While the
Freedom Caucus sank the vote, some GOP lawmakers are blaming Paul Ryan’s quest
for legacy-making wins.
By RACHAEL BADE
05/18/2018
03:46 PM EDT
Updated 05/18/2018
04:15 PM EDT
By THOMAS WRIGHT
House Republicans are
at each other’s troats after the Freedom Caucus delivered a shock to party
leaders on Friday by killing a key GOP bill over an unrelated simmering feud
over immigration.
Speaker Paul Ryan and
his leadership team were sure the group of three dozen rabble-rousers would
cave. The partisan farm bill, after all, includes historic new work
requirements for food stamp beneficiaries that conservatives have demanded for
years. Plus, President Donald Trump leaned in, tweeting his support for the
bill Thursday night to up the pressure on the far right.
But Ryan’s team
sorely miscalculated. In an embarrassing show of weakness, the bill went down
on the floor after a last-minute leadership scramble to flip votes.
Almost immediately,
Republicans pointed fingers at each other. Freedom Caucus members said GOP
leaders brought the matter on themselves by failing to pass a conservative
immigration solution for Dreamers sooner. GOP leaders blamed the conservatives
for upending a core Trump priority.
And some Republicans
even blamed Ryan, arguing they’re stuck with an outgoing speaker
who couldn’t get the job done.
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“Obviously the House
Freedom Caucus is to blame, but this is the problem when you have a lame duck
speaker who announces he’s leaving eight months in advance,” said one senior
Republican source. “He can make calls to members to urge them to vote for
something, but who will care?”
Ryan’s office put the
blame on the Freedom Caucus. The group had been demanding a vote on a sharply
conservative immigration bill, and Ryan’s team late Thursday offered such a
vote — but not until June, incensing members of the caucus.
“This is all the more
disappointing because we offered the votes these members were looking for, but
they still chose to take the bill down,” said Doug Andres, a Ryan spokesman.
It is unclear if the
conference would get another shot at passing Trump’s work requirements for the
food stamp program, though the White House in a statement encouraged the House
to try again. Leaders could decide to write a bipartisan bill instead without
the food stamp cuts, which would be much easier to pass.
"President
Donald J. Trump is disappointed in the result of today’s vote in the House of
Representatives on the Farm bill, and hopes the House can resolve any remaining
issues in order to achieve strong work requirements and support our Nation’s
agricultural community," the statement read.
Seeming to feel the
pressure, Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows argued that the bill would pass
eventually — they just wanted to deal with immigration first.
"It’s not a
fatal blow, it’s just a reorganization,” he told a swarm of reporters as he
left the House floor Friday. "I think at this point we just really need to
deal with immigration in an effective way.”
The legislation’s
passage was always going to be tricky. Typically farm bills, which include
agriculture subsidies and programs that help feed low-income individuals, are
crafted and passed on a bipartisan basis.
But due to his
looming retirement, Ryan has been in “legacy mode,” as one senior Republican
source put it earlier this week. And he decided the farm bill should have a
different path, instructing the House Agriculture Committee to craft a partisan
bill with the work requirements. It was an opportunity for the longtime fiscal
hawk to get one more signature policy checked off his list, after tax reform.
But other members of
leadership saw problems right away: Democrats would never back an employment
mandate for food stamp recipients — so Ryan’s gambit would require them to rely
on their own fractured conference.
True to form, the
Freedom Caucus took advantage of the predicament to get something they wanted
on a wholly separate issue. The group was unhappy that a cluster of moderate
Republicans were going to force votes on bipartisan bills protecting young
undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers — legislation many expect to pass
with Democratic support.
One group member,
Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, told POLITICO Thursday night that conservatives
have been petrified that GOP leaders are going to strike an immigration deal
with Democrats that ignores their own priorities.
So Meadows demanded
that GOP leaders put the group’s preferred conservative Dreamer bill on the
floor — legislation they’d been asking leadership to vote on since last year.
The bill would extend legal status for Dreamers for a few years, build a wall,
curb legal immigration, crack down on sanctuary cities and reform asylum for
minors — proposals that even some Republicans are uncomfortable with.
In a Wednesday night
meeting two days before the vote, Ryan agreed leadership could put the
conservative proposal on the House floor in June. But that wasn’t good enough
for Freedom Caucus members: they demanded that the vote happen before the farm
bill.
GOP leaders weren’t
willing to give them that, accusing the Freedom Caucus of moving the goal
posts. So instead, they told the group: pick any date you want after the farm
bill and it’s yours, according to one senior Republican source.
The Freedom Caucus
held a late-night Thursday phone call to mull their options. If they backed
down, they’d be seen as spineless; but if they didn’t, Trump could grow angry.
They risked the
latter.
“Lean pass, but a
real toss up,” said one senior Republican of the prospects of passage as
lawmakers headed to the floor Friday morning.
Any confidence
leaders felt earlier in the week melted away quickly on the floor. As lawmakers
considered a series of amendments to the bill, Majority Whip Steve Scalise
(R-La.) and his chief deputy whip Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) buzzed from
conservative member to conservative member trying to flip votes with mixed
results.
McHenry huddled with
Rep. Walter Jones, a fellow North Carolinian whom GOP leaders rarely rely on
because he so often votes no. Jones voted no, as expected. Scalise sat with
Sanford but couldn't move him.
House Majority Leader
Kevin McCarthy and his close friend Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.) talked animatedly
with Freedom Caucus member Jody Hice of Georgia, who they flipped. But that
wasn’t enough to save the bill.
At one point, Meadows
and Freedom Caucus founder Jim Jordan huddled with Ryan, McCarthy, Scalise and
McHenry for tense discussion. It didn’t do any good.
Moments later,
leadership just stopped working the vote, realizing the bill was going down.
And when it did, Republicans exiting the floor fumed about the Freedom Caucus
trying to take up the spotlight.
"It seems to me
it was a case of not being able to take yes for an answer," said Rep. Tom
Cole of Oklahoma, who is a member of the whip team. “It’s ridiculous … They
were guaranteed a vote on a specific day, and that’s enough!”
Jordan defended their
decision: “We need to deal with immigration in the right way — one where we
actually build the border security wall, do the kind of things we need to do.”
GOP leaders say,
however, there’s never going to be a conservative immigration bill that can
pass the House let alone the Senate without Democratic buy-in. Ryan and his
team have tried for almost half a year to tweak the Freedom Caucus’ favored
immigration bill so it can pass with with 218 Republican votes. They can’t do
it, they say.
Yet it was not the
Freedom Caucus alone that put the nail in the coffin. Of the 30 Republicans who
voted against the bill, more than half of them were centrists, not conservatives
— and many of those are typically leadership allies.
One of those no votes
was Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan, the former energy and commerce chairman.
Others, like Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, have been heavily reliant
on leadership’s help in their reelection efforts.
Some Republicans
speculated that Ryan should have been able to land those members — and that a
permanent speaker could have switched those votes.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/18/house-republicans-farm-bill-failure-597888?utm_campaign=KHN%3A%20First%20Edition&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=63074972&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--BiuMrX-AUSZsvIFKfFOsdk1GD8uRl09ueNFqWyWQG6MDZMTFelbAYcHxNHrWaLk6VqTgFpHKqPnf0LiNDS9u2Dg-mgw&_hsmi=63074972
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