IT WAS THE FIRST day of spring, and a giant nor’easter—the fourth in three weeks—had covered Washington with a thick blanket of snow. With schools closed, a throng of sledding children dotted the hulking slope of Capitol Hill, and the streets of the District were mostly empty as federal workers enjoyed a day off and commuters mostly stayed home. But congressional leaders were hard at work putting the finishing touches on the omnibus agreement, a $1.3 trillion spending bill to fund the government through September that was more than 2,200 pages long. It contained massive increases in military and domestic spending and was the product of painstaking negotiations between Democrats and Republicans. What it did not include was any money for the president’s border wall, and conservatives were up in arms, calling it a big-spending betrayal of their agenda. By mid-morning, Trump’s team notified Ryan’s aides that the speaker had better get himself down to the White House. The president is pissed about this bill, they were told, and he’s threatening not to sign it.
It was well after 11 a.m. by the time Ryan’s black Suburban rolled through the White House gates on Wednesday, March 21, but Trump, who often arrived in the Oval Office at midday, had not yet left the residence. The president was seated behind Abraham Lincoln’s large old wooden desk in the Treaty Room, and he was swearing up a storm. Vice President Mike Pence was there, as were Kelly, Nielsen, and Marc Short, the legislative affairs director, and McConnell joined by telephone from the Capitol. They took turns trying to quell Trump’s anger. Ryan noted that the bill actually contained precisely the amount Trump had requested for border security: $1.6 billion. “Well, who the fuck asked for that?” Trump thundered. The figure had been in the president’s own budget submission, someone mumbled quietly, but Trump seemed utterly unaware of it—nor did he care. Trump screamed at Short, who made the case for signing the bill. The president hated the situation in which he found himself, facing an all-or-nothing choice between rejecting the legislation and forcing a shutdown or swallowing what he considered a debacle of a compromise. McConnell, listening to the president’s expletive-filled tirade, said little. When he did speak, he told Trump in his dour, slightly twangy monotone, that it would be disastrous to veto the bill. It simply needs to get done, he said. Ryan told Trump he could understand his frustration; this was no way to handle government spending, and in the future, he promised, Congress would not send him another gigantic take-it-or-leave-it bill. They would pass individual spending bills in turn, Ryan said, and Trump would have another crack at securing more money for the wall. That seemed to satisfy the president. By the end of the session, he was still grumbling, but he seemed willing to accept the measure and live to fight another day on his wall.
But that night, Trump came in for an absolute grilling on Fox News. “This is a president who is being mocked by Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats as well as Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell,” Lou Dobbs told his viewers. “And there’s no other way to put it. He’s being mocked. Five percent on the border wall and he has to eat that?” Laura Ingraham said Trump had allowed himself to be played, and abandoned his principles in the process. “It pains me to say this, but the president is buying a pig in a poke here,” Ingraham said. “He won on calling out the establishment, on naming names—yes, even when it made things uncomfortable. So, I have a question: Where did that Donald Trump go?”
What really stuck in Trump’s craw was a point Mark Meadows had made to him. Chuck Schumer got his tunnel, the North Carolina congressman kept saying, but Trump didn’t get his wall. Meadows was referring to Gateway, a multi-billion-dollar rail tunnel project underneath the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey that had long been a top priority for Schumer, and the subject of intensive haggling on Capitol Hill. Trump saw the project as a means of gaining leverage over the Senate Democratic leader from New York. Following a meeting about it at the White House the previous fall, the president had taken Schumer aside and put it to him this way: If you give me my wall, I’ll give you your tunnel. Schumer had rejected the idea, but Trump never dropped it. If he couldn’t have a big, beautiful wall, Trump figured, Schumer couldn’t have his Gateway. Now he was being told that the Democrat had gotten the better of him. Not only did he have to swallow a giant spending bill he didn’t like, and that his supporters detested, but he was facing humiliation at the hands of Schumer. If he was going to sign this thing, he was at least going to let the world know he was not happy about it.
At 8:55 on that Friday morning, Trump fired off an angry tweet that sent Washington reeling. “I am considering a VETO of the Omnibus Spending Bill based on the fact that the 800,000 plus DACA recipients have been totally abandoned by the Democrats (not even mentioned in Bill) and the BORDER WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not fully funded.”
