White House Puts Lindsey Graham in Tough Corner on Immigration
White House Puts Lindsey Graham in Tough Corner on Immigration
South Carolina senator alienated President Trump with a weak proposal on border and illegals — and by attacking Miller
by Jim Stinson | Updated 27 Jan 2018 at 11:23 AM
As the White House prepares to negotiate a new but controversial immigration proposal made to Congress, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has been cut off by the Trump administration on the contentious issue.
Why the White House made the move is not clear.
White House officials speaking on background told LifeZette they are angry at Graham for attacking President Donald Trump’s point man on immigration, aide Stephen Miller, on Sunday night.
Media reports also indicate Trump himself is angry that Graham worked with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on a proposal that gave away too much in exchange for a White House plan to make legal as many as 800,000 illegal aliens who were brought here as children.
The illegal aliens, now adults, were granted limited amnesty by former President Barack Obama in 2012 through an executive order that created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Trump rescinded DACA in September, and expirations of DACA papers begin in March.
The main problem for Graham, though, is his attack on Miller. Last Sunday, Graham was walking through the Senate, wearing a ball cap and looking disheveled. While the president was nearing a victory on the government shutdown, Graham blamed White House staff for causing the immigration-related shutdown. Graham stopped to talk to reporters when he decided to blame Miller for the impasse.
"Every time we have a proposal, it is only yanked back by staff members," Graham said. "As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we're going nowhere."
Graham said Miller, 32, had been "an outlier" for "years" on the issue. Miller is a former aide to Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), and helped both Sessions and Trump develop their populist immigration policies. Trump grabbed Miller as an aide in the 2016 presidential campaign, then made Sessions attorney general.
A White House staff member noted Graham had been attacking Miller for a few days prior to the Sunday remarks, but the impromptu and well-publicized remarks particularly angered Trump staffers. On Sunday night, deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said Graham was being "ridiculous."
Then sometime during the week, the White House decided to cut Graham out of future negotiations. House Republicans, speaking anonymously, also told the Washington Examiner that Graham's involvement was the kiss of death in the more conservative lower body.
Graham was already viewed with deep suspicion by many in the Republican base for his involvement with the "Gang of Eight" immigration negotiations in 2013. The GOP sought to work with Democrats to reform immigration after the 2012 presidential election, in which Obama won re-election by a surprisingly healthy margin. In a GOP "autopsy" done by the Republican National Committee, anti-immigration stridency was seen as a big reason.
The bill the "gang" produced passed the Senate but failed to reach the House floor for a vote. The bill was labeled "amnesty" by conservative news sites such as Breitbart. The Republicans learned a harsh lesson — that their base cares deeply about illegal immigration — and Trump rode the issue into the White House.
Trump apparently worked on a new proposal, reported Thursday, that would expand amnesty and extend citizenship to as many as 1.8 million illegal aliens. The proposal has drawn fire from the Right and the Left. It appears Graham did not work on the proposal.
The last time Graham talked immigration with Trump, he brought Durbin to the White House on January 11 to talk about a new deal. Trump, without Graham's knowledge, invited immigration hardliner Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). The Washington Post reported Sunday that Miller was seen as the culprit in inviting Cotton — but Trump invited Cotton.
But what perhaps angered Trump most was what Graham and Durbin offered in the proposal. Non-immigrants from nations such as El Salvador and Haiti were offered amnesty because they had fled natural disasters. They were previously offered Temporary Protected Status (TPS) but declined to return home. Trump has revoked TPS for people from several nations hit by natural disasters in the previous decade.
Durbin leaked Trump's remarks to the media about such refugees, including allegations that Trump called Haiti and El Salvador "s***hole nations."
Trump tends to blame people in wide circles when a meeting like that goes south and then hits the press. For Graham, the remarks about Miller may have been the final straw.
https://www.lifezette.com/polizette/...n-immigration/
LINDSEY GRAHAM, THE UNINVITED GUEST
LINDSEY GRAHAM, THE UNINVITED GUEST
Ann Coulter - January 24, 2018
Why does Sen. Lindsey Graham have a seat at the table on immigration? Are Jorge Ramos and Vicente Fox unavailable?
Graham's claim to fame is: 1) having twice negotiated a voluntary surrender for the GOP on immigration; and 2) winning 0.00 percent of the vote when he ran for president two years ago. You could run for president on the platform that we should kill babies and eat them, and you'd get more votes than Lindsey Graham.
