Lawmakers’ quarreling dims hope for DACA
Two Republican senators dispute Democrat’s account of Trump words
WASHINGTON — With the fate of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants in the balance, relations between key GOP and Democratic lawmakers turned poisonous Sunday over disagreement about President Donald Trump’s use of a vulgarity to describe poor countries last week during an Oval Office meeting.
Sens. Tom Cotton, RArk., and David Perdue, R-Ga. — who attended the meeting and previously have said they could not recall whether Trump had referred to “shithole countries” — on Sunday denied outright that Trump had said it. They suggested that a Democrat who publicly confirmed the remarks, Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, could not be trusted.
“This is a gross misrepresentation; it’s not the first time Senator Durbin has done it, and it is not productive to solving the problem we’re having,” Perdue said on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.”
The accusations prompted Democrats to blast the GOP senators for
impugning a colleague’s integrity, while also slamming Trump and his remarks as unabashedly racist.
The only administration official to speak publicly this weekend about the meeting was Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who attended the session. She said in an interview with “Fox News Sunday” that she did not “recall him using that exact phrase” but acknowledged Trump “did use and will continue to use strong language.”
The president, away for a golf weekend at his Mara-Lago resort in Florida, made brief remarks Sunday night addressing the controversy. He again denied using the vulgarity and said “a lot of sticking points” remain in the immigration talks.
“I’m not a racist,” he told reporters. “I’m the least racist person you will ever interview.”
The White House did not dispute the remarks when The Washington Post first reported them Thursday. Trump offered a vague denial in a Friday tweet, and not until Cotton and Perdue spoke Sunday did another participant challenge whether Trump had used the word “shithole.”
Fierce sniping
International reaction to Trump’s comments was strong, and U.S. diplomats in Haiti and other nations have been called to host government offices to hear the complaints directly.
“One of the great things about being president is that you can say whatever you want,” Undersecretary of State Steven Goldstein said in an interview. “We have advised our ambassadors ... to indicate that our commitment to those countries remains strong.”
The developments together stand to undermine bipartisan talks aimed at shielding from deportation immigrants brought illegally to the United States as children, including the roughly 800,000 who secured work permits under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program created under President Barack Obama. Democrats have suggested they could force a government shutdown Saturday unless an agreement protecting those “dreamers” is reached.
Conservative hard-liners who want tighter immigration policies and the proimmigrant and business groups opposing them have long mistrusted one another, but the sniping in recent days has been unusually fierce.
“Both sides now are destroying the setting in which anything meaningful can happen,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a conservative, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
A tentative deal worked out Thursday by a small bipartisan group of senators crumbled in an Oval Office meeting in which, according to multiple people involved, an angry Trump asked why the United States should accept immigrants from “shithole countries” such as Haiti, El Salvador and African nations over those from European countries such as Norway.
In a Sunday morning tweet, Trump declared the immigration talks to be failing: “DACA is probably dead because the Democrats don’t really want it, they just want to talk and take desperately needed money away from our Military.”
Democrats have tied the immigration talks to spending negotiations being held ahead of a shutdown deadline at midnight Friday. Republicans are seeking a military spending increase; Democrats want a DACA deal and a matching increase in nondefense funding.
Durbin, the sole Democrat to attend the Oval Office meeting, told reporters Friday that Trump had used the vulgar word “not just once but repeatedly.” A Republican attendee, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, issued a statement that did not specifically confirm the words used but backed up Durbin’s account.
Durbin attacked
Cotton and Perdue issued a joint statement Friday saying that they did “not recall the President saying these comments specifically.” But Perdue told Stephanopoulos definitively Sunday that Trump did not refer to “shithole” countries: “I’m telling you he did not use that word, George.”
Cotton said much the same in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation”: “I didn’t hear it, and I was sitting no further away from Donald Trump than Dick Durbin was.”
Both senators pointed to a statement Durbin had made in 2013 about comments allegedly made by an unnamed GOP leader during a private White House meeting that were later denied by an Obama administration spokesman. “Senator Durbin has a history of misrepresenting what happens in White House meetings,” Cotton said.
Ben Marter, a Durbin spokesman, tweeted a rebuke early Sunday: “Credibility is something that’s built by being consistently honest over time,” he said. “Senator Durbin has it. Senator Perdue does not. Ask anyone who’s dealt with both.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., forcefully backed Durbin, who has written a bill to grant young illegal immigrants a citizenship path and is the leading Democratic negotiator on the DACA issue.
“To impugn (Durbin’s) integrity is disgraceful,” Schumer said on Twitter.