Wall Street Journal
By Siobhan Hughes and Kristina Peterson
May 24, 2018
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell threw cold water on the idea of holding a fresh Senate vote on immigration legislation if the House passes a measure, saying he had no desire to spend time on bills that are bound to fail.
“We have to make law—not just spin our wheels,” the Kentucky Republican said in an interview.
The comments come as the immigration fight is intensifying in the House, where centrist Republicans are attempting to a force a vote on a series of immigration measures.
The effort has divided GOP ranks, with conservatives suspicious that it could result in passage of a bill that many Republicans don’t support. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) has also opposed the centrists’ effort, as it undermines his ability to set the legislative agenda.
Earlier this year, Mr. McConnell allowed votes on four different immigration plans, including ones that would have created a pathway to citizenship for young immigrants brought to the country illegally as minors, known as Dreamers. Those measures, which included one based on a proposal put forward by President Donald Trump, were all defeated, amid a lack of agreement on issues such as Dreamers’ fate, funding for a border wall and family-based migration.
Can the GOP Find Consensus on Immigration?
“Honestly, I’ve spent a week on this, as you recall, in February,” Mr. McConnell said. “I couldn’t find a consensus in the Senate.”
Mr. McConnell left the door open to reconsidering an immigration measure, but only if Mr. Trump indicated he supported it.
“If the House passed a bill that the president was for—in other words I thought there was a chance of actually making a law—I’d consider it,” Mr. McConnell said.
Mr. Trump has said legal protections for Dreamers must be paired with tighter border security, including funding for a wall and other steps to tighten immigration rules.
Mr. McConnell has long guarded his prerogatives as Senate majority leader, and his willingness to open up the Senate to a freewheeling immigration debate earlier this year was something of an aberration, one that grew out of the horse-trading that enabled passage of a sweeping, $1.5 trillion tax cut.
Several times in the Journal interview, Mr. McConnell came back to the idea that the immigration fight had taken up valuable floor time without yielding a result, and he suggested he was unwilling to repeat such an experience.
Lawmakers have been fighting over immigration since September, when Mr. Trump ended an Obama-era program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. DACA protects Dreamers from deportation and allows them to temporarily work legally in the U.S. Mr. Trump set a deadline of March but federal courts have kept the program in place.
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