Given the rising pseudo-outrage over the status quo, you’d think this would be the easiest pass in the history of Senate legislation.
I’m not so sure.
If Congress passes the law President Trump has asked for, and he signs it into law and then stops separating illegal immigrant families at the border, then Congress will have validated everything Trump’s been saying about the situation being the inevitable result of the law. Are Democrats really going to do that?
But if the Republicans move the legislation and vote for it en masse, and Democrats oppose it, then who is responsible for the continued separation of families?
It can’t be easy when you’re pretending to care about kids but your real priority is to bludgeon the president politically. Poor Chuck Schumer. But he’s going to have to decide quickly what to do, because this train is coming:
President Donald Trump on Tuesday called on Congress to give his administration the power to detain and deport migrant families as a unit, saying he considered that the “only solution to the border crisis” and separation issue that has rocked immigration negotiations and his administration.
Following Mr. Trump’s remarks, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said that Republicans would craft legislation to address family separations. Legislation by Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) would place families that cross the border and are detained into a “humane” and “safe” facility together while they wait for their cases to be processed.
Mr. Cornyn said he hopes to introduce the legislation this week.
The administration’s new policy of detaining adults attempting to cross into the U.S. at the southern border, which has resulted in separating children from parents or other adults, has sparked explosive debate in recent days. As Democrats and some Republicans have called for an end to the policy, Mr. Trump and his administration officials have dug in and sought to blame Congress for not having passed a broader immigration overhaul that might have ameliorated the problem.
Current policy prevents migrant children from being held with adults in criminal detention, and the Trump administration policy, by arresting more adults and charging them with border-crossing offenses, has meant more children are separated and moved to separate facilities run by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Democrats are going to try to tie their support to broader amnesty measures they want. That could result in quite the showdown. If Republicans refuse and insist on moving a bill that deals only with the family separation issue, and nothing else, they risk the Democrats bolting and filibustering the bill to death in the Senate. But again, if the Democrats do that, then they own the family separation problem lock, stock and barrel.
Contrary to what they would have you believe, Democrats absolutely love the status quo because Trump is getting clobbered all day every day over images of children being ripped away from their parents, when he would rather have people paying attention to the soaring job-creation numbers of the white-hot economy. Democrats do not want to help Trump out of this. Their position is that if he wants to stop the separation of families, he can just order the border patrol to stop doing it. The problem with that is that it would leave no way to hold adults who need to be processed for criminal activity, and many of these adult criminals are dragging their children along precisely because they know U.S. law won’t allow the border patrol to hold them without putting their kids in detention facilities.
So Trump could order family separation stopped, but the result would be that criminals go free. The solution is to change the law just as Trump has asked, so families can be detained and/or deported together. Of course, then Democrats will howl that Trump is putting children behind bars. He can’t win either way and he knows it. But it is the right way to solve the problem: Change the law so families can stay together and the law can be enforced.
The only thing we would lose is a Democrat-friendly media narrative. Which is why you know Democrats don’t want to vote for this, but might decide they have no choice.
Given the rising pseudo-outrage over the status quo, you’d think this would be the easiest pass in the history of Senate legislation.
I’m not so sure.
If Congress passes the law President Trump has asked for, and he signs it into law and then stops separating illegal immigrant families at the border, then Congress will have validated everything Trump’s been saying about the situation being the inevitable result of the law. Are Democrats really going to do that?
