Those imagining New England’s congressional delegation as a solid blue wall of lockstep, bleeding-heart liberal votes might want to check last Thursday’s roll call. When it comes to immigration issues, politics can get tricky, even around Boston.
It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, really. The region has, on the one hand, been extremely welcoming to immigrant communities — legal and otherwise. Hartford recently followed New Haven in issuing city IDs to undocumented immigrants; Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza has pledged to fight deportations; Lewiston, Maine has become a sort of national Somali hometown; and, of course, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone, among others, have fiercely defended their city’s large undocumented immigrant populations.
That welcome mat has triggered something of an equal and opposite reaction in those cities and many others. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has toned down his rhetoric since running hard on a promised crackdown on illegal immigrants in 2010, but he still supports much of the same agenda. Maine Governor Paul LePage’s belligerence against immigrants, including asylum seekers, led the Economist last year to dub him “Trumpism in office.” And Trump did particularly well in the 2016 primaries in much of New England, winning by 20 percentage points in New Hampshire, 31 in Massachusetts, 29 in Connecticut, and 39 in Rhode Island.
The U.S. House of Representatives took two votes Thursday on immigration bills, both of which passed on the strength of near-unanimous Republican support. All 20 New England Democrats voted against a “sanctuary cities” bill, but a third of them voted for “Kate’s Law." The first of those bills seeks to force cities to comply with immigration enforcement by allowing the federal government to cut off law enforcement funding to those that refuse. The second adds penalties for convicted criminals who return to the United States after being deported.
The targets of Kate’s Law — named for a San Francisco murder victim — are not exactly a sympathetic group for lawmakers to side with. Still, outside of New England, 90 percent of Democratic House members voted against it.
Steve Lynch and William Keating of Massachusetts voted yes. So did Jim Langevin of Rhode Island, Ann Kuster of New Hampshire, and Elizabeth Esty, John Larson, and Joe Courtney of Connecticut.
In his newsletter to constituents (the “Lunch Bucket Bulletin”), Lynch defended the vote as “a step towards protecting the public from repeat offenders,” though he conceded that it is “a complicated issue.”
Decisions such as that in the House have Republicans hoping to win support for Kate’s Law from some Senate Democrats as well. They’ll need at least eight to overcome the 60-vote hurdle there. There are a few considered likely — Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Joe Donnelly of Indiana — but the New England Democrats of the Senate have given no indication that they are wavering.
There seems to be even less of a chance in the Senate for the sanctuary cities bill.
That measure couldn’t even get a yes vote from Keating, who voted in favor of a similar bill just two years ago.
In a statement, Keating’s office told me that his 2015 vote served to defend against “the precedent that state and local governments could defy federal law” on any matter, not just immigration enforcement.
The new version, however, goes further by threatening to deny all funding related to law enforcement—including Justice Department and Homeland Security grants that cities have come to rely upon in their budgets.
It hasn’t exactly helped that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can’t seem to clearly identify what cities are or are not sanctuary cities.
ICE this year began issuing weekly reports of local and state jurisdictions that were failing to cooperate regarding detainees, or had adopted policies against cooperation. But, as WGBH reported this spring, the list varied substantially from the first report to the next. And, while it included Amherst, Boston, Cambridge, Northampton, and Somerville—along with a few other New England jurisdictions—the list failed to include Brookline, Chelsea, Newton, and others.
Those weren’t the only unexplained inclusions and exclusions on a list that would presumably form the basis of grant denials, if the sanctuary bill becomes law.
The weekly reports ceased two months ago, after just three were published online. “ICE … continues to analyze and refine its reporting methodologies,” the site now says. “While this analysis is ongoing, the publication of [the weekly report] will be temporarily suspended.”
Immigration isn’t the only topic that divides the area’s Democratic lawmakers — they hold a range of opinions on the country’s best path forward against terrorist organizations in the Middle East. Yet they all agree on the need to revisit the 16-year-old Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF)—which suddenly, and surprisingly, jumped back into active debate last week.
A House Appropriations Committee voted to include, with the bill allocating defense spending for the coming fiscal year, a requirement for Congress to debate and vote on a new AUMF for military involvement.
The odds of it happening remain slim; Speaker Paul Ryan quickly deemed the committee’s vote a “mistake” and hinted that the language will be removed by the Rules Committee. The technical reason will be that the Appropriations Committee is not the proper venue for the AUMF to originate.
Worcester congressman Jim McGovern, a strident advocate for repealing the old AUMF (and a Rules Committee member) said that the real reason is that “members of Congress are too chicken.”
This is, nevertheless, the likeliest it’s seemed since—well, since Congress approved the existing AUMF following the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Since then, it has been stretched to cover everything from ISIS to the Syrian government.
“We use that AUMF for Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia,” McGovern said. “I worry that, one, Congress is not living up to its constitutional responsibility, and two, it’s made waging war too easy, without discussion.”
Last year, McGovern and a bipartisan group forced a floor vote on repealing the 2001 AUMF, which would force the crafting of a new one. That vote failed, despite support from all but one of the New England Democrats. That dissenter was Seth Moulton of Salem, Mass., who agrees with the goal of replacing the old AUMF with a new one, but didn’t like the idea of terminating the existing one without a replacement in hand.
That was before Donald Trump took command of the country’s armed forces. Not only are there some who suggest that “Trump is not temperamentally fit to be commander in chief,” as McGovern put it, but others are concerned with reports that the president has essentially outsourced military decisions to the Pentagon.
“That may be the reason members of the Appropriations Committee decided to let this [AUMF amendment] go,” McGovern said. Defying Trump at least unites New England’s Democrats, even if, as with immigration, they disagree on the details.
