Ted Cruz blames Dems for failed border bill. Who drafted it and what would it have done?

Statements made by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz on Thursday attributing this week’s failed border security bill to his Democratic counterparts and blaming them for its collapse are unfounded, according to political science experts.

“Democrats kept their border bill text secret for four months because of the terrible provisions that don’t fix the border crisis,” Cruz said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “It would have normalized 1.8M illegal aliens per year, taxpayer-funded lawyers for illegals, and immediate work permits. This is why the bill was dead within 24 hours.”

This and other statements he made in a clip of him speaking on Fox News included in the post are untrue and misleading, according political scientists consulted by the Star-Telegram.

The bill would have toughened asylum standards while streamlining the application process, aiming to whittle it down from years to months. It would have also created an “emergency authority” for the federal government to swiftly expel asylum seekers and effectively close the border during periods of high levels of migrant crossings, while providing funding to build more wall and increase technology at the border.

Despite having widespread bipartisan support during negotiations, the bill quickly lost Republican backing after the text was released on Sunday and failed to pass in the Senate on Wednesday.

Who drafted and negotiated border bill?

“There were three principal negotiators,” SMU political science professor Calvin Jillson said in a phone interview.

These were Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, a Republican who was designated by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnel to be the party’s voice in the talks with independent Sen. Kyrstin Sinema of Arizona and Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut.

“Cruz may be trying to be cute by making a distinction between the negotiators and the drafters,” Jillson said.

As is regular practice in the Senate, members of the three senators’ staffs, who are experts in legislative language, likely cooperated to write the 280-page bill.

“My sense is that he’s probably wrong all the way around. It’s not a Democrat bill, and it probably was not drafted exclusively by Democrats,” Jillson said.

TCU political science professor James Riddlesperger echoed Jillson’s analysis, saying that Cruz’s statement was “of course not” true.

“But it’s an election year, and those are the claims that he is going to try to use as leverage for his reelection campaign,” Riddlesperger said.

Cruz was first elected to the Senate in 2012 and was reelected in 2018. He is seeking a third term this year. Texas Democrats will elect a challenger in the upcoming primaries in March.

Was border bill drafted in secret?

Withholding details of a bill during the negotiation phase is standard practice in the legislature, the professors said.

“Probably the details were not completely known, that’s what negotiation is about,” Riddlesperger said.

“Most complex negotiations are in some sense done in secret,” Jillson said, citing the famous back-and-forth that led to the drafting of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, which was done in secret “so that the negotiators could talk about a number of different positions and not be publicly assigned to a position that they would then back off of.”

Even so, the border bill was not one such bill. Senate and executive branch leadership were kept informed during the negotiations, Jillson said.

“Now, if there was a member you would want to keep it secret from it would be Ted Cruz, because all he does is search for cameras to talk to,” he added.

Would border bill have naturalized millions of immigrants?

Nothing in the bill text appears to back up Cruz’s statement that the bill would have “normalized” 1.8 million “illegal aliens” a year. The bill did include a path to naturalization for those with “conditional permanent resident status” granted under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Those eligible for this status would have been considered “to be present in the United States as an alien lawfully admitted to the United States for permanent residence.”

When asked to clarify what the senator meant by “normalize,” a spokesperson for Cruz said, “Making it normal,” in an email exchange.

Jillson called Cruz’s declaration that the bill would have “on its face codified open borders” an election-year slogan on par with the unfounded claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

“Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and others, particularly on the right of the Republican Party in the House and Senate, love the charge of open borders, as if there were no Border Patrol, no barriers, no nothing, and that is not the case,” he said. “Those are bumper sticker slogans that don’t need to be true to be effective.”

Riddlesperger said that “the question of whether borders are open or closed is of course a silly thing to talk about, and it’s been silly from the beginning.”

The U.S.-Mexico border is always going to be open, he said, because Mexico is the United States’ biggest trading partner.

In her email, the Cruz spokesperson repeated many of the claims the senator said on TV earlier in the day, adding that the bill included “pouring billions of dollars into leftist NGOs and sanctuary cities, moving litigation against the Biden administration to liberal D.C. courts, and giving Democrats an excuse to pretend they want to secure the border.”

The bill text allows for information sharing with relevant nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, and allows federal authorities to accept fingerprint cards prepared by such groups, but does not mention providing them with funding. Nor does it mention sanctuary cities.

Sen. Lankford was unavailable for comment, but a spokesperson pointed the Star-Telegram to his statements Wednesday on the Senate floor, where he said claims that the bill would have provided amnesty for people in the country were false.

“In this building and in the 202 area code that is Washington, D.C., border security is a political issue,” he said. “But if we leave the 202 area code, everywhere else in the country this is not a political issue, it’s a national security issue.”

Is border security a political issue for Republicans?

Speaking with NPR on Wednesday, Lankford’s fellow negotiator Sen. Sinema accused Republicans of not actually wanting to make progress on the border security issue.

“It does appear that there are some who were more interested in going on television and complaining about the border than actually voting to secure the border,” she said.

The political scientists who spoke with the Star-Telegram had similar opinions. Riddlesperger called the issue a “political football for the election year” for both parties, with Democrats hoping to “lower the flame on the immigration issue” and Republicans aiming to stoke that fire.

Jillson said that the bill’s failure on the Senate floor revealed the “widespread cowardice in both the House and the Senate,” as legislators who had pushed for a border solution for years suddenly backed away after former President Trump called it a “Death Wish for The Republican Party,” after the text was released.

“The reason that John F. Kennedy’s book ‘Profiles in Courage’ is so brief is that there’s very little courage in politics, and we just saw that again this week,” he said.