“His heart is right on this issue; I think he’s got a good understanding of what will sell, and every time we have a proposal, it is only yanked back by staff members,” Mr. Graham told reporters on Capitol Hill on Sunday. “As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we are going nowhere. He’s been an outlier for years.”
Mr. Miller, 32, has been the ideological architect behind much of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda and a tart-tongued and unapologetic true believer in the president’s “America First” approach to the issue. A former aide to Attorney General Jeff Sessions when he was in the Senate, he cut his teeth on Capitol Hill as a lonely gladiator against bipartisan efforts to overhaul the immigration system and provide a pathway to citizenship for roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants.
The president was urged for a second day to step back from the fray, and for a second day he vented to aides that he wanted to do more to get involved.
Yet when Mr. Trump has become engaged, he has sometimes created problems for himself and his party.
When Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said she wanted a “clean DACA bill,” Mr. Trump quickly agreed, only to have Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority leader, pipe up to explain that meant accepting a stand-alone bill to legalize a group of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, without any security measures or other conditions the president had cited as priorities.
During a closed portion of that meeting, Mr. Trump snapped at staff members for handing out a sheet of paper he had not seen before that included an elaborate plan for border security.
“The president looked at it and said: ‘Who did this? This is way too much. I didn’t approve this,’” Mr. Graham said on Sunday.
At that same session, he added, Mr. Trump had talked about a request of $18 billion for border security, and said he could build a wall for less.
“So what does the White House staff do a couple days later? They pitch a proposal for $33 billion,” Mr. Graham said. “That’s just not credible.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/21/...column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Mr. Miller, 32, has been the ideological architect behind much of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda and a tart-tongued and unapologetic true believer in the president’s “America First” approach to the issue. A former aide to Attorney General Jeff Sessions when he was in the Senate, he cut his teeth on Capitol Hill as a lonely gladiator against bipartisan efforts to overhaul the immigration system and provide a pathway to citizenship for roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants.
The president was urged for a second day to step back from the fray, and for a second day he vented to aides that he wanted to do more to get involved.
Yet when Mr. Trump has become engaged, he has sometimes created problems for himself and his party.
When Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said she wanted a “clean DACA bill,” Mr. Trump quickly agreed, only to have Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority leader, pipe up to explain that meant accepting a stand-alone bill to legalize a group of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, without any security measures or other conditions the president had cited as priorities.
During a closed portion of that meeting, Mr. Trump snapped at staff members for handing out a sheet of paper he had not seen before that included an elaborate plan for border security.
“The president looked at it and said: ‘Who did this? This is way too much. I didn’t approve this,’” Mr. Graham said on Sunday.
At that same session, he added, Mr. Trump had talked about a request of $18 billion for border security, and said he could build a wall for less.
“So what does the White House staff do a couple days later? They pitch a proposal for $33 billion,” Mr. Graham said. “That’s just not credible.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/21/...column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
