Collapse of Border Bill Proves Need for Electoral Reform
The debacle is confirmation that the primary (meaning "main") problem is the primary (meaning "partisan preliminary election") problem.
It seems hard to overstate the significance of this week’s stunning failure of the Senate’s compromise immigration reform bill. For months, Senators Lankford for Republicans, Murphy for Democrats, and Sinema, now an independent with a track record of bipartisan success, have been working on a proposal aimed at addressing what’s widely recognized as a crisis at the border. The compromise leans heavily in the Republican direction, as a Wall Street Journal editorial observed, because Democrats were willing to trade away their views on immigration policy in exchange for aid to Ukraine—a deal that Republicans themselves proposed as a condition of agreeing to Ukraine aid. Remember the Republican talking point about the need to fix America’s border first, before protecting European borders from Vladimir Putin?
Yet within 24 hours of the text of the compromise finally becoming available, the deal utterly collapsed. And not just in the GOP-controlled House, where Speaker “MAGA Mike” Johnson declared it “dead on arrival,” but also in the Senate itself, where Lankford’s fellow Republicans—including Mitch McConnell, who had sent him on this negotiating mission—pulled the rug out from under him. “Gobsmacked” is how another senator put it (as quoted in the New York Times): “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
It’s irrefutable what caused this 180-reversal: Trump. He didn’t want Biden getting credit for signing a bipartisan immigration bill. So, he told congressional Republicans to kill the bill that they had demanded all along, and they obeyed his orders.
But what’s important here is why congressional Republicans felt obligated to kowtow to Trump’s demands: it’s the fear of being primaried. As a Washington Post story put it, GOP officeholders know their fate if Trump decides to oppose their reelection. The story quotes a leading Trump operative as saying about a Republican member of Congress from Virginia: “Bob Good won’t be electable when we get done with him.”
It's not just House members. It’s senators as well. The Post story goes on to say, “Trump’s endorsements in 2022 Senate races were decisive in multiple contested primaries,” and as a result incumbent GOP senators “would prefer to avoid his wrath.” Hence, they capitulated to Trump on the compromise border bill just as much as House Republicans did. Indeed, The Hill reported Senator Murphy angrily denouncing Senate Republicans as “indistinguishable” from their House co-partisans in “car[ing] only about former President Trump.”
Thus, if anyone needed any more proof about the urgent necessity of electoral reform, especially to eliminate partisan primaries, the failure of the border bill is it. To be sure, immigration is a notoriously difficult issue, and Trump is a uniquely pernicious force in American politics. But the compromise bill was undoubtedly in the national interest, was within reach of being adopted, and clearly would have been adopted if congressional Republicans didn’t live in fear of being primaried.
This last factor is most crucial. Just imagine if members of Congress, both House and Senate, were elected in a system that involved some version of the nonpartisan primary that Alaska and California use: Alaska to send four candidates to the general election, where Ranked Choice Voting is used to elect the winner; and California to send two candidates to the general election, with a simple choice between the two of them. The members of Congress elected that way would be more disposed to compromise and find achievable solutions. But even more importantly, the members could be confident that they would make it to the general election ballot without punishment for defying Trump from his MAGA-loyal primary voters.
Thus, even if the members of Congress were exactly the same as the ones in office today (in other words, products of the existing defective system), if nonpartisan primaries had been put in place for this year’s election, one can be reasonably confident that the compromise bill would have passed—at least in the Senate.
It is of course too late to change the system for this year’s election. But don’t forget the lesson of this debacle. Assuming that the nation survives this year’s elections, the primary order of business afterwards should be to eliminate partisan primaries.