The Do-Nothing Party
James Lankford tried to secure the border. The party of Trump shanked him.
OVER THE LAST DECADE, as the Republican party has hardened into a cult, it has sidelined or purged a series of principled conservatives. Sen. Mitt Romney, who stood alone among Republicans when he voted to convict Donald Trump at his first impeachment trial, has since announced his retirement. Rep. Liz Cheney, who served as chair of the House Republican Conference in 2019 and 2020, was expelled from that job in 2021 and voted out of Congress a year later for defending the Constitution against Trump’s coup attempt. Of the ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in January 2021, only two remain in office.
Now another Republican lawmaker, Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, is being ostracized and censured. Unlike Romney and Cheney, Lankford voted twice to acquit Trump and has endorsed Trump for president again. But in today’s GOP—a party whose national committee has merged with Trump’s family and is on course to become a fund for his legal bills—that’s no longer enough. Lankford has committed what is now a censurable offense within the party: trying to solve, through conservative policies, a crisis that Trump wants to preserve for political advantage.
LAST FALL, REPUBLICANS REFUSED to send aid to Ukraine until Democrats agreed to tighten control of the U.S.-Mexico border. Lankford was assigned to work out a deal. In February, he emerged with a bill that would restrict asylum, end catch-and-release, double deportation flights, hire more Border Patrol agents, build more border fencing, buy equipment to detect fentanyl, and shut down all admission of migrants—even those who would qualify for asylum—when the system was overwhelmed. The deal was so stacked with Republican priorities that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell advised his colleagues to grab it, since they wouldn’t get a better package even if they controlled the whole government.
There was just one problem: If the bill were to pass, and if the border chaos were to subside as a result, that would be bad for Trump politically. He wanted to keep the crisis going so he could continue to claim that the only way to fix it was to elect him. So Trump told Republicans to kill the bill. “A Border Deal now would be another Gift to the Radical Left Democrats,” he warned on Truth Social in late January. “If you want to have a really Secure Border, your ONLY HOPE is to vote for TRUMP2024!”
Trump’s attack on the bill presented Republicans with a choice: Were they serious about the border? Did they really want to legislate and solve problems? Did they believe in conservative policies? Or were they just a vehicle for empowering Trump?
They chose Trump. On February 4, minutes after Lankford posted the text of his bill—which filled 280 pages, plus another 90 pages of funding provisions—Republican lawmakers began to denounce it. At 9:38 p.m. that night, less than three hours after the bill was released, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced, “I’ve seen enough. . . . If this bill reaches the House, it will be dead on arrival.” The next day, the entire House GOP leadership declared: “Any consideration of this Senate bill in its current form is a waste of time. It is DEAD on arrival in the House. We encourage the U.S. Senate to reject it.”
And that’s what Republican senators did. Forty-four of them voted against cloture, blocking the bill from advancing to the House. Republicans concocted various lies—claiming, for instance, that the bill “would effectively endorse the Biden ‘catch and release’ policy,” when in reality it would do the opposite. But their real goal was to help Trump by thwarting any non-Trump solution to the crisis. With the bill out of the way, said Sen. John Barrasso, the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, “Americans will turn to the upcoming election to end the border crisis.”
Lankford tried to rebut the lies. When CNN’s Jake Tapper quoted what the House GOP leadership had said in its statement about the bill, Lankford replied: “None of that is actually true.” He detailed the restrictions in the bill, from asylum application limits to ankle monitors to criminal record checks. He said he’d be happy to consider other ideas, too. All he asked from his Republican colleagues was that they allow the bill to proceed to debate. They refused.
Lankford marveled at their insincerity. He noted that Johnson and others had dismissed the bill without taking the time to read it. He pointed out that Trump and many conservatives in Congress, having previously insisted that asylum laws had to be changed, were now pretending that no such changes were necessary. Trump was “running for president,” so “a chaotic border is helpful to him,” Lankford observed. On Fox News, the senator asked: “Are we as Republicans going to have press conferences and complain the border’s bad—and then intentionally leave it open?”
ON FEBRUARY 7, LANKFORD spoke for nearly half an hour on the Senate floor. He explained why any president, including Trump, would need changes in law—starting with the provisions in Lankford’s bill—to control the border. But controlling the border didn’t seem to be what other Republicans had in mind. Some, according to Lankford, had told him that 2024 was “the wrong time to solve the problem” or that it should be left instead to “the presidential election.” He added that four weeks earlier,
a popular commentator . . . before they knew any of the contents of the bill . . . told me flat out: “If you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year, I will do whatever I can to destroy you, because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election.”
To his party, Lankford posed a simple question: Did Republicans care more about grandstanding or governing? He ended his speech by holding up his Senate pen:
This is the pen that I was handed at that desk when I was sworn in to the United States Senate. And I signed a book that was at that desk with this pen, because I was becoming a United States senator, because the people at home sent me here to get stuff done and to solve problems. There is no reason for me to have this pen if we are just going to do press conferences. I can do press conferences from anywhere. But we can only make law from this room.
Half an hour after that speech—and a day after staging press conferences to decry chaos at the border—Senate Republicans voted to bury Lankford’s bill.
ALL OF THIS LEAVES LANKFORD in an awkward position. He’s a border hawk. On this issue, as on many others, he supports Trump’s executive actions, not Biden’s. But when it comes to passing laws, it’s Biden, not Trump, who’s willing to act now to alleviate the problem.
Last week, in his State of the Union address, Biden saluted Lankford’s bill. The president noted that the bill would hire thousands of border security agents, asylum officers, and immigration judges and that it would authorize the president to “shut down the border” when the flow made normal procedures unmanageable. As Biden recited these facts, Johnson sat behind him, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. But Lankford, captured on camera, nodded at the president’s words and said, “That’s true.”
On Sunday, in two national TV interviews, Lankford stood by what he had said during the speech. On CNN, he explained that as Biden recited the facts of the bill,
I could hear some of my colleagues around me saying, “None of that’s true.” And I was actually listening to the president and said, “No, that part is actually true.” It would have hired all of those additional agents. It would have expedited the process. It would have also changed the asylum standard, so we can [process applicants] much faster.
On Fox News, Lankford said of his Republican colleagues: “What I was hearing around me when President Biden was talking was this false narrative” that the bill “lets 5,000 people in a day before it does anything. That’s completely false. . . . So yes, I said out loud, ‘That’s true.’ Because [what] President Biden was saying was true.”
NONE OF THIS HAS ENDEARED Lankford to his party. A day after the senator released his bill, Trump tried to renounce him. In an interview, Trump warned that the bill would help Democrats in the election, predicted that it would hurt Lankford’s career, and denied—falsely—that he had endorsed Lankford for re-election. Then, last Saturday—two days after Lankford admitted that Biden was telling the truth about his bill—the Oklahoma County Republican Party, which represents Republicans in the Oklahoma City metro area, censured the senator.
The GOP’s betrayal of Lankford marks a new stage of its degeneration. The party isn’t just shunning members who try to hold Trump accountable, as Romney did, or excommunicating those who defend the Constitution, as Cheney did. It’s attacking a lawmaker for trying to do the most basic part of his job: solving a problem. Lankford thought the party’s mission was to enact conservative policies and help people. He has learned, in the bitterest way, that he was wrong.