Ryan placed an emergency call to the White House to try to reason with Trump. You have your facts wrong, Mr. President, and Meadows does, too. There’s no money for Gateway in this bill, the speaker said. Trump was grumpy and unconvinced. For the past twenty-four hours, the Fox News airwaves had been saturated by critics of the bill repeating the mantra: Trump promised a wall, not a tunnel. How could he sign a bill that made him look like a loser? The president was not entirely wrong. While the bill didn’t explicitly provide money for Gateway, it did include $540 million in transportation funding that could be used for the project and others like it, much of which could be accessed without express approval from Trump’s administration. Ryan conveniently omitted any mention of those details, and finally succeeded in persuading Trump that the spending bill did not, in fact, fund Schumer’s beloved tunnel project. As for the wall, Ryan told Trump again, we can come back later in the year and secure additional funding for that. It’s not worth shutting down the government today, he pleaded, when we can take what’s in this bill and fight it out again later. Trump grudgingly said he was willing to sign the bill. Before he hung up, though, Trump had a demand: Don’t tell anyone I’ve agreed to sign it. I want to keep up the drama until the very last second. The reality show had to go on.
Ryan agreed, and hung up, convinced that Trump would not veto the bill. But over the next several hours, Trump made a public show of having second thoughts. Ryan called Jim Mattis, the secretary of defense, and asked him to hurry to the White House and brief Trump on all the military funding that was at stake if he vetoed the bill. All Trump seemed to want to talk about was the prospect of using Pentagon money, rather than the Department of Homeland Security, to build the wall, a prospect that Mattis told him could only be possible if Congress voted to reprogram the funds. Cable news was saturated with “will-he-or-won’t-he” coverage, and White House officials caveated their predictions to reporters with the familiar caution: Nobody really knows what he will do. By midday, Trump decided to end the suspense. White House officials gathered reporters in the Diplomatic Reception Room to hear from Trump, who said he had signed the bill and lamented the “ridiculous situation” in which he found himself.
“There are a lot of things that I’m unhappy about in this bill,” Mr. Trump said. “There are a lot of things that we shouldn’t have had in this bill. But we were, in a sense, forced—if we want to build our military—we were forced to have. There are some things that we should have in the bill.”
Then he issued a warning that foreshadowed future fights. “I will never sign another bill like this again,” Trump said. “I’m not going to do it again.”
The backlash from Trump’s base was swift, and it was vicious.
Amy Kremer, a Tea Party activist who had helped found the group Women for Trump, assailed the president on Twitter, writing “I’m done.” She predicted that Democrats would win the midterm congressional elections in November and said she wouldn’t waste her time trying to prevent it. In a column dripping with snark that sarcastically attributed Trump’s retreat on the wall to “3-D chess,” Ann Coulter called the president “the Worst Negotiator God Ever Created,” and suggested that he add a chapter to his book The Art of the Deal entitled, “How to Give Up Everything in Return for Nothing.” Trump was enraged by the coverage and grasping for ways to show his core supporters that he was still committed to the wall, and willing to do whatever was necessary to build it.
Trump became more insistent about the idea of having the Department of Defense pay for the wall, arguing that he could do so by calling illegal immigration across the border with Mexico a national security issue. Privately, he told aides that he deeply regretted having signed the funding bill. Miller, Kelly, and the rest of the president’s top aides in the West Wing were in a frenzy as they tried to find ways to address Trump’s anger about the border. It was bad enough that the number of migrants crossing into the United States was increasing. But now Trump was watching every day as Fox News tracked the movement of about 1,000 Hondurans heading on foot toward the United States. The pressure to do something—anything—was intense. Every day, Kelly made calls to Hamilton, Nielsen, and others and his message could not have been more clear: “If you’re not spending every waking minute thinking about securing the border, you’re not doing your job,” he told them.
