Speaker sets immigration vote
WASHINGTON: After frenzied, late-night negotiations, Speaker Paul Ryan defused a moderate Republican rebellion on Tuesday with a promise to hold high-stakes votes on immigration next week, thrusting the divisive issue onto centre stage during a difficult election season for Republicans.
The move by Mr Ryan, announced late on Tuesday by his office, was something of a defeat for the rebellious immigration moderates, who fell two signatures short of the 218 needed to force the House to act this month on bipartisan measures aimed more directly at helping young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children.
Instead, the House is most likely to vote on one hard-line immigration measure backed by President Donald Trump and conservatives — and another more moderate compromise bill that was still being drafted, according to people familiar with the talks.
Had the rebels secured just two more signatures for their “discharge petition,” they would have also gotten votes on the Dream Act, a stand-alone bill backed by Democrats that includes a path to citizenship for young immigrants brought as children known as Dreamers, and another bipartisan measure that couples a path to citizenship for Dreamers with beefed-up border enforcement.
Mr Ryan desperately wanted to avoid bringing those bipartisan measures to the floor. Yesterday morning he is expected to
present a detailed plan for next week’s votes to his conference.
“Members across the Republican conference have negotiated directly and in good faith with each other for several weeks, and as a result, the House will consider two bills next week that will avert the discharge petition and resolve the border security and immigration issues,” a spokeswoman for Mr Ryan, AshLee Strong, said late on Tuesday.
Tuesday night’s developments were a high-wire act for Mr Ryan and the House moderates. Under House rules, Tuesday was the deadline to force a vote this month, and as moderates and conservatives met separately late into the night, the moderates insisted that they had the votes necessary to put their petition over the top.
“We have people waiting to sign; we’ll see how the rest of the night unfolds,” Rep Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla, a leader of the petition drive, said shortly before the speaker’s announcement.
But those signatures failed to materialise, significantly weakening their hand. The chairman of the hard-line House Freedom Caucus, Rep Mark Meadows of North Carolina, said before Mr Ryan’s announcement that his group wanted the House to hold votes on two immigration bills: the conservative-backed bill, which is sponsored by Rep Robert W Goodlatte of Virginia, and the still-unfinished compromise bill. He appears to have gotten just that.
“Right now, we have a framework of
a bill, and there’s no legislative text,” Mr Meadows told reporters on Tuesday night. “There is a whole lot that needs to still be worked out with that.”
Democrats pounced on the setback for the moderates, many of whom — such as Mr Curbelo and Reps Jeff Denham of California and Will Hurd of Texas — are high on their target list in November.
“House Republicans’ latest failure to deliver for Dreamers is made all the more inexcusable by their many empty promises that they would get the signatures and move on the discharge petition,” said Javier Gamboa, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “If vulnerable members like Carlos Curbelo, Will Hurd and Jeff Denham can’t get the job done with their party controlling all of Washington, they have no business serving in Congress.”
But Mr Curbelo called Mr Ryan’s announcement “a major development.”
“Our goal has always been to force the House to debate and consider meaningful immigration reform,” he added. “And today we’re one step closer.”
In gathering signatures for their petition, the moderates were seeking to protect hundreds of thousands of Dreamers, who have been shielded from deportation under an Obama-era program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or Data. Mr Trump moved last year to end the program.
To force the votes, the petition needed
a majority of the House — 218 signatories — which would require 25 Republican signatures if all 193 Democrats signed on. Twenty-three Republicans signed, and by Tuesday night, all Democrats had, as well.
Mr Ryan had feared a debate on immigration would divide the party just as lawmakers who are trying to defend their seats have to face voters. But leaders of the petition drive, many of them with large Hispanic constituencies, had argued that to ignore the immigration issue would put them in political peril.
“There have been some critics who say that this could cost us our majority,” Mr Denham said in a recent interview. “My concern is if we do nothing, it could cost us our majority. So yes, it’s risky. But it’s the right thing to do.”
In effect, Mr Curbelo, Mr Denham and the other moderates did force Mr Ryan’s hand. For the past several weeks, House conservatives have been in intense talks, conducted in Mr Ryan’s office, with Mr Denham and Mr Curbelo. But coming up with a compromise on immigration that is acceptable to the vast majority of House Republicans is challenging, given the differing views within their conference.
Among the particularly thorny questions were whether to provide a path to citizenship for Data recipients, precisely which young immigrants would be eligible for that path and how it would be structured. Any special pathway for Data recipients could be viewed by conservative members as offering “amnesty” and could prompt a backlash from the party’s right flank.