{"id":14102,"date":"2024-02-06T17:34:28","date_gmt":"2024-02-06T17:34:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/?p=14102"},"modified":"2024-02-12T17:17:05","modified_gmt":"2024-02-12T17:17:05","slug":"the-gops-true-priority","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/?p=14102","title":{"rendered":"The GOP\u2019s True Priority"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Republicans who won\u2019t take yes for an answer.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By David Frum<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
House Speaker Mike Johnson. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Sometimes, a negotiation produces a deal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes, a negotiation reveals the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Negotiators in the Senate have produced a draft agreement on immigration and asylum. The deal delivers on Republican priorities. It includes changes to federal law to discourage asylum seeking. It shuts down asylum processing altogether if too many people arrive at once. Those and other changes send a clear message to would-be immigrants: You\u2019re going to find it a lot harder to enter the United States without authorization. Rethink your plans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The draft agreement offers little to nothing on major Democratic immigration priorities: no pathway to citizenship for long-term undocumented immigrants, only the slightest increase in legal immigration. The Democrats traded away most of their own policy wish list. In return, they want an end to the mood of crisis at the border, plus emergency defense aid for Ukraine and Israel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet Republicans in the House seem determined to reject the draft agreement. They appear poised to leave in place a status quo that one senior GOP House leader has described<\/a> as an \u201cinvasion\u201d and an \u201cexistential and national security threat.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So if no deal results, what truths will we learn from this process?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first is that Republicans don\u2019t really care all that much about the situation at the border. A real \u201cexistential threat\u201d cannot wait for some later date. People who perceive an existential threat don\u2019t delay. In fact, a good many Republican legislators are very happy to allow a continuing flow of laborers across the border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consider that Florida\u2019s Republican-controlled House of Representatives has voted<\/a> to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to work eight-hour days during the school year. Or that the Republican governor of Arkansas has signed<\/a> a bill that relieves the state of having to certify that teenage workers aged 14 and 15 may work. Or that Ohio\u2019s Republican-controlled legislature may soon pass<\/a> a law allowing 14- and 15-year-olds to work as late as 9 p.m. on school nights. Or that Republican legislators in Wisconsin are pushing<\/a> to allow 14-to-17-year-olds to serve alcohol in bars and restaurants. Consider also that all of these changes are written with teenage migrants very much in mind: Almost 40 percent of recent border-crossers have been<\/a> under 18, a fivefold increase since the late aughts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those teenagers are traveling both alone and in family groups. They are coming to the U.S. to work. When state legislatures relax the rules on employing under-18s and under-16s, they\u2019re flashing a giant WE\u2019RE HIRING sign to job-seeking teenagers around the world. The legislators know that. The teenagers know it. American voters should know it too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A second truth concerns what Republican priorities really are. When Mike Johnson was elevated to the House speakership, he claimed<\/a> that he genuinely wanted to help Ukraine but that aid had to wait until Congress passed new laws to harden the U.S. southern border. He wrote to<\/a> President Joe Biden as recently as December 5 that further aid to Ukraine was \u201cdependent upon enactment of transformative change to our nation\u2019s border security laws.\u201d When Senate negotiators produced exactly what Johnson said he wanted\u2014a transformative bill that Congress could enact\u2014he responded by reversing his demands. Johnson no longer wants any law at all. But one thing is constant: no aid to Ukraine\u2014which suggests that \u201cno aid to Ukraine,\u201d not \u201cdefend the border,\u201d is the true priority here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A third truth is suggested by the angry reaction of House Republicans to the work of Senate Republicans: The very act of negotiation is mistrusted. Along with their speaker, House Republicans radically altered their position from \u201cthere must be a new law\u201d to \u201cthere must be no new law,\u201d and from \u201cthe president must sign our bill exactly as we wrote it\u201d to \u201cthe president must act unilaterally by executive authority only.\u201d How does anyone negotiate with a House majority that can so abruptly and totally pivot? The true goal revealed is failure and chaos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And this points to a fourth truth, maybe the most important one of all. Donald Trump has sold his supporters the dangerous fantasy that democratic politics can be replaced by one man\u2019s will. No need for distasteful compromises. No need to reckon with the concerns and interests of people who disagree with House Republicans. Just somehow return Trump to the presidency: He\u2019ll bark; the system will obey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, such fantasies have no basis in reality. As the Cato Institute reported<\/a> last November:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

The Biden Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has removed a higher percentage of arrested border crossers in its first two years than the Trump DHS did over its last two years. Moreover, migrants were more likely to be released after a border arrest under President Trump than under President Biden. In absolute terms, the Biden DHS is removing 3.5 times as many people per month as the Trump DHS did.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Altogether, about 1.1 million unauthorized border-crossers were released into the United States during the Trump presidency and not removed by the end of his term. Glowering and yelling do not in fact accomplish much. But to many Trump supporters, glowering and yelling are the whole of it. They don\u2019t care how little gets accomplished, so long as that little is done in the most offensive manner possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In their 1981 study of negotiation, Getting to Yes<\/em>, Roger Fisher and William Ury stress the importance of understanding the opposite party\u2019s point of view. Among the benefits of doing so is helping a negotiator recognize when he\u2019s received the best offer he\u2019s likely to get\u2014and then say yes rather than press for more and arrive at no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arriving at no is what\u2019s happening now among the House Republicans. Because they refuse to understand the other side, they cannot appreciate a good offer and recognize when to accept it. They\u2019re going to arrive only at no\u2014no for America, and no for Ukraine. But no is what they want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

David Frum<\/a> is a staff writer at The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Republicans who won’t take yes for an answer. By David Frum Sometimes, a negotiation produces a deal. Sometimes, a negotiation reveals the truth. Negotiators in the Senate have produced a draft agreement on immigration […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14106,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,69],"tags":[80,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-14102","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-slider","8":"category-immigration","9":"tag-immigration","10":"tag-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14102"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14113,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14102\/revisions\/14113"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}