House Leaders Postpone Border Supplemental, Delay Recess, Blame Obama (Updated) (Video)
Updated 4:52 p.m. | House GOP leaders ditched their plans to vote on a border supplemental Thursday after failing to secure the votes to pass it — but plan to try again Friday before jetting out of town for the August recess.
“We will stay until we vote,” Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., told reporters after an emergency meeting held at 3 p.m. Another GOP conference meeting was called for 9 a.m Friday, a GOP leadership aide said.
Asked if talks would continue Thursday night, Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, told reporters “Oh, yeah.”
Earlier, chaos reigned in the House as GOP leaders’ carefully crafted gambit to win conservative votes fell apart.
“We don’t think we have the votes,” said Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, one of the architects of the bill. But she said the whip count was “very close” with about 214 supporters, including Democrats.
“There are people who just don’t want to do anything,” she said. “They don’t want to spend the money.”
“I’m going to talk to the whip and the leaders to try and talk them into doing something else,” said Rep. John Carter, R-Texas on his way to the whip’s office.
Carter said he’s been telling his GOP colleagues, “60 percent of something is better than 100 percent of nothing.”
The $659 million bill intended to deal with the crisis of child migrants coming across the border would have been followed by a vote on separate legislation prohibiting President Barack Obama from granting deportation relief and work permits to any more illegal immigrants.
GOP leaders, led by Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, issued a joint statement pinning the blame for pulling the bill on Obama.
“This situation shows the intense concern within our conference – and among the American people – about the need to ensure the security of our borders and the president’s refusal to faithfully execute our laws. There are numerous steps the president can and should be taking right now, without the need for congressional action, to secure our borders and ensure these children are returned swiftly and safely to their countries. For the past month, the House has been engaged in intensive efforts to pass legislation that would compel the president to do his job and ensure it can be done as quickly and compassionately as possible. Through an inclusive process, a border bill was built by listening to members and the American people that has the support not just of a majority of the majority in the House, but most of the House Republican Conference. We will continue to work on solutions to the border crisis and other challenges facing our country.”
Some conservatives however weren’t happy with the supplemental language itself, while others wanted a prohibition on deportation relief to be attached to the supplemental so that it couldn’t just be discarded by the Senate. And still others didn’t want to spend money. Democrats, led by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., nearly all opposed the bill over changes made to expedite deportations of child migrants by altering a 2008 trafficking law.
Pelosi called the bill “unjust and inhumane.”
Katherine Tully-McManus, Matt Fuller and Niels Lesniewski contributed to this report.
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