Is GOP Sabotaging Itself By Rejecting Bipartisan Immigration Reform?
Election will decide
Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma calls overhauling U.S. immigration — which hasn’t been done since the 1980s — a “Rubik’s cube.” He was the principal author of a bill to, in the words of the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial board, “tighten the legal standard for migrants claiming asylum in the U.S., while allowing an emergency border shutdown to stop the current crisis…Many voters are fed up with border sloganeering. They want to fix the problem.”
Lankford “has visited the border a dozen times while in Congress, and he spent months looking under the hood of the U.S. immigration system and trying to discern what improvements might be possible in divided government. As the politics of the border got worse for Democrats, he was able to negotiate the most conservative border bill in decades,” the WSJ observed.
It called the border bill “worth passing,” something President Trump “never came close to getting.” There was nothing in the bill “for nearly all of the Dreamers who were brought here illegally as children, no general pathway to citizenship or green cards for most illegal immigrants already in the U.S.”
President Biden and Democrats “made concessions that infuriated the open-borders left.”
Even so, GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson was instrumental in passing $60 billion in Ukraine military aid while jettisoning a tough border bill he previously vowed, on orders from Trump, was essential before Ukraine funding. Go figure.
Langford felt abandoned by his colleagues.
Boston College History Professor Heather Cox Richardson observed:
“Because the Democrats are desperate to fund Ukraine, they were willing to give up things they had never laid on the table before, including a path to citizenship for those brought to the United States as children, making the bill that emerged from the negotiations strongly favor the Republican position on immigration. The Border Patrol Officers’ union, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal all endorsed it.”
Now that moment has passed.
Republicans’ refusal to pass the bill, on orders from Donald Trump who wants the issue to campaign on, is an example of the party’s “self-sabotaging,” the WSJ editorialized.
It demonstrated poor negotiating or someone as the head of the party who is no longer skilled at “the art of the deal.”
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