If Biden goes beyond signing orders on Dreamers, Cornyn can help score bipartisan win
You’ve got to hand it to President Joe Biden.
While Congress is busy keeping Donald Trump on its agenda with an unprecedented second impeachment, Biden has busied himself issuing a series of executive orders (more than twice as many as his predecessor) aimed at expunging any memory of Trump from the Oval Office.
Several relate to immigration, where some of Trump’s actions — even his most loyal of supporters should concede — deserve erasing.
I get it. But this isn’t Biden’s first rodeo.
While his orders are received with delight by members of his political base, they are not a substitute for the hard work and compromise required for actual bipartisan lawmaking.
While they carry the force of law, they are vulnerable to being overturned when the next administration enters office.
Case in point: Biden’s restoration of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.
Since its inception in 2012, it has shielded about 800,000 immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children from possible deportation and given them opportunities to obtain work permits and temporary legal status.
The program has endured multiple legal challenges (including one from Texas’ own Attorney General Ken Paxton) and existed in a sort of legal limbo under Trump, who was at first surprisingly reticent to undo it.
But DACA was a lightning rod for the Obama administration from the start, more for the manner in which it was initiated than the program itself.
While many Republicans balked at its vehicle, an executive order, some still acknowledge its ultimate good: to help those brought to the U.S. illegally as children who have been raised as Americans and who want to work, attend school and contribute to society
One of those Republicans is Texas’ John Cornyn.
The senior senator has been a vocal supporter of finding a legislative solution for the more than 100,000 “Dreamers” in Texas. (The Migration Policy Institute estimates that the potentially eligible population is twice that.)
Last June, he again called for legislation on Senate floor, lamenting how “the uncertainty about [a “Dreamer’s”] status and what will happen to them is no less terrifying for them than it would be for any of us.”
But 2020, like 2012, wasn’t the right time for a permanent legislative fix.
This year may be.
Perhaps that’s why this week, Cornyn renewed his efforts to pass a federal “DREAM Act” with the help and support of a new coalition of business and higher education organizations, including the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, among others.
The legislative fix they propose would make DACA’s deportation protections permanent, but Cornyn and his coalition want to keep the current focus of the law narrow and specific.
After all, he will face challenge enough in convincing his fellow senators that the benefits of keeping DACA would outweigh the costs, that this immigrant population is willing to work and the most likely group to assimilate into American culture.
Passing a DREAM Act with bipartisan support might even build enough good-will to garner congressional Republicans stronger border security and interior enforcement in return. But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.
Because Biden has a big role to play in this, too.
He entered office with a promise to restore unity and find common ground.
He may have a chance right here.
But executive orders, even when they are expected, do not convey a sense of comity or a willingness to compromise on some of the toughest issues facing our nation.
Biden has a genuine opportunity to work with Cornyn and the rest of Congress on DACA.
He should be glad-handing members of Congress (in a socially distanced way) instead of sitting in the Oval Office with his pen.
