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Arizona’s senior Democratic senator is adding a new wrinkle to Republications’ lengthy deliberations over how to send President Donald Trump a border security package.
Mark Kelly is seeking to open up bipartisan talks on beefing up the border — an option that could further complicate Republicans’ talks on approving new border money without Democratic votes. It’s a long-shot play from Kelly, but Republicans aren’t ruling it out.
“They are interested, because they know that there are things that they can do here by working with us that they can’t do otherwise,” Kelly told Semafor on Wednesday, referring to congressional rules that strictly limit policy changes in any border bill that passes without Democratic votes.
Kelly and 12 of his colleagues in the Democratic caucus sent Senate Majority Leader John Thune a letter on Wednesday urging him to work with them. Kelly insisted it’s not a strategy to slow down Republicans’ party-line agenda, which is already sparking disagreement between the House and Senate: “We don’t want to drag it out.”
Even so, it was just four years ago that Republicans threw their own wrench in Democratic plans to pass an infrastructure bill without GOP votes. It ended up working: The Senate passed a bipartisan infrastructure law that underpinned a surprising era of cross-aisle cooperation.
So as Republicans haggle over whether to bundle their tax cut legislation with border security money, they may decide there’s little downside to testing the waters with Democrats on border legislation.
“I’m very obviously interested in doing as many of these consequential, big issues in a bipartisan way as we possibly can,” Thune said on Wednesday morning in response to Kelly’s letter.
He added that time is short, citing “an immediate imperative to secure the border. And however we can get that done, if it’s with Democrats or without them, we intend to do it.”
Know More
President Donald Trump killed a bipartisan immigration effort in 2018 that would have protected some young immigrants from deportation; last year, he stopped a bipartisan border bill in the Senate. Still, the Senate is displaying an unanticipated degree of cooperation in the new Trump era, passing the Laken Riley Act’s more restrictive detention policies on the same day he was sworn into office.
Doing something bigger would be harder, but Kelly is determined to try.
“There’s a lot of common ground, so let’s work on this together, as we have in the past. We got really close, and we don’t have to reproduce the thing we did six months ago,” Kelly said of last year’s border security bill. “But I think that showed that there’s a desire to work collaboratively.”
If they took a bipartisan approach, Democrats and Republicans have more latitude to stem border crossings with permanent policy changes that future presidents could not undo. Former President Joe Biden and Trump both used executive power to change border policies, quickly reversing each other – the sort of head-snapping effect a new border law would mute.
Keeping things focused on border security, perhaps only skirting the edges of immigration policy, might be the only way to get it done.
“There’s a lot we agree on: more pay for Border Patrol agents, hiring more staff, building infrastructure, technology at the border,” Kelly argued. “We’ll get a better product, better legislation, if we do this together.”
But that narrow area of agreement might be tough to maintain. Kelly said he also wanted to work on deportation protections for immigrants who came to the US as young people, the group known as “Dreamers,” and achieve a pathway to citizenship.
He asserted that he’s talked to “Republican colleagues that feel the same way; they just also talk about like, ‘well, now is not the time.’”
Notable
- The new Trump administration is gearing up for immigration enforcement, Politico reports.
- Troops are being ordered to the border, according to CNN.