How did we get to this place where so many legislators don’t make laws, where legislators don’t want to make laws? Why come to Washington if not to govern?

I witnessed the obstructionist evolution among Republicans in Congress in the post-Reagan years. Successful legislation requires compromise, and the more right-wing Republicans and their voters have become, the less compromise they make.

Donald Trump has only strengthened the dynamic. As president, he has made a big push for bipartisan deals with Congress on gun restrictions, infrastructure, health care and immigration, but has failed to deliver on a single promise, leaving the White House with enough nerve for a new book: The Art of No Deals. As Time magazine reported on Trump’s negotiating style early in his term: Time and time again, the president has proven to be an unreliable partner.

Unfortunately, Trump continues to practice his dark arts even outside of office

in return for

making deals, taking advantage of spineless Republicans’ fear of him and his supporters.

Trump’s immediate thumbs-down Monday on a bipartisan compromise on border security in the Senate (terrible, he said) was the apparent final blow to the first major immigration bill in years. Trump’s mushrooms in the House of Representatives preemptively announced the bill D.O.A. Maybe it won’t get there; sycophantic senators

even questioning Senate passage.

Forget

That

Republicans for now, though. Instead, let’s recognize a Republican profile in courage: Senator James Lankford.

The previously obscure Oklahoman has braved the right’s not-so-friendly fire for months as he negotiated the immigration compromise with the Democratic senator.

Chris Christopher S.

Murphy of Connecticut, independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and advisers to President Biden, who blessed the final product. Now that Republican attacks have redoubled, Lankford is standing his ground and standing up to Trump. (It certainly helps that Lankford was elected to a second term in 2022 and won’t face voters again until 2028.)

Lankford is a rarity in Congress, a Republican willing to work with Democrats to actually try to solve problems that Americans want solved, rather than endlessly campaigning on them. The few such Republicans, Sen. Todd Young of Indiana, is another who should get credit when it’s due. They certainly don’t get it from their party: the Oklahoma party condemned Lankford for his efforts last month before withdrawing his action.

Constructive Republicans were the rule in Congress when I started covering this place. That was mainly before the advent of social media, right-wing telegrams and rancorous populism. Now too many members of Congress count clicks and cable hits, not hard-won legislation, as a measure of success.

Senate Republicans used to be divided between conservatives and moderates. Now it’s split between invertebrates and vertebrates, says Luke Albee, a former Senate aide who worked for two Democratic senators and always looked for principled conservatives willing to make deals. Senators like Lankford…

and Todd Young

are in the vertebrate camp, although they are clearly on the endangered species list.

Few congressional observers expected this leadership from Lankford, especially on immigration, one of the country’s most divisive issues and one that Republicans hope the Bidens and other Democrats will undo in November.

Lankford, a lanky 55-year-old whose favorite drink is ice-cold skim milk, has a bass voice befitting the Southern Baptist preacher he was, but otherwise projects a boyishness reminiscent of the red-haired Opie from early TV’s fictional Mayberry. He’s not a RINO. Lankford checks all the boxes on the Republicans’ litmus test: pro guns and fossil fuels, against taxes, abortion and gay rights. On January 6, 2021, he was among the 2020 election objectors before the riots, but ultimately voted to certify Biden’s election.

Lately, Lankford has been ubiquitous in the media, staunchly opposing what he calls Republican falsehoods, such as the claim that the border compromise would allow 5,000 migrants into the country every day. He describes the provisions on asylum, detention, deportation, border security funding and presidential authority to close borders as a once-unthinkable victory for conservatives. The bill, as Republicans prefer, leaves out Democrats’ past priorities: permanent legal status for DACA beneficiaries and a path to citizenship for long-term, law-abiding unauthorized immigrants.

But Lankford’s Republican colleagues are focused on politics, not policy, and he knows it. He characterized the thinking of many of them on CNN: We’re in a presidential year, so let’s not help Biden with that.

His enemies include the usual knee-jerk Senate naysayers, including Sen. Mike Lee of Utah. Lee personifies the modern Republican Party’s disdain for bipartisan legislation: He arrived in Congress in 2011 as a

T

tea

P

party insurgent who had dethroned a widely respected Republican. The incumbents are sinning? Compromising with Democrats on the hot issue of the day: health care.

Lee’s upset victory shook the party’s incumbents and foretold

the replacement of pragmatic Republicans with the uncompromising kind.

Like Sens. Ted Cruz from Texas, Roger Marshall from Kansas, Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee, JD Vance from Ohio. Now that kind of defines the party in Congress.

That’s why so many Republicans are lying about a border security bill they originally asked for

they like that more than they could ever have hoped for from the Democrats. And

why on Wednesday they will likely deprive the deal of the 60 Senate votes needed to pass, thereby wiping out associated aid for Ukraine and Israel.

If that is not the death of government, it is something close to it. If only we could have more Lankfords and fewer Lees.

@jackiekcalmes