Carnes: Compromise now a four-letter word
Richard Carnes Follow
It has been more than 40 years since President Ronald Reagan and Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill quite literally set the bar for political compromise, marginalizing the extremists of their respective parties to lead the country toward its greatest economic expansion in history.
In 2024 we now find ourselves stuck in a never-ending zero-sum game where one side of the political coin can only win if the other side loses, regardless of the condition of the metaphorical coin or the reality of it having only a single side.
This complete lack of ability to compromise is the Golden Ratio of political greed, the Fibonacci sequence of fecklessness, the petulance of Phi, in other words just flat-out selfishly dumb and provides zero benefit to the American people both sides are elected to represent.
There’s an old cowboy saying that “A job doesn’t get done when it’s started with a promise and finished with an alibi,” but that’s exactly what we’re witnessing at the moment as the Biden administration has finally opened its eyes, seeing the reality of a much-needed compromise in order for the nation to move forward on our ridiculously complicated border situation.
The tangible issues are national security (bad people coming to do bad things) and economic (job losses for American citizens and providing social services to undocumented immigrants), yet all either side seems to actually care about is political posturing for the next election season, which brings us to this week’s nonsense where the GOP-led Congress is all but refusing to even consider a bipartisan Senate deal to drastically alter current immigration laws, something GOP members have been demanding for years.
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But why, you hopefully ask, would Republicans down an opportunity to get what they’ve been demanding?
It’s simple, really, in that it is the minority MAGA GOP members refusing to compromise because their cult leader is demanding fealty to him as opposed to the country, much less their own party.
The idea of even daring to consider making a deal would indeed compromise what Trump sees as his single biggest issue to use as leverage against his opponent next November — and that’s it in a nutshell.
Trump only cares about himself, and his ever-so-fragile ego will never allow him to put the country first, regardless of the detriment to the American people he pretends to want to represent.
The Senate has proposed toughening asylum protocols, bolstering border enforcement with more personnel and high-tech systems and deterring migrants from making the journey in the first place. And to be clear, “open borders” is a MAGA cult-fueled fantasy, as the United States has the most secure and heavily restricted and regulated border in the Western Hemisphere, yet Republicans are trying desperately to hang their hat on a crisis issue leading up to November.
Of the hundreds of thousands being arrested, assessed and requesting asylum, the vast majority are refused asylum and deported, with around 60,000 accepted in 2023.
Back in the 90s, it was over 100,000 each year.
President Joe Biden cannot make laws about the border — that’s the job of Congress, and as we watch larger and larger pockets of the world continue to deteriorate, whether due to dictators, war, famine, climate change, etc., the problem of people wanting to escape to America will continue to be a double-edge sword of nationalistic pride one day and demanding jingoism the next, meaning the issue will never go away as long as we continue to be the most prosperous nation on the planet that the poor, huddled masses yearn to come to.
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A willingness to compromise is a sign of political maturity, and if the adults in Congress can control their children, positive changes can be made to our border, and they can finally return to focusing on Hunter’s laptop.
Richard Carnes, of Avon, writes weekly. He can be reached at poor@vail.net.
