An article from Vox appeared yesterday related to Trump’s latest offer to the settlement. Apparently McConnell is working on the exact same bill, to be introduced to the senate on Monday. What happens then, in the senate, can seem almost surrealistic.
It’s reportedly the result of discussions that Vice President Mike Pence and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner have had with congressional Republicans (most notably Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)). It is strange that you don’t find a single Democrat in that mix, and Lindsey Graham is about the most outspoken supporter that Trump has in the senate.
The house’s Democratic coalition promise that such a bill is “D.O.A.”, meaning it has absolutely no chance of passing.
Trump is now offering to exchange is wall for extending the provisions of existing protection for some immigrants. The deal is basically:
$5.7 billion in funding for a physical barrier on the US-Mexico border
Trump is not backing off of his demand for his monument. It was this promise that he based his whole presidential campaign upon and he is going to fight for it, even as he sinks lower and lower in the polling. He is basically saying that “unless he gets his wall, the entire Republican party is dead.” (Meaning that his core voters would try to find a different Republican for whom to vote in 2020.)
But, the white house has already conceded that the wall will be made of “see through” steel (which have been demonstrated that the bars are easily cut). The administration plans to build 243 miles of this see through steel, mostly in the Rio Grande valley; that is once the legal situation is settled in a few decades.
Three years of protection for DACA recipients
This is from Senator Graham’s Bridge Act plan which would extend DACA recipients’ existing deportation protections and work permits for three more years. (The original BRIDGE Act applied also to immigrants who were eligible for DACA but not currently protected. This is the modified one which does not permit new applications.)
In theory, the extension would allow congress to work out what to do with the immigrants in the plan. That is good if it wasn’t for the fact that the last time that it was proposed by the white house the gambit did not succeed either, even with Republican majorities in both houses. Still, it is another try. During the earlier attempts in 2017 and 2018, many Republicans wanted bills that would offer DREAMers access to permanent legal status and ultimately to citizenship. This is a more moderate approach than what Trump is offering now.
In response to Trump’s announcement, Sen. Dick Durbin, who co-authored the bipartisan Bridge Act on which Trump’s latest proposal was based, said “I cannot support the proposed offer as reported and do not believe it can pass the Senate.”
A Three year extension of protections for TPS holders
Trump is offering to extend to holders of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) an additional three years of protection to hundreds of thousands of refugees. This plan is designed to allow the refugees to stay in this country while their own is recovering from war or natural disasters. Basically, this is the status for the “massive caravan of illegal immigrants” that have been invading our undefended border every day. This does not offer any sort of green-card status, or the ability to earn a living and contribute to the economy. It does offer legal status which DACA does not.
$800 million to improve care for families and children at the border — with millions more for border enforcement
This is basically what was proposed two weeks ago. For the most part, the request to Congress just reiterates the funding demands the Trump administration has been making since it proposed a fiscal year 2019 budget almost a year ago: hiring more border and ICE agents, expanding immigration detention, and building (of course) hundreds of miles of physical border barrier. This reflects a crisis that’s become apparent, and even urgent, in the past few months. It is an attempt to deal with the families, with women and children, who have been coming to the border to seek asylum.
The border agents are unable to deal with the volume of people there. So, trump is demanding money for an additional 2,750 agents to handle the workload; millions for screening technology to detect drugs at ports of entry; and the hiring of 75 additional judges to “help with the case load and see that the deportations are processed quickly” as this is the biggest barrier to the monumental case load that the justice department has.
A modest change in the asylum status for Central American children and teenagers
The Trump administration is floating allowing Central American children and teenagers to apply for asylum in their home countries. This is a modification of Obama’s program that Trump ended in 2017. I suppose that the plan was not all that bad if he wants to bring back some of it. In return for this change, he wants to eliminate the requirement for an automatic court hearing for minors who come to this country. This will make it easier for the deportation proceedings to happen.
And that is basically it. Of course there was the typical bluster about the shutdown being the “Democrats fault”.
Why this is a non-starter in the house
1. Trump needs to fund and open the government. This is a demand that is basic to the operation of the country. It is hurting, now, millions of people, even the “wrong ones”. It cannot continue.
“We Democrats are exasperated. All we want to do is reopen the government,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said during floor remarks this week. “We are happy to debate border security with the president and our Republican colleagues. Happy to. But let’s reopen the government.”
Nancy Pelosi, who has repeatedly refused to accept a deal that includes any amount of money for a border wall, and insisted that she won’t negotiate an immigration bill until Trump agrees to reopen the government, called Saturday’s offer “a non-starter.”
“Democrats were hopeful that the President was finally willing to re-open government and proceed with a much-need discussion to protect the border,” Pelosi said in a statement issued ahead of the President’s speech on Saturday. “Unfortunately, initial reports make clear that his proposal is a compilation of several previously rejected initiatives, each of which is unacceptable and in total, do not represent a good faith effort to restore certainty to people’s lives.”
“The President must sign these bills to re-open government immediately and stop holding the American people hostage with this senseless shutdown,” she said.
