It’s a logical place to start, and for once, a practical one.
One of the challenges of any new presidential administration is deciding what should lead the legislative agenda. Nothing dissipates faster than the momentum and legislative mandate that accompanies a strong election victory. This is especially true of second-term presidencies, as Trump’s is in spite of the Biden interregnum. George W. Bush attempted Social Security reform, failed at it, then turned to immigration and failed at that, too — while seeing a good deal of focus during the crucial early months of his second term diverted by the Terri Schiavo controversy. Barack Obama, riding high on hubris and driven by the emotional moment after the Newtown shooting, wasted his own second-term legislative window on a losing battle for gun control.
There’s a bunch of things Donald Trump and Republicans will want to do over the next two years. Many are outside of the regular legislative process: executive actions, confirmations, tax and budget bills. But with what looks like a modest House majority and 53 Senators, Republicans will be in a position to pass bills through the House that can pass the Senate if and only if there is Democratic support. The most obvious big-ticket issue on which that may now actually be possible is immigration. The Biden approach to immigration is completely dead — you can’t find anybody in the Democratic Party who now both acknowledges and defends how the Biden-Harris administration approached border security in 2021-23. It is universally recognized, at least implicitly, to have been a massive, unforced political error. Even Kamala Harris ran on promising to secure the border and pretending that Republicans in Congress, not the administration, were responsible for the administration’s policies. Democrats across the country ran ads pledging to get tough on the border and even openly embracing Trump on the issue. Where I live on Long Island, Laura Gillen flipped New York’s fourth district from Anthony D’Esposito, and Tom Suozzi was reelected in the third district, won by George Santos in 2022; both of them focused almost entirely on getting tough on the border in any ad that wasn’t purely negative. Elissa Slotkin was especially vigorous in embracing Trump immigration policies in her Senate campaign. And all of them, even those who defended the Biden-Harris position by blaming Trump for blocking the bipartisan Lankford bill in the spring, ran on the importance of working across the aisle on the issue.
The huge swing of Hispanic voters toward Trump also shattered the Beltway consensus that partisan division over immigration would keep those voters from giving Republicans a look, and that Republicans are the ones who needed to compromise on the issue to avoid incensing Latinos.
In 2017, the Democratic base wouldn’t tolerate Democrats collaborating with Trump or acknowledging the legitimacy of his presidency. With a second term and what looks like a popular majority or something close to it for Trump and for House Republicans, that mood will likely be in remission — however briefly. And given how they campaigned, many Democrats may be happy to shore up their bipartisan credibility on the border before reverting to unified opposition on nearly everything else. That could make Slotkin, Tammy Baldwin, Jacky Rosen, and Ruben Gallego all gettable votes on an immigration bill, as well as some of the other six Democratic senators in states Trump won (Mark Kelly, Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, Gary Peters, John Fetterman, and Catherine Cortez Masto), perhaps New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján, and maybe some others not so obviously on the radar — including Democrats with national ambitions.
As National Review editorialized in February, the Lankford bill was “the best bipartisan immigration bill we’ve seen out of Washington, D.C., in decades,” but still fatally flawed because “it’s not going to compel Joe Biden to do anything he doesn’t want to and further entrenches a system that has been fundamentally distorted by mass bogus asylum claims.” The bill’s positive provisions thus provide an already-agreed starting point for negotiations, while Trump replacing Biden reduces the Democrats’ incentives to demand broad executive discretion. Democrats are sure to try to drive a bargain that will soften the blow of the second Trump administration’s rightward shift on the border, and perhaps demand stronger protections against, say, family separations. But these should not be insuperable barriers to getting a deal done from a position of Republican strength. The fact that Trump will already have expansive tools to reverse course through executive enforcement at the same time as negotiations on a new bill should keep the fire lit on Democrats to come to the table. It’s a logical place to start, and for once, a practical one.