Kos has just published a highly contentious and divisive post that evidently was inspired by an article in the right-wing Weekly Standard which asked a question that is really just trolling. The question was
Would you trade aggressive immigration restrictions and enforcement for single-payer healthcare?
Note that the intent of the author at the Weekly Standard in posing the question was to be divisive, and it doesn’t server the interests of the Democratic Party to pretend that it is a real issue. When I was a kid, we would ask each other this kind of ridiculous question all the time: you can only have A or B. Choose one (though in no version of the real world would such a trade be possible). Would you take the power of flight if you had to be blind? Questions like that.
The point is that any configuration of Democrats that actually wins power would oppose aggressive immigration restrictions and enforcement (certainly Bernie Sanders has a long record of opposing it), while only one side in this fight wants single-payer healthcare, so this is a non-question. No one is being asked to make this tradeoff. Neither the Weekly Standard nor Kos have any pointers to quotes of Democrats saying that they would, in fact, make such a trade. So the only thing we are fighting over is single-payer.
So let’s rephrase the question:
Do you want single-payer healthcare?
Apparently Kos does not. And certainly, reasonable people can disagree. But let’s not pretend that Bernie Sanders is any less committed to fighting sexual harrassment, police violence against blacks, families being torn apart by ICE, or violence against Jewish and Muslim places of worship than Kos.