Migrants/Ukraine Lollygag Spills Over Into New Year
Good morning and happy new year!
We're super excited to bring you the news from Congress in 2024. Let's get right to it with an update on migrant policy in the Senate...
2023 ended with migrant rights on the chopping block in Washington after President Joe Biden said he was willing to make significant concessions on migrant policy to unlock GOP support for funding Ukraine.
The president's words were all Senate migrant hawks needed to jam $61 billion in emergency assistance to Ukraine by attaching it to "border"---a nebulous, political term in America today.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will travel to the U.S.-Mexico border this week at the head of a Congressional delegation hosted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), an eager tour guide with powerful media relations teams more than capable of pushing the simple message out to the American public that their southern border is in crisis.
The White House wants to hire 1,300 Border Patrol agents and 1,600 asylum officers to deal with increased encounters and process asylum cases quicker, a sweet deal if the GOP were serious about quickly expelling migrants who don't qualify for asylum.
Sensing Biden's desperation to fund Ukraine's war with Russia, Senate Republicans have mostly ignored the president's ask and instead are pushing for an immigration crackdown with sweeping new authorities for federal agents and restrictions on asylum seekers.
Everything was on the table before Congress left for the holiday recess. White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients was negotiating directly on Biden's behalf with a bipartisan gang of four senators: Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), Chris Murphy (D-CT), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and James Lankford (R-OK).
Politico reported that talks continued for 90 minutes on Monday — with Tillis notably absent — but nothing from those talks has been presented to the public. Usually a "framework" or outline of ideas leaks at this point in a policy discussion that's actually moving forward. So far we've seen nothing like that from this Gang of Four (or Three?).
As it stands, rumors abound of what's on the table and what's not. But there's no evidence so far that the "Migrants/Ukraine" talk — i.e., Biden's insanely dumb policy of horse-trading immigrant pain for weapons shipments to Ukraine — is anything more than smokescreen for Sinema to fake productivity in a tough election year for her in Arizona, while allowing Lankford and Tillis to make the rounds in the Capitol press as "border" thought leaders.
What remains a mystery is how the heck Chris Murphy got dragged into taking the Democratic position in what is increasingly evident to be another Senate lollygag over migrant policy.
NOTABLE: None of the four Hispanic Caucus Democrats in the Senate — Bob Menendez (NJ), Alex Padilla (CA), Ben Ray Luján (NM) and Catherine Cortez Masto (NV) — supported Murphy taking this role when we asked them last year.
Until this deal collapses or by some miracle makes it to the Senate floor, we'll keep asking senators when they return to Capitol Hill next week.