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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

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.”

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) talks to press outside the House Chamber before voting on Thursday, January 11, 2024. (Allison Robbert)

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.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), the GOP’s lead negotiator, has sought to defuse the criticisms from within his party, arguing much of the griping is based on “internet rumors” that have mischaracterized what the bill actually does.

“People just want a secure border where we have legal immigration, but we’re not promoting illegal immigration, and that’s what we’ve seen in the last three years,” Lankford said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Johnson, seeking to get ahead of any announced deal, amplified his red lines on Monday, saying House Republicans won’t accept any proposal that allows “even one illegal crossing.”

“The number must be ZERO,” he posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.

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Much of the pushback has centered around reports that the bill has a provision to shut down the border if crossings exceed 5,000 a day.

Lankford has pushed back on that point as well, saying it would be “absolutely absurd” to agree to that number.

The willingness of Democrats to cede some of their long-held demands has prompted some House Republicans to question Johnson’s firm opposition to the emerging Senate deal, warning that an insistence on ideological purity will get Republicans nothing at all.

Asked earlier this month whether Johnson was making the perfect the enemy of the good on the border deal, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) — who negotiated a debt limit deal with Democrats last year and served as Speaker pro tempore before Republicans elevated Johnson to the position — advised the Speaker to take incremental steps.

“Take the moment, man. Take the policy win, bank it, and go back for more. That is always the goal,” McHenry said.

Democrats have their concerns with the Senate legislation, not least because no members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus have been involved in the negotiations. But their loudest criticisms have targeted Republicans, saying GOP leaders want to sink any deal to maintain the border crisis, which stands among Biden’s chief vulnerabilities heading into November’s elections.

“It’s very clear that House Republicans don’t want a solution,” said Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), who represents the border district around El Paso. “They’ve said as much.”

The collapse of the deal would follow a familiar pattern for Congress, which has struggled to come to any substantial agreement on immigration policy for decades. House Republicans rejected a 2013 “Gang of Eight” immigration package, which passed through the upper chamber with a strong bipartisan vote. House conservatives killed another effort by GOP leaders to move similar reforms in 2014. And under Trump’s presidency, Republicans forced the longest shutdown in history over demands for more border wall funding and policy reforms that never materialized.

And Trump, the runaway favorite for the GOP presidential nomination, is further complicating the calculus for Republicans by pushing them to reject any border legislation until he’s in the White House once again — a risky bet in the eyes of some Republicans.

“Moving legislation like this is a tall order in any event — there are always members incentivized to vote no,” said veteran Republican strategist Doug Heye, a former House GOP leadership aide. “But it’s a huge bet to punt on doing anything to potentially give Donald Trump the opportunity to do what he never tried to do as president.”

Trump, though, is making clear that he’s watching the border fight closely, and won’t make it easy for the early GOP opponents to shift away from that position. He said over the weekend that he would fight the border deal “all the way” and praised Johnson for how he was handling the deal.

“I think he’s going to prove to be a very good Speaker,” Trump said. “It’s tough when you have a very small majority. Very tough. Mike Johnson, Speaker, he just said it’s dead on arrival in the House.

“Dead on arrival.”

Tags Byron Donalds James Lankford Joe Biden Mike Johnson Veronica Escobar