海角大神

As I noted earlier today, the House鈥檚 version of a supplemental spending bill to deal with the border crisis was imperiled by opposition from tea party groups, led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz who has spent the last several days lobbying House Republicans to vote against the bill proposed by their own leadership. As the day began, though, it looked as tough the House would actually go forward with a vote, though, and debate on the bill actually proceeded to the point where the House would be ready to vote on the bill later today. In the end, though, the House pulled the bill from the floor, obviously because there were not sufficient votes to pass it:

This isn鈥檛 the first time we鈥檝e seen the House GOP Caucus embarrass the House Leadership like this. It happened several times in the runup to last year鈥檚 government shutdown, it happened when the House failed to pass a bill for emergency aid for hurricane Sandy, and it happened during the summer 2011 debt debacle. On each occasion, as in this case, the leadership bent over backward to give the most extreme wing of the GOP caucus what it wanted and it usually still wasn鈥檛 good enough. On some occasions, Speaker John Boehner was willing to buck his caucus and put a bill on the floor that he knew would only pass with Democratic support, but that doesn鈥檛 appear to be an option this time because the Democratic caucus in the House opposes the Republican bill both because the funding provided is a mere fraction of what the president is saying is necessary, and also less than the amount the Senate bill would authorize, and because it would eliminate some legal protections for the Central American migrants claiming asylum under the applicable law. So, either the House passes a bill that a majority of Republicans can support or they pass nothing and, now, it looks like they will pass nothing.

The tweets from Congressional reports on the scene this afternoon tell the story:

Perhaps the most ironic thing about all of this, though, is in the statement that House Leadership released when the bill was pulled:

Let this sink in for a minute. The same House of Representative that just yesterday evening voted to sue the president of the United States, something no House in American history has ever done before, because he was acting on his own in areas where Congress refused to act is saying that the President can solve the border crisis on his own without Congress acting. I鈥檓 not sure if the correct word here is irony or chutzpah, but it鈥檚 certainly something.聽

In any case, House Republicans are apparently meeting late this afternoon to try to see if they can pull some kind of bill together before everyone leaves town, but it鈥檚 not looking good. And if the bill that they pulled wasn鈥檛 going to have much of a shot of passing, it seems hard to see what they could propose that will have a chance at passage.聽

Update: The House Leadership has announced that the House will be back in session tomorrow, presumably to try to hammer out some kind of border bill, starting with a GOP caucus conference tomorrow morning. It鈥檚 unclear if the Senate will still be in session at that point, though.

Doug Mataconis appears on the Outside the Beltway blog at http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/.