Senate, House on collision course

‘Costs are real and urgent’

WASHINGTON, July 23, (AP): Senate Democrats prepared Tuesday to whack $1 billion from President Barack Obama’s emergency spending request for the border, while leaving out policy changes Republicans have demanded as their price for agreeing to any money. The developments pointed to a hardening stalemate over the crisis in Texas, where unaccompanied children are arriving by the tens of thousands from Central America.

The impasse comes as lawmakers prepare to leave Washington for their annual summer recess at the end of next week.

Legislation finalized by Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski would spend $2.7 billion for more immigration judges, detention facilities and other resources for the southern border. It also would include $225 million for Israel’s Iron Dome, designed to intercept short-range rockets and mortars, as Israel battles Hamas militants, and $615 million to fight wildfires raging in the West.

“The United States has an obligation to help resolve these crises but is running out of money,” Mikulski said in a statement late Tuesday. “The costs are real and urgent. We don’t save money by refusing to act or through delay.”

Yet the money for wildfires and for Israel appeared unlikely to sweeten the deal enough for Republicans to swallow it absent legal changes to allow the Central American kids to be turned around fast at the border and sent back home.

“Unfortunately, it looks like we’re on a track to do absolutely nothing,” said Republican Sen. John Cornyn.

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More than 57,000 young people have arrived since October, mostly from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Polls suggest the American public is demanding a solution, but lawmakers could not say where a compromise might lie.

Senate Democratic aides said the smaller spending bill, which could come to the floor for a vote next week, aimed to include enough money to handle the border crisis through the end of this calendar year amid pleas from Homeland Security Department officials who say overwhelmed agencies will be running out of money in