crystal clear on what he wants and he s to the wavered. what lindsey graham and senator durbin offered to the president was to say, here, we ve narrowed it down to the four areas, when they came over to the white house and presented them they were woefully insufficient inside the four arrows. we narrowed down the broader debate into a smaller one. well feel like we re making progress on the overall discussion and we think we ll get to a solution. what befuddles us is we re not going to pay millions of our troops serving around the world and we re not going to pay the border agents until what, we don t know what it is we re asking for. they said give us a shorter cr. tonight senate republicans are going to vote for a three-week cr and democrats are unwilling to give up the vote to keep the government open. one of the issues that democrats have they just don t believe that the oral promise they get from the president will be fulfilled because every time they think they have one, somebo
about that base than thinking about the middle. well, all i know is that we did a reprogram after the 14 election and we have doubled down on the mistakes we agree in 12-13. excuse me. look, for the republican party, the president had already tested daca. the base seemed to be okay with it. now that things have changed to the point where this bill passiones apasses and it should, democrats are going to take all the credit and we re taking none. stupid politics. the second part that makes us stupid is the fact that no one in our party is saying, look, i m not for this bill but i ve got a lot of empathy for these million families. look, i can see why somebody would not have would not be for this policy. i don t understand it, but i can respect it. but there is no empathy. when i saw the secretary of homeland security in front of the senate saying she never met a dreamer and yet she s going to deport a million people, break up all these families, where is
do you think democrats in the senate would have us buy-in on this, would draw this line in the sand without that kind of activity? let s remember what this is about. this is about the dreamer population, more than 700,000 kids who came here through no fault of their own and basically have grown up as americans and are contributing to our country. democrats have been for fixing that problem for a long time, former president decades. most republicans have been, too. that s why it s an 80-plus supported issue. i think everybody understands, and i don t think anybody around this table would disagree, that if the compromise were put on the floor of the house and the senate, they would both pass that bill. drawing a line in the sand to get that done is not just a base exercise, it s the right thing to do. what does it do to those red state democrats? they voted the way they wanted to. is that healthy for them to be referred to as wafflers by fellow democrats? in some of those state
you re jerking me around. right. so that s the part that i think is not working and maybe he s not so deeply involved at the moment because his particular talents don t apply here. you know, al, i was talking to some republicans on the hill, and they do believe that if this were the straight-up merits of this, that they have got the winning hand here. democrats, they are negotiating over the window of negotiating daca, but they are they know the wild card here is the president, that he could blink. well, listen. i think this is such an easy putt i m just perplexed by why it doesn t happen. it s a winning hand for the president. allow him to continue the momentum he built after the passage of tax reform so a winning hand for the democrats because they showed that they got the republicans for the first time to agree on immigration reform that helped innocent people, a million people so why didn t they make this deal and why didn t they agree to the proposal that president schum
let us not turn immigrants into criminals. let us not deport the d.r.e.a.m.ers. all right. what deal will you take to reopen the government? obviously i think you guys accept the idea that you can t actually vote on the daca bill as part of reopening the government. obviously it s my understanding you ll accept reopening the government as long as there s a separate commitment to vote on daca but give me what you ll accept. there s two possibilities. one is that the president steps up as he said in the january 1th meeting and says i embrace the following approach to dealing with daca and the d.r.e.a.mers. congress has met the challenge and here s what i ll stand by and we can include it and pass it quickly. the alternative is to have competing ideas. senator cotton and i have dramatically different ideas, competing ideas on the floor of the senate and then, this is critical, and then are brought up in the house. remember when we passed comprehensive immigration reform in the senate