Wall Street Journal
By Siobhan Hughes
March 2, 2015
With
just days left for Republican congressional leaders to end a stalemate
over homeland-security funding, House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) is
under increasing pressure
to find a way to bridge differences in his caucus over how to push back
against President Barack Obama ’s immigration policies.
Divisions
among House Republicans were exposed last week when restive
conservatives balked at a plan backed by Mr. Boehner to pass a
three-week spending bill, which GOP
leaders had hoped would give them time to negotiate with the Senate on
funding the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration
activities.
A
new Friday deadline provides five days for lawmakers to try to resolve
GOP divisions over a fiscal 2015 homeland-security spending bill, which
many conservatives want
to use to stop Mr. Obama’s executive actions on immigration.
For
several weeks, Democrats have blocked Senate GOP efforts to use the
bill to prevent those executive actions from going into effect, but on
Friday, the Senate passed
a bill to fund the department without the immigration language, putting
pressure on Mr. Boehner to go along.
The
episode highlighted the continuing dilemma Mr. Boehner faces in
managing the rambunctious House, where Republicans, though in the
majority, are divided between hard-liners
who believe the party’s 2014 electoral wins validated their positions
and pragmatists who say that the GOP still doesn’t have enough votes to
drive through its agenda. Mr. Boehner acknowledged the difficulties in
an interview Sunday on CBS. “I’m not going
to suggest it’s easy,” he said. “Because it’s not.”
The
fight over immigration looms especially large because of what it
portends for other big battles. Congress must vote on whether to raise
the debt ceiling, which the
U.S. will hit later this year, as well as on more immediate issues like
avoiding a cut in payments to Medicare providers and replenishing the
Highway Trust Fund, which is funded only through the end of May.
If
Mr. Boehner sides with conservatives, he risks stalemates and shutdowns
and undercuts the stated GOP goal of proving the party can govern. If
he sides with GOP centrists,
Mr. Boehner undercuts his own status as the Republican leader because
any strategy based on support from the center also means relying on
Democratic votes.
“He’s
in a vise,” Rep. Steve Womack (R., Ark.) told reporters Friday night
when it had become apparent Mr. Boehner’s original strategy had fallen
apart. “You’ve got the
speaker in the middle trying to appease people—that’s a hell of a
position to be in. I just can’t imagine the frustration the speaker must
have right now.”
Moreover,
the centrists in his caucus have become more vocal in urging Republican
leaders to back away from hardball tactics such as holding government
funding hostage
to get their way. “There’s an element within our party, there’s a wing
within the Congress which is absolutely irresponsible,” Rep. Peter King
(R., N.Y.) said Sunday on ABC. “They have no concept of reality. Listen,
I am as opposed this immigration action
as they are.”
Speaking on CNN Sunday, Rep. Charles Dent (R., Pa.) said “it makes no sense why anyone would want to go to war over this issue.”
“A
spectacle has been created. What happened on Friday night, when the
three week bill failed, that was a humiliation for the House
Republicans,” he said.
Mr.
Boehner has tried to play down the divisions, insisting that
Republicans have an intraparty disagreement over tactics and not
substance. He said that Friday’s events
were “messy, and I’m not into messy.”
On
the immigration issue, 52 members of Mr. Boehner’s own caucus abandoned
him on the three-week plan, leaving him scrambling for an alternative,
because Democrats also
refused to support it.
The
one-week reprieve, approved by both chambers in the final hours before a
Feb. 27 deadline, gives him just days to chart a course through an
increasingly narrow strait,
and allowed the House to avoid the awkwardness of not having the
Homeland Security Department funded during a Tuesday speech before
Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Meanwhile,
Republicans hoped that they could use the time to rally voters to apply
pressure on the Senate to include the immigration language. “Anybody
who disagrees with
the president’s illegal action on immigration like I do, light up the
Senate switchboard,” Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.), the House majority
whip, said on Fox News. “Put the heat on Senate Democrats to stop
blocking this.”
Rep.
Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), a former wrestling coach who heads the House
Freedom Caucus, which was formed earlier this year to push the party
further toward the right,
said Republicans needed to go to the mat with Democrats over
immigration policy. “We need to make the case—we haven’t made the case
long enough,” Mr. Jordan said.
But
that tactic hasn’t worked so far, and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid
(D., Nev.) has vowed to block negotiations that House Republicans are
seeking with the Senate,
aiming to pressure the GOP to fund homeland security for the rest of
the fiscal year.
He
said that he and fellow conservatives weren’t trying to oust Mr.
Boehner, telling CNN on Sunday “of course not—that’s not the point.” But
he said that Republicans needed
more time for their message that Mr. Obama’s immigration actions were
unfair and violated the constitution to get through to voters.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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