The message came directly from Trump, too. The president had a habit of calling Nielsen many mornings, often well before six thirty as he watched Fox and digested stories clipped from right-wing websites. Frequently, Nielsen, who was not a morning person, would still be asleep when the president called. She would awake to an ominous message from the department’s National Operations Center: “President Calls. Tries to Reach Secretary. Secretary Unreachable.” Often, after seeing images in news reports of the wall along the southern border, Trump would unleash on Nielsen about its design. “Kirstjen, what the fuck are you doing building that ugly, ugly wall?” Trump demanded on more than one occasion. In late March, Nielsen went to Mexico to meet with President Enrique Peña Nieto for trade and security talks. When she returned and went to the White House to brief Trump on the trip, he became even angrier about the caravan, demanding she do something to stop it. Nielsen explained—for the umpteenth time—the way in which immigration and asylum laws worked, that DHS had limited legal means of barring people from streaming north if they were determined to do so. Mexico had bolstered security at its southern border, but there were limits to its ability to control the flow as well, she explained.
Trump lambasted Nielsen for not doing enough to secure the border. There were too many ways for illegal immigrants to flood into the United States, he complained. Why wasn’t she doing more to block them? In a particularly brutal series of calls, Trump berated her for failing to be tougher on the migrants crossing the border illegally in order to send a message to the Central Americans that they shouldn’t even try to come. Nielsen tried to describe the actions her department was already taking to stem the flow of migrants while underscoring the complexities that make the problem difficult to solve. Trump did not want to hear excuses. He yelled at Nielsen to be more aggressive. Trump flew down to Mar-a-Lago for the Easter weekend, with Miller in tow, preoccupied with the caravan and feeling powerless to address it.
Miller had spent the past several months trying to drive home to Trump the importance of toughening the country’s immigration laws—not just building a wall, but fundamentally overhauling the way the United States treated people who sought to enter. The caravan gave him a powerful bit of evidence to press his case in conversations with Trump at his Palm Beach resort. Because of the dysfunctional way in which our laws work, Miller explained to the president, migrants know that if they show up at the border and say certain magic words—that they have been persecuted, are afraid for their life and safety, or otherwise have legitimate reasons to fear returning to their home country—American immigration agents have to allow them in as asylum seekers with a “credible fear,” and can only hold them for a short period of time before releasing them into the interior to await adjudication of their claims. It was known as “catch and release,” and it made a mockery of any attempt at real enforcement. What was even worse, a more than two-decade-old court-ordered consent decree known as the Flores settlement placed a twenty-day limit on the time that children could be held in immigration detention, essentially guaranteeing that any parent of a minor child could not be held for longer than that unless the two were to be separated. The machinations over potentially codifying DACA, Miller argued to Trump, had made the situation even worse. Migrants had received the message, via smugglers who had a financial interest in stoking the rumor mill, that the United States was about to issue a mass amnesty and were therefore streaming north in the hopes of arriving in time to take advantage.
Trump was incensed by what he heard, even if he did not follow all the details. He spent Easter Sunday morning watching Fox and rage-tweeting about the migrants. “These big flows of people are all trying to take advantage of DACA,” the president tweeted, misinterpreting what Miller had told him “They want in on the act!” He threatened to rip up the NAFTA trade deal if Mexico did not do more to stop migrants from getting near the United States, punctuating his message with, “NEED WALL!”
“Border Patrol Agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the Border because of ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release. Getting more dangerous. ‘Caravans’ coming,” Trump wrote. “NO MORE DACA DEAL!”
By the time he returned to Washington, Trump was on the warpath, and his aides scrambled to translate his tweets into something resembling policy. In a meeting chaired by Bossert, the homeland security adviser, in one of the small secure rooms off the main Situation Room, Sessions made a radical suggestion: they should simply ignore Flores and start holding families for longer periods of time. Let the judge come after us, the attorney general told the others in the room, including Nielsen, Andy McCabe, the acting FBI director, and Don McGahn. The comment drew a tart response from McGahn, who seemed unable to believe that Sessions was proposing violating a consent decree. This wasn’t some lower-court ruling that could be challenged and potentially overturned; these were a judge’s direct orders, McGahn said as the conversation became heated. There were other ways to attack Flores, the White House counsel argued—they could promulgate a regulation or send Congress legislation—but they couldn’t just pretend it didn’t exist.
