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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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Milbank: GOP senator sees immigration move as call to action

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Here’s a paradox worth pondering: Could President Obama’s executive actions on immigration actually make it easier to enact comprehensive reform?

The invective pouring forth from Republicans this week would suggest not: “deliberately sabotage any chance of enacting bipartisan reforms … trying to pick a bar fight … throwing this nation into a crisis … anarchy.” Mitt Romney, the failed 2012 Republican presidential nominee, told CBS’ Bob Schieffer that Obama was “poking an eye of the Republican leaders in Congress.”

The natural instinct is to poke back — an eye for an eye. But one Republican, at least, has a better idea. “Rather than poke him in the eye, I’d rather put legislation on his desk,” Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., told me Thursday.

The idea of Congress legislating seems quaint these days, but Flake’s counterintuitive view is that Obama’s unilateral action Thursday will increase pressure on the president to accept conservative immigration bills.

Flake is a conservative in good standing, and he opposes the executive orders as much as the next Republican. Elected to the Senate in 2012 after a dozen years in the House, he has a 95 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union. But he’s also a reasonable man; he was a member of the Gang of Eight that crafted the original Senate compromise on immigration. And this border-state legislator thinks it’s stupid to shut down the government in an effort to undo Obama’s immigration orders.

Let the orders stand

Flake proposes letting the orders stand — and even offering to make them permanent — if Obama first makes the three concessions that Republicans have long sought on immigration.

First, Flake wants the House, followed by the Senate, to pass a border-security bill with tougher standards than the Senate compromise, requiring a 90 percent apprehension rate at the border before any permanent legalization of undocumented immigrants. Obama, who has just stretched the limits of his constitutional authority to protect undocumented immigrants, “would be harder pressed to veto a border security bill, a tough one, than he would have before,” Flake figures.

Next, Congress would send Obama a bill with tougher interior enforcement of immigration, including a mandatory E-Verify program. Third, Congress would send Obama legislation covering visas for temporary and high-tech workers. Some Democrats would object to both, but Obama would find them “tougher for him to turn down now” after the furor stirred by his executive order.

Then, and only then, would Congress send Obama legislation giving his executive actions force of law and providing a path to citizenship. Flake admits that will still be opposed by many Republicans as so-called “amnesty.” But Flake thinks he can win over enough of them after giving them piecemeal approach to immigration reform they insisted on.

Obama and the Democrats may regard the first three bills as legislative eye pokes, but the president, who picked this fight with his executive order, has a powerful incentive to make concessions now: His executive order offers temporary protection from deportation to 3.7 million undocumented immigrants, but without congressional approval, it doesn’t put anybody on a path to citizenship and it can be erased by a future president.

Is the Flake plan naive? Perhaps. But Flake is one of the good guys in Washington — devoted to his conservative principles but also to the belief that lawmakers have been sent here to get stuff done. He retains strong ties to House conservatives, and he predicts he can find enough Republicans to support his approach — “if we can resist the urge to shut down the government” in the meantime.

That’s a sizable if. “Make no mistake: It’s going to be tough for a lot of members to deal with this president at all,” the senator said. And Obama made clear Thursday that the disregard is mutual. But, with luck, both sides will conclude that Flake’s plan, though imperfect, beats a poke in the eye.

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