House GOP vows to ‘die on the hill to secure the border’
WASHINGTON — With a government shutdown days away, the House GOP is seizing on the recent rush of border crossings to renew demands that any funding bill include border security measures long sought by Texas Republicans.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Wednesday morning that a bipartisan short-term funding bill the Senate is working to pass is a non-starter in the House, in part because it does not include new border measures.
The Senate bill would continue funding the government at current levels until November as Congress works to pass annual spending packages.
Many Texas Republicans have long refused to support government funding bills without stricter border security measures, including resuming construction of a wall and returning to other Trump-era policies.
Their position is gaining new traction as the influx in migration has overwhelmed shelters in San Antonio and El Paso and pushed the mayor of Eagle Pass to issue a disaster declaration last week. Border Patrol logged a record 11,000 crossings Tuesday.
“We’re going to ignore that?” McCarthy said. “I think if you want to walk and chew gum at the same time, you have to deal with the issues before you.”
The stance, however, moves the two chambers further apart and appears to make a government shutdown more likely after funding runs out at the end of the month. McCarthy said he would tee up a vote on a shortterm funding bill with border measures later this week while the House continues votes on a series of annual spending bills full of GOP priorities that are unlikely to pass the Democraticcontrolled Senate.
The Senate proposal, supported by 30 Republicans, including U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, would maintain current spending levels, which funded 300 new Border Patrol agents this year and included $800 million in emergency management funding for border communities and other cities where migrants end up.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is among 19 Republicans who have opposed the bill.
Meanwhile, Democrats, including U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar of Laredo, have warned that a shutdown would come at just the wrong time for the Border Patrol as thousands of migrants have been crossing every day for the last two weeks.
“An Extreme House Republican Shutdown would impose enormous costs on the Border Patrol agents whose positions they want to eliminate, including forcing thousands of law enforcement officers to work without getting paid,” Deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates wrote in a memo on Wednesday.
Republican hard-liners such as U.S. Rep. Chip Roy of Austin have sought for months to tie government funding to a sweeping border security package the House passed earlier this year that would resume border wall construction, reinstate
Trump-era rules requiring asylum-seekers to "remain in Mexico" and restrict asylum to block the vast majority of migrants seeking refuge in the United States.
Democrats oppose the package, which U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar of El Paso slammed at the time as “an extremist Republican wish list that caters to the party’s most warped values by jailing children and families and extinguishing asylum.” Since passing the House, it has gone nowhere in the Senate, where both Cornyn and Cruz have endorsed it.
But Roy, whose district stretches to San Antonio, said on Glenn Beck’s radio show Wednesday morning that border security is a “burn-theplace-down, take absolutely no hostages” stance.
With a razor-thin majority in the House, even a handful of Republicans can derail legislation that does not have some Democratic support. McCarthy has been under increased pressure from a handful of the most conservative members of his party, who have threatened to challenge his speakership if he does not do as they wish on the funding fight.
Roy said if McCarthy were to “cut a deal with Democrats” to pass a funding bill without border measures, “it will be World War III within the Republican Party.
“We should absolutely die on the hill to secure the border,” Roy said. “And if we don’t do that, then we need to change things.”