But Trump wanted a quick fix. Even when the president wandered out to the South Lawn of the White House to make the traditional presidential appearance at the Easter Egg Roll, he did not let go of the issue. Surrounded by young children making drawings to send to American service members stationed overseas, Trump responded to a reporter’s shouted question about the Dreamers, saying that Democrats had “really let them down,” and that, “now, people are taking advantage of DACA.” That afternoon, Miller rushed to put together a conference call to answer the many questions the president had raised with his comments and tweets. Did the president actually think that the caravan was full of people trying to get DACA protections? Was he going to tear up NAFTA? When he blasted out, “ACT CONGRESS,” what exactly was Trump asking them to do?
During the call, three senior administration officials outlined an elaborate package of immigration legislation they said Trump planned to push in the weeks to come. It would make it more difficult to apply for or be granted asylum in the United States, strip protections for children arriving illegally without their parents, so they could be turned back at the border or quickly removed. It would overturn Flores and allow families to be detained for longer periods while they awaited decisions from immigration authorities about their fate. In other words, it looked a lot like the list of demands Miller had produced as trade-offs for legalizing the Dreamers. Only now, Trump seemed to be suggesting that he was no longer willing to help the Dreamers. One aide told reporters on the call what Miller had told Trump over the weekend, that the debate in Congress over granting legal status to the Dreamers—which he called a “generous immigration benefit”—had created a “major pull factor” for new waves of illegal immigrants.
The next day, during a meeting with the leaders of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Trump surprised his staff and his cabinet with a declaration. “We are preparing for the military to secure our border between Mexico and the United States,” the president said, with Jim Mattis, the defense secretary, seated next to him. If Congress wouldn’t fund his wall and Nielsen wouldn’t do what was necessary to block migrants from entering the country, Trump thought, he was still the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world. He could use American troops to do what nobody else seemed to be willing to. Mattis was taken aback, although his dour expression betrayed no emotion. Under a late-nineteenth-century law known as the Posse Comitatus Act, much of the military was barred from performing domestic law enforcement duties, such as policing a border, and the principle had long been seen as sacrosanct. Beyond that, administration officials knew it was a horrible idea to amass troops at the southwestern border with a close ally, Mexico, whose cooperation they badly needed. All it would take would be an innocent blunder or misunderstanding and American troops could be engaged in hostilities with the Mexican military. Trump might have been willing to publicly dangle the idea of trashing NAFTA and closing the border, but his advisers knew that would be disastrous, too.
After the Baltic leaders left, Trump convened a meeting with Mattis, Sessions, Nielsen, Kelly, and General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to figure out what to do. Mattis made it crystal clear to Trump: he could not support sending active-duty troops to police the border, but if Trump wanted to send the National Guard to support immigration agents at the border, as other presidents before him had done, that would be acceptable. Don McGahn, the White House counsel, sprang into action to explore the legal dimensions of what Trump was asking for. The president had the authority to defend the border—there was no question about that—but he had to comply with international and domestic laws. In the space of a few hours, McGahn made himself an expert on the use of American troops to handle domestic crises, reaching all the way back to the late eighteenth century to analyze Trump’s options.
In a briefing for the president in the Oval Office, McGahn pulled out centuries-old statutes and read from them verbatim, going all the way back to Thomas Jefferson’s use of the Navy to deal with the Barbary pirates in 1802, and George Washington’s putting down the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, when the nation’s first president used the military to quell an insurrection over a tax on whiskey that had been imposed to help pay off the government debt incurred during the Revolutionary War. A president’s powers under the Insurrection Act are quite broad, McGahn told Trump, and they essentially provided a carve-out from Posse Comitatus. President George H. W. Bush had invoked the law in 1992 to deploy the military to restore order during the Los Angeles riots. That didn’t mean it was a great idea, and the authority had never been used to deal with immigration, but if his advisers couldn’t come up with a better idea, McGahn said, this avenue was available to Trump. By nightfall, the White House had massaged Trump’s impromptu pronouncement into an actual policy: the president would be working with governors to send guardsmen to the border to assist DHS officials. But since Trump had sprung the announcement on his administration, officials could not say how many troops would go, or when. When reporters pressed the Pentagon for more details, it was clear that Mattis was not interested in owning this particular policy. Call the White House, they were told.
