Before Sens. Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham could get to the White House last Thursday to relay their bipartisan deal on DACA and border security to Donald Trump, two Trump aides took a hatchet to the deal, which had originally been received quite well by Trump. The Washington Post reports:
In the late morning, before Durbin and Graham arrived, Kelly — who had already been briefed on the deal — talked to Trump to tell him that the proposal would probably not be good for his agenda, White House officials said. Kelly, a former secretary of homeland security, has taken an increasingly aggressive and influential role in the immigration negotiations, calling lawmakers and meeting with White House aides daily — more than he has on other topics. He has “very strong feelings,” in the words of one official. But he’s not a lone voice. Trump in recent weeks has also been talking more to conservatives such as Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) on immigration, these people said. [...]
“Once we saw what was going on in the meeting a few days earlier, we were freaked out,” said immigration hard-liner Mark Krikorian, who runs the Center for Immigration Studies. Trump, he said, “has hawkish instincts on immigration, but they aren’t well-developed, and he hasn’t ever been through these kind of legislative fights.”
After the Thursday meeting, Trump began telling allies that the proposal was a “terrible deal for me,” according to a friend he spoke with, and that Kelly and other aides and confidants were correct in advising him to back away.
The Center for Immigration Studies, which clearly has its hooks deep inside the White House, has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Last year, SPLC wrote:
This year, for the first time, we listed the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a nativist think tank that churns out a constant stream of fear-mongering misinformation about Latino immigrants. [...]
CIS is the brainchild of John Tanton, the father of the modern nativist movement, and part of a network of closely related anti-immigrant groups that Tanton founded. These groups have been responsible for much of the hysteria about immigrants that dominates conservative politics. Tanton, a retired Michigan ophthalmologist, spent decades at the heart of the white nationalist movement.
Anyway, Kelly and CIS had a third conspirator, nativist Stephen Miller.
But some White House officials, including conservative adviser Stephen Miller, feared that Graham and Durbin would try to trick Trump into signing a bill that was damaging to him and would hurt him with his political base. As word trickled out Thursday morning on Capitol Hill that Durbin and Graham were heading over to the White House, legislative affairs director Marc Short began to make calls to lawmakers and shared many of Miller’s concerns.
Miller's the one who effectively made sure that lawmakers who would kill the deal were included in the White House meeting. Both Graham and Durbin were surprised to findRep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) along with Sens. Tom Cotton and David Perdue there once they arrived. And guess what? They did exactly as Miller had hoped—they urged Trump not to take the deal and then covered for his racist "shithole" comments by painting Durbin as a liar negotiating in bad faith because he wasn't willing to let Trump's racist smears go under the radar.
Now the nativist hardliners in the House think they're in charge of cutting an immigration/DACA deal because they clearly have zero understanding of how Congress actually works. See, the Senate is still gonna need some Democratic votes to pass any deal—meaning it will have to involve some compromise that can entice Democrats to vote for it. But House Republicans—hermetically sealed from reality—think they’ve got this.
[Rep. Mark] Meadows said he and Goodlatte were working to add a merit-based immigration policy to their conservative version. He said a majority of Republicans were not going to line up behind Graham and Durbin and should instead rally behind his proposal, which is unlikely to win support from Democrats.
In essence, stick with us—we'll make sure to conceptualize something that's doomed in the Senate!
Any deal that earns Democratic votes will have to involve a compromise and House Speaker Paul Ryan may have to have the guts to put it up for a vote in his chamber, even if a majority of the GOP conference doesn’t support it.
