House GOP cuts Obama border-funds bid, urges law change

Speaker of the House John Boehner of Ohio, joined at right by incoming Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy of Calif., talks with reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, July 23, 2014, following a Republican strategy session. House Republicans want to slash President Barack Obama's emergency spending request for the border, speed young migrants back home to Central America, and send in the National Guard.  (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Speaker of the House John Boehner of Ohio, joined at right by incoming Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy of Calif., talks with reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, July 23, 2014, following a Republican strategy session. House Republicans want to slash President Barack Obama's emergency spending request for the border, speed young migrants back home to Central America, and send in the National Guard. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

WASHINGTON -- House Republican leaders Wednesday proposed giving President Barack Obama less than half of his $3.7 billion emergency request to address an influx of Central American children at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The $1.5 billion draft plan, offered by a group of House Republicans including Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers of Kentucky, is the maximum amount Republicans said they can support and may be reduced further because members of their own party won't accept more spending.

"That would be too much for me," Sen. Richard Shelby, the top Republican on that chamber's Appropriations Committee, said of the Rogers proposal.

House Republican leaders are calling a special conference today to try to build a consensus for their bill, said Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas. Support now is "unclear," he said.

Obama is seeking the emergency funding to temporarily shelter and process the foreign children. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Congress can act on the request only if Democrats drop their opposition to changing a 2008 law to let border agents more quickly turn back the foreign children from the U.S. border.

The law guarantees judicial hearings for unaccompanied youths arriving in the United States from Central America, which in practice allows them to stay in the U.S. for years because of backlogs in the immigration court system.

"What the president's asking for is a blank check," Boehner said. "Without trying to fix the problem, I don't know how we actually are in position to give the president any more money."

In a letter to the president Wednesday, Boehner said Republicans were "surprised" that Obama didn't include proposed revisions to the law in his spending request.

"It is difficult to see how we can make progress on this issue without strong, public support from the White House for much-needed reforms," Boehner said in the letter.

Many Democrats oppose changing the deportation law, which they say is meant to give children fleeing violence and poverty a chance to make a claim for asylum.

The second-ranking House Democrat, Steny Hoyer of Maryland, said he spoke Wednesday with Cecilia Munoz, Obama's domestic policy adviser, and that Democrats and the White House are unified in opposition to changing the law as part of a spending bill.

The law, passed with bipartisan support and signed by President George W. Bush, shouldn't be changed without more deliberation, including congressional hearings, Hoyer said.

Senate Democrats on Tuesday put forth a plan providing $2.7 billion for spending on the border crisis through December. It doesn't include a change in the 2008 law.

More than 52,000 unaccompanied children were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border from Oct. 1 through June 15, about double the total in a similar period a year earlier, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Most of the children came from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

The dispute over the 2008 law, which Obama initially supported changing, is raising the chances Congress may fail to reach a compromise in the next two weeks before lawmakers are set to leave Washington for an August break.

During Wednesday's party meeting, Boehner was noncommittal on whether he would bring the plan up for a vote, said Rep. John Fleming, R-La.

"He himself expressed some doubt it could pass," Fleming said. "If Republicans move forward on this, we're now jumping right in the middle of President Obama's nightmare and making it ours."

Boehner said, "I do believe that the Congress should act, and I'm hopeful that we will."

Members of the Republican Study Committee, which includes more than 170 House members, met to consider Rogers' proposal. Afterward some said they favored doing nothing or passing a symbolic resolution blaming Obama for the crisis.

"There are some compelling arguments against taking action," Rep. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina said.

Fleming suggested a resolution demanding that Obama cancel his 2012 executive order granting deportation deferrals for illegal aliens brought to the U.S. as children. He said the House shouldn't risk passing a bill and getting "jammed" by the Senate adding provisions the House can't support.

Some Republicans reject the plan's price tag and say the children should be put on one-way flights back to their home countries.

"There's no way I'll support" it, said Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama. "To spend billions of dollars on foreign children, money that we don't have, that we have to borrow to get, that we can't afford to pay back, is financial insanity when you can solve the problem with as little as $20 [million] to $30 million."

Asked whether Democrats would support the Republican proposal, Hoyer said, "Right now I would tell them not to expect that." He said "there is a consensus feeling" that the child deportation law shouldn't be changed without holding committee hearings.

Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, who earlier offered a proposal with Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, said he was open to considering the proposal.

The plan "mirrors a lot of what we've been saying," Cuellar said.

In the Senate, Appropriations Chairman Barbara Mikulski said the Democrats' $2.7 billion proposal would fund most of what Obama sought, though only through Dec. 31. Obama asked for funds through Sept. 30, 2015.

"The total amount of the president's request will be needed," Mikulski of Maryland said Tuesday in a statement. "However, based on a review of what is needed in calendar year 2014 to meet needs at the border, the bill reduces the president's request by $1 billion."

Rogers said the House plan allocates far more to border security by putting National Guard troops on the border and speeding up the deportation process. Unlike the Senate measure, the money would be offset with spending cuts elsewhere in the budget.

The Republican plan includes recommendations by a task force led by Rep. Kay Granger of Texas, including one to open unprotected border areas, such as U.S. national parks, to Border Patrol agents.

Republicans propose changing the child deportation law to allow Central American children to be voluntarily returned to their home countries. Those who don't voluntarily leave would be given an immigration hearing within a week.

"In our personal meetings with the presidents of Honduras and Guatemala, they both stated that they wanted their children back, and we believe that is in the best interest of all the countries involved in this crisis," Granger said.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said she is reviewing a draft proposal to give the Department of Homeland Security more "flexibility" to process the children more quickly without changing the law. Such legislation would be considered separately from the spending bill, she said.

If the two parties can't overcome their differences, Congress could handle the matter the same way it has addressed other spending disputes -- through a temporary spending fix.

Congress has kept the government open for much of the past few years through such temporary bills.

As the debate continued, a White House spokesman said Wednesday that Obama had dispatched a government team to the Texas-Mexico border to assess whether National Guard troops can help deal with the influx of children.

Officials from the Defense and Homeland Security departments were to assess conditions through today in the Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol Sector to consider responses to the humanitarian crisis, Shawn Turner said.

The move comes after pressure on Obama from Republicans including Texas Gov. Rick Perry and comes ahead of a meeting Friday at the White House with leaders of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

In a meeting July 9 with Perry in Texas, Obama said he would consider the Republican's request to deploy National Guard troops to supplement border enforcement.

Obama called it at the time "a temporary solution" to a problem better solved by new U.S. immigration laws. He urged Perry, a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2016, to use his influence with his party to get Republicans to drop opposition to such legislation.

Perry announced this week that he will send as many as 1,000 National Guard troops under his control to the state's border with Mexico.

Information for this article was contributed by Heidi Przybyla, Erik Wasson, James Rowley, Roxana Tiron, Derek Wallbank, Kathleen Hunter, Angela Greiling Keane, Erik Wasson and Margaret Talev of Bloomberg News and by Maria Recio of McClatchy Newspapers.

A Section on 07/24/2014

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