Friday on MSNBC’s “Live With Velshi and Ruhle,” when asked about the looming government shutdown, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said President Donald Trump needed to make a decision on DACA and “stick to it.”
Graham said, “I’m not going to vote for a 30-day CR. What the House sent over is unacceptable to me. The CR kills the military. If you don’t believe me, ask General Mattis. 30 days of more chaos, forget it. I appreciate my House colleagues, but we need to grow up and get this done. Four days is too short. I understand where Senator Schumer, is coming from wanting to shorten the time period. I would expect a CR of days, not weeks. We’re inside the ten-yard line on five issues. We need a process to close the deal and can’t do it without the president. ”
He continued, “It’s a proposal. We’ll introduce a bill. We’re not going to get a solution. The Steven Miller approach to immigration has no viability. Tuesday, the president was in a good place. He was the president of all of us. He spoke compassionately about immigration, tough on security, wanted bipartisanship. Two days later, there was a major change. I think the change comes about from people like Mr. Miller. Mr. Miller is well-known in the Senate for having views that are outside the mainstream. 80 percent of the American people want the DACA population to have a pathway to citizenship, and most people want more border security.”
He added, “All I can say is the president’s got to decide what he wants for phase one. If you don’t like Graham-Durbin, fine. It’s a fine proposal. It can be made better. We didn’t write the Bible. We wrote a proposal based on an outline given to us by Kevin McCarthy.”
After being interrupted by a phone call from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Graham said, “You asked me a question, what would the president take. The point I’m trying to make is at 10:00 Thursday morning, he thought this was a pretty good proposal. We could always make it better. Now they’ve taken a hard-edged approach all I can say is we’re not going to end immigration for DACA. The Tom Cotton approach has no viability here. He’s become sort of the Steve King of the Senate. I like Tom, but on immigration, he’s putting something on the table that there’s just no market for in phase one. As soon as the White House understands there’s a bandwidth here for phase one that will include border security and DACA and a few other things, we’ll get a deal.”
He added, “I am not going to vote for 30 days of chaos without any concept of how to bring it to an end. The military is being killed. I’m not going to continue this game with DACA recipients’ lives. A lot of people on my side say what’s the urgency. Put yourself in their shoes. You’re a teacher somewhere. You don’t know if March the 5th you’ll be kicked out of the country that you call home. So this idea we’ve got plenty of time I don’t like that. If you’re one these recipients, you feel like we should have done this yesterday. And 80% of the American people are actually with us. So I’m not going to vote for 30 days, four days is too short. I want to keep the government open. I want to fund the military and do right by the DACA population. We’re inside the 10-yard line. We need a White House that can make the decision and stick to it.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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