Ashley Killough – immigrationcourtside.com

TAL @ CNN: DREAMERS WON’T BE PART OF BUDGET DEAL — What Happens After That Still Up In The Air!

Tal and her colleague Ashley Killough write:

http://www.cnn.com/2018/02/08/politics/bipartisan-senators-immigration-bill/index.html
Bipartisan group of senators scrambling to draft immigration bill
By Ashley Killough and Tal Kopan, CNN
A bipartisan group of roughly 20 senators that’s been huddling behind closed doors for weeks is furiously working to draft a bill that they can propose during an expected floor showdown on immigration next week.
If they are successful, it would mean at least one-fifth of the Senate would have established an influential voting block to shape the debate over immigration and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Emerging from one of their closed-door meetings Thursday, senators said multiple members are drafting language for compromise legislation, though they acknowledged they still don’t have a consensus yet.
Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, said she would be “shocked” if they didn’t end up introducing their plan next week.
Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who hosts the meetings in her office on a near-daily basis, said there will “probably” be more than one proposal that emerges from their recent talks that could serve as amendments during next week’s debate, though she added it’s “too early to tell.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is expected to bring up immigration next week in a rare neutral Senate floor debate. The Republican has pledged to allow for amendments from both sides, but it’s still unclear how many amendments either side will be able to offer. And the expectation is any proposal would need 60 votes to succeed, a high bar that may make a major immigration compromise unlikely.
Other groups of senators are expected to introduce amendments as well. The White House also has its own framework, and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn confirmed this week that some Republican lawmakers are working to draft a version based on those bullet points.
The bipartisan group of roughly 20 lawmakers, which calls itself the Common Sense Coalition, is aiming to operate as a voting bloc that can help steer the debate. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-New Jersey, who is working with members of the group said the goal would be to get 60 votes on the bipartisan amendment, and “then that would be it, we’d resist everything else, any other amendments.”
It’s unclear just how many members will make up the coalition in the end. The group could be influential if they vote as a unit, though it’s not clear that everyone would get on board. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Delaware, said the number of supporters they have depends on the contours of the proposal. In their negotiations, sometimes a proposal will garner 30 members, while a different proposal will have 20 or 40.
“The challenge with immigration is it’s a very broad range of concerns,” he said.
Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma cautioned that a final deal hasn’t been reached yet. “It’s one thing to edit concepts, it’s another thing to look at language and go, ‘no this doesn’t work,’ and then try to make adjustments from there,” he told reporters.
While the White House wants an immigration bill that focuses on four key pillars — increasing border security, resolving DACA, ending the visa diversity lottery, and heavily curtailing family-based immigration, or chain migration, as they call it, multiple senators stressed that a bill has little chance of passing unless it narrows to just two of those pillars: DACA and border security.
“I think a lot of people are learning that immigration’s complicated. The more we try to do, the more unanswered questions emerge,” said Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who was part of a different group of senators that pushed a much larger immigration bill in 2013. It was passed by the Senate but went nowhere in the House.
Like Rubio, Coons also endorses the concept of a narrower bill. “The challenge is, there’s lot of other proposals that the White House and others want to address,” he said.
The clock, however, is ticking, and the group is hoping to strike a final deal by Monday or Tuesday, roughly when McConnell is expected to kick off the amendment process.
“We don’t have any choice, right?” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-New Hampshire. “Next week’s coming.”

