How Republicans Can ‘Raise’ Their Midterm Hopes

I n an essay for August’s issue of the magazine, Yuval Levin argues that the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress are at risk of significant losses in November’s midterm elections not because the president “is uniquely unpopular, or even because its prospects in the midterms are unusually grave,” but because Republicans in Washington are “adrift” when it comes to policy. While the administration has been aggressive in advancing the president’s signature policies, the GOP’s narrow congressional majorities, Levin observes, have been far less effective in codifying those executive actions into legislation.

I disagree with the idea that Trump’s use of executive actions represents a deliberate choice “not to govern through the structure of our system of government.” Still, it is true that Republicans are struggling with voters. Given Congress’s demonstrated inability to legislate, why should conservatives turn out to reelect their Republican congressman? Why does the GOP deserve two more years in control of the House of Representatives and the Senate?

The president’s top strategists believe that minimizing congressional losses will hinge on the perception that however deep the GOP’s unpopularity, Democrats are faring worse on key issues. But an authentic election-year recalibration requires more than playing up Democrats’ extreme and dangerous policy ideas. The GOP is the incumbent party, and even sympathetic voters will want to know what a Republican Congress will do with two more years of power.

Recognition of the need to present an affirmative policy agenda — what Republicans stand for and will do, not simply what they will prevent from happening — is what has led the White House and conservatives in Congress to push in recent months for the SAVE America Act, a far-reaching elections bill to crack down on voter fraud and illegal voting, as well as a third budget reconciliation package that could include everything from election-security provisions and cuts to government waste to more military and immigration-enforcement funding. But the SAVE Act has stalled, and the third reconciliation bill’s prospects are at best uncertain. Republicans risk leaving their base frustrated and unenthusiastic about turning out in November.

As the days tick down to November 3, the GOP desperately needs to reset the political narrative. They can do so by announcing that a Republican-controlled 120^th Congress will resurrect and pass the RAISE Act.

First introduced in 2017 by Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) and then-Senator David Perdue (R., Ga.) and endorsed by Trump, the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment Act was conservatives’ most ambitious attempt in several decades to rein in America’s out-of-control immigration system. Far from a performative messaging bill, the RAISE Act is packed with sound policy, including provisions to cap annual refugee admissions at 50,000, to abolish the disastrous green-card lottery (also known as the diversity visa), to eliminate avenues of chain migration by largely restricting family-based visa sponsorship to nuclear family members, and to transform America’s employment-based visa system into a merit-based process under a points-based rubric.

As a practical matter, the RAISE Act would reduce immigration to the United States to more sensible levels and close most pathways to enter the country for low-skilled immigrants and others who are likely to be net drains on the economy. At the time of its original proposal, projections indicated that the RAISE Act would have cut immigration by 50 percent over ten years.

The RAISE Act never received a vote in the Senate and has remained dormant, save for a brief and unsuccessful reintroduction in 2019. But events of the past decade have only underscored the RAISE Act’s importance. After the historic explosion in immigration to the United States triggered by the Biden administration’s open-borders policies, the Trump administration was determined to bring immigration back under control: From his first days back in office, Trump acted quickly to end nearly all new illegal immigration to the United States, block further renewals of Temporary Protected Status (which had become all but permanent for more than 1 million supposedly temporary residents in the U.S.), overhaul America’s refugee program, and initiate mass deportations of immigrants illegally in our country.

But the president’s actions were taken unilaterally, via executive orders and other executive-branch policy changes. Besides the praiseworthy Laken Riley Act, which requires the federal government to detain illegal immigrants accused of certain crimes, this Congress has taken no action to reform federal immigration law. A future Democratic president would immediately reverse Trump’s restoration of sanity to America’s immigration system.

If Joe Biden could import, according to estimates by the Center for Immigration Studies, approximately 12 million immigrants into the country over four years, one shudders to imagine how much America would be damaged by an administration that champions an end to all deportations, the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, amnesty for illegal immigrants, and massive increases to legal immigration — all of which are positions likely to be espoused by any serious 2028 Democratic presidential contender.

The RAISE Act would make it significantly more difficult for a future progressive administration to enact such a radical agenda. The refugee admissions cap, for example, would bar by statute a president from unilaterally admitting hundreds of thousands, or millions, of refugees. The abolition of the diversity visa and especially the restriction of family-based visas would permanently eliminate crucial tools that the left has deployed to thrust mass immigration onto Americans.

To be sure, the RAISE Act would face significant hurdles to enactment, including from centrist elements within the Republican Party (just as it did in 2017). The left would be apoplectic, as it was nine years ago. But a pledge by the president and his allies to push for a new version of the RAISE Act if Americans entrust Republicans with two more years of unified government would represent a much-needed rallying cry for a party and movement on the defensive.

Knowledge that at stake is legislative permanence for much of the president’s immigration agenda would, for large swaths of the MAGA base and other conservative-minded but disillusioned voters, instantly energize Republican midterm campaigning. Revisiting the RAISE Act would speak to the concerns of voters already sympathetic to the administration’s position on immigration, promising tangible results if only they turn out to vote once more.

There is little discernible downside, and plenty of potential upside, for Republicans to bring back the RAISE Act. Doing so would blunt criticisms that a Republican-controlled Congress is devoid of policy ideas and would do nothing with two more years; it would also motivate pro-Trump conservatives to get out and vote to reelect a congressman or senator of whom they might not otherwise be the biggest fans.