Republicans want to talk about tax cuts. Instead, they’re talking about kids in cages.Rather than touting lower taxes and a steady job market, House and Senate Republicans are being forced to answer for President Donald Trump’s contentious immigration policies — whether it’s separating migrant kids from their parents, removing DACA protections or building a border wall. And that’s likely bad news heading into November.“The whole thing is a hot mess,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), who opposes splitting up families at the border but otherwise supports the administration’s stepped-up enforcement policies.Even as the White House blames Congress for the crisis at the border, GOP lawmakers are struggling to craft a proposal that unites their own party, let alone one that can win bipartisan support and become law. And with no congressional solution in sight, Hill Republicans worry that Trump’s immigration crackdown could swamp their success on the economy and overshadow

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Senate Republicans are racing to come up with a solution to stop the separation of parents from their children on the border with Mexico.Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas is working to come up with a legislative fix for the Trump administration’s practice of splitting up families that cross the border illegally. Cornyn is leading a small group of Senate Republicans who recognize that Congress may have to step in and do something if President Donald Trump won’t back down.“You can keep families intact and enforce the law,” Cornyn said. “The solution is up to us, and if Democrats don’t want to work with us to solve the problem, shame on them. But we think we can come up with a reasonable way to solve the problem of family separation that is humane and compassionate.”Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) separately plans to introduce a bill that would add 375 more

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Top House Republicans sharply criticized the Justice Department’s internal watchdog Tuesday for writing in a report last week that political bias did not appear to lead the FBI to recommend against charging Hillary Clinton in 2016 over her handling of classified information on a private email server.Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report provided examples of senior FBI officials exhibiting negative attitudes toward President Donald Trump, but he said those feelings did not appear to affect their investigation of Clinton. Some of the same investigators in 2016 launched the FBI’s investigation of contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign.Republicans strongly disagreed with that conclusion.“They prejudged the outcome of the Hillary Clinton investigation before it ended,” Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said at a hearing with Horowitz Tuesday. “They prejudged the outcome of the Russia investigation before it even began.”“If that’s not evidence of outcome-determinative bias, for the

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