There are two major pieces of bipartisan legislation in Congress right now and House Republicans are reacting to them in strikingly disparate ways. The first, a bipartisan measure to cut taxes, has won over sweeping support from conservatives and is poised to sail through Congress. The second, a bipartisan plan to reduce the inflow of migrants, is meeting a massive wall of resistance.
Why are Republicans so willing to deal on taxes and so unwilling to deal on immigration? The answer is that the Republican Party has an informal division between issues that are intended to build political capital and those that are intended to spend political capital.
Immigration is a political capital-building issue. Republicans use it as a wedge against Democrats to win elections. If Biden were to sign a tough border bill, it would reduce the efficacy of the immigration message. They would rather blame the border problem on Biden than let him take credit for helping to solve it.
Taxes are a political capital-spender. Republicans want to do certain things when they win power and the highest item on that list is always cutting taxes for affluent people. That is an unpopular position among voters, but Republicans are willing to accept some pain in order to achieve a policy goal they consider vital.
Once you understand the difference, the choices Republicans have made on the two bills make perfect sense. It certainly isn’t the case that the tax bill is just a better deal for Republicans than the immigration bill. Just the opposite, in fact. The tax deal Republicans are embracing is an actual compromise, with give and take for both sides. Democrats are getting an expansion of the child tax credit, which benefits working-class families, and Republicans are getting tax cuts for businesses.
The immigration deal, by contrast, has no give-and-take. It’s a pure enforcement bill, with none of the traditional protections for Dreamers or increases in legal skilled immigration that liberals have traditionally demanded in return.
Republicans claim they reject the immigration deal because toughening laws and beefing up enforcement staff won’t make a difference, and only presidential authority can change things. But none of them believe this.
Donald Trump and his allies insisted during the Trump presidency that Congress had to act to change immigration law. (“The only long-term solution to the crisis, and the only way to ensure the endurance of our nation as a sovereign country, is for Congress to overcome open-borders obstruction,” said Trump in 2018, one of many times he said similar things). And they were right: While Trump did take a lot of executive action to reduce immigration, the overwhelming majority of his actions (33 of 35) were reversed in court.
They are back to insisting executive actions, and only executive actions, can end the migrant surge. But if Trump is back in office, they will revert to demanding Congress change the law. It’s just a constant bait-and-switch technique to keep the issue alive, passing the blame to Congress when they hold the presidency and passing it back to the president when they don’t.
Remember, it was during the Trump years that Fox News devoted obsessive attention to the caravans in the run-up to the midterm elections. If Trump had genuinely closed the border, the caravans would not have been a threat. But they wanted the threat to exist to give people a reason to vote Republican, so that Republicans can get in office and pass another regressive tax cut.
Republicans think explicitly in terms of building and spending political capital. When Republicans gained seats during the 2002 elections by running on the terrorism threat (classic political capital-builder), Dick Cheney famously insisted on using the newfound clout to pass a regressive tax cut, saying, “We won the midterms. This is our due.” And when Bush won reelection two years later by emphasizing the dangers of same-sex marriage (political capital-builder), he immediately ignored the issue and attempted to privatize Social Security.
The flip side is that, because Republicans care so deeply about regressive tax cuts, they become uncharacteristically reasonable when negotiating for them. Bill Clinton got the Children’s Health Insurance Program created by trading a capital-gains tax cut for it. Barack Obama got permanent extensions of tax credits for low-income people by locking in tax cuts for the top rate. Biden is now making the same trade.
Democrats have spent more than a decade trying to cut immigrations deals, but they always fall apart. Republicans simply don’t care, or at least don’t care enough, about the issue to settle for incremental policy gains the way they do on taxes. They demand total victory and blame Democrats when it fails to arrive.
It is common for critics to call the congressional Republicans “nihilists.” But the truth is that they really do care about something. It’s just not the thing they say they care about.
