Migrant children: Immigration bill teeters on the edge of collapse

Conservative columnist George Will is hoping President Donald Trump’s horrifying zero-tolerance policy on the border that led to the separation of thousands of kids from their parents will be the last straw for many people planning to vote Republican in the 2018 midterms.

Trump told fellow Republicans in Congress to “stop wasting their time” on immigration legislation until after the November elections.

The next year, the House and Senate tried to tackle immigration but never resolved the deep differences in their legislation.

House members will vote on a bill that funds Trump’s signature campaign promise of a border wall and provides a path to citizenship for individuals who were brought to the United States illegally as children by their parents, all happening under a retiring speaker who once vowed to conservatives he would not touch immigration as long as Barack Obama was President.

U.S. Representative Jeff Denham (R-Turlock), has introduced, with a group of Republicans in coordination with House leadership, a compromise immigration bill to address family separation, a permanent solution for Dreamers, and border security. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), the chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

But Rep. Pete King (R-NY) is not too concerned.

But then he tweeted on Thursday that whatever passed in the House was surely dead in the Senate because Republicans have just 51 votes, not almost enough to clear the 60-vote threshold to get past a Democratic filibuster.

GOP Majority Whip Steve Scalise interpreted the tweet as the president “acknowledging that there is no willingness of Democrats to work with us to solve this problem”.

The House killed a hard-right immigration bill Thursday, and Republican leaders delayed a planned vote on a compromise GOP package with the party’s lawmakers fiercely divided over an issue that has long confounded them. “But now the problem is for the Democrats because separating families may be unpopular; zero tolerance, however, is relatively popular”, Trump said.

“We got 193 votes yesterday on a bill the leadership said wasn’t even close, right?” said Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. That’s despite a damaging tweet by President Donald Trump urging them to wait until after the November elections. Just Tuesday, he met privately with GOP lawmakers and told them he supported the immigration legislation and would have their backs in November. Every Republican involved in the House’s immigration fight is really just trying to send an advantageous message to his or her constituents.

But that order isn’t legally tenable: The administration still intends to jail all migrants who commit the misdemeanor offense of crossing the southern border between official points of entry – which means that, to keep families together, our government must incarcerate innocent children with their parents. He used the loaded term “infest” to reference the influx of immigrants entering the country illegally.

He said the GOP will have won this immigration battle, and Democrats will be the ones to “pay a political price”.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy says it’s “important” that his chamber shows it’s addressing the issue, which is an important one to voters.