hoya88 The Man Who Tried to Solve Immigration for the G.O.P.

At a campaign rally in Georgia late last monthhoya88, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to supporters about one of the biggest issues in this election: immigration. She talked up her record as the former attorney general of a border state, and she made a promise that if elected president, she would “bring back the border-security bill that Donald Trump killed” and sign it into law.

The bill she was talking about was negotiated starting late last year by a bipartisan trio of senators, and the Republican in that group was Senator James Lankford, a former Baptist youth minister from Oklahoma. Lankford, who arrived in the House as part of the Tea Party movement in 2011 and became a senator in 2015, clearly has big political ambitions; he’s currently running for Senate leadership. And for months, he worked on that immigration bill with Senators Kyrsten Sinema, an independent from Arizona, and Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut. Their negotiation was a rare show of bipartisanship in Congress, and after getting sign-off from both party leaders in the Senate and an endorsement from the White House, the bill looked as if it was going to become law. It would have been the first major piece of bipartisan legislation on immigration in decades.

Listen to the Conversation With James LankfordThe senator discusses how political calculations killed his border bill, the evangelical Christian vote and preparing for life after Trump.Listen · 43:51 min

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But then Donald Trump came out against it — he didn’t want to give President Biden a political win on such a sensitive issue during an election year. And even though the bill contained most of the hard-line policies that the right wanted, it became toxic among Republicans. In the end, only four Republican senators voted for the bill, it tanked and Lankford was left holding the bag.

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I wanted to talk to Lankford about his experience working so hard on this bill only to see it fall apart and what that says about the prospect of getting anything bipartisan done in a Republican Party that is beholden to Trump. But we started by talking about his faith, which he told me guides everything he does.

Before you were in politics, you ran the largest Baptist youth camp in the country, Falls Creek. A friend of mine from Oklahoma basically said it’s the place everyone goes when they’re young. I think when you were elected, something like 40 percent of Republican primary voters in Oklahoma either had gone to Falls Creek or knew someone who did. What role did that organization play in your life? Wow, that’s a huge question. I served 22 years in ministry, working with students and their families. So when you work with middle school and high school students, you’re dealing with all kinds of trauma that happens in those families. That’s what my wife and I did for 22 years, to be able to just love on families and to encourage them. I didn’t do anything in politics other than vote. And in 2008 and 2009, we really felt a calling to be able to run for Congress in the central district. I had to go to our state Republican leaders and introduce myself and say: “Hi, my name’s James. I’m filing to run for Congress.” And they basically pat me on the head and said, “That’s nice.” But saying all that, my faith is important to me, and it’s not something I take off and put on. I tell people all the time, your faith should affect everything about you. It’s how I treat my wife. It’s how I treat total strangers. I believe every person’s created in the image of God. They have value and worth. Even if I disagree with them, that person has value and worth. As I joke with some of my Democrat colleagues, we’re friends, but they’re wrong all the time. They vote wrong all the time, but we can still be friends in our conversation and relationship and try to be able to engage.

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