Editorial: House Republicans, listen to the American people on the border crisis and negotiate

Republicans have done a masterful job of forcing Democrats to concede there’s a catastrophe unfolding at this nation’s southern border.

It wasn’t long ago that President Joe Biden showed every sign of ignoring border and immigration reform as matters needing immediate attention in hopes he could push an issue that he well knows sharply divides Democrats past the election. Plenty of progressives believe in something close to open borders and Biden knows that shouting that from the rooftops is a losing call for the party.

So Biden, along with savvy Senate Democrats, came to the table late last year. Negotiations in the Senate have proceeded apace, and there’s real hope that a serious, comprehensive bill could emerge.

This page last month cheered the brightening prospects for a comprehensive immigration bill with input from both Democrats and Republicans, which is the only answer here.

Great news, right? Not so fast. House Republicans already are declaring the Senate product dead on arrival in their chamber, even before the bill is finished.

Speaker Mike Johnson has been among the chief critics of the in-the-works Senate measure; the most conservative among his members are insisting they will support only a measure that passed the House in May on strictly partisan lines. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has said she will call for a vote to oust Johnson if he allows a vote on any deal coupling immigration reform with aid to Ukraine.

That’s no idle threat, of course, since a single member can force such a vote under rules the Republicans approved for this Congress at the insistence of irresponsible members like Greene.

The upshot: It appears as we write today that House Republicans are open to nothing other than the stand-alone immigration bill they’ve already passed. That is a non-starter with Democrats, who control the Senate and the White House. So the House GOP position essentially undermines the concessions the party already has won from Democrats after making the case, albeit with a lack of humanity, that northern “Sanctuary Cities” like ours were ill-prepared to house the huge numbers of migrants familiar to overwhelmed border cities.

In “Catch-22,” Joseph Heller’s classic anti-war novel, pilots could escape having to fly more missions only if they could prove they were insane. But, anyone wanting out of combat by definition was sane, so the rule in practical terms was useless.

So it is with immigration reform. Republicans in border states — notably Texas — have convinced blue-state America that the border is a crisis. With Democrats now seriously seeking solutions, too many Republicans in Washington refuse to address the crisis, at least so long as it’s useful as a campaign issue. The crisis gets worse, and the cycle continues.

The politics of this approach is strikingly cynical, even for this day and age. If the migrant surge is a crisis, then it should be treated as such. The House GOP leadership instead seems pleased to see it worsen, at least judging by its actions rather than its words.

By so doing, they ignore their own constituents. In polling preceding the Iowa caucuses, GOP voters identified the border and immigration as the most important issue facing the country — more so than the economy, which typically tops such polls.

Donald Trump, whose Iowa caucus triumph makes his GOP nomination for president even likelier than it was before, has made impractical mass deportations a key platform of his campaign, employing incendiary rhetoric describing those coming to the U.S. for a better life as “poisoning the blood” of America.

We don’t need to remind our readers that this gambit is terrible news for Chicago, which is struggling to care for more than 15,000 migrants bused here from Texas with no end in sight to the influx and no solution available that does not involve action at the federal level.

That’s not all. Given the House GOP’s insistence on holding desperately needed aid to Ukraine hostage to addressing the border, the ploy threatens to undermine that critical effort. Defeating Vladimir Putin, or at the least keeping Russia at bay, is of vital interest to the U.S.

It used to be that divided government was seen in some quarters as preferable to one-party dominance. That was supposed to yield compromises on vital issues that would slowly but surely result in a more perfect union, to use the words of our founding document.

The House GOP must return to that philosophy, especially on this issue. Otherwise, the result will be that a time-sensitive and critical issue remains unaddressed, the consequences of which are hard to predict but are likely to make this crisis significantly worse.

They’ll have a chance to engage seriously beginning today when Biden is to meet with congressional leaders, including Speaker Johnson.

House Republicans still have time to embrace compromise. If and when the Senate comes up with immigration language that can pass that chamber, House Republicans should come to the table in good faith and forge something that in more reasonable eras would be seen as a victory for their side.

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