In early April, during a visit to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where he was supposed to be touting the $1.5 trillion tax cut, Trump found himself distracted. Sitting on an elevated stage in a crowded auditorium adorned with standard royal blue pipe-and-drape and American flags typical of a presidential visit, Trump focused on his remarks for all of a few minutes, dutifully reciting his talking points. “America is open for business,” he declared, flanked by local elected officials and West Virginians who had been invited to speak about what the tax cut had meant to them and their families. But soon, the president tired of his talking points, and delivered a lengthy rant against immigrants and the country’s immigration laws, in which Trump accused Democrats of pushing tax policies because they wanted immigrant votes.
“We’re toughening up at the border,” Trump said. “We cannot let people enter our country—we have no idea who they are, what they do, where they came from. We don’t know if they’re murderers, if they’re killers, if they’re MS-13. We’re throwing them out by the hundreds.”
Going off-script clearly thrilled the president. “This was going to be my remarks,” he told the audience, waving a sheet of paper in the air, “but what the hell? That would have been a little boring.” He tossed the paper into the audience and told them he would rather riff. “I’m reading off the first paragraph, I said, ‘This is boring.’ Come on. We have to tell it like it is.”
Flying back to Washington on Air Force One a short time later, Trump visited the cramped press cabin at the back of the plane and told the reporters traveling with him that there would be somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 National Guardsmen deployed to the border. The president asked members of the press pool what they had thought of his off-message performance. Met with silence, Trump answered his own question: “Thought it was really great,” he said.
The last thing Republican leaders wanted to do was make another run at fixing DACA. But throughout the spring, a group of moderates who had been pressing for action on the issue began ratcheting up their demands for a vote. Jeff Denham of California and Carlos Curbelo of Florida, whose districts had voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, were leaders of the effort, but they were hardly the only Republicans to defy their leaders. One by one, more moderates added their names to the discharge petition, the list of lawmakers demanding a floor vote on a bipartisan bill to protect the Dreamers, and with each passing day, they moved closer to having enough signatures to force action.
Republican leaders considered this possibility disastrous. If the bipartisan bill reached the floor, they knew, it would easily win the support of the vast majority of Democrats and enough centrists in their party to pass the House, producing a humiliating result and dividing the party as it braced for midterm elections that could cost Republicans control of the chamber. There was only one way to stop that from happening, Ryan and McCarthy agreed: they had to come up with their own Republican alternative, a compromise that melded what the moderates wanted with what conservatives were insisting on, something that their members could be for without handing Nancy Pelosi control of the floor. The White House was initially cool to the idea. This was the speaker’s problem—a “floor management issue”—not Trump’s, they said. Miller was sick of trying to cut a DACA deal that was clearly not coming together. Short, the legislative affairs director, assumed Republicans would lose the House in the fall and the issue would remain unaddressed, giving Trump and Republicans an issue to run on in 2020.
But Ryan knew there was no avoiding a DACA vote; his moderates, who were toiling to hold their seats in districts where more moderate voters held sway, would not allow it. With the White House mostly on the sidelines, Ryan’s staff began an intensive behind-the-scenes effort to mediate a compromise. The talks were exhaustive and often emotional. At one point, Ryan’s staff asked the White House for a list of the top ten enforcement measures they wanted in exchange for legal status for the Dreamers; when the moderates agreed to accept all ten, members of the Freedom Caucus still said they couldn’t sign on to a deal. After weeks of negotiations, the negotiators came up with a measure they believed reflected a fragile kind of consensus among Republicans, and something that Trump could sign. Miller even called members of the restrictionist groups to ask them to support it—or at least not try to kill the deal.
But Trump’s ambivalence was palpable. Days before the scheduled votes, Trump strode out on the White House driveway for an interview with Steve Doocy of Fox News and distanced himself from the compromise bill. “I certainly wouldn’t sign the more moderate one,” he said, suggesting that he preferred a different, more conservative version instead. After a day of confusion and mixed signals, White House aides insisted that he had misspoken, and he really did back the bill. But privately, they acknowledged the reality: Trump did not want to be on the record enthusiastically endorsing something that might not pass—particularly a measure that could be tarred by his core supporters as “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.
