How to Tell What Political Parties Really Care About
What the GOP's immigration debacle tells us about the interplay of politics and policy.
The recent implosion of a bipartisan attempt at immigration reform demonstrated something important about how politics works, offering a good opportunity to step back and view the underlying dynamics of policymaking. If you want to know how you can tell what parties really care about, as opposed to what they wouldn’t mind seeing happen but aren’t willing to do much to bring about, here’s the test: Are they willing to do it when they get no political benefit from it, or even when it has a political cost?
We’re going to look at a couple of cases, starting with immigration. This latest farce illustrated something I’ve been arguing for a long time (see here from 2013 or here from 2018) and everyone else is finally waking up to: Republicans don’t actually care about fixing the immigration system. They want immigration to be a live issue, and they want to stage lots of photo-ops at the border where they can don khaki shirts with tactical pockets and gaze determinedly across the Rio Grande, but working to solve the problem is beside the point. Which is how you get this kind of jackassery:
As I discussed in my latest MSNBC column, the bill Republicans killed was actually tilted heavily in the direction of their priorities. It included a trigger that would close the border if migrant encounters exceeded 5,000 a day; toughening of standards to receive asylum; money to process asylum claims more quickly, which in practice would mean fewer asylum-seekers in the country (since most asylum claims are ultimately rejected); and billions of dollars for Border Patrol agents, ICE detention facilities, and border wall construction.
What Democrats got in exchange was relatively paltry, and didn’t include their most important priority: a path to citizenship for Dreamers, those brought as children to the U.S. who have never known another home.
But Republicans wouldn’t take yes for an answer. Donald Trump’s intervention — attacking the bill on his social media platform and personally lobbying members of Congress against it — certainly played a role in crushing the bill before the ink on the text was dry. But even if he had remained silent, it’s almost certain that congressional Republicans would have rejected it anyway.
And all because they worried that if they passed some kind of reform — even one that gave them so much of what they say they want — Joe Biden would get to take credit for it and they would be less able to attack him on the issue from now to November. Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, the chief GOP negotiator on the bill, seemed shocked at how his own party is acting. “Are we as Republicans going to have press conferences and complain the border is bad and then intentionally leave it open?” he lamented. Yes, they are. Lankford later said that a “popular commentator” told him, “If you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year, I will do whatever I can to destroy you. Because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election.”
Now imagine a different world in which Republicans actually believed what they were saying about the border, that this is a “crisis,” an “invasion,” a catastrophe so horrific that it threatens the very survival of America. If they believed that, they would do anything and everything in their power to prevent it from happening. They’d work to alleviate the disaster in any way they could, even if they couldn’t solve the entire problem. If your country was being invaded by a foreign horde bent on killing you and defiling your daughters, then you wouldn’t say that we can get around to fixing this the next time there’s a Republican in the White House. But that is what Republicans have concluded. As one GOP Senate aide told Punchbowl News, “the House Republican position is now basically ‘Let’s wait for Trump.’” And that applies to many in the Senate as well.
So no, they don’t actually want to fix immigration. The most generous thing you could say is that they wouldn’t mind fixing it, but not if there’s any chance it could hurt Donald Trump in November. The political consideration outweighs the policy preference.
Should we save the American economy? Well, that depends…
Let’s look at a recent case where this played out in the other direction. In 2020, as the coronavirus was sweeping the country, Congress had to respond. The political consideration was obvious: The deeper and more painful the pandemic-induced recession, the more unhappy voters would be, and the lower the chances that Trump would win reelection. An effective response by the federal government would undoubtedly help Trump.
Democrats could have done what Republicans just did. But they didn’t. In fact, in the negotiations over the CARES Act, the stimulus bill that passed that March, Democrats pushed for more aid to the country. In the end, the vote in both houses was nearly unanimous.
A year later, Joe Biden took office. With the country still struggling, he pushed to pass the American Rescue Plan to inject more money into the economy. And now that they were in the opposition, what did Republicans do? Did they say, “We understand that this might help the president’s political standing, but it’s just too important.” No they did not. Let’s take a look at the vote totals on these two bills with a little pair of charts I made:
Granted, there were a lot of provisions in the ARP that Republicans didn’t like. But after almost all of them voted for stimulus while Trump was president, every last one of them in both houses voted against stimulus when Biden was president. This was a repeat of what happened during the Great Recession: With the economy beginning to teter in early 2008, both parties supported an economic stimulus bill signed by George W. Bush. Then a year later, when the economy had absolutely crashed, every Republican in both houses voted against the Recovery Act of 2009. Because Obama.
The point I’m making here is less about the Republicans and more about the Democrats: Even when it might have helped Trump, they still voted for stimulus. Because it mattered to them. Just as it did in 2008.
I’m not trying to paint Democrats as saints; there are issues on which they don’t really have the courage of their convictions, either. But not those times.
What Republicans do care about
To give Republicans their due, there are issues they care so much about that they’re willing to take real political risks in order to accomplish something. The clearest example is tax cuts for the wealthy, which are deeply unpopular but always on the top of the Republican agenda whenever they take control of the White House and Congress. They did it under George W. Bush, they did it under Donald Trump, and they’ll do it again the next time they are in power. In fact, a big tax cut for the wealthy and corporations was, until the CARES Act, the only major piece of legislation Trump signed in his whole term in office. Whatever else Republicans will or won’t do with power when they have it, they are definitely going to cut taxes for rich people.
In sum, you learn a lot about a party not just by what policies they put into law, but how they react to political risk and what they’re willing to do when there might be a cost. Republicans just proved how they really feel about immigration, so now you know. And you know how to tell what both they and Democrats really care about.
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