Democrats "badly overplayed their hand" by allowing their fight for immigrants and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to lead to a short-lived government shutdown, and that will help strengthen Republicans' hands going into negotiations on immigration, Sen. Tom Cotton said Tuesday.
"What we learned is that the American people don't want to have the government shut down for illegal immigration," the Arkansas Republican told Fox News' "Fox & Friends."
"The Democrats badly overplayed their hand here. They ought not to have done it, but I'm glad the shutdown is over, and people can get back to work in the government serving the American people."
The compromise that will allow the Senate to get to 60 votes on an immigration bill is "pretty obvious," said Cotton.
"It's what the president has said all along," he said. "We want to be generous and humane about people brought here through no fault of their own as children. At the same time, we have to do that responsibly and control the effects of it."
However, the Democrats' "obsession over amnesty for illegal immigrants" is not popular, and that has "significantly strengthened our hand going into these immigration negotiations, to have a responsible bill for the DACA population while also controlling for those side effects, building a wall, securing our border and ending chain migration."
Cotton said he knows President Donald Trump has been meeting with lawmakers from both parties.
"We have a few more weeks to get this done now," Cotton said. "I'm confident we can. But we have to be responsible about it."
Cotton said there are several Democrats who he'd be willing to work with, including West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin or Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, who "helped this weekend to talk some sense into Sen. [Chuck] Schumer and the Democratic leaders."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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