House Border Bill In Doubt In Face of Tea Party Opposition
The usual suspects are blocking any action at all on the border crisis.
With mere hours left before Congress heads out of town, the House of Representatives is set to vote later today on a bill that is supposedly intended to address the ongoing border crisis created by the arrival of Central American migrants at the southern border. At some $650 million, the House bill is but a fraction of the $3.7 billion in emergency funding that the President has requested to deal with the crisis, and it is far below even the roughly $2.5 billion that a parallel bill in the Senate contemplates authorizing. However, even this bill is in doubt thanks to opposition from Tea Party groups and their supporters in the House GOP Caucus:
The fate of a Republican proposal to address a brewing immigration crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border was cast into doubt Wednesday after a tea party senator lobbied against it to House members.
The effort by Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), who made his pitch to a group of House Republicans in a closed-door evening meeting, marked another direct shot at attempts by Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to deal with the influx of illegal immigrants arriving from Central America.
House members are preparing to vote Thursday on border legislation that would provide considerably less money than President Obama is seeking, while the Senate is moving forward with a larger Democratic proposal. With two competing border measures and little agreement between House and Senate leaders, figuring out how to pay for the unexpected surge is unlikely to be resolved before Congress’s summer recess begins Friday.
Even so, a defeat of border legislation in the House would deliver another embarrassing blow to Boehner and his leadership team, which has struggled to contain the party’s restive tea party caucus. It also would serve as the latest example of Cruz wading into House affairs and working against the agenda of GOP leaders.
“The Obama White House should put Ted Cruz on the payroll,” said Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), a vocal Cruz opponent. “We have a chance to pass a good bill, not a perfect bill. Boehner is working hard to get to 218 votes and yet there is Ted Cruz, telling us to do nothing. If he wants to come over and run for speaker, that’s fine, but otherwise he should stay over there in the Senate.”
Boehner has not promised victory on the immigration bill, suggesting Tuesday that Republicans had “a little more work to do.” With most Democrats expected to vote against the measure, Boehner needs every GOP vote he can find and has been busy trying to win support from Reps. Steve King (Iowa), Louie Gohmert (Tex.), Matt Salmon (Ariz.) and other conservatives.
At a conference meeting Tuesday, Boehner announced that he would pare down his initial framework after hearing numerous complaints about its size and scope. On Thursday morning, he will meet again with GOP members to underscore the importance of passing his plan and giving the party a document that shows its ability to find consensus.
But Steve King, Gohmert and Salmon — along with Cruz and others — want House Republicans to defund Obama’s Deferred Action for Child Arrivals program, which has granted temporary relief for some children of illegal immigrants and is set for renewal this fall. Boehner has resisted the idea. But late Wednesday, GOP aides said that leaders were likely to allow a vote on a standalone bill that would defund DACA before voting to approve the border spending measure. If the bill to defund DACA were to pass, it wasn’t clear exactly how House leaders would merge the two proposals and send them to the Senate.
“The only way to stop the border crisis is to stop Obama’s amnesty,” Cruz said in a statement. “It is disappointing the border security legislation unveiled today does not include language to end Obama’s amnesty. Congress cannot hope to solve this problem without addressing the fundamental cause of it.”
I noted earlier this month that Ted Cruz had said that he was willing to block any immigration bill that didn’t include language defunding the President’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which is the set of 2012 Executive Branch decisions that granted what some have called “amnesty” to certain children of illegal immigrants, albeit on a temporary basis. As the article notes, he’s lived up to that promise by actively campaigning against the very border bill backed by the House Republican Leadership. This, of course, is roughly the same thing that he did last year during the government shutdown last September. At that time, as we neared the closing days and hours of the Fiscal Year and appeared headed for a shutdown, Cruz was working behind the scenes to defeat the bill that the House Leadership had come up with to avert a shutdown, an effort that ended up proving to be successful. Cruz is joined in that effort by conservative pundits and several Tea Party groups, none of whom have actually come up with an alternative proposal of their own that could realistically be considered something that would address the problems on the southern border caused by this new influx of immigrants.
