WITH DEADLINE LOOMING, MCCONNELL’S PLAN FOR DREAMER DEBATE STILL UNCLEAR EVEN TO GOP

File Photo : Mitch McConnell’s

Just a week away from a promised timeline to bring up a sweeping immigration debate on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is privately giving no indication how the battle over Dreamers will even begin.

Senior Senate Republicans close to McConnell, as well as top GOP aides, say the majority leader yet to sketch out his immigration strategy to his leadership circle. How the floor debate begins is a crucial decision facing the Kentucky Republican, particularly as the White House and conservative senators lobby him to bring up the administration’s plan that goes too far for most Democrats and is unsatisfactory to a swath of congressional Republicans.

“I don’t know,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas said Monday when asked what kind of bill McConnell plans to bring to the bill as the base measure. “That’s Sen. McConnell’s decision to make, and I don’t know.”

Cornyn supports the White House framework on enshrining protections of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program into law and said the Senate will vote on it “at some point.”

“I think we need to vote on the various ideas that were proposed. That’s what I infer when he talks about a fair and open process,” Cornyn said. But still he cautioned: “Sen. McConnell hasn’t announced his intention."

To help dig the Senate out of a three-day shutdown last month, McConnell pledged to tee up an open floor process on legislation protecting so-called Dreamers so as long as the government stayed open.

In the two weeks since that promise, a group of the No. 2 leaders in each chamber who were deputized to strike a deal have gone nowhere. And now, Congress is staring down yet another government funding deal with its immigration dilemma still unresolved.

Complicating matters further for McConnell, the majority leader is facing competing pressures internally from Republicans on even what bill he should use to start the Dreamer debate next week.

White House legislative director Marc Short, who visited Capitol Hill on Monday for a meeting with McConnell and other top officials, said the administration was advocating that the White House framework serve as the starting-off point for a floor debate.

“The only thing that has the chance to pass is the basic framework that the president’s laid out. It makes an awful lot of sense,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said Monday. “I would hope we start out with a pretty reasonable bill that way that could potentially pass the House.”

Yet other Senate Republicans, especially those in a growing group of senators trying to craft a compromise immigration framework, say the starting point for a floor debate needs to be as impartial of a plan as possible — a bare-bones measure dealing with the legal status of Dreamers and border security.

“What we want is something which is neutral, so that people can add and subtract from it,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said. Asked what “neutral” means, Rounds responded: “That’s the multibillion-dollar question. Perhaps the trillion-dollar question.”

The White House framework “can’t be the beginning because [Democrats would say] that’s not neutral, that’s the White House’s point of view,” Rounds added.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who proposed a minimal border security and Dreamer legislation earlier Monday with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), backed up Rounds’ argument.

“I think if he put on the floor as the base bill the Cotton-Perdue bill I think all of us would be surprised,” Coons said, referring to legislation from two conservative senators that dramatically restricts legal immigration. “I think if he put on the floor as the base bill the clean Dream Act, I think all of us would be surprised. I’m expecting something in between.”

South Dakota Sen. John Thune, another top McConnell deputy, also said as for a base bill, it was “hard to say at this point.”

“There’s so many different verson of bills out there,” Thune said. “We’ve got Graham-Durbin, Tillis-Lankford, Perdue and Cotton, the president’s bill. There’s a whole bunch of them out there.”

SOURCE: Politico