Q. What would constitute a fair DACA compromise?

A. Whatever Tom Cotton and Dick Durbin can come to an agreement on.

Look, I think it’s fair to say that Tom Cotton is pretty hard-line in terms of immigration enforcement.  And Dick Durbin is determined to get to a path to amnesty*/mass legalization with as few enforcement concessions as possible, and, in general, seems to represent a mindset that illegal immigration isn’t really that bad, anyway.

But Cotton knows that he’s not going to get enough votes to pass enforcement provisions without cooperation from Democrats and mass legalization/semi-open immigration supporters.  And Durbin surely recognizes that their DACA proposal is an opening bid, not something that they can actually get passed through the House and the Senate (the claim that DACA recipients were banned from sponsoring their parents, while at the same time those parents were being given legalization, was particularly galling).

If these two men were willing to negotiate, and conceded that playing games wasn’t going to get them what they wanted, if they made concessions in good faith, if they produced a deal that they were willing to take and shop around for support, that would be a compromise.

Anything else — regardless of its ability to garner votes — simply, by definition, isn’t a compromise.

Image:  Wikimedia commons.