As Senate negotiators prepared to unveil their compromise package on border reforms and security aid, Sen. Lindsey Graham warned his GOP colleagues not to look a gift horse in the mouth. “To those who think that if President Trump wins, which I hope he does, that we can get a better deal — you won’t,” the South Carolina Republican told reporters.
There have been plenty of headlines lately about why the GOP will ultimately regret rejecting the bipartisan legislation, and part of this has to do with electoral considerations. By killing the bill they asked for, Republicans have opened the door to all kinds of credible criticisms that Democrats will eagerly take to voters: The GOP doesn’t care about governing, and Republicans are directly responsible for not trying to address challenges at the border.
But there’s another element to the party’s looming regrets: Republicans have never before received an offer this good on one of their own priorities, and the opportunity is likely gone forever.
The Washington Post’s editorial board published a piece along these lines on Monday, under a headline that read, “Republicans will never get another border security deal this good.”
The Republican Party should take yes for an answer. By torpedoing the Senate’s bipartisan immigration deal, under pressure from former president Donald Trump to preserve his election-year advantage on a wedge issue, congressional Republicans would blow an opportunity to reduce undocumented immigration and curtail mass crossings at the southern border — along with save Ukraine before it runs out of ammunition.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which tends to be closely aligned with Republican politics, published a similar piece, which concluded, “If Republicans pass up this rare chance at border reform, they may not get a better one.”
Consider this from a Democratic perspective. GOP leaders said they’d make it easier for Russia to take part of Eastern Europe by force unless Democrats agreed to a dramatic overhaul of the nation’s border policies. Democrats, convinced that they had no choice, not only agreed to negotiate for months, they also gave up on the one thing they wanted in an immigration deal, and then grudgingly endorsed the most conservative reform package in decades. At that point, Republicans then rejected the deal they asked for. The odds of Democrats presenting the GOP with a comparable opportunity again are roughly zero. Making matters worse, Republican Sen. James Lankford invested a considerable amount of time, effort, and political capital into this endeavor. For his trouble, the Oklahoman discovered that his own ostensible allies subjected his bill to a misinformation campaign for petty and unserious reasons. Will any GOP policymaker ever again volunteer to work on a bipartisan immigration deal? After Republicans have rejected four bipartisan offers in two decades? I rather doubt it.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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