It’s clear now that Senate negotiators badly miscalculated in their attempt to craft a bipartisan border-security and immigration bill. Republicans misread what their Senate brethren would accept, and they clearly had no idea about sentiment in the House.
But the vitriolic response to the bill that failed Wednesday, not just to the substance but also to the mere attempt at reaching compromise, was disappointing. Republicans, including some leading Texans, have spent years telling us — correctly — that the border is a crisis in need of immediate action. In a matter of days, they changed their tune to: It can wait until next year.
The Senate deal would have allowed far too much illegal immigration to continue mostly unchecked. It contained some useful asylum reform, but not nearly enough. It fell short of what’s needed to deal with the millions who have been released into the country in recent years, let alone stop future waves of migration.
Rather than negotiate a better bill, Republicans, joined by some progressive Democrats, walked away. The fate of this bill demonstrates the impulses that plague politics. The desire to have all or nothing, despite narrow majorities. The push to force through sweeping bills rather than tackle distinct problem-solving. The top-level negotiating that blunts the input of the rank and file. And most of all, the disdain for compromise.
There’s also, always, looking ahead to the next election. Some Republicans surely want a politically useful issue in the broken border. Some may hope that they can win majorities so large in November that they can enact legislation much more to their liking — or worse, just let a re-elected Donald Trump take executive action that the next Democratic president will quickly reverse.
If it’s the first, politics, that’s cynical but understandable. If it’s the second, it’s fanciful thinking. The country has had divided government, often with narrow majorities, for most of the last 30 years. Rarely in that time has either party had enough votes to be able to ram through its priorities. And this year’s battles for control of the White House, the Senate and the House are a toss-up.
Polls look good for Republicans right now, but there’s a long way to go. Betting on a large majority is a big risk; it’s just as likely Democrats end up with at least one center of power in Washington and thus the ability to block grand GOP wishes on the border or anything else.
Republicans such as Sen. Ted Cruz countered with a House bill that contains the Republican dream version of legislation. But it’s unknown if that bill could even pass the House, now down to a one-seat GOP majority, and it would obviously go nowhere in the Senate.
If Republicans genuinely believe that the very fabric of the country is at risk from unchecked illegal immigration, they would be better off working to win incremental legislative victories to their liking. That’s not to say they should have swallowed the Senate deal; it clearly fell short on what Republicans want in physical barrier construction and curtailing migration.
But where is the willingness to negotiate and compromise? To hear some corners of the right, anything short of everything is not just disappointing, it’s a betrayal. The message becomes nonsensical: The status quo is a disaster, but let’s keep all of it in place for another year.
A useful step would be to choose a few absolute priorities and offer to deal, finally, with “Dreamers,” people brought to the country illegally by their families when they were young. Doing so could force Democrats into significant concessions and remove the legal and moral stain of leaving hundreds of thousands of people who know no home other than America in legal limbo.
Some Republicans argued that the entire effort was useless because President Joe Biden wouldn’t use border-closing authority even if Congress granted it. That’s an argument for not trying, for leaving the entirety of governing to the executive branch, even at the same time when Republicans say it’s Biden’s executive choices that got us into the mess.
If compromise in Congress on major issues is impossible, we’re in trouble. There was a telling moment Wednesday when, after the border package was clearly headed to the trash heap, House Speaker Mike Johnson tweeted that the president “must immediately use his executive authority to take action now.” Gosh, if only there was a Republican in charge of a key government institution that could try to force the president’s hand … Choosing to do nothing and then griping isn’t an option. At least, it shouldn’t be. Nor should throwing up your hands on an issue that got you elected because you can’t get every single thing you want.
And yet, for many in Congress, that seems to be the entire playbook.
