WASHINGTON — With the lifting of Title 42, House conservatives are making the case that the situation at the border is an emergency and mounting an eleventh-hour push to include the recently passed Republican border bill in debt ceiling talks.
A GOP aide said conservatives believe Republicans are already making a compromise by negotiating over spending caps and that there should be room for further negotiation given the significance of the border issue. The source described the group as “making a lot of noise about it.”
On Thursday morning, members of the conservative Republican Study Committee sent a letter to congressional leadership, President Joe Biden and the negotiators for both sides, including Rep. Garrett Graves, R-La., Shalanda Young, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, and White House senior aide Steve Ricchetti, calling for the border to be included in negotiations. Rep. Chip Roy, a signatory, said last week that this should be on the table.
What remains unclear is if their insistence that the border be included in talks could grow into enough opposition to sink a deal — or imperil McCarthy’s position as speaker.
McCarthy has managed to keep his caucus on board, but risks a revolt at any time. Should he try to pass a debt deal that relies on Democratic votes to clear the House, it will raise questions about whether the far-right faction of his caucus revolts. But if he hopes to pass it with only Republican votes, then he may have to concede to efforts to begin including issues like the border.
In order to become speaker, McCarthy agreed to some rules changes, including allowing just one member of the House to force a vote to remove him.
An insistence on adding the GOP border legislation would complicate already fraught negotiations over how to avert a debt default. The White House opposes the border measure and has threatened to veto it. House Democrats unanimously voted against it, blasting it as the “Child Deportation Act” and calling it an “extreme MAGA” bill. It has no prospects of clearing the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., a key McCarthy ally and Freedom Caucus member, said she’s not demanding that the GOP border bill be included in a debt deal but said it should be discussed as part of the bipartisan talks.
“It’s not a red line for me — it’s just something that I think should be involved in the negotiations, and quite a few other Republicans members have said the same thing,” Greene said in an interview Thursday.
“The situation at our border and basically our national security crisis has become such a major issue … and with 300 Americans being murdered every single day with fentanyl … I think it’s so bad I introduced articles of impeachment against Secretary Mayorkas and President Biden.”
McCarthy sounded optimistic on Thursday that negotiators are headed to a deal.
“We haven’t agreed to anything yet, but I see the path that we could come to an agreement,” he said.
Conservative Republicans are already concerned that McCarthy isn’t going to push hard enough on spending cuts.
A source who has spoken to people in the negotiation said the biggest points currently being debated are budget caps — including whether to limit spending to the 2022 or 2023 levels — followed by work requirements.
There is pressure on McCarthy from conservatives to hold a firm line on budget caps and not cave to Biden, exposing a tension inside the Republican caucus that has been kept at bay since he was able to win the speaker’s gavel in January.
An outside adviser to McCarthy says the speaker thinks “that a deal isn’t hard to put together” on spending caps, unspent Covid funds and changes to the environmental permitting rules.
One Republican hardliner privately shared concerns that McCarthy may be willing to make concessions to strike a deal with Biden that doesn’t make deep enough cuts in spending.
Some Republican hardliners warn that they won’t make compromises from the House bill and predict the Democratic-led Senate will back down.
“This is the bill,” said Rep. Bob Good, R-Va. “The Senate and the White House have no choice, literally. What if the House doesn’t do anything? What’s gonna happen: The Senate’s gonna pass the bill, the White House is gonna sign it. Why would we do anything else?”
“What choice would they have?” he continued. “The Senate will cave and pass our bill.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
