The House is all but guaranteed to reject a broad immigration reform proposal Wednesday from Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., even after delaying the vote from last week in an attempt to win over more votes.
Republicans were scheduled for a late Tuesday afternoon meeting with President Trump to help broker small changes to the proposal to win enough Republican votes to pass. But that meeting was scrapped, and lawmakers, realizing the differences are too vast, have all but given up and acknowledged that they could not find the formula needed to win the 215 votes to pass a bill.
[Update: Paul Ryan’s immigration bill flops in the House as 112 Republicans reject it]
Ryan intends to hold a vote on the bill Wednesday, but it is poised to fail.
“At this point we need to vote, see how it goes and then reboot from there,” Rep. Mark Walker, R-N.C., head of the Republican Study Committee, the largest House GOP faction, told the Washington Examiner. “The die has been cast at this point.”
The bill was written as a compromise between House conservatives and Republicans lawmakers who want to legalize Dreamers who came to the country illegally as children, as well as boost border security and reform other immigration programs.
But the plan fell apart when it became apparent no bill could win over enough of the two factions without the help of Democrats, who are unified against all GOP immigration legislation.
Republican lawmakers mulled changing the legislation over the weekend by adding more conservative provisions such as mandatory use of E-Verify, but it did not attract enough new conservative votes and cost too many moderate votes.
“Every time you bump it one way or the other, you bump some people off, one way or the other,” said Walker, who opposes the measure.
Conservatives wanted the bill to exclude parents of Dreamers from citizenship eligibility, but the change was not made and it cost votes.
Most conservatives back a bill authored by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., that provides a very limited pathway to citizenship for about 700,000 Dreamers, ends the diversity visa and chain migration programs, and cuts federal funding for sanctuary cities.
Walker and other lawmakers said this won’t be the last attempt to pass immigration reform. The GOP got close, lawmakers said, noting the Goodlatte bill won 193 votes last week.
“What we have here is the seeds of consensus that will be gotten to, hopefully now, but, if not, later,” Ryan said.
Plan B is for the House on Thursday to consider a narrow bill that would address the separation of children from adults who enter the country illegally at the southern border, a GOP leadership aide said.
The bill, not yet written, could incorporate provisions from proposals introduced by Republican lawmakers that would allow children to remain with adult family members at the border while they await immigration hearings.