I seriously doubt that any legislation will be considered until the government is opened. However, Trump feels that if the government is re-opened, that he, like a two year old child, would lose his bargaining position of threatening to keep it shut until he gets all that he wants.
2. Money for a physical barrier on the southern border is a deal-breaker. No additional money will be spent on walls. Week after week the Democrats have signaled that there is little room for negotiation on this point. Nancy Pelosi has stated that even after the government was opened, she would not allocate money for a wall. “The fact is, a wall is an immorality,” she said at a recent press appearance. “It’s not who we are as a nation.”
Democrats, and the nation predominantly as a whole, are vehemently opposed to a border wall not necessarily because they oppose useless physical barriers along the border, but because backing it would be seen as the equivalent of backing one of Trump’s racist campaign promises, if not the cornerstone of trump’s promises. And trump sees it as a “do or die” issue — either he gets his wall or he dies.
Unfortunately that does not leave much room for negotiations. It will take an outside force to mediate this impasse. Hopefully it will be the senate Republicans to demonstrate that they have the votes to override trump’s veto of the house bills. And until the Republicans feel the heat they are unlikely to act.
3. Democrats have a lot of trust issues with Trump regarding promises. Perhaps because he, for his entire life, has backed out of promises that he has made to others copious times before. He is not personally trustworthy.
Much of this stems from earlier efforts to negotiate on DACA when Schummer offered Trump $20B for his wall in exchange for DACA. At that time it seemed like a fair offer. Trump agreed to it. The hours later he reneged on the deal stating that the “plan was not conservative enough” and urged congress to consider a plan that far more stringent “restrictions on legal immigration”.
Schumer was criticized for his offer last January, an offer he wound up retracting. It’s unlikely he and Pelosi would be willing to take on that kind of heat without certainties that the Democrats can walk away with other significant victories.
4. The Trump Administration’s efforts to dismantle DACA and end TPS for several countries have been derailed by a number of legal challenges. In October, a federal judge in California issued a preliminary injunction against the administration’s intention to stop renewing legal status of 300,000 TPS holders from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan. On Friday, the Supreme Court indicated that it will likely not consider the Trump Administration’s appeals of lower court rulings keeping DACA in place. So what Trump is proposing is something that the Supreme Court has already given the Democrats.
The strange thing is that Trump’s willingness to offer DACA status is producing more backlash from “trump’s queen” Ann Coulter who states that “we voted for trump and got jeb!” It is unlikely that Trump would actually follow through on this part of the offer now as he might drop a few points in polls of his “core” group. Heaven forbid that they listen to Fox News and not him!
Then Steven King (the “king of racists”) goes on to say “A Big Beautiful Concrete Border Wall will be a monument to the Rule of Law, the sovereignty of the USA, & @RealDonaldTrump. If DACA Amnesty is traded for $5.7 billion(1/5 of a wall), wouldn’t be enough illegals left in America to trade for the remaining 4/5. NO AMNESTY 4 a wall!”
He won support from Sen. Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney. However it seems that he did not have the total support from all of the Republicans who don’t like Trump’s great compromise. And if this is the case how can the Democrats expect Trump to even like it when it comes time to sign his name.
But his proposed extension of the two programs came with a time limit: three years. Congress could, of course, write DACA into law, but he made no commitment to sign such a bill.
So what is left? What happens next?
McConnell is planning to introduce Trump’s plan to the senate this week. The Democrats can still block the bill introduction as the Republicans do need three Democratic senators to vote with the entire Republican membership.
The Democrats can offer amendments to the bill when it comes up. They are free to ask that the provisions be changed, such as removing the wall funding, adding in money to fund the government, etc. It is unlikely that these amendments would pass the senate.
The senate then needs to vote on the bill. Since the bill involves funding, it requires 60 votes. Again, the Democrats can block the bill in the senate.
Assuming that the bill passed the senate, the bill goes to the house. Nancy has two choices. She can simply not put the bill forward, much like McConnell is doing, or she can amend the bill by removing the provisions that are not satisfactory such as trump’s wall and restricting the funding for the border to humanitarian needs. It is even possible to totally gut the entire bill and then add back the items passed earlier in the house, in effect turning it back into the same passed bill. The house would then vote on the amended bill and, if passed, it would go back to the senate for another vote.
The senate bill, without significant amendments, has absolutely no chance of passing in the Democratic house. Without changes the bill would simply die in the house, never to see the light of day again.
Only after both houses of congress agree upon a single version of the bill would it go to the president’s desk. To get to a single version, it may take a conference committee to resolve the differences.
Without the money for his wall it is unlikely that trump would sign it.
Then it is up to the senate to override the president’s veto. McConnell has shown that he does not wish to be put into this position. He would rather hide out than take responsibility for being the senate majority leader. He feels safer being known as “trump’s ‘jack-in-office’.”
What This Means For The President
I think Trump is in as much political peril now from this symbol potentially dying as he is in legal peril from the various investigations. Because the wall is what his base cares about. It’s why he’s president.
That thing about setting t-shirt-simple goals saying “Build The Wall!” — it does make it a cinch to get what the mission is. But it has a flip side. It’s also obvious to all when the mission fails.
This one has failed.