In reality, of course, even if the House bill did pass later today it’s unlikely that we’ll end up with any kind of legislation that the President would be able to sign before members leave on their five week August vacation. As I noted, the Senate bill is significantly different from the one that the House is considering, and it may not even survive its final cloture vote to get to a vote on the merits. If it did, though, the differences between the bills the two chambers are considering is so profound that it’s unlikely that they’d be able to come to any kind of agreement before Congress adjourns for vacation; and there’s pretty much no chance at all that either chamber would be willing to postpone their departure from Washington to deal with the matter. Given that, it is likely that we will end up with no bill at all to deal with the border crisis at the same time that the Federal Government is essentially trying to find money in other programs that it can divert to border-related expenditures between now and the end of the Fiscal Year. Meanwhile, of course, the same Tea Party Members of Congress that are blocking any action at all on this issue will spend their recess back in their home districts campaigning against the President who is allegedly not doing anything on immigration.
This is what our political system has been reduced to, and it is really is quite pathetic.
Update: As of 3:30pm this afternoon at least, the House will not be voting on a border bill before leaving on vacation.
Even when the GOP leadership wants to just pretend to govern, the Tea Party will not let them.
I always wonder if the Tea Party is an elaborate false-flag operation by the Democrats. No one can be so stupid in playing into the D’s hands. Then I look at a bell curve for 300 Million Americans, and think, maybe there’s enough of them after all.
Looking at this, I am even more certain than ever that the rationalists in the Republican Party can restrain the drive towards impeachment…..
/Snark.
@Mu: You beat me to it – I was going to write a similar comment.
At what point do we stop calling them the Tea Party and just call them what they are, the Republican party?
I’m sure that’s uncomfortable for a lot of people but it it effectively the case.
Can anyone think of a left leaning group that voted lockstep democrat and who’s candidates all ran as democrats yet were called anything other than “Democrats”?
I sure can’t. They are your Rubes GOP, they always have been and the fact that they’ve coined a new phrase to describe themselves doesn’t make any difference.
I think a major probem here too is the way the mainstream media will cover this. The headline won’t be “Republican Party makes a gesture at passing a bill pertaining to the border crisis, but is derailed by right wing extremists”. No, the headline will be “Congress fails to pass border bill” with the implication that everyone-including the Democrats-are equally at fault. There may be good analysis on page 3 of the article, but most people will not have read that far, thus contributing to the public conclusion that everyone-including the Administration-is at fault. This is what media calls “balanced coverage” -a refusal to call out those who are wrong.
“At what point do we stop calling them the Tea Party and just call them what they are, the Republican party?”
At what point do we admit the Republican Party has fractured into two smaller parties that, individually, do not have a majority in the House or anywhere else?
@Davebo: We can’t call the Tea Party the Republican Party because establishment Republicans, including Doug and James, want to pretend that the TP is some random force of nature, like the weather, that just fell out of the sky on them. They can’t admit the fact that, as you point out, the TP are the “Rubes” they conned into voting for them, and that they can’t live without.
Mu writes:
stonetools writes:
And therein lies all our woes …
“This is what our political system has been reduced to, and it is really is quite pathetic.”
You ain’t seen nothing yet. If the GOP gets away with this, and it looks like the media and the midterm electorate may let them, it is an absolute certainty that Democrats will adopt the same approach to policy making. It may take another generation or two, but it will happen.
Mike
@jd: Beyond that idea, when do we acknowledge to ourselves, as individuals AND as a society, that we might need to look for a model of governance that will allow more than two viable political parties?
@jd: “At what point do we admit the Republican Party has fractured into two smaller parties that, individually, do not have a majority in the House or anywhere else?”
When they totally stop voting together.
@Davebo:
Socialists! Femi-Nazis! Blacks!
@jd:
Sorry, I haven’t seen a single tea party candidate run for election for a federal or statewide office.
Did I miss it?
It’s the GOP, it’s always been the GOP. It nurtured the nuts (I haven’t seen a Republican denouncing the bile that is right wing radio) and won with them.
Now it essentially is them.
Is there any situation the Tea Party can’t make worse? Seems like every time they pop up it means the country is going to suffer.
Hi there colleagues, how is everything, and what you
want to say on the topic of this post, in my view its
genuinely awesome in favor of me.
@jd: “At what point do we admit the Republican Party has fractured into two smaller parties that, individually, do not have a majority in the House or anywhere else?”
Steve Baldwin, a former California lawmaker and onetime executive director of the Council for National Policy, believes that Tea Party and Religious Right activists should form a third party to “do to the GOP what the GOP did to the Whig Party 150 years ago.”
Ha! I called it first!