Who designated this most remote of back-benchers, thoroughly rejected by the American people, as the principal negotiator on Trump's central campaign promise?
Graham's thought process seems to be: We had an election, I ran for president; literally no one voted for me, so my views should prevail over the guy who won an Electoral College landslide.
How about getting Dennis Kucinich in there? Has anyone asked Martin O'Malley for help in the "DACA" negotiations?
To a rapturous media, Graham has been peddling the lie that President Trump blew up a beautiful bipartisan deal on immigration. It wasn't "bipartisan," except in the sense of being "angrily rejected by the voters."
It's the same deal that has gone down in flames at least twice before. It's the same deal that has already destroyed the careers of Sens. John McCain, Marco Rubio, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Kelly Ayotte, Mark Kirk and Gov. Jeb! Bush.
It's the same deal President Bush tried to push through Congress in 2006 -- with Graham's support! -- leading directly to the Republican wipeout in the midterm elections later that year. (Innumerable polls showed that the public hated Bush's proposed amnesty even more than it hated the Iraq War.)
It's the same deal that voters repudiated for approximately the 87th time when they made Donald Trump president (and -- again -- gave Lindsey Graham zero votes).
Notwithstanding the media's phony polls showing 98.6 percent of voters wildly enthusiastic about amnesty for "Dreamers" -- or "Nightmares," as radio host Howie Carr calls them -- every time the public gets its hands on an actual ballot, it votes for: less immigration, punishing employers who hire illegals, no government services for illegals, no driver's licenses for illegals, no amnesty ever, English-only and Donald Trump.
What the media call a "bipartisan deal" didn't even meet the basic definition of a "deal."
For at least a decade now, the argument for amnestying the Nightmares has been: Screw the parents. THEY SUCK! They were the lawbreakers ... but don't blame the innocent children (single typewriter key) brought-here-through-no-fault-of-their-own.
Then we get to see the big bipartisan deal, and it's: We amnesty the kids -- but also the parents! Not only is this not meeting Trump halfway, it's also doubling the distance.
It's like negotiating in the Kasbah:
Democrats: We demand $30!
Republicans: We'll give you $10.
Democrats: OK, $200.
Lindsey Graham: DEAL!
How did an existential issue for the Republican Party get assigned to the single worst person to negotiate it?
It would be as if during Bush's presidency, anti-war Republican Chuck Hagel had anointed himself spokesman for the GOP on the Iraq War. Republicans would have gone nuts! They would have been screaming at the media, the Democrats and the president: DO NOT TALK TO CHUCK HAGEL!
The fact that Senate Republicans have not done this in the case of Graham and immigration makes me think the fix is in. If we had a party that was serious, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Senate GOP would say, "That's great that you and Jeff Flake have been having meetings, Lindsey, but you don't speak for us."
It's hard to avoid the impression that other Republicans are saying, God bless Lindsey. There, but for the grace of God, go I -- because this is what our paymasters want. The Business Roundtable doesn't care what Republicans have to do to fool the base, provided: Another year goes by, the Nightmares are still here, and we haven't sealed the border.
Either Mitch McConnell is very, very stupid or the reason he's not pulling Graham is precisely because he keeps missing shots.
Let's see, what's the stupidest way we could do this? Every single day of Trump's campaign he promised everyone a wall and mass deportations. What if we DON'T build a wall, but take the person who got zero votes, was the earliest and most vociferous in attacking Trump -- and involve him centrally in the negotiations on immigration?
Recall that McConnell spent $8 million to defeat Rep. Mo Brooks in the Alabama Senate Republican primary last August, leading to Trump's humiliating defeat in the reddest state in the Union in December. There's nothing embarrassing about Brooks. But he's with Trump on immigration, so he had to be stopped.
Voters get lip service on "securing the border" at the same time that Republicans are letting Graham negotiate amnesty. The complicit senators hide in their offices and practice looking shocked. No, Lindsey! That's not what we wanted at all! ... Oh well, what are you going to do? Let's just get those illegals their permanent residence cards and move on to more tax cuts for Wall Street.
It's said so often that it's become a cliche: Elections have consequences. Just this once, couldn't an election have a consequence? A wall and deportations -- YES! Amnesty for the Nightmares -- NO!
http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2018-01-24.html
