I wrote today for Politico about the immigration negotiations:

After the experience of the past two weeks, it’s not White House adviser Stephen Miller and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton who should be expelled from immigration negotiations, but Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham.
The Illinois Democrat and South Carolina Republican teamed up for a comically inadequate immigration proposal that prompted President Donald Trump’s “shithole” blowup and then Chuck Schumer’s shutdown overreach.
The Durbin-Graham offer was advertised as a bipartisan compromise, which it was — among a group of six Republican and Democratic senators who broadly agree on immigration. Only in Washington would this be hailed as a major breakthrough and the statesman-like way forward.
To his credit, Graham long ago concluded that Trump isn’t going anywhere and it makes sense to try to have more influence over him, rather than less. His mistake was attempting to assimilate Trump into an elite consensus on immigration that the president ran straight into the teeth of, and won.