Sometimes I hear from friends who ask me why I’m so supportive of Tom Suozzi, a relatively conservative Democrat— a New Dem. I’ve known Suozzi a long time and I like him as a person and appreciate his honesty. A few years ago, I asked him if there were any policies he was progressive on. There were, but the one he wanted to talk about most was immigration. I think it went all the way back to when he was mayor of Glen Cove and opened the very first “shape-up” center on the East Coast, a place where undocumented workers could find work, learn English, and receive job training. Everything he did was anchored in a shared sense of humanity that you don’t always feel from conservatives.
Republicans are trying to use the border and undocumented migrants as an issue against Democrats. I admire that Suozzi is having none of it. Last week he crashed a no questions allowed anti-immigrant event his immigrant opponent, Mazi Pilip, held in Queens and turned it into an actual press conference.
Pilip read prepared statements and questions that did get asked of her, were answered by Republican Congressman Anthony D’Esposito who was there to help her navigate talking to constituents. He wound up speaking more than she did. She was unable to offer any solutions to the migrant crisis and her campaign staff tried to cut off reporters who had questions.
In contrast, Suozzi laid out in detail how he would address the migrant crisis and took as many questions that the assembled press had for him. “My opponent is very good at telling all of us what the problem is,” he said. “We all know what the problem is! What are you going to do about it?”
Questions largely centered around the compromise immigration bill in the US Senate. While it was clear that Pilip had no idea what is in the bill, Suozzi was able to speak in detail about it, as well as criticizing Republican leadership in the Senate and the House for slow walking the compromise bill as Trump has been demanding. “This, he said, “is the best time in 30 years to reach a compromise to finally get something real done on immigration and the Republican leadership would rather weaponize it. But instead of encouraging her party bosses to keep politics out of a big problem facing the country, Mazi Pilip can only cite talking points that are given to her by the Republican bosses, both here locally and at the national level. I've proposed concrete ideas about what needs to be done to solve the problems that we face. She has not.” (You can contribute to Tom’s Get Out The Vote efforts here.)
That’s the way you turn the tables on these hypocrites. Suozzi was working on an immigration/border security plan with Long Island Republican Peter King before anyone had heard of Mazi Pilip or George Santos. Now Trump is demanding his MAGA puppets in Congress kill the compromise very similar to the one Suozzi and King came up with originally. Yesterday, Trump’s mouthpiece in the House insisted that the bill is DOA.
Stef Kight wrote that MAGA Mike “has fallen in line” and that on Saturday, campaigning in Nevada, Trump said, “It’s not going to happen, and I'll fight it all the way,” even though Lankford has said, it’s precisely what Trump asked for when he was president.
Greg Sargent noted yesterday that Lankford “appeared to admit that they are trying to kill his bill to deny President Biden a bipartisan victory. That triggered a flurry of social media excitement. But his appearances [on the Sunday talk shows] revealed something deeper about this whole affair: Trump and MAGA Republicans can’t allow this bill to pass, not just for crass political reasons, but because it might succeed on the substance, denying them an opening to pass hideously onerous restrictions later.
The bill would actually have a big impact— in ways that you’d think Republicans would like. As Lankford noted on both shows, it would toughen the standard to qualify for asylum and provide massive new resources for border cops and for processing asylum-seekers faster, including speeding the removal of those who don’t qualify. It would give presidents an entirely new authority to shut down asylum-seeking when border encounters hit certain thresholds.
These aren’t simply Republican-friendly proposals. Lankford pointed out that many of those are resources and authorities that Trump himself urged Congress to give him as president. If Trump gets elected again, Lankford said, he would enjoy authorities that “he’d actually asked for.” Brennan agreed, noting that on the bill, Trump doesn’t “know what he’s talking about.”
…I think it’s no accident that Trump and MAGA are trying to sink this deal even as Trump and Miller are loudly advertising plans for an extraordinarily cruel and draconian second-term crackdown. This includes the mass removals of millions of undocumented immigrants settled here, commencing on Day One; and dramatically scaled-up “camps” to detain enormous numbers of asylum-seekers, who would be subject to appalling new limits that would go further than the GOP bill does. Trump is openly flaunting this agenda’s white nationalist aspirations.
The spectacle of border disorder along with Congress doing nothing in response is the essential combination that Trump, Miller, and MAGA Republicans need. Images of serious destabilization being met with parliamentary sclerosis might create the opening for them to persuade swing voters— especially those who aren’t ideologically opposed to immigration— to accept maximal ethnonationalist savagery, packaged as “border security,” as the only “solution” that will “work.”
At least that’s the dream that fires up the fevered MAGA imagination. It’s what Trump really means by saying, “I’d rather have no bill than a bad bill.” If a bipartisan deal passes and it persuades swing voters that the border is being stabilized without excessive anti-immigrant cruelty, that opportunity could vanish. This is the darker reason MAGA is trying to tank the deal— and Lankford laid it bare for all to see.
Is Trump turning the border issue into a GOP liability? That’s going to depend on how deftly the Democrats play the hand they’re being dealt. Can Democrats show the voters that the GOP hasn’t been serious about solving the problem and just putting politics over solutions? It sure is working for Tom Suozzi, whose campaign slogan is "Let's Fix It."
And remember, this is a pretty draconian bill from a progressive perspective so, we'd be better off if Trump and his allies in the House tank it and get blamed for tanking it. If the Democrats win in November-- the White House and both Houses of Congress, they can write and pass a better bill. Basically a mirror image of what the xenophobic MAGAts are looking for.