The votes are in — and the bipartisan immigration proposal that had the best chance of passing has failed.
Senate immigration vote count: The bipartisan DACA deal just failed
No compromise managed to get 60 supporters.
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Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
On Thursday afternoon, a compromise proposal written by Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) and Angus King (I-ME), went down to defeat in the Senate, with 54 votes in favor and 45 against. 60 votes were necessary for the amendment to be approved — so it fell six votes short.
Eight Republicans — Sens. Rounds, Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Cory Gardner (R-CO), Lamar Alexander (R-TN), and Johnny Isakson (R-GA) — joined most Democrats to vote in favor of the proposal. All the other Republicans present voted no.
Three Democrats — Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), and Tom Udall (D-NM) — also voted no, apparently due to concerns that the Rounds deal conceded too much to President Trump on funding of the border wall and other immigration enforcement measures.
Earlier in the afternoon, a simpler proposal — the McCain-Coons amendment, which would have given DREAMers a path to citizenship without making other major immigration changes — also failed, by a vote of 52 to 47. Almost all Democrats and four Republicans voted for that, and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and the rest of the Republicans present voted no.
A more conservative proposal written by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and backed by the White House, then failed by an even wider margin — with only 39 votes in favor, and 60 against.
The failure of the Rounds compromise, then, scuttles what seemed to be the best chance of getting a deal for the DREAMers through the Senate this week.
Now, even if it had passed, it would have faced enormous obstacles going forward. President Trump tweeted that the proposal would be “a total catastrophe,” and the White House threatened to veto it. Furthermore, Speaker Paul Ryan has said the House of Representatives won’t take up an immigration bill unless Trump says he supports it.
The nearer-term problem, though, was that even some Senate Republicans who’d shown some inklings of moderation on immigration — like Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Dean Heller (R-NV), Bob Corker (R-TN), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and John Hoeven (R-ND) — ended up opposing Rounds’s deal.
Now, three Democrats defected too. But they waited until the amendment’s failure was certain before announcing their votes. It seems probable that, if three more Republicans had backed the measure, those three Democrats would have voted for it as well.
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