A bipartisan group of senators just managed something that happens only once a decade or so, crafting a compromise bill to reform the immigration system. Republicans’ reaction was emphatic: Though the bill would give them much of what they say they want, while offering Democrats only minor concessions in return, almost the entire GOP refuses to pass it.
The deal’s swift collapse confirms an important truth that everyone must now accept: Republicans don’t actually want to fix the immigration system. And accepting that truth clears the way for a new era in America’s immigration debate — one when we’re not waiting around the GOP to come to its senses.
Any bipartisan reform that could involve more than a handful of Republicans is dead.
Yes, a few Republicans are sincerely interested in improving the current immigration system. But as a whole, their party is much more interested in creating and exploiting chaos at the border, in between holding photo-ops at the Rio Grande. Some conservatives are even saying so openly. “Why would we do anything right now to help [President Biden] with that 33% [approval rating]?” one Republican congressman said to a reporter. “Why give [Biden] this in an election year?” a Fox News anchor asked Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, Republicans’ chief negotiator on the bipartisan bill. “There are a good number of people for whom border security is too good an issue to give up,” admitted Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D.
Former President Donald Trump, still the leader of the GOP, has not only been attacking the bill publicly; he is reportedly lobbying Republican lawmakers to kill it. So when President Joe Biden went before the cameras on Tuesday to discuss the bill, he put responsibility squarely on his predecessor, just as he should have.
“Republicans have to decide: Who do they serve? Donald Trump or the American people?” Biden asked. “Every day between now and November the American people are going to know that the…
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