Loving the Children To Death

Right now, the Republican Party is trying to square a very nettlesome circle. On the one hand, they want to communicate that they care about the immigrant children the Trump administration is ripping away from their families. On the other hand, they want to do as little as possible to actually challenge Trump's policies or effectuate any meaningful change -- especially if it might mean (heaven forbid) some of these kids actually get to stay in the United States and build a safe and productive life here.

The latest bit of rhetoric emerging out of this impossible dynamic is the claim that it is for the children's own good that they are being ripped from their families and locked into cages. Moderate Republican(tm) Susan Collins kicked this off, wailing about how "dangerous" it is for parents try and cross the American border as cover for refusing to join Democratic efforts to end family separation.

More recently, that gambit has been extended to allege that the children in question are actually trafficking victims and that therefore efforts to prevent family separation are the real acts of child abuse. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, for example, tweeted the following today:

Dems' Keep Families Together Act is better called the Child Trafficking Encouragement Act. Show up at border with a minor & call him your child, then you get released into the US! Children will be abducted & sold to drug cartels & slave-traders as a free ticket into US.

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) June 19, 2018

Meanwhile, his Nebraska colleague Ben Sasse took a more circuitous route -- sprinkled with many rhetorical condemnations of the family separation policy -- to arrive mostly at the same place:

This bad new policy is a reaction against a bad old policy. The old policy was “catch-and-release.” Under catch-and-release, if someone made it to the border and claimed asylum (whether true or not, and most of the time it wasn’t true), they were released into the U.S. until a future hearing date....

Catch-and-release – combined with inefficient deportation and other ineffective policies – created a magnet whereby lots of people came to the border who were not actually asylum-seekers. This magnet not only attracted illegal immigrants generally, but also produced an uptick in human trafficking across our border.... 

Human trafficking organizations are not just evil; they’re also often smart. Many quickly learned the “magic words” they needed to say under catch-and-release to guarantee admission into the U.S. Because of this, some of the folks showing up at the border claiming to be families are not actually families. Some are a trafficker with one or more trafficked children. Sometimes border agents can identify this, but many times they aren’t sure. 

Any policy that incentivizes illegal immigration is terrible governance. But even more troubling is that catch-and-release rewarded traffickers, who knew they could easily get their victims to market in the U.S.

Incidentally, "Ben Sasse takes a more circuitous route to arrive at the same place as Tom Cotton" basically describes the Republican Party dynamic on every noteworthy case of Trump administration extremism.

Anyway, first thing to say about the trafficking talking point is that it's basically bogus: DHS statistics indicate that 0.61% of family apprehensions at the border are even alleged to be cases where smugglers have falsely presented a trafficking victim as a family member.

But let's take the tiny minority of trafficking cases at face value. Those kids whom Collins and Cotton and Sasse are so concerned about? They're the ones the Trump administration is putting in cages. One might forget that the immigrant children are supposedly the victims in the GOP story, given how every Republican solution centers around keeping them incarcerated until they can be sent back to their countries of origin (where, remember, they were by stipulation abducted and smuggled across international borders -- so not a great place for them). Much like Syrian children, immigrant children (whether victims of traffickers or not) are good enough for Republicans to imprison, but not good enough to rescue.

It's no accident that the more honest voices of the Trump movement -- the Ann Coulters of the world -- are perfectly explicit in stating that the children are just as much of the enemy as their supposed "traffickers". Nothing the Republican Party has done over the past several years has been remotely consistent with the idea that they actual view immigrant children as valuable human beings whom we have an obligation to treat with respect. The priority is ensuring -- at any cost -- that they do not have the opportunity to build a dignified life for themselves in America. If that means ripping them from their parent's arms, so be it. If they means permanently destroying families, so be it. If that means sending them back to countries where they'll be executed by paramilitary gangs, so be it.

Republicans care a lot about immigrant children. It's a shame that all that care and concern goes mostly into destroying their lives.

The Wasted Potential of Ben Sasse

Last fall, I noted that if there was any hope that Senate Republicans would actually exercise meaningful oversight over the Trump administration, it would almost certainly have to be led by Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE).

Since then, Senator Sasse has talked a good game about being upset by this or that Trump administration action. But in terms of tangible actions, he's done absolutely nothing.

This Slate profile of Sasse says everything I've wanted to say about Sasse and more. It's good not because it's brutal but because it's fair -- it really does recognize that Sasse is in many ways different from other Republicans, and at the same time, it recognizes that "if Nebraskans had elected a cravenly partisan alt-right bozo as their senator in 2014 instead of a genial Ph.D. [Sasse], American public life would be little different today." In terms of actual votes, hearings, procedural practices -- everything but words-of-concern on major media platforms -- Sasse is entirely indistinguishable from a standard-issue Republican flack. That he clearly knows better makes him in many ways worse, not better.

I wonder if the Washington Post or another major media outlet will ever run a story on putatively "moderate" or "reasonable" Republicans' reputations running ahead of their voting record. With a few stray exceptions, after all, a moderate Republican in Congress is one who "talks about voting against Republicans before voting with Republicans."

The Independent Republican Conference

The Independent Democratic Conference is a group of six renegade Democrats who effectively let the GOP control the New York State Senate, despite its nominal Democratic majority.

I do not expect there to be an Independent Republican Conference in the U.S. Senate. It will be a 52-48 Republican majority (barring something truly shocking in Louisiana's runoff) -- a two-seat Democratic gain (pickups in Illinois and New Hampshire).

But what is plausible -- maybe -- is that a cohort of Senate Republicans might be willing to break from the past eight years policy of absolute, resolute, kneejerk party line voting and join with Democrats to insure there will be some actual oversight of the Trump administration.

Who are the likely candidates to take up that mantle?

The leader almost certainly would have to be Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE). He was one of the earliest, most consistent, and most outspoken critics of Trump from within the GOP (here's his column on Trump's victory, tealeaf it yourself). That's one -- not because it's guaranteed, but because if he doesn't take the lead I can't imagine any caucus forming. Who else?

The supposedly moderate Susan Collins (ME) is an obvious possibility, but she's never exactly been renowned for her backbone. It'd be a major change for her to start bucking her party on a regular basis. But if ever there was a time for her to grow an actual spine, it'd be now.

Lindsey Graham (SC) could be a possibility. He's likewise been pretty critical of Trump, and has some personal grudges against Trump's wing of the party. His colleague Tim Scott (SC), as the only Black Republican in the Senate, is a complete wild card on this -- I wouldn't normally slot him in unless Trump goes so avowedly White supremacist that he can't not say something.

John McCain (AZ) ... well, who knows what he's thinking these days. I don't have a lot of faith. Jeff Flake might actually be a more realistic shot from this rapidly purpling state.

Marco Rubio (FL) and Ted Cruz (TX)? Don't make me laugh. Both have raced to snuggle up to Trump after getting blown apart by him in the primaries.

Chuck Grassley (IA), Orrin Hatch (UT), and maybe Pat Roberts (KS) might be old enough to do the whole "elder statesmen" thing. None of them will suffer any repercussions if they don't, though.

Dean Heller (NV) might look at Joe Heck's defeat and feel the need to avoid a similar fate. Or he might think that Heck was undone by his late wince away from Trump.

The Democratic Party is in a routed state right now. It will recover, but it will take time. In the meantime, it'll be up to congressional Republicans to decide if they want to put brakes on Trump or let him run wild. Democrats are, for the short-term at least, out of the equation: the last eight years have shown that a unified Republican majority can completely, utterly, entirely shut out the Democratic minority if they want to.

The ball is in your court, Sasse.