It was late Thursday afternoon in the marble chambers of the Senate, and a small group of negotiators — one Republican, one Democrat and one independent — had nearly completed a laborious border security compromise that took them months to craft.
But what should have been a triumphant moment felt more like a test for the lone Republican of the trio.
“I feel like the guy standing in the middle of the field in a storm, holding up the metal stick,” Sen. James Lankford, the Oklahoma Republican who was his party’s chief broker on the deal, told reporters last week.
The plight of Mr. Lankford, a lean, reserved Baptist minister with neatly coiffed red hair and a baritone voice that regularly cracks off-the-cuff jokes, reflects the dramatic rise and fall of the border-Ukraine deal that is expected to collapse in a test vote in Senate on Wednesday — and the GOP political forces that brought it down.
For months, Mr. Lankford, a staunch conservative, had been working on the package with Senators Christopher S. Murphy, D-Connecticut, and Kyrsten Sinema, Independent, Arizona, demanding tough immigration policies that his party insisted must to be part of any bill for dispatch. a new infusion of aid to Ukraine. But when Mr. Lankford managed to pull them off, he found his fellow Republicans reluctant to embrace the plan, in a vivid illustration of how the political ground for any compromise on immigration has disappeared for a party that has decided the issue is too precious. . political weapon for resolution.
Mr. Lankford, who previously ran the nation’s largest Christian youth camp and has often spoken about how his faith guides his political positions, was left to pick up the pieces, a process he dryly likened on Tuesday to a bus — and then bring it back up over him.
The mild-mannered Republican, who generally avoids seeking the political spotlight, did not offer to lead the border negotiations when they began in the fall. Sen. Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, filled in for him as the top Republican on the Senate border security subcommittee. Or, as Mr. Lankford put it, he drew “the short straw when it came time to be able to negotiate all of this.”
His Republican colleagues warned him to be careful.
“I told him he would be like a goalie in a dartboard weeks ago,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who supported the talks but came out this week against the bill. “He knew this was a treacherous path, but I have nothing but praise for Senator Lankford. I think he did the best job you could do under the circumstances. It’s just a very, very, very difficult, complicated situation.”
Just as Mr. Lankford and his fellow negotiators were closing in on a deal, former President Donald J. Trump intervened, killing the bill both before and after it was released on Sunday and opening the floodgates to Republican resistance. That left Mr. Lankford scrambling to keep the deal alive while under attack from members of his own party, including in his home state, where the Republican Party sought to criticize him late last month for “playing fast and loose with the Democrats on our border policy.” (The resolution was later rescinded.)
Mr. Lankford said he was just the latest in a long line of lawmakers burned by failed efforts to push a bipartisan deal on immigration.
“This only happens every decade or so — to try to work on border security — because it’s so controversial and it takes people a decade to forget what happened to these people,” he said Monday, “and in the process, to to be able to take the risk again.”
The bill he helped write would impose the most significant border restrictions Congress has considered in decades, including measures to raise the bar for asylum applications, expand detention capacity and close the border if more than 5,000 migrants a day attempt to cross. pass in a week, or more than 8,500 try to pass every day. It reflects a paradigm shift in how Congress has considered modern immigration and border policy, with no reference to legalization pathways for undocumented immigrants currently in the country, previously a plank of any immigration policy the U.S. could negotiate. Democrats.
Still, Republicans have rejected the plan, with the hard right calling it too weak and more mainstream members, including Mr. McConnell, saying they are simply bowing to the political reality that it has no way through Congress.
The irony is not lost on Mr. Lankford.
Republicans “actually locked arms together and said, ‘We’re not going to give you money for this. We want a change in the law,” Mr. Lankford said on “Fox News Sunday” late last month. “Now it’s interesting, a few months later – when we finally get to the end – they say, ‘Oh, I’m just kidding.’ Actually, I don’t want a change in the law, because it’s a presidential election year.”
Democrats and Republicans alike see Mr. Lankford as serious, policy-focused, reliable and staunchly conservative.
“I decided to do it because James was going to be my partner,” said Mr. Murphy, who spent countless hours in a Capitol room with Mr. Lankford going over the details of the package. “He comes into politics out of a desire to bring about change, not because he loves the rigors of political life. On some level, it’s a bit retrograde. That probably creates some problems for him when you get into the mix of one of the toughest, most controversial issues in American politics.”
Mr. Lankford is “a very respected and conservative member of our conference who is willing to do the hard thing,” said Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican.
His attention to detail was part of the reason it took so long to solidify a deal, Mr. Murphy said.
“James made a commitment to know every piece of this bill inside and out so that he could ultimately defend it,” he said. “Obviously, Trump made his life difficult.”
On Monday, as speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, declared bill “even worse than we expected”, Mr Trump singled out Mr Lankford for contempt, telling conservative commentator Dan Bongino on his show that the deal was a “very bad account” of Mr Lankford’s career — “and especially in Oklahoma.”
Mr. Lankford, who won re-election in 2022 with 64 percent of the vote, is not due to face voters again until 2028, and it was unclear whether his involvement in the deal would hurt him in a state where he enjoys a reservoir. goodwill.
Mr. Lankford “had honest intentions, but he took on a herculean task,” Chad Alexander, the former chairman of the Oklahoma Republican Party, said in an interview. “The feeling has gotten even stronger since this started four months ago. And now it’s a powder room.”
In some ways, Mr. Lankford’s involvement in the effort recalls a very different political moment decades ago, when evangelical Christians were influential voices on the right in favor of humane immigration policies, including welcoming refugees and a path to citizenship for undocumented people.
“He is completely driven by his faith and the value he places on every life,” Pat McFerron, an Oklahoma pollster and political consultant, said in a message. “Every human being is made in the image of God. The passion he has here is no different than his passion to help the unborn.”
Mr. Lankford has previously found himself swept up in the crosshairs of Republican politics. After the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on Capitol Hill by a pro-Trump mob, Mr. Lankford apologized to black voters in Oklahoma for supporting Mr. Trump’s bid to overturn congressional elections, saying he had not realized that the his attitude will be seen as an attack on their electoral rights.
He has taken on other intractable political issues in the past. He worked closely with Senator Tim Scott, the lone black senator in the GOP, on Republican legislation to address systemic racism in law enforcement and sought to bridge racial divides and attitudes about race within the GOP during widespread protests for racial justice in 2020.
None of this was more difficult than the frontier effort. On Monday, as the bill’s prospects looked increasingly bleak, he went on a media spree, trying to explain a provision in the package that Republicans have misrepresented as allowing 5,000 undocumented immigrants into the country each day. He pointed out that Republicans have repeatedly said there is a crisis at the border and that Congress must pass new legislation — a message Democrats have already deployed against the GOP.
“Are we as Republicans going to hold press conferences and complain about the evils of the border and then deliberately leave it open after the worst month in American history in December?” Mr. Lankford told “Fox & Friends,” adding that few believed Republicans could secure such significant policy concessions from Democrats.
“Nobody would have believed it,” Mr. Lankford said. “And now nobody really wants to be able to fix it.”
On Tuesday, even as his colleagues called the compromise dead, Mr. Lankford refused to resign.
“The scriptures say you work while it’s daylight, so I’m going to keep working until we know there’s no chance for me to move anymore, because I really believe the issue needs to be resolved,” he said.
That was not the prevailing attitude among Republicans, particularly hard-line lawmakers who cheered his effort’s collapse.
In a lengthy thread Mr. Lankford posted on social media trying to defend the bill, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, he replied bluntly: “Just take the L.”
Karun Demirjian and Katie Edmondson contributed to the report.
