Home United States USA — Science House Dems: Senate ‘screwing us’ with shutdown deal

House Dems: Senate ‘screwing us’ with shutdown deal

289
0
SHARE

So far, Speaker Paul Ryan has resisted pressure to bring an immigration bill up for a vote.
House Democrats are fuming about the deal their Senate counterparts accepted to reopen the government, saying it gets them no closer to an immigration agreement in the House and may have cost them precious political capital in the meantime.
“They blink, they just do, and it’s unfortunate,” Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) said about Senate Democrats. “I thought they were going to stand tall and firm.”
Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) was blunter at a House Democratic Caucus meeting Monday afternoon. “How do we know the Senate isn’t screwing us?” she said, according to two sources.
“They are,” responded House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.).
The agreement between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) will bring an end to the three-day shutdown and provides for an immigration debate on the Senate floor if no deal to protect Dreamers is reached by Feb. 8. But, notably, the deal includes no assurances from House Republican leaders that they too will allow a bipartisan immigration debate on the House floor.
So far, Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has resisted pressure from both moderate and conservative Republicans to bring an immigration bill up for a vote, two groups with very different ideas about what should be included in a final deal.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has also tried to nudge Ryan, asking him via phone last week to allow the House to vote on two bills: A hardline immigration proposal sponsored by conservatives like Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and a bipartisan Dreamer-border security bill offered by Reps. Will Hurd (R-Texas) and Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.). Ryan refused.
Ryan has not given any indication he would bring up a Senate-passed immigration bill on the House floor and resisted making a commitment to do so on the phone with McConnell Friday night before the shutdown.
Gutierrez and others leaving the House Democratic Caucus meeting pointed out the same thing: Nothing has changed for House Democrats since Friday, except they could shoulder some of the blame in the public eye for shutting down the government.
“The big question is what’s different?” said one House Democrat describing the overall tone of the meeting. “This works in the Senate but it doesn’t accomplish what the ‘no’ votes — ‘no’ to the extension — were intended to accomplish [in the House].”
All but six House Democrats voted against a short-term funding bill last week, including several vulnerable lawmakers who supported two other continuing resolutions to keep the government open in December.
House Democrats in particular took issue with the messaging strategy adopted by Schumer and other members of Senate Democratic leadership during the shutdown. They say Schumer made the showdown about the Dreamers but then appeared to get cold feet when Republicans slammed Democrats for shutting down the government over “illegal immigrants.”
Democrats also tried to argue that the shutdown was about a lot more than just saving the nearly 700,000 undocumented immigrants from deportation. But by then, House Democrats argued, the messaging war was lost.
“Clearly no one looked really good here and everyone wanted to get the government open,” said one House Democratic source. “People didn’t specifically say [Schumer’s] name but that’s where the anger was directed.”
While House Democratic leaders and most members avoided publicly berating Schumer — unlike liberal groups who unleashed a torrent of criticism — the schism was obvious.
Both Pelosi and Hoyer voted against the short-term funding bill.
“I don’t see that there’s any reason, speaking personally and hearing from our members, to support what was put forth,” Pelosi said at a press conference Monday.
Now House Democrats worry they’ll be in the same place in just three weeks — staring down another government funding deadline with little, if any, progress on immigration talks that have languished in Congress since President Donald Trump rescinded protections for Dreamers in September.
Plus, members say, they are skeptical there is enough time in the next two weeks for real negotiations to take place. The House is expected to leave town after voting Monday for an already-scheduled recess. And next week will be consumed by Trump’s first State of the Union address and the GOP’s annual retreat.
“I can’t really tell you what the thinking is on the Senate side,” said Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairwoman Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N. M.). “How many times has one chamber voted for something that the other chamber won’t bring up?”
Grisham and other CHC leaders met with Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) on Sunday, where they discussed details of the Hurd-Aguilar bill.
Cornyn didn’t reject the bill, which currently has more than 50 bipartisan House cosponsors, according to sources with knowledge of the meeting. But it’s unclear if the White House would support the plan — likely a prerequisite for House GOP support — given it doesn’t address family-based migration or the diversity visa lottery, two hot button issues Republicans want to tackle as part of any immigration deal.
Cornyn was one of a handful of Senate Republicans who met with Trump Monday at the White House on immigration.
Now House Democrats are trying to salvage what they can out of a three-day government shutdown that seemed to move the needle little, if at all, in their favor — arguing they still have leverage on a raft of issues, including spending levels for defense and domestic programs, hurricane aid and, in the coming months, the debt limit.
“We have a lot of things that are left unaddressed, sort of twisting in the wind, including the Dreamers,” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) said.

Continue reading...