Bye bye Cantor, hello Steve King
by digby
Meet the new GOP leadership team:
House Republicans emerged from a closed-door meeting Friday morning with a revised plan to address the child migrant border crisis — one leaders hope to pass later today.
The latest plan will still require the House to vote on the border funding bill before being allowed to vote on language to stop the expansion of President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, according to members exiting the conference meeting.
Both components, however, will look slightly different.
The appropriations bill, which was $659 million on Thursday night, will now include an additional $35 million to bolster National Guard resources at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The bill, which also contains numerous related policy riders, will also expand on language tweaking a 2008 trafficking law in order to expedite deportations of the migrants.
The measure originally called for treating all unaccompanied minors apprehended at the border the same in terms of whether they could volunteer for deportation back to their home countries. Now, the legislation will incorporate the stronger language of legislation recently introduced by Republican Reps. John Carter of Texas, Robert Aderholt of Alabama and Jack Kingston of Georgia.
In addition to making it easier to expedite deportations, their proposal would allow immigration enforcement officials to detain children while they wait for deportation hearings and require immigration enforcement officials to investigate people taking custody of undocumented immigrant children to determine whether they are being compensated by drug smugglers.
Regarding DACA — the 2012 executive order granting stays of deportation to young undocumented immigrants brought to the country illegally by their parents — that language would revert back to the original legislation introduced by Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. GOP leaders quietly softened the language in the earlier proposal, angering conservatives.
There was at one point discussion about whether the new proposal would include language to crack down on asylum fraud and raise the threshold for making an asylum claim, but members pushing for those provisions ultimately backed down, saying that as long as the issue was addressed later in the legislative session they would not demand it be integrated into this package.
Conservative Republicans are now more positive about the package and the process by which changes were made, with some of the earlier, harshest critics, like Rep. Steve King of Iowa, now leaning toward voting “yes.”
King said he was extremely pleased with the concessions he was able to extract from leadership.
“The changes brought into this are ones I’ve developed and advocated for over the past two years,” he told CQ Roll Call. “It’s like I ordered it off the menu.”
You remember Steve King. He’s long been concerned about migrant children smuggling drugs across the border:
For everyone who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert…We have young people that are being recruited from age 11 on up to increasingly smuggle drugs into the United States.”
Now he wants to require anyone who extends a helping hand to these migrant kids at the border to be investigated as drug smugglers.
And the GOP has agreed.
Greg Sargent called this a long time ago” “On immigration, the GOP is Steve King’s party.”
Of course they are. After all a large majority of the Republican base thinks Steve King is right about those Latinos. As Laura Ingraham tells them every single day: these children are coming here to destroy our way of life.
Update: Luke Russert just declared that John Boehner has brought his far right into line. Yeah, that’s how lil’ Luke sees this.
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