Rebellion Inside G.O.P. Scuttles Vote on Border BillBy ASHLEY PARKER and JONATHAN WEISMAN
WASHINGTON — Conservatives in the House rebelled against their leadership on Thursday to scuttle an emergency spending measure that addressed the migrant crisis at the southern border, pushing the issue to a showdown on Friday as lawmakers prepared to leave for a five-week recess. The unexpected turmoil offered a coda to the dysfunction that has gripped the Capitol for much of the year.
The failure of the comparatively modest Republican border bill, coupled with the Senate’s own inability to even bring a Democratic alternative to a vote, emphasized how the prospects of a broad immigration overhaul — which at the beginning of the 113th Congress held great bipartisan promise — have ground to a crashing halt.
The struggle to deal with immigration, which became more urgent with the flood of tens of thousands of children at the border, succumbed to congressional infighting, driven by more conservative Republicans who balked at further government spending and President Obama’s approach on deporting the migrants.
Fissures were evident in the Republican Party, with many House members critical of their more conservative colleagues for holding up the bill, arguing that heading home for the August break having not even voted on immigration legislation would be politically damaging. The episode was also a rebuke, at least temporarily, for Speaker John A. Boehner and his new leadership team, who in an emergency closed-door meeting on Thursday told members that they were not even close to the necessary votes required to pass the bill.
House Republicans were set to hold another meeting on Friday morning to decide how to move forward, and nearly all the lawmakers said they would stay in Washington as long as necessary to put the bill on the floor. “There was a lot of come-to-Jesus talk in there, and I think at the end of the day we’re going to end up getting to a majority and get this thing passed,” said Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois. “Were not going to leave here until this is done.”
Representative Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, said, “Doing nothing is the worst of all worlds.”
“You have people on our side of the aisle who go through all sorts of contortions to get to ‘no,’ ” Mr. Dent said. “On the Democratic side, they’ll vote for the money but not for the policy changes. In my party, we’ll vote for the policy changes but not the money to implement the policy. This is extraordinarily frustrating and infuriating for people like me. We have a crisis on our hands.”
While Republicans were stunned by Thursday’s setback, the inability of either chamber to reach a consensus on even a scaled-back bill to deal with the border crisis yielded no clear winners. Republicans fear that not at least voting on a border measure could hurt them in the November midterm elections — as well as the 2016 presidential election — even as the electoral climate has been highly favorable to them. Democrats worry that any bill the Republicans could pass would endanger the young migrants fleeing violence in their Central American countries.
The Republican leaders had hoped to push through a $659 million emergency spending measure, well short of the $2.7 billion that Senate Democrats had proposed and the $3.7 billion that President Obama had requested.
Mr. Boehner and his team had worked to hold together their already fragile coalition to support the border bill by promising members a vote on an additional measure intended to curb Mr. Obama’s executive authority to stop the deportation of certain immigrants in the country illegally, including those brought as young children.
But in the end, it was not enough. House Republicans were not helped by their Senate counterparts, particularly Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who on Wednesday night held a meeting over pizza and beer with more than a dozen of the House’s most conservative lawmakers where he voiced his concerns about the immigration bill.
Mr. Cruz came up in Thursday’s closed-door meeting, which opened acrimoniously, according to House members. Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, said some members had expressed frustration that Mr. Cruz was once again dictating terms to the House, as he did when he helped push Congress toward a government shutdown in October.
“I do wish that Ted Cruz would stay in the Senate,” Mr. King said after the meeting. “Nobody elected him speaker. Nobody elected him majority leader in the House, and it’s really a cheap shot to be coming in from the side. To have some guy come in from the outside like the Pied Piper is wrong.”
Mr. King added that it was critical for Republicans to vote on their own legislation before leaving. “It’s very important we show we’re a governing party,” he said. “It’s bad enough we shut the government down last year.”
The outcome was at great remove from the optimism that marked the immigration debate just a year ago. Fresh off a Republican report of the 2012 presidential election that said the party had to reach out to Hispanics and other minorities in order to survive, hope ran high for a broad immigration bill, including a path to citizenship for the 11 million immigrants in the country illegally. Unlikely bedfellows, like business and labor and technology officials, as well as religious leaders and farmers, signed on to help.
At the time, a flood of young migrants at the southern border was not even part of the debate.
But despite the efforts by the Senate, which passed an immigration overhaul in June 2013, the legislation foundered in the Republican-controlled House. Republican House members, many of whom sit in gerrymandered districts with small Hispanic populations, were unwilling to take a vote in favor of a broad compromise.
The issue became increasingly toxic, ensnaring Republicans like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, an author of the Senate immigration bill. Once considered an ideal Republican to lead his party forward on the issue, Mr. Rubio took a hit for his involvement with an immigration overhaul and has since said Congress first needs to pass border security measures before turning to an overhaul.
Now, the crisis at the border has become a proxy fight over the larger immigration bill, which was officially declared dead by even its most ardent supporters this summer.
The White House has said the president expects to receive recommendations from the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department by the end of the summer about how Mr. Obama could use his executive authority to make immigration enforcement more humane.
Now the president is also coming under pressure on both sides. Republicans are asserting that they do not trust him to enforce the existing immigration laws, and saying that anything else he does would only further poison the debate. Democrats facing tough re-election fights are urging the administration not to take further executive actions on immigration, warning it could hurt them back home with voters.
In a meeting with lawmakers on Thursday to discuss foreign policy, Mr. Obama told Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, that he agreed with Republicans on 80 percent of the elements of the border legislation but disagreed on an important 20 percent: whether to offset the money and how to alter a 2008 law to allow American authorities to more quickly deport unaccompanied children, according to a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The president said Republicans would have to think long and hard about why they would not act on the areas of consensus, the official added. The result, Mr. Obama said, is that he would have to act over the congressional recess to redirect funding in ways they would not like.
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