http://www.cnn.com/2018/02/08/politics/budget-deal-anger-daca/index.html
Anger rises from left as DACA left out of budget deal again
By: Tal Kopan, CNN
As a massive bipartisan budget deal moved towards a vote Thursday, temperatures were rising on the left, where Democrats were fuming that — once again — immigration was being left behind.
“Anyone who votes for the Senate budget deal is colluding with this President and this administration to deport Dreamers. It is as simple as that,” said Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez, a longtime Democratic advocate of immigration reform. Pro-immigration advocacy groups were sending similar messages to Democratic offices as well.
Democrats on the left, especially members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, were frustrated to see a budget deal negotiated that resolved virtually every Democratic priority except a resolution for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a policy that protected young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children that President Donald Trump decided to terminate in September.
The Senate is expected to pass the bill Thursday and send it to the House attached to a continuing resolution to fund the government into March. Government funding expires Thursday at midnight.
The pushback was strong enough that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who was involved in negotiating the compromise, was so moved by the frustration when she presented the deal to her caucus that she took the House floor for a record-breaking eight hours straight on Wednesday, reading stories of DACA recipients.
But that wasn’t enough to satisfy some of her base, and the leadership team sent conflicting messages, saying they weren’t whipping the bill Wednesday, then sending a whip notice to vote no on Thursday. Pelosi also sent a “dear colleague” letter saying Republicans will need Democratic votes to pass the deal in the House and urging her caucus to “be heard,” though not necessarily block its passage.
“House Democrats have a voice here and we must be heard,” Pelosi wrote. “These are the reasons I am voting against this bill.”
But earlier Thursday, Pelosi called it a “good bill” and said she “fought very hard for many of the things that are in there,” even as she said she wouldn’t vote for it.
Pelosi also told members of her caucus planning to vote “yes” on the budget deal not to telegraph those positions in order to maintain leverage, according to two Democratic sources.
Even so, most everyone in Congress believed that the bill had enough votes to pass the House, even among Democrats.
“I think it’s very important for DACA that there be a significant presence of votes against whatever comes over, and not just for DACA, there’s other reasons (to oppose the deal),” said Rep. Raul Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat and Hispanic caucus member. “But I anticipate that if 30, 40 Democrats vote for it, it would pass.”

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I can definitely see some House Democratic “protest votes” over the DACA omission. What I can’t see is House Dems joining the “Bakuninists” in the GOP to shut down the Government again.

PWS

02-08-18

THURSDAY AM DACA UPDATE: WASHPOST SAYS DEMS SHOULD TRADE WALL FOR DREAMERS — TAL @CNN REPORTS ON THE “FOUR PILLARS” OF IMMIGRATION NEGOTIATIONS ON THE HILL!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/take-a-deal-for-the-dreamers-build-the-wall/2018/01/10/d02a5c06-f640-11e7-beb6-c8d48830c54d_story.html?utm_term=.276f11c859c2

“By Editorial Board January 10 at 7:21 PM

PRESIDENT TRUMP says he is optimistic a deal can be struck to shield “dreamers,” the young undocumented immigrants whose lives he put in jeopardy by stripping them of work permits and deportation protection, beginning March 5. His price, and that of many Republicans, is up to $33 billion in border-security measures, including Mr. Trump’s “beautiful” wall.

If that’s the deal — not one freighted with a laundry list of other items on the GOP wish list — Democrats should take it.

Granted, Mr. Trump once told Americans that a border wall, paid for by Mexico, would cost $4 billion. After that, he said $6 billion or $7 billion, and later $10 billion. Now his administration says it’s really $18 billion for 722 miles of wall, of which just 316 miles would be a brand-new structure along the 2,000-mile southwest frontier. Oh, and Mexico’s credit card seems to be missing.

The wall is a dumb idea. It won’t do much to suppress illegal border crossings, which in any event have been falling for decades. And the additional border-security spending proposed by the administration, including thousands of new Border Patrol agents, is largely a waste. Rather than seriously addressing the opioid epidemic, or mounting cyberwarfare threats, or America’s crumbling infrastructure, the president wants to fortify a border where illegal crossings, as measured by Border Patrol apprehensions, are already at their lowest point since the Nixon administration.

But consider how rare it is that a dumb idea in Congress actually buys something smart in return. In this case, the return on that dumb idea would be huge. (And betting that the courts will save the dreamers is too risky, notwithstanding a federal judge’s ruling Tuesday freezing dreamers’ protections — for now.)

