The enemy of action

It is often said that, when trying to accomplish something difficult, perfect is the enemy of good. In the U.S. Congress, it is becoming increasingly obvious that politics is the enemy of any achievement of at all, and the apparent demise of a Senate compromise on immigration is a vivid example of this assessment.

The Senate deal was struck to break a logjam over aid to Ukraine, which Republicans have refused to support unless meaningful policy changes are put in place to improve controls on immigration at the southern border.

Details of the Senate deal have not been officially released, but news reports have described it as placing strict daily immigration quotas with specific responsibilities for the president to enforce them. Buttressed by insistence from former president and GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump that the deal is a political "gift for Democrats," House Speaker Mike Johnson has declared the bill would be dead on arrival in the House if the Senate passes the compromise as it has been described. He and other conservative Republicans argue that the president already has the authority to impose the restrictions called for in the deal, and that a compromise now would simply hand President Biden a political victory on the cusp of the 2024 presidential campaign - and simultaneously eliminate a key Republican argument in the party's attempt to retake the White House, presumably with Trump at the helm.

This reasoning raises at least two points of concern.

One is the simple irony that congressmen already worried about having relinquished too much legislative authority to the executive branch seem more than happy to hand over to whims of the president the responsibilities for establishing immigration policy. Their political calculus seems to be that it's worth the wait until November when Trump could reascend to the office and impose even stricter immigration policies. This is hardly a new or unfavorable strategy. Sen. Mitch McConnell used it effectively to block a Supreme Court nominee and eventually set the stage for conservative dominance of the court.

But a second aspect of the approach raises even more pervasive and troubling concerns. The nation has been clamoring for meaningful immigration reform for more than two decades, yet Congress has been unable to produce even a minimal response. No one seems to be suggesting that the reported Senate compromise is anything close to the sweeping reform needed in immigration policy, but it certainly offers the prospect of moving in that direction. Derailing it simply out of political hubris offers further evidence of the deterioration of cooperative policy making in Congress, pushing us even further toward legislative ping pong on every issue — immigration, Ukraine and virtually anything else controversial — in which policy is continually imposed and reversed depending on the vicissitudes of party power.

And, of course, it's certainly possible that the Trump/Johnson strategy could backfire with a Biden victory in November, leaving us with no movement whatsover toward reform.

We will always have elections. If policies are to be decided solely according to whether they can weaken one party's political prospects and approve another's, policies will never be established, for anything meaningful will always have that potential.

So, the preemptive opposition to almost any deal on immigration now, even before it has been offered for debate, presents a stark picture of the future legislative potential for Congress. It virtually ensures that politics will always hold sway over action on almost any difficult and controversial issue.