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who arrived as children, but the bill, which passed the House, couldn’t overcome a Republican filibuster and died on the vine 55-41.) Hemingway has an answer: DACA is to Democrats what Obamacare Repeal is for Republicans. That is, it’s a better political weapon than actual policy.

In other news

Cory Booker’s animated performance in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday isn’t sitting well with many in conservative circles. Booker berated Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen during the hearing, and David French at National Review sees hypocrisy in the left lauding a card-carrying mansplainer. “He didn’t just mansplain, he mansplained at maximum volume,” French writes. “If he were a Republican, this exchange would be taken as proof-positive that he doesn’t respect women … It would be compared to Donald Trump’s physical approaches to Hillary Clinton during a presidential debate and used as evidence that Republicans aren’t just misogynistic, they’re menacing.”

In other ’splaining news, Ben Shapiro, for Townhall, tackles the latest #MeToo moment that’s ensnared Aziz Ansari. “Men are now being pilloried for the sin of taking women too literally – of not reading women’s minds,” he writes of Ansari, which brings him to his underlying point: “Feminists, it’s time to stop ‘feministsplaining’ sex to men.”

In National Review, Shapiro also waded into the racial dynamics of President Trump’s character to answer the question: “Is President Trump a racist?” Shapiro writes Trump certainly “makes racist statements,” but his “worldview is not openly racist” like, say, white supremacist Richard Spencer. Categorizing Trump as a racist writ large is a political tool, Shapiro concludes, that “alleviates the requirement to honestly assess his actions and statements.” “Rather than analyzing whether a given statement is racist, or whether it could be interpreted otherwise, the media simply use Trump’s alleged racism as a skeleton key answering every question,” he writes.

A special election in a Wisconsin state Senate race Tuesday night in a district Trump carried by 17 points had Democrats crowing about an electoral wave come the midterms. David Byler parsed the results for the Weekly Standard to see if Republicans should be worried, and he finds that yes, Republicans should “seriously worry about their chances in November.” “Republicans have, on average, been underperforming Trump in special elections since his inauguration, and the election in Wisconsin’s 10^th District is no exception.” In 2017, Democrats outperformed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vote tally by an average of 10 points; in Wisconsin Democratic candidate Patty Schachtner outperformed Clinton by more than 20 points. It’s just one race, comprising a particularly small sample size, which Byler writes doesn’t amount to a wave—yet. After Tuesday night’s results, however, he posits “Democrats are still the favorites to control the House in 2019.”

• Today in Conservative Media