On January 9, President Donald Trump sat down with a group of about two dozen members of Congress and told them in front of the nation that he would sign “whatever” bill they could come up with to protect nearly 700,000 Dreamers from deportation. Although Trump listed his priorities—securing funds for a border wall, limiting family migration, restructuring the diversity visa lottery in favor of a merit-based system, and protecting Dreamers—he recognized the fact that immigration is a particularly challenging topic in American politics.
“When this group comes back, hopefully with an agreement,” Trump declared in the January meeting, “I am signing it. I will be signing it. I’m not going to say, ‘Oh gee, I want this or I want that.’ I will be signing it.”
As Oklahoma Republican James Lankford, who attended the January meeting, put it: “The president expressed more flexibility than some expected.”
But on Thursday, that flexibility was not to be found. The Senate debated and ultimately voted down several immigration measures: one the type of bipartisan solution Trump entertained last month, but he strove this week to kill.
That particular bill, introduced by Sens. Angus King, Mike Rounds, Susan Collins, and Chuck Schumer, would have allocated $25 billion for border security, blocked DACA recipients who become legal citizens from sponsoring their parents for citizenship, and provided a 10-to-12-year path to citizenship for almost two million Dreamers. As with most bipartisan compromises, it involved some painful pills for members of both parties to swallow: Some Democrats were unsettled by its border security provisions because they didn’t want to help finance the construction of Trump’s wall, and some Republicans were opposed because it would leave the diversity visa lottery intact, as well as prioritize deportations for criminal aliens over those of DACA recipients.
The bill had support among members of both parties—but not enough to get it across the finish line. It failed on a vote of 54-45. (The amendments needed to win at least 60 votes to advance.) It did outperform the measure that was based on Trump’s four demands, though, sponsored by Sen. Chuck Grassley. That bill failed on a vote of 39-60.
“I fear that you’ve got some within the [White House] that have not yet figured out that legislation almost by its very definition is a compromise product, and compromise doesn’t mean getting [four] Republicans together and figuring out what it is that those four agree on, it’s broader,” moderate Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski told CNN’s Lauren Fox before the vote.
Compromise was not the theme of the week, which was supposed to be dedicated to a freewheeling, open debate of pressing immigration issues. Gridlocked lawmakers made little progress in the days leading up to Thursday’s votes, ultimately bringing to the floor a grand total of zero amendments for an up-or-down vote. It appears Congress will leave Washington for a weeklong recess without finding a solution.
The King-Rounds-Collins-Schumer proposal (put forward by the so-called Common Sense Caucus) represented the best chance the Senate had at passing a deal before the recess. But conservative Republicans in the House said it had no chance of passing their chamber or earning Trump’s signature. “The Administration strongly opposes passage of the Schumer-Rounds-Collins Amendment,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement, announcing that Trump would veto the measure if it were passed.
Before that, the Department of Homeland Security released a rambling and unattributed statement at 1:00 in the morning to list all of the Trump administration’s concerns with the bill. According to the DHS, the bill represents “an egregious violation” of the four tenets of Trump’s framework, “ignores the lessons of 9/11,” “would make our border far more open and porous,” and would “effectively make the United States a Sanctuary Nation where ignoring the rule of law is encouraged.”
Senator Lindsey Graham, a leading cosponsor of the measure, responded to the DHS statement in a press release of his own on Thursday morning. “I don’t think the staffers who compiled this document served the President very well,” he said. “As for Secretary Nielsen, I’m incredibly disappointed in her for allowing her office to become so politicized and for allowing something like this to go out.”
Graham is seen as a thorn in the side to hardline immigration hawks in the White House. During a phone call with reporters on Thursday, White House advisor Stephen Miller attacked the South Carolina Republican repeatedly. Miller refused to go on-the-record with his comments during the call. I was not on the call, and I am not bound by the agreement. A reporter from a different outlet who was on the call confirmed the official who made the comments was Miller.
“I’m not aware of when Lindsey Graham became the chairman of the Democratic caucus,” Miller remarked, going on to allege Graham is an “obstacle” to protecting Dreamers.
Now that the Senate has killed all of the DACA plans it managed to consider, lawmakers are left with few options.
“After this crash-and-burn experience, we’ll do one of two things: We’ll reconfigure the process to be able to get us to a ‘yes’ position where 70 percent of Americans reside, by the way, or we’ll do what’s happened for the last 35 years: Punt,” Graham told reporters. “And I hope we don’t punt.”
