House Republicans poised to torpedo GOP’s best chance in years to pass border bill
BY
EMILY BROOKS AND
MIKE LILLIS - 01/30/24 6:00 AM ET
SHARETWEET
House Republicans appear to be on the precipice of torpedoing their best opportunity in years of enacting border legislation.
Republicans had long insisted on changes to border and migration policy as a condition of approving any additional aid to Ukraine. But as Senate negotiators close in on a deal that does just that, opposition from former President Trump threatens to sink the bill, which many conservatives say doesn’t go far enough to put the brakes on southern migration.
The House opposition — from GOP leaders on down — is frustrating even some conservative immigration reformers, who fear the Trump-led resistance will sink the GOP’s best chance in years to bolster border security.
“[G]iving up on a border security bill would be a self-inflicted GOP wound,” The Wall Street Journal editorialists
warned this month.
Undeterred, Speaker
Mike Johnson (R-La.) told colleagues in a Friday letter that if the “rumors” about what is in the proposal are true, it would be “dead on arrival” in the House. Instead, he has urged
President Biden to take executive action to restore Trump-era policies and has pushed for the provisions from a House GOP border bill passed last year with no Democratic votes.
Most members of the House GOP conference appear to back Johnson’s hard-line demands. And increasingly, they see Republican senators supportive of the emerging deal — including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — as sellouts for their willingness to compromise with Democrats.
“This is why we don’t listen to the Senate Republicans,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) said in a Sunday interview with Fox News. “What they did in the Senate is once again some ham-handed deal that would help the Democrats save face, give Republican leadership an ability to say that they did something. And if it became law, the American people would quickly realize nothing changed, except that the politicians patted themselves on the back.
“We’re just not interested in that.”
The full details of the Senate deal are still murky as negotiators work to complete the legislative text. But Republican supporters are pitching several locked-in provisions — including new limits on asylum-seekers and new presidential powers of deportation — as clear wins for the GOP. In what would be another major concession from Democrats, the deal does not appear to include any new pathways to citizenship for “Dreamers” — based on never-passed proposals in Congress called the DREAM Act — brought to the country as children or for other migrants in the country illegally, long a Democratic priority.
thehill.com
www.scoop.co.nz
www.pbs.org
