Border Crisis Politics: Show vs. Go

I know that the blog is really about Illinois politics, but I'm going to write about politics in general (or whatever strikes a chord with me!). 

I've been tweeting about House Republican efforts to pass a bill addressing the crisis on the U.S-Mexican border. Speaker Boehner wisely opted to delay the five-week August recess by a day to ensure that his caucus didn't go home empty-handed. Nobody wants to face angry town halls. An even bigger issue would have been handing the President and Congressional Democrats a cudgel with which to beat Republicans over the head for failure to act (even though the Democrat-controlled Senate left town without passing a bill). 

It would have looked pretty bad if Speaker Boehner and Company went wheels up without passing legislation to address the border crisis after recently passing a bill authorizing litigation against the President for acting on policies without Congress!

So House Republicans stayed behind to get the job done and this could benefit them in the run-up to the November election. Vox has a good analysis of the politics involved in the passage of not one, but two bills aimed at addressing the border crisis. Keep in mind that politics is part "show" and part "go." 

Neither of these bills is going to pass. Not only have Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Obama both declared their opposition to them, but the Senate isn't even in Washington anymore — it adjourned Thursday night after failing to get its own border bill through a procedural vote.

But House Republican leadership didn't put these bills up in the hopes they would pass into law. It put them up so that Republican members of Congress can have an easy answer when they go back to their districts during the August recess and constituents ask them what they're doing about the border crisis. It's very important to these members that they have a good, and simple, response — especially one that implies that they showed leadership and took action, and their opponents weren't willing to rise to the challenge. 

In fairness, this is what Senate Democrats would have done, had they managed to pass their own border-funding bill last night. The Democratic bill would have put more money toward judges and long-term care for unaccompanied children, and avoided changes to the law. But it failed on a procedural point of order when no Republicans were willing to join Democrats to pass it. So instead of Democrats having the easy talking point on immigration action, Republicans have it.

That's a pretty dead-on analysis. The passage of these bills was more "show" than "go," but House Republicans may have achieved what they needed in order to politically insulate themselves back home.  

It's about jockeying for position. It's frustrating when problems aren't solved, but this sort of thing happens with increasing frequency when partisan gridlock is prevalent. And, unfortunately, this is how politics works in Washington...and Illinois.