Texas Senator John Cornyn’s immigration plan is simple: Deliver the White House a plan identical to its stated demands.
Cornyn, tapped by his colleagues to lead Republicans in the negotiations over Dreamers and a border wall, is working hard to give Trump what he wants. The senator has been meeting multiple times a day with White House officials, and urging colleagues to rally around a bill that largely matches the president’s outlines.
Cornyn could face a bigger challenge selling Trump’s plan back home in Texas, where 38 percent of the population is Hispanic. Cornyn has long worked to court their support, and sought to craft immigration plans in the past that wouldn’t isolate Latinos from his party.
A January Gallup Poll found the president’s overall approval there in the negative — 39 percent approval to 54 percent disapproval.
"The president is a central element in a solution," said Cornyn, a 15-year Senate veteran who has seen plenty of immigration deals die at the hands of his own party, “His endorsement of an approach… is the only way that you’re going to see sufficient political cover given for people across the spectrum to vote for a bill."
But the ultimate plan, which Congress has yet to craft, is sure to look different from the ones Cornyn has sought to negotiate in the past.
Congress and the White House Tuesday were swirling with ideas, meetings and finger-pointing over immigration. Trump wants an immigration blueprint approved, and said if no agreement is reached, “We’ll do a shutdown.”
The government could endure another partial shutdown after Thursday if no funding plan is approved. But Senate Democratic and Republican leaders were eying a compromise that would deal with spending for the next two years, and the Senate is likely to consider immigration ideas on the floor later this month.
Trump is calling for major changes to the existing legal immigration system, as well as an ill-defined border wall that Texas Republicans are still trying to accept. He wants those measures in exchange for protections for the nearly 700,000 beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, who could be deported if no deal is reached.
He’s also said a deal could include a path to citizenship for DACA recipients and other young immigrants brought into the country illegally as children – something a majority of Republicans in Congress wouldn’t have agreed to in past negotiations.
It’s a different approach from the immigration deals Cornyn has sought in the past to secure Texas’s border without alienating the state’s Hispanic voters, who chose him over his Democratic opponent in his 2014 re-election race.
But Cornyn, one of his party’s most seasoned immigration negotiators, says giving Trump what he wants is the only way the GOP will reach the immigration deal they’ve failed many times to achieve.
Though Trump once said he would sign almost any deal Congress passed, he’s already rejected several proposals with support from both parties. On Monday he dismissed a plan crafted by GOP Reps. Will Hurd, R-Texas, and Jeff Denham, R-Calif., with more than 50 Republican and Democratic co-sponsors, in a single tweet.
Faced with a 2018 Senate map that usually runs through Democratic territory, Republicans in Washington feel they need to deliver on the president’s agenda. They hope to pick up seats in some of the 10 states that voted for Trump in 2016 and have Democratic-held Senate seats up this year.
“President Trump’s approval rating at the national level is one thing, but his approval rating in these individual states where these senators are running for re-election is another,” Cornyn said.
The same Gallup poll that showed Trump underwater in Texas found him at 61 percent approval and 35 percent disapproval rating in West Virginia, where incumbent Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., faces re-election.
With an eye on that map, Cornyn, who twice led the Senate’s GOP campaign committee, has shown little daylight from Trump when it comes to immigration.
Last year he quickly went to work crafting a border security plan with Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, hoping for a plan that would satisfy the president’s demands for a wall. That proposal, unveiled in August, could be paired with a DACA solution to help the president make good on a major campaign promise, Cornyn said the next month, after Trump announced plans to end the program.
By early January, Cornyn was still waiting for the White House to provide senators with a list of border security requirements that he would accept in exchange for a DACA solution.
That lack of direction from the White House drew an unusual rebuke from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who said that month that lawmakers were just “spinning [their] wheels” waiting for the president to “figure out what he is for.” Cornyn, for his part, took a much milder approach to the same question, suggesting Republicans were “looking to the president” for guidance.
Cornyn isn’t up for re-election in Texas until 2020.
He’s already facing plenty of push-back from the left on DACA. Immigrants’ rights groups lobbied at his Houston office on his birthday last week. The Texas AFL-CIO plans to meet with his Austin office Wednesday to push him on DACA.
Asked how he squares Trump’s plan with the needs of Texas, Cornyn pointed to a recent letter from League of United Latin American Citizens President Roger Rocha that called it a “reasonable framework on immigration and border security.” Rocha has been the target of intense criticism for that letter.
Cornyn called it an “ extraordinary statement by the president of the largest and oldest civil rights organization in the country and one that reflects the view of many people of Hispanic origin in this country.”
Andrea Drusch: 202-383-6056, @AndreaDrusch
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