The Senate’s awful nonenforcement, immigration-acceleration bill is dead.
The proposed $118 billion Emergency National Security Appropriations Act was so terrible that it never got off the ground.
Misleadingly labeled bipartisan, two pro-expansion senators, Kyrsten Sinema, a faux Independent from Arizona, and Chris Murphy, a deep-blue Democrat from Connecticut — along with clueless Oklahoma Republican James Lankford, safely five years away from his next re-election bid — were the chief negotiators.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., cheered them on from the sidelines.
Schumer and McConnell may not agree on much, but they are united in favor of unlimited immigration.
After what all parties claim was months of intense give-and-take debate, the negotiators arrived at a final product that would worsen, not improve, President Joe Biden’s self-created border crisis.
The long-awaited details of the Senate’s bill, which also provided funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, dropped the night of Feb. 4 against a warning from House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., that a bad immigration bill would be dead on arrival.
Sure enough, the Senate’s proposal was worse than Johnson anticipated.
Johnson, in his statement after studying the text, wrote that among its many flaws, the bill granted immediate work permission to asylum seekers but excluded meaningful reforms.
The language allowed illegals, including family units, to be “released from physical custody” which effectively gave cover to Biden’s catch and release policy.
Disastrously, the Senate proposal required the release of “a minimum of 1,400 inadmissible (but work authorized) aliens each calendar day cumulatively across the southwest land border ports of entry.”
Senate leaders, skilled in duplicity, promoted their bill as an immigration crackdown.
The proposal established an emergency authority to shut down the border when a 5,000 daily average of alien encounters over a consecutive seven-day period was reached or 8,500 encounters in a single day.
But the bill’s fine points allowed Biden to suspend this authority at his discretion, which could allow for thousands more illegal immigrants to cross.
The bill’s so-called shutdown authority was riddled with loopholes that granted discretionary authority to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who has for more than three years proven he will defiantly undermine immigration law and keep the border open.
The bill also left unchallenged Biden’s parole authority abuse, and provided $1.4 billion to nongovernmental organizations to transport and house illegal immigrants in hotels through the FEMA Shelter and Services Program.
Although Customs and Border Protection encounters since Oct. 1 exceed 1 million and 1,000 daily average gotaways, a total that includes suspected terrorists and known criminals since the current fiscal year began, Mayorkas barely escaped impeachment in a 214-216 vote.
The three GOP lawmakers who voted against impeachment were Reps. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security and Enforcement; Ken Buck, R-Colo.; and Mike Gallagher, R-Wis.
McClintock, a former state senator representing Santa Barbara County who now represents a suburban Sacramento district in Congress, was a disappointing defection, especially since he represents a border state.
After the vote, Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the House of Representatives expects leadership to bring the impeachment resolution back to the floor for a vote after absent GOP members return.
The correct number of illegal aliens who should be admitted daily is zero. Even those very few illegal immigrants found to have a truthful, credible fear of persecution asylum claims must be detained until their cases have been fully adjudicated as per the Immigration and Naturalization Act.
Under established federal law, no illegals should be getting in. Months ago, the House passed HR-2, a bill that would have resolved much of the border chaos, but Senate leadership sat on it for nine months and let it languish without acting.
As internal opposition roiled within the Senate about its bill’s future, supporters realized that the body could not reach the required 60-vote threshold in a 51-49 divided chamber.
Republican senators blocked further action so Schumer devised a new game plan: a $95.3 standalone bill that strips out the immigration provisions but leaves the Ukraine and Israel foreign aid funding intact.
The Senate’s Feb. 9 foreign aid vote, which advanced the legislation, has kept the Beltway buzzing.
If the Senate passes the funding-only version, the ball will go back to Johnson, who has promised that border security would be “the hill to die on” — without it, the House would not move forward on Ukraine funding.
If he breaks his enforcement vow, Johnson’s job could be at stake.
Under a deal former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., made in January 2023 that helped him secure the position, any single House member could force a vote on a motion to vacate.
At least a dozen conservatives have indicated they would be willing to begin the process to remove Johnson.
On Capitol Hill, the drama never ends.