Holding out hope for Congress to do a border deal

The best thing that happened Tuesday in Washington was not in President Donald Trump’s nearly hour-and-a-half State of the Union address but in signals that Congress could soon reach a deal on border security.

The bright spot came in remarks from Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell to reporters that negotiators were focused first on finding common ground between them “and then we’ll hope that the president finds it worth signing.”

It has been a huge frustration for weeks — especially during the record 35-day government shutdown — that Mcconnell would consider only proposals Trump would sign.

That was a wrongheaded stance that effectively rendered Senate Republicans powerless to reach agreement with the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.

The only deal Trump has indicated he would sign is one that gives him $5.7 billion toward construction of more miles of physical barrier between the U.S. and Mexico, and House Democrats have firmly rejected that demand.

The stalemate produced the shutdown from Dec. 22 to Jan. 25, and another closure of federal business looms if Congress cannot compromise on border security before Feb. 16, when temporary government funding expires.

Mcconnell is right to give budget negotiators more latitude without making their task impossible with Trump approval as a prerequisite, and we hope he continues this path.

Ironically, the president himself apparently sparked the Senate leader’s resolve to break the impasse; Trump’s own continuing threat to bypass Congress and declare a national emergency to fund a border barrier irked Mcconnell.

Now, with the president challenging Congress in his Tuesday night speech to “reject the politics of revenge, resistance and retribution,” the question may soon become how much of that plea Trump is willing to model.

We start with the assumption, based firmly on his first two years in office, that most of Trump’s assertions are built on sand and that whatever he says today can be undone by tomorrow’s tweets. Further, the president typically does not hold himself to standards he demands of others.

So when the president implored Tuesday’s joint session of Congress to choose greatness over gridlock, results over resistance, vision over vengeance and incredible progress over pointless destruction, we did not take it as a pledge that he will give up the kind of vengeful, destructive resistance on his part that led to the previous shutdown.

True to formula for State of the Union speeches, Trump did offer glimpses of greatness by citing aspirations to eliminate AIDS in 10 years, fight childhood cancer, lower costs for health care and prescription drugs, empower women with economic opportunities in developing countries, rebuild crumbling infrastructure and enact fairer trade agreements.

But he also followed his trademark pattern of creating chaos in order to ride to the rescue, such as when he claimed unabashedly that but for his election, “we would right now, in my opinion, be in a major war with North Korea.”

Just as the president challenged Congress to choose greatness, we urge him to do the same. He can start by forgoing divisive name-calling, upholding American values of law tempered with compassion and listening to reason on border security that is more personnel and technology than steel and concertina wire.