No Biden Shouldn't Pay The GOP's Latest Ransom Demand. By Brian Beutler

Read time: 6 minutes

BRIAN BEUTLER

DEC 13, 2023

No Biden Shouldn't Pay The GOP's Latest Ransom Demand

At least not yet, maybe not at all

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

President Biden seems prepared once again to pay Republicans substantive ransoms in exchange for releasing hostages (in this case, military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan) that have broad bipartisan support.

And (once again) a consensus is forming that Biden should simply pay these ransoms (in this case, a suite of right-wing immigration policies) rather than let Republicans undermine the consensus view of U.S. interests. 

Ross Douthat got the ball rolling last week with a New York Times column titled “Why Biden Should Make an Immigration Deal With Republicans,” in which he makes no mention of the fact that Biden’s facing a ransom demand (that is, there’s no “immigration deal” in the works) or who the hostages are. 

But other writers who are not doctrinaire restrictionists also think Biden should give Republicans what they want, or at least much of it. OF makes a genuinely spirited case for what he calls “caving.” He acknowledges throughout the piece that Republicans created this standoff in bad faith, and stipulates (without much elaboration) that this complicates Biden’s analysis, yet lays out in detail why caving is nevertheless Biden’s best (or least bad) move. 

What we have here is a good-faith argument that can’t be resolved conclusively, because there’s no objective way to know in advance what the optimal thing to do is when moral imperatives are pitted against each other and the future is murky. 

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But I think we can do a better job teasing out the proposition, and when you do that rigorously, it seems much less clear that he should cave. If anything, actual immigration restrictionists like Douthat should be urging Republicans to stop acting in bad faith, and cut a deal with Biden, rather than urging Biden to cut a deal with people who may not actually want one. 

We can simplify the calculus a little bit by breaking down the options Biden faces, and how they’d develop in the two likeliest medium-term scenarios.

Biden pays the GOP ransoms (assuming there are any they’d actually accept) and goes on to beat Donald Trump.

Biden pays the GOP ransoms (assuming there are any they’d actually accept) and goes on to lose to Donald Trump.

Biden walks away and goes on to beat Donald Trump.

Biden walks away and goes on to lose to Donald Trump

(Apologies, I’d have presented this as a 2x2 matrix, but my graphic-design skills are for shit.)

To me this raises a few pretty obvious questions: 

What are the ransoms, and how might Trump exploit them if he wins? 

What are the near- and long-term costs of walking away, particularly from Ukraine?

If Republican demands are unacceptable, is it better to offer them something less extreme, assuming they’ll reject it, or to take a principled stand against hostage taking?

Greg Sargent has been at pains to note that the details matter. You can’t reduce this so far as to say Republicans demand a more secure border, border policies should be reformed, ergo, Biden should give in to their demands. 

Naturally their demands are draconian, and entirely one-sided. They’d make the United States both a crueler, less-welcoming place to those seeking to settle here, and a much more harrowing place for those who’ve already done so. Immigration experts are particularly wary of the GOP’s insistence on expanding “expedited removal” authority to the entire country, because it would portend mass expulsion of long-term residents without due process in a second Trump administration, and even under Biden would embolden power-mad immigration enforcers to ruin lives arbitrarily. 

In Biden’s hands, these tools are questionable and politically uncertain. In Trump’s they’re a gut-wrenching nightmare. It’s a price that might be worth paying only if you had some certainty that Trump couldn’t win or steal the election. That doesn’t currently look like a safe bet. Biden could counter with a proposal that wouldn’t expand executive authority to round up immigrants, or he could insist on first legalizing most settled immigrants, or stipulate that the new authorities must expire when the foreign aid expires, all before January 2025. He could let the GOP reject this, and then walk away. 

But the latest reporting, vague though it is, suggests Biden’s ready to give in to Republicans outright, then roll the dice on next year’s election.

That seems unacceptably risky unless you have reason to believe Ukraine can defeat Russia by January 2025. I’ve read and spoken to no one who would bet money on that. In part that’s because war is murky; but it’s also because Vladimir Putin knows Trump might win and let him have all of Ukraine if he can just hold out for one more year. If anything (and this is perverse) refunding the Ukraine resistance now will fuel Putin’s inclination to interfere in our election on Trump’s behalf. 

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All else equal, aid to Ukraine is the right thing to do. But if you’re worried about what Trump might do to U.S. immigrants, because you think he might win, you have to start bracing now for the likelihood that Ukrainians are fucked whether they get more aid now or not. Everything for Ukraine depends on Trump losing. If Biden wins he may be able to restore aid, and even if he doesn’t, he may be able to lean on allies between now and next November to fill the void created by Republican sabotage. But temporary Ukraine aid, in exchange for a permanent immigration crackdown, with Trump looming is a very shaky proposition. Too great, given an alternative where Biden wins, but Ukraine’s future remains uncertain, and immigrant-crackdown powers fall into the wrong hands four or eight years later.

And that’s all before we get to the “don’t negotiate with terrorists/hostage takers” principle. 

The aid money is a bipartisan priority and the GOP is taking it hostage to partisan demands—a familiar story. What are the consequences of submitting to another GOP ransom demand? We are well into the era of small ransoms already, so one could argue that ship has sailed. But this would represent creep in the size of the ransoms. What will Republicans come asking for next if and when they realize they can wring an awful lot out of Democrats simply by taking the country’s geopolitical interests hostage?

Walking away would by contrast let Biden take Republican treachery to the voters. By now it’s plain that Biden is uncomfortable in that register. But he offered a reasonably good taste of what it might look like if Republicans stab our allies in the back.

Biden said this as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made rounds on Capitol Hill, appealing to the decency of people who’ve lost all familiarity with the concept. But Zelensky isn’t the only foreign leader asking the U.S. for money. 

One reason it was a mistake for Biden to tie himself so tightly to an untrustworthy, Trump-aligned figure like Benjamin Netanyahu is it’s weakened his leverage in this standoff. If Israel aid were “a thing that Republicans want” and Ukraine aid were “a thing Democrats want” one could imagine a swap. But if Biden is equally committed to funding both Ukraine’s resistance and Israel’s retaliatory war against Gaza, then it simply gives Republicans more reason to believe they can shake him down. 

The shrewder move would be for Biden to draw a line against ransom-taking, and send Bibi hat in hand, just like Zelensky, to beg his Republican friends to release all the hostages. 

He might not play along. Netanyahu may reason that Democrats will eventually cave and pass a stand-alone Israel-aid bill, or that he, too, can simply grind it out for a year in the hope that Trump will become president again. But it’s an option worth exploring before handing Republicans the tools they need to extinguish the American dream.