Wall Street Journal
By Kristina Peterson and Laura Meckler
January 30, 2018
The Senate is expected to begin considering immigration legislation next week, and none of the lawmaker groups devoted to the topic have figured out how to close the divide among Democrats, Republicans and GOP President Donald Trump.
The proliferation of groups has highlighted both lawmakers’ widespread interest in immigration, and the chaos that the issue has produced on Capitol Hill. Even lawmakers and congressional aides who closely follow the issue aren’t always sure how many groups are meeting, much less what they are discussing.
“All of us are participating either minimally or maximally in all of these different things. It’s now a swirl,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.). “I don’t think anybody’s supposed to be keeping it straight, but it will come together,” she predicted.
There is no consensus as to how broad the bill should be, with some lawmakers advocating a narrow focus on border security and Dreamers—the undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children. Others want to wrap in additional, more contentious aspects of immigration policy.
There is disagreement about whether the Dreamers should be given citizenship or just legal status. On border security, Republicans want a border wall plus a broad set of policy changes that affect those who cross the border, while Democrats want more technology and, perhaps, personnel. And there is sharp debate over whether the bill should make big changes or just small ones to the legal immigration system now in place.
Mr. Trump kicked off the complex debate in September, when he ended an Obama-era program shielding the Dreamers from deportation and gave Congress until March 5 to pass a replacement.
As part of a deal to reopen the government after a three-day shutdown, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said he would bring an immigration bill to the floor on Feb. 8, when the government’s current funding expires, if lawmakers haven’t yet resolved the issue.
For months, negotiations centered on a bipartisan group of six to eight senators, who produced a bill spearheaded by Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), but which was later rejected by Mr. Trump.
Then, a bipartisan group of roughly 20 senators emerged to try to help chart a path out of shutdown. That group, calling itself the Common Sense Coalition, is now holding its own immigration talks, meeting over Girl Scout cookies in the office of Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine) on Monday night.
Separately, a group of nearly 40 senators met in the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing room last week to brainstorm over ideas. And conservative Senate Republicans are meeting on their own.
Meanwhile, in the House, a group of four Republicans led by Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.) unveiled their own far more conservative immigration bill this month. That is attractive to House conservatives, so GOP leaders are holding “listening sessions” to discuss it.
Two House bipartisan groups have unveiled more centrist proposals—one from the Problem Solvers Caucus on Monday that is almost identical to the Graham-Durbin bill, and one from a group led by Reps. Will Hurd (R., Texas) and Pete Aguilar (D., Calif.).
There is just one group that combines lawmakers from both the House and Senate: a quartet of the No. 2 leaders from each party in each chamber, whose importance has varied with the day. Late last week, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R., Texas) called this group of deputies “history,” meaning they would likely dissolve. But he later revisited that assessment. “Glad I was wrong: the twos meet again this afternoon,” he tweeted Monday.
As with most policy fights on Capitol Hill, senators said they were most likely to hammer out the compromise needed to clear their chamber’s 60-vote threshold, a prospect that angers conservative House Republicans, who don’t want to be forced to swallow the Senate version.
“I have a wariness of anything that starts in the Senate,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R., N.C.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, said Tuesday. “When you start with consensus in a moderate body, you get a less-than-conservative bill.”
But senators from both parties said a bill that can pass the GOP-led House on party lines is likely to come up short in the Senate. They think the group led by Ms. Collins is likely to build momentum for a bipartisan bill that could clear the Senate, even if that cluster of lawmakers is not expected to produce actual legislative text.
“It’s got to be that group displaying leadership and making sure that this is done in good faith and doesn’t turn into just an opportunity for people to make fodder for campaign ads,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii), who isn’t part of the group.
Mr. Durbin said senators in the bipartisan group have been bringing ideas to him and Mr. Cornyn, who are acting as their party’s leaders on immigration in the Senate. Mr. Durbin said the fact that both he and Mr. Cornyn are in the group of four deputies suggests that it could help broker a deal with the House.
“If we could agree within that group—Cornyn and I are both there—perhaps that would be the path to a bicameral approach,” he said. But Mr. Durbin said there was still considerable uncertainty over which group would ultimately produce a widely acceptable deal. “That is a good and unresolved question,” he said.
Last week, Mr. Trump produced a framework of his own that would give 1.8 million undocumented young immigrants a path to citizenship as long as Congress agreed to spend $25 billion toward a U.S.-Mexico border wall and other security measures, reduce family-based legal immigration, ratchet up deportations and otherwise tighten enforcement.
Conservative House Republicans grumbled about elements of the proposal in the House GOP’s closed-door meeting Tuesday morning, criticizing the decision to allow undocumented immigrants to become citizens.
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) has said he is unlikely to bring any bill to the floor that Mr. Trump doesn’t support. But if Mr. Trump is in favor, Mr. Ryan is betting conservatives will come along, too. “We’re not going to bring a bill through here that the president’s not going to support,” Mr. Ryan said earlier this month. “What would be the point of passing something that doesn’t go into law?”
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