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Inside the Senate's ugly immigration breakdown

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If the Senate was ever going to pass a bill to protect hundreds of thousands of young immigrants from deportation, it needed James Lankford.

A conservative senator from Oklahoma with a youthful visage, Lankford had been working since September to help so-called Dreamers. The 49-year-old Lankford dutifully attended bipartisan meetings, cobbling together ideas and trying to enlist support for a bipartisan deal.

But when the group showed him the latest draft of their plan Tuesday night, Lankford was stunned. It was far from what he had expected.

“I looked through the outlines of the proposal and realized: ’This is nothing close to what we’ve talked about,’” Lankford said.

On Thursday, Lankford voted against the last-gasp proposal from Sens. Angus King (I-Maine) and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.). So did North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, another critical Republican on immigration. And they were joined by a trio of GOP senators who backed the comprehensive immigration bill that passed the Senate in 2013 and were seen as gettable this time: Bob Corker of Tennessee, Dean Heller of Nevada and Orrin Hatch of Utah.

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Come Thursday’s vote, even though Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and the Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas gently coaxed undecided Republicans to oppose the bipartisan plan, most of the finger-pointing for the failure was directed at the White House.

“The administration made it difficult for some [Republicans] to try to publicly support anything,” one Republican senator said.

It wasn’t until the final hours that people in both parties knew the effort was doomed. Even after Lankford bailed, senators and aides working on the bill said they were bullish that they could get fence-sitting Republicans to come their way.

But the Trump administration had other ideas. A statement issued by the Department of Homeland Security in the wee hours of Thursday morning doused any hope of securing 60 votes. It charged that the King-Rounds bill would turn the United States into “a sanctuary nation where ignoring the rule of law is encouraged.”

“The DHS release was like nothing I’ve ever seen from a government agency. It was more like from a political campaign. And it wasn’t very accurate. And that’s putting it mildly,” King said in an interview.

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Harris’ “no” vote caused the most apparent drama on the Democratic side.

As senators announced their vote on the bipartisan plan, the potential 2020 presidential candidate and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) spoke tensely on the Senate floor. Harris then departed to the Democratic cloakroom.

A few minutes later, she emerged and announced her “no” vote to audible gasps.

Some Democrats were furious.

“If Sen. Harris tries to use this no vote to get to the left of her colleagues in Iowa ... she’ll be rightly and roundly pummeled for it. Some Democrats fought for Dreamers today, others fought for themselves,” said a Democratic staffer whose boss was fighting for the bill.

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Privately, Democrats said it was Republicans such as Tillis and Lankford who were too willing to give up. They said those senators never seemed particularly interested in how far Democrats were moving toward Trump and his border wall.

Endorsing $25 billion in wall funding was a real concession, they believed, considering how much their base hated the idea. They didn’t see the same give in the GOP.

“It cannot be overstated. They have not moved one inch,” said a Democratic aide of Tillis and Lankford.

Lankford said he worked his “tail off” before dropping off this week. And Tillis had bailed from the talks in January after the meeting between lawmakers and Trump at the White House, where the president said he’d back whatever deal they sent him. Despite the president's encouraging words, Tillis came away from the meeting believing that Democrats wouldn't support a plan that Trump would actually sign.

“They’re going down a path that won’t produce an outcome,” Tillis recalled thinking.

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Indeed, the chief GOP sponsor of the compromise found an upside in what seemed like a wasted exercise: Republicans now have a much better sense of how far the minority will bend on immigration.

“That,” said Rounds, “is a big step.”

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/...eakdown-415629