Welp, the dog caught the car again. After months — decades? — of running on tightening the border, House Republicans are suddenly paralyzed when offered the chance to do so.
- beefing up border security as a condition for giving any more aid to Ukraine (check!)
- a tougher and faster asylum-processing system so that those who don’t meet asylum criteria cannot stay and work for years while their cases crawl through the courts (check!)
- hiring more personnel for Customs and Border Protection as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (1,500 and 1,200, respectively — so, check, check!)
- huge investments in fentanyl detection technologies and other anti-trafficking enforcement (check!)
- reviving something like Title 42 restrictions, wherein the president can “shut down” most of the asylum system (though this version doesn’t require a public health pretext and has more severe consequences for border-crossers — so, check-plus, perhaps).
House Republicans should have been pinching themselves in disbelief. Yet within hours of this 370-page bill dropping, House GOP leaders ruled out letting their chamber vote on any of it.
“I’ve seen enough,” Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) said, later adding that it was “a waste of time.” He just can’t take yes for an answer, it seems.
There are different ways to interpret why this much-awaited, much-desired legislation ended up, in Johnson’s words, “DEAD on arrival in the House.” Perhaps his conference wants to maintain “border chaos” as a live issue through the 2024 election. Trump, the party’s likely presidential nominee, has said as much, since he hopes to continue running on the idea that he alone can fix it.
Maybe GOP lawmakers genuinely think they should hold out for the more draconian bill they put forward last year, known as H.R. 2. There are two major problems with this strategy: First, H.R. 2 would not supply funding for pretty much anything that could stop border crossings.
Second, it would almost certainly never become law — even if Republicans were to gain control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) himself has pointed this out. (For procedural reasons, the bill would need 60 votes in the Senate, which it could not get.)
Maybe House lawmakers are genuinely confused about how immigration law works. After all, they keep insisting that President Biden take actions that courts have ruled would be illegal. They also appear to misunderstand (misrepresent?) an aspect of the bipartisan Senate deal by suggesting that it “accepts 5,000 illegal immigrants a day.” This is not, in fact, what the bill would do; rather, it would force the United States to block anyone crossing between ports of entry from even applying for asylum when that threshold has recently been met (as is the case right now).
Maybe House Republicans have convinced themselves that any legislation that could appeal to Democrats must, ipso facto, be too reasonable for them to consider. In a twist on the Groucho Marx line, they’d never belong to a club that would have anyone else as a member.
Hard-line Republicans had already begun efforts to punish their own party members who worked on this bipartisan deal, including lead GOP negotiator Sen. James Lankford (Okla.). Poor Lankford reportedly didn’t want this job at all, but he caught the falling knife anyway — and then got stabbed in the back with it.
Maybe House Republicans are pining for a replay of their failed efforts to repeal Obamacare in 2017. Back then, they demagogued for multiple campaign cycles on overhauling the U.S. health-care system. Then, when granted the power to do so, they realized they had no real solutions. Everything they’d said on the issue was a meaningless posture, and they (fortunately) failed to pass anything at all.
Unlike the Obamacare repeal debacle, the passage of the Senate border bill would not be so terrible. I maintain serious concerns about its Title 42-like powers, as well as some other provisions relating to asylum. But much of the bill would make useful changes that should, theoretically, receive robust bipartisan support.
For example, it would invest much-needed resources in the border. It would give our Afghan allies — people who’ve already been vetted and are here in the United States but stuck in legal limbo — a pathway to permanent legal status. And for the first time, it would mandate that vulnerable, unaccompanied children seeking asylum receive legal counsel.
The White House and the bill’s Senate negotiators are now trying to defend it against myriad falsehoods about open borders and the like. But the burden of proving — or disproving — the merits of this hard-fought deal should be on the speaker: What, exactly, is Johnson’s objection to doing so many things his party ran for office to do?