A few days later, the president went to Capitol Hill to offer his personal reassurance to Republican lawmakers who were deeply nervous about backing the compromise that they would have political cover from him for voting yes. They were desperate for Trump to explicitly bless the compromise, to sell lawmakers on the Ryan-engineered DACA measure, and to make it clear he wanted Republicans to vote for it. He would thank lawmakers who had worked tirelessly in the backroom negotiations—both the moderates and conservatives—for sticking with a difficult process and coming up with a consensus. He even had a list of people to name-check. But when Trump got up to speak in the basement conference room under the Capitol Crypt on Tuesday evening, June 19, he didn’t do any of that.
“I’m with you 1,000 percent!” Trump told the roomful of Republican lawmakers. The problem was, nobody knew what he meant. Trump gave a meandering stump speech touting his own success as president and boasting of his popularity, resurrecting his campaign-trail hyperbole to drive home his point. He could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support, the president said. He flitted from topic to topic, from his trade war with China to his great relationship with Kim Jong-un. He regaled the group with a lengthy yarn—one of Trump’s favorites—claiming that he had single-handedly negotiated down the price of the F-35 fighter jet. In true Trumpian style, the president teased and attacked members of his audience with varying degrees of cruelty. He drew laughs for a wisecrack about Trey Gowdy’s hair and more chuckles when he mused aloud about whose idea a DACA-for-wall deal had been. When the members reminded him it was Mario Diaz-Balart, Trump quipped, “I like him more than his brother.” (Diaz-Balart’s brother José was a journalist.) There were muted boos from rank-and-file Republicans when Trump singled out Mark Sanford, who had just lost his primary to a Trump-friendly opponent, and called the vanquished congressman a “nasty guy.” The president remembered to thank conservative members of the Freedom Caucus—Louie Gohmert of Texas, Meadows, and Ohio’s Jim Jordan—and praised them for defending him in the face of the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. But then Trump was off on a tangent about the “Russia hoax” and how his adversaries were grasping for ways to bring him down. He never got around to thanking the moderates whose political careers were on the line.
As he treated the Republicans to his stream-of-consciousness narration, the president touched on immigration only glancingly. He slammed the Democrats, saying they only wanted more immigrants because they wanted more voters for themselves. I’m with you all the way, Trump told the Republicans. He paused to recall the first time he had addressed them as a group, and said he had thought to himself, “Who are these people?” Now, the president said, I know these people. And with that, he walked out, applause echoing behind him.
It was hardly the heartfelt presidential pitch Republican leaders had been hoping for. This was the worst performance they’d ever seen from Trump, some of them said. Republican leaders begged White House officials to clarify the president’s position after he left. He had never actually said he supported the leadership’s DACA bill, they said. But no clarification came. This was the very scenario Republican leaders had tried to avoid. They feared they were in for a replay of the disaster they had lived through the year before with their ill-fated effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Trump had never made clear which bill he supported, and after the House finally muscled one through and he held a ceremony in the Rose Garden hailing the measure, he turned around and pronounced it “mean,” yanking the political cover they needed. Now, staring down a politically risky DACA vote, Ryan’s staff asked White House officials to issue a formal policy statement declaring that Trump would sign the compromise measure. There was one drafted, they were told, but it was never sent out.
The day before the June 27 vote, Trump invited undecided lawmakers to the White House for lunch in the Cabinet Room, where Republican leaders hoped he would make the hard sell he had failed to deliver a few days before in the Capitol. Trump sat in the middle of the large wooden conference table, flanked by lawmakers, with Kelly, Short, and Nielsen joining him for the session. As the discussion unfolded, lawmakers worried aloud about how a vote to legalize DACA recipients would play in their districts, complaining that the issue was politically perilous and could cost them reelection. That’s okay, Trump kept telling them. You don’t have to vote for it. It was the opposite of the message a president is supposed to transmit on the eve of a difficult vote.
Later, Ryan’s staff got word from the White House that Trump planned to tweet something “nice” about the DACA bill in a last-ditch effort to get Republicans to vote yes. They sent back word to the White House: Tell him not to bother. They had already done their informal nose-count, and they knew it wasn’t going to pass. A presidential tweet would be too little, too late. Trump tried it anyway, blasting out an all-caps endorsement of the “STRONG BUT FAIR IMMIGRATION BILL.”
It failed spectacularly, 121–301, with Republicans almost evenly split and Democrats unanimously voting no.