EDITORIAL: Children are more than political props, and chaos is not acceptable

OPINION:

It’s in the DNA of the human family to hear to the cry of a helpless child. Democrats and their media partners know it, and have weaponized the migrant child in their obsession to destroy Donald Trump and his administration, and by any means necessary.

Painting the president as a heartless monster with no ear for the cries of the huddled masses is of a piece with the Democratic larger goal of voiding a national election, as if America is a third-world country where voiding elections is routine. Sober Americans must pay attention to what’s best for the nation. What’s best for the nation is ultimately what’s best for everyone, including young migrants.

The outcry over children separated from illegal migrant parents has brought Washington to hysteria, as TV cameras have focused on the 2,300 children held apart from their Central American parents by immigration authorities, mostly along the Texas border.

This is not something new. Some 135,000 children, both unaccompanied and with families, were apprehended at the U.S. border between 2014 and 2016, according to the non-partisan Pew Research Center. The majority were males 15 years old or older, not toddlers clinging to their mothers. The press, which affects such large heart now, showed little interest when the hard heart was that of President Obama.

Nevertheless, the photographs and videos of the current human wave have lit a shuck under Congress, which enacts the laws that govern immigration policy. Republicans and Democrats rightly agree that children shouldn’t suffer for the sins and transgressions of their parents.

The House of Representatives was considering two bills that address critical elements of the immigration crisis, including the separation of children from parents. President Trump has endorsed a Republican compromise that would grant citizenship to the so-called “Dreamers,” aliens brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents; restrict chain migration, terminate the visa lottery and spend $25 billion to complete the border wall.

Tougher legislation sponsored by Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, would have renewed the legal status of the Dreamers but not grant automatic citizenship. The Goodlatte legislation would have required employers to use the E-verify system to check on work eligibility for new employes. The House rejected it Thursday.

Both measures attempted to mitigate the current conditions on the southern border which encourage parents south of the border to undertake the perilous journey north with their children in tow. But Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, who is desperately trying to keep alive the weaponizing of children project, is blocking the path to a solution: “There are so many obstacles to legislation and when the president can do it with his own pen, it makes no sense,” he said earlier in the week. “Legislation is not the way to go here when it’s so easy for the president to sign it.” The “it” is an executive order enabling children to remain with their parents in detention, which the president signed Wednesday after bowing to an outcry by Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. Mr. Schumer prefers the Obama example of dispensing with Congress and using executive orders instead of legislation.

Mr. Schumer and his fellow Democrats have been searching for a tool with which to topple the president since his election. The Russia collusion narrative that has preoccupied special counsel Robert Mueller for more than a year appears to be a dry hole. The obstruction of justice meme in the firing of James Comey is looking like another dry hole in the wake of the conclusion of the Justice Department inspector general that suggests that Mr. Comey’s misbehavior made his termination inevitable.

Congressional Democrats obviously hope the mantra of “children in cages” will be the weapon that penetrates the public’s customary common sense and turns on the president with the fury that his enemies have poured on Mr. Trump since the people elected him.

So far, the pillory has failed. Despite nonstop name-calling, always punctuated with F-word bombs, Mr. Trump’s approval with voters has slowly and steadily risen. Reckoned at 48 percent by a Rasmussen Poll, the president’s favorability rating has finally surpassed that of his predecessor at this point in their first terms.

Americans must take careful account shorn of hysteria, of the confusion on the southern border. The tears of children are always genuine, but the designs of those who would use children as political props are not. The histrionics will end if Congress summons the courage to enact a fair and effective immigration bill, and get on with building the wall. The alternative is permanent chaos.