Congress Can’t Even Do This One Thing
The moment was practically unrecognizable in modern politics. Just four years ago, Democrats and Republicans in Congress seemed to agree on something. And not on an innocuous topic like fixing roads and bridges, no—they came together on one of the most controversial subjects in the history of American political debate: immigration.
When the American public learned definitively in June 2018 that government officials were forcibly taking children away from their parents as part of a misguided scheme to discourage migration across the southern border, legislators started clamoring to take action. They were responding to the sounds of toddlers crying out for their parents, who, by then, were likely hundreds of miles away, lost in a labyrinthine federal detention system. Suddenly, some of the fiercest conservatives in Congress, including Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn of Texas and members of the House Freedom Caucus, introduced a flurry of bills calling for the same thing that leading Democrats were demanding: to immediately end the use of family separation as an enforcement tactic, and to outlaw it for good.
In years of covering immigration, I had never seen this kind of bipartisan agreement. Casey Higgins, who was serving at the time as the top immigration-policy staffer for Paul Ryan, the Republican speaker of the House, said party lines that seemed to have been etched in stone suddenly faded. “All the politics and things like that went out the window,” she told me recently, “because any parent who was hearing about this or reading about this was sick.”
So confident were these legislators in their reporters Republican staffers were finalizing a single bill that they planned to “hotline” to the president’s desk within days. Hotlining is one of the fastest ways to get a bill signed into law. It allows the full Senate to vote on a piece of legislation without any floor debate, but is only rarely invoked, because it requires unanimous consent. Cornyn felt sure he had it.
