House Republicans are getting ready to block the very border policies they’ve been demanding—all so Donald Trump can continue to wield the issue against Joe Biden ahead of the November election.
The White House and members of the Senate spent much of the weekend touting their immigration deal, which will include measures to limit asylum-seekers and the use of immigration parole. The compromise deal is expected to be released in the coming days. “If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border and fix it quickly,” the president said in South Carolina Saturday night, embracing a more hardline tone on the issue that has become one of his biggest political vulnerabilities. “We’ve got to do something now,” Republican Senator James Lankford told Fox News Sunday, a day after the party in his home state of Oklahoma censured him for helping lead the talks.
But it seems unlikely his counterparts in the lower chamber will act. At a rally Saturday, Trump called the compromise a “bad bill” and a “betrayal of America,” even though the details of the deal have yet to come out. “I’ll fight it all the way,” Trump said in Nevada. His cronies are following his lead: The plan is likely “dead on arrival,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told colleagues Friday, as he announced a vote would be held “soon” on articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas—over his handling of the border.
The juxtaposition of the plans to block the bill and to impeach Mayorkas is telling: This is a group of Republicans eager to rebuke the administration for its border approach—and to engage in dangerous, anti-democratic saber-rattling over it—but unwilling to do anything substantive to address the issue, even when the proposal in question is sure to be closer to the strict immigration policies they favor. “Donald Trump is rooting for chaos,” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, a lead Democratic negotiator on the bipartisan proposal, told CNN’s Dana Bash Sunday.
Such chaos, of course, would be ripe for Trump’s exploitation in November. But it would come at more than just the political expense of Biden and the Democrats, as Murphy noted—failure to secure a deal on immigration could mean the inability to pass Ukraine military aid, which Republicans have held hostage in exchange for tougher border policies.
That Johnson is threatening to blow up that deal, despite Democrats’ expected concessions, is partly a reflection of his own political bind: Upset even one member of his unruly conference and he could face the same fate as his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy. The speaker has already faced grumbling from some hardliners for dealing with Democrats. And Marjorie Taylor Greene has vowed to introduce a motion to vacate if he even puts Ukraine funding to a vote.
But Johnson isn’t only acting this way out of fear of losing his job. Indeed, before he led this group of bad faith actors, he was one of them—and now approaches the speakership with the same cynicism as his members, interested not in policy but in the power politics of his party leader. “They weren’t serious,” as a Democratic campaign operative put it to Politico Sunday. “They’ve been talking about it, highlighting it and freaking everyone out—then when there’s a bipartisan deal, with a lot of Dem compromises in it, they went running for the hills.”
Eric Lutz
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