The Senate’s Four Potential Immigration Bills, Including DACA Fixes, All Look Destined for Failure

According to Politico, each of the three proposed immigration bills designed to strike a deal on DACA appear destined for failure.

A bipartisan bill presented to the Senate on Wednesday, which provides a path to citizenship to those previously protected under DACA and spends $25 million on border security, has not met the required 60 votes.

Bloomberg reporter Sahil Kapur tweeted that Republican Lisa Murkowski, who co-sponsored the bipartisan bill, was doubtful of that the legislation would reach the necessary vote count.

Looks like the bipartisan Rounds-King Dreamer fix is going down.

“Unfortunately I don’t think that it will get the requisite 60 votes that we need,” says Lisa Murkowski, who is a cosponsor.

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) February 15, 2018

Another GOP amendment that includes all four elements of Trump’s general immigration platform framework and includes cuts to legal immigration is also short of the 60-vote threshold.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has set up votes on four amendments to the Senate’s immigration bill: a bipartisan agreement, the GOP version of Trump’s priorities, a narrower plan with no border wall funding and an amendment on sanctuary cities.

The White House has threatened to veto the bipartisan agreement, citing concerns that it would “produce a flood of new illegal immigration in the coming months.”

Politico has shed some light on the partisan immigration bickering in Congress, specifically in regards to McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. McConnel told the Senate, “Remember: Democrats wanted this debate. They shut down the federal government for 300 million Americans — unnecessarily — to guarantee we could have this debate at this time.”

McConnel continued, “Democrats haven’t mustered “a single proposal that gives us a realistic chance to make law — that is, pass the Senate, pass the House, and earn the president’s signature.”

Schumer fired back in response to McConnell and the White House’s tactics on immigration, “That’s not how democracy works. You don’t get 100 percent of what you want in a democracy.”

As Congress works to solve the DACA issue, tensions are running high, especially considering the fact that lawmakers have been working on a DACA solution for weeks—despite the polls which show the vast majority of Americans support giving the Dreamers a path to citizenship.

It seems a little pathetic that instead of just passing a clean, no strings attached bi-partisan DACA bill that most Americans support, President Trump and Republicans are using the Dreamers as a bargaining chip to get funding for border security.