New York Times
By Ashley Parker and Jonathan Weisman
July 31, 2014
WASHINGTON
— Conservatives in the House rebelled against their leadership on
Thursday to scuttle an emergency spending measure that addressed the
migrant crisis at the
southern border, pushing the issue to a showdown on Friday as lawmakers
prepared to leave for a five-week recess. The unexpected turmoil
offered a coda to the dysfunction that has gripped the Capitol for much
of the year.
The
failure of the comparatively modest Republican border bill, coupled
with the Senate’s own inability to even bring a Democratic alternative
to a vote, emphasized how
the prospects of a broad immigration overhaul — which at the beginning
of the 113th Congress held great bipartisan promise — have ground to a
crashing halt.
The
struggle to deal with immigration, which became more urgent with the
flood of tens of thousands of children at the border, succumbed to
congressional infighting, driven
by more conservative Republicans who balked at further government
spending and President Obama’s approach on deporting the migrants.
Fissures
were evident in the Republican Party, with many House members critical
of their more conservative colleagues for holding up the bill, arguing
that heading home
for the August break having not even voted on immigration legislation
would be politically damaging. The episode was also a rebuke, at least
temporarily, for Speaker John A. Boehner and his new leadership team,
who in an emergency closed-door meeting on Thursday
told members that they were not even close to the necessary votes
required to pass the bill.
House
Republicans were set to hold another meeting on Friday morning to
decide how to move forward, and nearly all the lawmakers said they would
stay in Washington as
long as necessary to put the bill on the floor. “There was a lot of
come-to-Jesus talk in there, and I think at the end of the day we’re
going to end up getting to a majority and get this thing passed,” said
Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois.
“Were not going to leave here until this is done.”
Representative Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, said, “Doing nothing is the worst of all worlds.”
“You
have people on our side of the aisle who go through all sorts of
contortions to get to ‘no,’ ” Mr. Dent said. “On the Democratic side,
they’ll vote for the money
but not for the policy changes. In my party, we’ll vote for the policy
changes but not the money to implement the policy. This is
extraordinarily frustrating and infuriating for people like me. We have a
crisis on our hands.”
While
Republicans were stunned by Thursday’s setback, the inability of either
chamber to reach a consensus on even a scaled-back bill to deal with
the border crisis yielded
no clear winners. Republicans fear that not at least voting on a border
measure could hurt them in the November midterm elections — as well as
the 2016 presidential election — even as the electoral climate has been
highly favorable to them. Democrats worry
that any bill the Republicans could pass would endanger the young
migrants fleeing violence in their Central American countries.
The
Republican leaders had hoped to push through a $659 million emergency
spending measure, well short of the $2.7 billion that Senate Democrats
had proposed and the $3.7
billion that President Obama had requested.
Mr.
Boehner and his team had worked to hold together their already fragile
coalition to support the border bill by promising members a vote on an
additional measure intended
to curb Mr. Obama’s executive authority to stop the deportation of
certain immigrants in the country illegally, including those brought as
young children.
But
in the end, it was not enough. House Republicans were not helped by
their Senate counterparts, particularly Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of
Texas, who on Wednesday
night held a meeting over pizza and beer with more than a dozen of the
House’s most conservative lawmakers where he voiced his concerns about
the immigration bill.
Mr.
Cruz came up in Thursday’s closed-door meeting, which opened
acrimoniously, according to House members. Representative Peter T. King,
Republican of New York, said
some members had expressed frustration that Mr. Cruz was once again
dictating terms to the House, as he did when he helped push Congress
toward a government shutdown in October.
“I
do wish that Ted Cruz would stay in the Senate,” Mr. King said after
the meeting. “Nobody elected him speaker. Nobody elected him majority
leader in the House, and
it’s really a cheap shot to be coming in from the side. To have some
guy come in from the outside like the Pied Piper is wrong.”
Mr.
King added that it was critical for Republicans to vote on their own
legislation before leaving. “It’s very important we show we’re a
governing party,” he said. “It’s
bad enough we shut the government down last year.”
The
outcome was at great remove from the optimism that marked the
immigration debate just a year ago. Fresh off a Republican report of the
2012 presidential election that
said the party had to reach out to Hispanics and other minorities in
order to survive, hope ran high for a broad immigration bill, including a
path to citizenship for the 11 million immigrants in the country
illegally. Unlikely bedfellows, like business and
labor and technology officials, as well as religious leaders and
farmers, signed on to help.
At the time, a flood of young migrants at the southern border was not even part of the debate.
But
despite the efforts by the Senate, which passed an immigration overhaul
in June 2013, the legislation foundered in the Republican-controlled
House. Republican House
members, many of whom sit in gerrymandered districts with small
Hispanic populations, were unwilling to take a vote in favor of a broad
compromise.
The
issue became increasingly toxic, ensnaring Republicans like Senator
Marco Rubio of Florida, an author of the Senate immigration bill. Once
considered an ideal Republican
to lead his party forward on the issue, Mr. Rubio took a hit for his
involvement with an immigration overhaul and has since said Congress
first needs to pass border security measures before turning to an
overhaul.
Now,
the crisis at the border has become a proxy fight over the larger
immigration bill, which was officially declared dead by even its most
ardent supporters this summer.
The
White House has said the president expects to receive recommendations
from the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department by
the end of the summer
about how Mr. Obama could use his executive authority to make
immigration enforcement more humane.
Now
the president is also coming under pressure on both sides. Republicans
are asserting that they do not trust him to enforce the existing
immigration laws, and saying
that anything else he does would only further poison the debate.
Democrats facing tough re-election fights are urging the administration
not to take further executive actions on immigration, warning it could
hurt them back home with voters.
In
a meeting with lawmakers on Thursday to discuss foreign policy, Mr.
Obama told Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, that he agreed with
Republicans on 80 percent
of the elements of the border legislation but disagreed on an important
20 percent: whether to offset the money and how to alter a 2008 law to
allow American authorities to more quickly deport unaccompanied
children, according to a White House official who
spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The
president said Republicans would have to think long and hard about why
they would not act on the areas of consensus, the official added. The
result, Mr. Obama said,
is that he would have to act over the congressional recess to redirect
funding in ways they would not like.
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