The wall’s $18 billion price tag would be spread over a decade. If a few billion dollars annually is the trade-off that provides certainty — a pathway to citizenship or permanent legal status — for nearly 700,000 young immigrants brought to this country as children by their parents, it’s worth it. Because the alternative — all those lives ruined, all those jobs lost, all that education and promise cut short — is much worse.

Democrats who choke on the wall, loath to hand Mr. Trump a political triumph, might ask themselves what other deals they might strike that would do so much tangible good, for so many people, so immediately — and at such a relatively modest price. The likely answer is: very few.

Some Republicans are angling for more than half a loaf. Using the dreamers as hostages, they want to decimate legal immigration, slash family reunification visas and dissolve the lottery system that provides visas for people from Africa and other regions that generate relatively few immigrants.

Those measures would inflict real harm on real people. By contrast, spending billions on border security, while profligate, has enjoyed bipartisan support in the past. In 2006, many prominent Democrats, including then-Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, voted for 700 miles of fencing at the southwest frontier, albeit at a time when illegal crossings were more than three times greater than they are today.

Many in Congress may have lost the muscle memory required to strike a compromise, but here’s a reminder: In politics, as in life, compromise is often painful. That doesn’t mean you refuse it.”

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Meanwhile, over at CNN, Tal and her colleague Ashley Killough file the following reports:

“Lawmakers compete to carry President’s mantle on DACA as talks continue

By: Tal Kopan, CNN

If the “four pillars” that emerged out of the White House immigration meeting spurred anything Wednesday on Capitol Hill, it was a fresh PR strategy.

A variety of competing factions continue to pursue their proposals on resolving the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a policy President Donald Trump is seeking to end that protects from deportation young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children.

As the lawmakers touted their proposals Wednesday, though, they made an effort to explain just how their own push is the one that meets the President’s wishes — even as all of them took different approaches. The marketing underscored how essential Trump’s approval is to any deal — and how much lawmakers believe he can still be convinced.

The White House meeting settled on four check boxes for Trump’s signature, although he told lawmakers he’d sign whatever the group came up with:

A fix for DACA recipients.

Money for border security.

Dealing with “chain migration” or family-based sponsorship.

Ending the diversity lottery.

As lawmakers sought to fill in the details Wednesday, they made sure to explain how their proposals related to the President’s guidelines.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/10/politics/daca-latest-talks/index.html

Here are the key players in Congress on immigration

By Ashley Killough and Tal Kopan, CNN

As President Donald Trump led the widely-televised bipartisan meeting at the White House on Tuesday, he was surrounded by a flock of lawmakers from both parties and both houses of Congress.

A massive issue like immigration has many competing interests at stake, drawing in groups of lawmakers who work on competing proposals

In just one effort to streamline the process, the four second-in-command congressional leaders — Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn, Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer — got together Wednesday afternoon to try to sort through the efforts.

“We are not going to default to existing groups. There were too many groups to count and they were basically getting nowhere,” Cornyn told reporters. “So that’s why, I think, the need to move to this level.”

But Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican member of another group, says it’s his “Gang of Six” that’s leading the way. “Somebody has to put forward a document. Somebody has to put forward a bill,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing.”

A variety of formal and informal groups are still meeting and doing their own work, some designed to find the middle ground and some designed to pull talks to the left or right. Here’s a look at the key players across the political spectrum that have taken the lead.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/11/politics/key-players-immigration-congress/index.html”

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I’ve been saying for some time now that a “Wall for Dreamers” deal might be the best the Dems can do. As the Post points out, although the “The Wall” probably is “overkill” in terms of border security, at least the money gets us something in return: the Dreamers are one of our country’s most valuable assets. People over “things.” Or, as we used to say in college, “nothing gets broken, no-one gets hurt.”

Whether or not the “deal” outlined by the Post is actually out there to be “closed” remains to be seen. It apparently would only address two of the four “pillars” described by Tal and Ashley. That seems entirely reasonable to me; but, of course, I’m not one of the negotiators. And, Trump said he would “sign anything that Congress sends him” on the topic.

PWS

01-11-18

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