Whew: Republicans Will Not Grant DACA Amnesty With Spending Bill

While there is still an unseemly amount of enthusiasm among Republicans for some kind of amnesty deal for Obama’s Dreamers, conservatives can at least breathe a small sigh of limited relief – it doesn’t appear that such amnesty will be included in the upcoming must-pass December spending bill. There had been some talk – even among Republicans – about including the deal in the bill and getting it off the table entirely. Thankfully, that won’t be the case. That would have given Democrats an enormous amount of power and it’s unclear that it would have given national-security minded conservatives anything meaningful in return.

In an interview with Laura Ingraham last week, President Trump said he wasn’t interested in signing any amnesty bill that didn’t make a dent in legal immigration practices.

“I don’t think any Republican would vote for anything having to do with leaving chain migration in place,” he said. “Chain migration is a disaster for this country and it’s horrible.”

Chain migration has become the topic of the day, apparently, in Republican circles. When Sens. John Cornyn and David Perdue spoke to the press last week to announce that the spending bill would not include a permanent DACA amnesty clause, they too brought up the issue.

“This should be debated on its own merit,” said Perdue of Trump’s feelings about amnesty. “He also talked about that any solution to DACA has got to include ending chain migration and some features of border security, so that is a very tight window that he is laying out about what he will sign. So I’m very encouraged by that.”

Rep. Jim Jordan, the founding member of the Freedom Caucus, said he was pleased to see the GOP back away from the idea of including amnesty in the spending bill. “That’s great news,” he said. “We’ve got to do what the American people sent us to do on immigration, and I just don’t see that happening on the spending bill. Attaching DACA and something else to a spending bill – you don’t want to go there.”

Republicans, including Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, are convinced they can extract something significant from Democrats in exchange for DACA amnesty.

In an interview with Hugh Hewitt over the weekend, McConnell said, “The Democrats desperately want DACA. Republicans are not necessarily opposed to that. The president has set it up in such a way that we have an incentive to act here because he’s given us six months to come up with a proposal.”

Here’s the thing. Amnesty does nothing but encourage more illegal immigration. We’ve been through this before – once in 1986 and once after Obama signed the original DACA order. This is not a lesson we need to learn over and over again, is it? So if we’re going to allow these Dreamers to stay in this country, we need to make sure Democrats are paying an extraordinarily steep price for it. Republicans need to go to the mat for American citizens with every bit the same vigor as Democrats are going to go for non-citizens.

They can damn well be sure that voters are watching.