President Miller’s Immigration Veto Trump will never get a victory if he won’t ‘take the heat.’
https://www.wsj.com/articles/president-millers-immigration-veto-1518740527
President Trump may need a refresher course in deal-making after the Senate on Thursday rejected his take-it-or-leave-it offer on immigration. He could start by recalling who’s President, and stop giving adviser Stephen Miller a policy veto.
The Senate considered four amendments Thursday, and all failed to reach the 60 vote threshold to open debate. But the bill backed by Mr. Trump did the worst with a mere 39 votes. The amendment with the best chance of passing was a bipartisan effort negotiated by Susan Collins (Maine) and Mike Rounds (South Dakota) that had the support of eight Republicans and seven Democrats. It included the President’s biggest priorities as well as concessions from both parties, but it fell six votes short of 60 after the White House issued a veto threat.
In a bizarre mid-morning statement, the Administration warned that the bipartisan amendment “would drastically change our national immigration policy for the worse by weakening border security and undercutting existing immigration law” and “would undermine the safety and security of American families and impede economic growth for American workers.”
Did anyone tell Mr. Trump what’s in that amendment? It legalizes as many as 1.8 million Dreamer immigrant adults who were brought here illegally as children on Mr. Trump’s terms. But it also goes a long way to meeting the President’s other priorities. That includes authorizing $25 billion over 10 years for Mr. Trump’s wall on the Mexico-U.S. border. That’s a huge political victory on one of his main campaign promises.
The spending would be $2.5 billion in the first year, but that’s probably more than the Department of Homeland Security could spend amid lawsuits by property owners and other legal hoops. The amendment even included a requirement for a 60-vote Senate supermajority to block the annual wall appropriation.
The White House statement also complained that the bipartisan effort would prioritize enforcement against illegal immigrants convicted of a crime or those who pose a security threat. But that’s what Mr. Trump campaigned for—deporting criminal aliens like the one in San Francisco who killed Kate Steinle.
Homeland Security also griped at this language, but agents would still retain authority to detain non-criminal undocumented individuals. This would nonetheless be a waste of resources since there aren’t enough beds in jails to house them. Adding them to the immigration court backlog means it could take longer to deport criminals.
The bipartisan bill even bowed to Mr. Trump on his priority of reducing “chain migration.” It barred Dreamers from sponsoring parents for immigration, and it barred permanent U.S. residents from sponsoring unmarried adult children. What is it about this “winning” that Mr. Trump can’t accept?
Our sources say Mr. Trump is listening to Mr. Miller, who has told the President that this is his only chance to get his entire immigration agenda enacted. Unlike Mr. Trump, Mr. Miller wants this to include a major reduction in legal immigration that is a priority of the GOP’s restrictionist wing.
But if Mr. Trump insists on this strategy, he’ll end up with nothing. The Cotton-Perdue bill to cut legal immigration in half that the President endorsed last year at Mr. Miller’s urging went nowhere in the Senate, even among Republicans. By demanding too much, Mr. Trump will get an embarrassing political defeat.
Whatever happened to the “art of the deal”? If Mr. Trump isn’t happy with everything in the Collins-Rounds bill, why not engage and negotiate? Instead he let the White House issue veto threats that scared some Republicans into voting no but produced failure.
Mr. Trump can recover from Thursday’s defeat, but he’ll need to be the President who told Members of Congress in January that if they strike a deal that gives him the wall in return for Dreamer legalization he’ll “take the heat.” The restrictionist minority on the right erupted, and Mr. Miller persuaded him to demand more.
Well, the Collins-Rounds bill gives him more. No President can expect to get everything in a single immigration bill, especially not after so many years of bipartisan mistrust. Mr. Trump issued the order repealing a safe harbor for the Dreamers, and he’ll rightly get the political blame if he now blocks a sensible compromise to save them from deportation to countries they barely know.
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