Republican leaders in the House were able to recover from an embarrassing setback. The 'Do-Little' Congress heads home

Congress is leaving town for a five-week recess after failing to address one of the most serious issues facing the nation: the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Republican leaders in the House were able to recover from an embarrassing setback by passing border legislation late Friday full of political red meat for their conservative base, including revisions to a 2008 anti-trafficking law and more money for the National Guard.


Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and his GOP colleagues also passed — over bitter Democratic objections — a bill to rein in President Barack Obama’s program to shield undocumented immigrants from deportations.

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But the House bills have no chance of becoming law. The Senate has already adjourned for the month, and Obama blasted the GOP proposals hours before House lawmakers cast their vote.

In the final days of the summer session of Congress, lawmakers reached a deal to overhaul the scandal-plagued Department of Veterans Affairs, provide aid to Israel and prevent highway construction projects from halting.

Yet the failure of members from both parties in the House and Senate to send a border bill to Obama’s desk served as the latest example of the apparent inability of Congress to come together on legislation addressing thorny national issues.

A narrowly divided House approved the border bill 223-189 late Friday after GOP leaders abruptly pulled their original measure from the floor on Thursday when it became clear it lacked sufficient support from the party’s own rank and file. House Republicans, determined to pass a border crisis package before leaving for the August recess, worked through the night to revise the bill and switch several opponents in favor of the measure — a redemption of sorts for the new Republican leadership.

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“The House has just passed a responsible bill to address the humanitarian crisis at our southern border,” Boehner said. “It will help secure our border and ensure the safe and swift return of these children to their home countries. If President Obama needs these resources, he will urge Senate Democrats to put politics aside, come back to work, and approve our bill.”

Later on Friday, the Republican-led chamber voted 216-192 on a separate measure to gut a 2012 Obama administration program – created without the blessing of Congress — that has protected from deportation hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants who grew up in the United States. One member voted present.

House Republicans relentlessly criticized the Democratic-controlled Senate for leaving Washington without having passed its own measure — a $2.7 billion package that was killed during a Thursday procedural vote. But the two chambers were on dramatically opposite tracks for weeks, and it was never likely that Congress would reach a solution before the congressional recess.

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Republicans also seized on muddled messages from the Obama administration about whether it supported changes to the 2008 anti-trafficking law that came under the microscope with the influx of unaccompanied migrant children, primarily from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. GOP lawmakers overwhelmingly supported such revisions and made it a condition of approving any additional funding for Obama, who initially asked for $3.7 billion to deal with the crisis.

The border supplemental measure that ultimately passed the House — outlined to GOP lawmakers Friday morning — uses revised language from Texas Rep. John Carter, Alabama Rep. Robert Aderholt and Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston tightening a 2008 trafficking law that, in practice, made it more difficult to deport unaccompanied children from countries other than Canada and Mexico.

The bill is more costly than the legislation that had to be yanked from the floor Thursday. The latest version sends $35 million to Southern governors to pay for the National Guard units involved in responding to the crisis, boosting the price tag to $694 million — still a far cry from Obama’s request. It is still fully offset by spending cuts, GOP sources said.

Those changes seemed to build support for the package among House Republicans.

“I’m so proud of our team,” said Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas). “We didn’t have it quite right [on Thursday], and you know sometimes when people don’t have it quite right, they quit. I think what Republicans showed the American people is that we are not quitting on this problem.”

The fight over the Republican immigration measures provoked strong emotions on both sides of the aisle. As lawmakers debated the the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals measure Friday evening, the House sergeant-at-arms was on the floor to ensure lawmakers behaved in the chamber, according to members.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and GOP Rep. Tom Marino of Pennsylvania got into a heated exchange on the floor after Marino chastised her for failing to pass immigration reform during her tenure as speaker. Once Marino was finished speaking, Pelosi raced over to the junior Republican and was pointing at him, clearly upset over his comments.

The House’s moves prompted an angry response from Obama earlier Friday.

“House Republicans as we speak are trying to pass the most extreme and unworkable version of a bill that they already know is going nowhere, that can’t pass the Senate,” Obama told reporters. “They’re not even trying to solve the problem.”

Lawmakers, aides and immigration law experts said the language regarding DACA will be changed so the roughly 550,000 current beneficiaries, who are granted a two-year reprieve from deportations, will be blocked from renewing their status in the program. That essentially makes those hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants eligible for deportation.

That change is a clear nod to the conservatives in the conference, who have widely blamed the Obama administration program as the root cause of the steep increase in unaccompanied migrant children coming to the U.S.-Mexico border.

The vote is sure to put a handful of Republican lawmakers representing significant Latino constituencies in a tough political spot — and several of them ended up voting against their party. Republican Reps. Mike Coffman and Cory Gardner of Colorado, Jeff Denham and David Valadao of California, Mario Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, Joe Heck and Mark Amodei of Nevada, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Dave Reichert of Washington and Fred Upton of Michigan opposed the legislation rolling back DACA.

“I think we should be very generous with those children who have not done anything wrong,” Diaz-Balart said earlier Friday. “I’ve always said the United States is a meritocracy … there’s no secret about my position.”

As a policy matter, the border bill matters little because the Senate has already left town for the month and Obama would never support it.

But the Democratic response was immediate. On the other end of the Capitol, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said earlier Friday the House GOP was “heading from bad to worse.”

“Let’s be clear about what’s happening today on the other side of the Capitol,” Reid said. “House Republicans will vote to deport children who have been living in the United States their entire lives.”

At a press conference with House Democratic leadership and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) leveled sharp criticism at Republican lawmakers who have used harsh language to characterize the unaccompanied children coming to the border.

“They have said that they are disease-ridden, lice-filled, gangbangers, drug dealers, mules of the drug cartels who have come here in hordes to invade our nation,” a furious Gutierrez said. “Now they are demonstrating that that’s how they feel in their legislation because they have to go down to the least common denominator of hatefulness toward an immigrant community.

“And when they say it about the children, they say it about all of us,” he added.

Politically, the House package has serious implications for Republicans. The Senate has not been able to pass its border bill, and House Republicans were determined to something before leaving for the August recess to show that they’re at least trying to address the humanitarian crisis.

In the closed meeting Friday morning, the legislation picked up support from the most conservative parts of the House Republican Conference. GOP Reps. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Steve King of Iowa — among the biggest immigration hardliners in Congress — were on board, illustrating that the legislation will likely be accepted by the hard right.

Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.), a key lawmaker behind drafting the conference’s policy recommendations to the border crisis, said several Republicans who would have rejected the leadership’s border-crisis proposal stood up during the closed-door session and said they would switch their votes.

“I think this was one of the best conferences we’ve had over the past couple of years,” said Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.). “I’m going to go back and re-read the changes, but I think you’re going to see a strong positive vote for this bill” from Republicans.

However, other conservatives remained unconvinced or “no” votes, saying they were not satisfied by the changes made to the bill by the leadership.

Passing this legislation Friday was important for Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, who became House majority whip Thursday. On his first day in leadership, Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California had to pull the original border security package from the House floor.

Anna Palmer contributed to this report.