Five Takeaways From the Border Aid Vote

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/us/politics/border-aid-vote-takeaways.html

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Congress on Thursday approved a $4.6 billion emergency aid package for the southwestern border after Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California capitulated to moderates in her party and withdrew a House amendment with more restrictions and oversight provisions.

But the vote exposed a number of realities about the House majority and its relationship with the Senate.

Here are five political realities that the vote laid bare.

House Democrats have long played up their diversity, saying that the variety of viewpoints strengthen the party’s reach.

But the different factions have frequently clashed, with more moderate members voicing concern that the progressive wing pushes the party too far to the left and more liberal members complaining about the tendency of moderate members to break with the party and vote with Republicans.

Referring to the bipartisan group of moderates, Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, questioned members’ allegiances. “The Problem Makers Caucus? The conservative Democrats who only want to vote with Republicans numerous times, against our own party?” said Ms. Jayapal, a chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, for their part, took issue with the criticism from the more liberal flank of their party. On the floor, tensions ran high between Representative Max Rose, a moderate freshman Democrat from New York, and Representative Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin and a chairman of the progressive caucus, who had asked on Twitter, “Since when did the Problem Solvers Caucus become the Child Abuse Caucus?”

“He’s just trying to get retweets,” Mr. Rose said.

In the past, Ms. Pelosi and her leadership team have bowed to the party’s moderate wing, which was a critical force behind decisions to punt on releasing a budget resolution and to pull legislation that would have effectively given members a pay bump.

But top leaders spent days negotiating additions to the House bill that the party’s liberal flank had requested, even as some moderate members quietly expressed discomfort with the prospect of cutting funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and producing a bill that the Republican majority in the Senate could not stomach.

Ultimately, under pressure to get a bill to the president’s desk before recess, Ms. Pelosi ceded to threats from moderate members and agreed to put the Senate bill on the floor.

The vote on Thursday — which almost had more Republican votes of support than Democratic — underscored how powerful the moderate members of the Democratic caucus can be when united with Republicans.

Ms. Pelosi’s closest lieutenants, Representatives Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader, and James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the majority whip, voted in favor of the Senate bill. (Ms. Pelosi, as is customary for the speaker, did not vote.)

But the second tier of leadership — widely seen as next in line to ascend to the top of the House Democratic leadership — did not. Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the caucus chairman; Representative Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, the assistant speaker; and Representative Katherine M. Clark of Massachusetts, the caucus vice chairwoman, voted “no.”

The two representatives for the freshman class, Representatives Joe Neguse of Colorado and Katie Hill of California, also voted against the bill.

When it came to ending the country’s longest government shutdown and forcing more aid for Puerto Rico into a long-delayed relief package for disaster recovery, House and Senate Democrats stayed united and ultimately forced Senate Republicans and President Trump to acquiesce to deals they had initially rejected.

But as House lawmakers seethed over the capitulation to the Senate legislation, some blamed Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, and Senate Democrats for almost universally joining onto that version and giving it such a wide bipartisan margin. (The absence of seven senators, all 2020 presidential candidates, in Miami for debates, also contributed to the 84-to-8 margin.)

“Senate Democrats joined the leadership behind McConnell and supported something that had no safeguards, no basic human rights for these children,” Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, told reporters after the vote. “What are you doing? You’re just throwing money and saying, ‘Continue what you’re doing, President Trump.’”

Officials in both chambers, however, privately acknowledged that if the House had acted more swiftly in passing its own legislation — and resisted some of the liberal demands in drafting the measure — moving in tandem would have been easier.

When lawmakers return from their weeklong July 4 recess, they will confront a gantlet of fiscal deadlines that need to be reconciled with the Senate: a deal to prevent billions of dollars in sharp spending cuts across all government agencies, an agreement to raise the government’s borrowing limit and all 12 bills to keep the government fully funded after Sept. 30.

But the bitter divide over this vote is likely to carry over to a fight to fund the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services for the next fiscal year. That may be particularly true of members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which denounced the vote on Thursday as “a betrayal of our American values.”

“This bill — opposed by the Hispanic Caucus and nearly 100 Democratic members of the House — will not stop the Trump Administration’s chaos and cruelty,” the statement said. “What happened today is unacceptable, and we will not forget this betrayal.”