Conservatives in the House indicated Monday they aren’t thrilled with the idea of considering legislation to salvage former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, something that could happen under President Trump’s plan to end the program after giving Congress six months to come up with a replacement.
A delayed termination of the controversial program is a clean way out for Trump, who said during the campaign he would immediately end the program and has since softened that position.
But for conservatives in Congress, Trump’s move to hand the issue over to lawmakers threatens to become a significant interruption this fall and into next year, time they were hoping to use to finally advance major pieces of their stalled agenda.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has already said he wants Congress to come up with its own policy, instead of Obama’s unilateral decision to spare from deportation illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.
“[I]t would be helpful for the administration to give us time to figure this out legislatively because that’s where the issue belongs,” he said Friday. “I do believe there needs to be a legislative solution that is humane to fix this problem.”
That’s a signal Ryan may start looking at ideas to provide clarity for the so-called “dreamers,” and that has some worried that Republicans are about to wander off down the wrong trail.
“I think moving on to something that’s controversial, that a lot of Republicans didn’t run on, you know, I think that that would be a mistake,” Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., said Monday on Fox News. “I think we gotta do what the American people sent us here to do and that’s gotta be the first order of business.”
DeSantis, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, acknowledged complaints that many of Republicans’ biggest campaign promises have been left undone, and said it may not be wise to spend months looking for ways to codify parts of Obama’s DACA program, which most conservatives opposed.
“If you look so far, the cupboard has really been bare,” he said of the stalled GOP agenda.
“Promised to repeal and replace Obamacare, haven’t seen that done,” he said. “Said we were gonna tackle spending and debt, haven’t seen that done. Said we were gonna do things like welfare reform, haven’t seen that. Said we were gonna reform taxes, haven’t seen that. Said we were gonna drain the swamp, haven’t seen that.”
The issue also runs the risk of further splitting Republicans into people like DeSantis, and lawmakers like Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who said Monday he welcomes the chance to find a legislative solution.
But some are clearly worried about how much time might be taken up trying to fix DACA, and how much more it might split the GOP. Even worse, one Republican aide agreed that the GOP could be at risk of ending the year by fulfilling priorities that Democrats typically champion.
In addition to possibly taking up a DACA bill, Republicans are also expected to quickly raise the debt ceiling and punt on major spending reforms for several month. For conservatives, these are not the sorts of events that will help make winning campaigns, and some are nervous GOP leaders are not setting up their members well for 2018.
“I have a hard time believing Republican leaders on Capitol Hill want to send Republican lawmakers into midterms having accomplished little more than raising the debt ceiling without reforms and extending unconstitutional DACA,” one aide to a House Freedom Caucus lawmaker. “That would be a recipe for electoral disaster.”
On Sunday, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, said the plan was terrible for Republicans, and said DACA should simply be scrapped immediately.
“Delaying so R Leadership can push Amnesty is Republican suicide,” he tweeted.
