As the House GOP attempts to use its power and lawmaking authority to restore some semblance of sanity at the border, one holdout is causing major trouble for the party and bizarrely seems to be siding with border chaos and cartel control over tough but necessary policies.
Specifically, every single House Republican in the Texas delegation has rallied around Rep. Chip Roy’s H.R. 29. That bill would fix asylum loopholes and reimplement the “turn away” authority that the border authorities need to keep it secure. Well, every single one of them except one: Rep. Tony Gonzales.
Rep. Gonzales has said that he has a “lot of issues” with the bill and won’t support it, even going so far as to side with Team Biden on spending if doing so would stop the Roy bill. Such is what the Federalist noted in its expose of Gonzales’ betrayal of his constituents, writing:
Gonzales has effectively declared political war on his own conference and voters. He first falsely maligned the Roy bill as legislation that would ban “all asylum claims” and more recently, tagged the asylum reform bill as an “unchristian anti-immigrant bill.” Gonzales has declared that if the bill is brought to the House floor, he will be forced to vote “no” on the debt ceiling.
In reality, the bill provides for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to hold illegal immigrants in custody while they are in expedited removal proceedings, or to keep potential immigrants in Mexico while their asylum claims are being adjudicated. If DHS refuses to detain illegal immigrants, the bill mandates that immigrants be turned away at the border in a manner almost identical to Title 42 public health authority.
In other words, the legislation returns to Trump-era border security policies that succeeded in significantly curbing illegal crossings and invalid asylum claims. Yet Gonzales not only blatantly continues to lie about the bill’s contents but also deployed the proverbial nuclear option. He has shown he is willing to tank his party’s foremost priority — thwarting the Biden administration’s inflationary spending — if the bill comes to the floor for a vote.
And Rep. Gonzales has stuck to his guns as outrage about his position has grown, saying, “People think I’m gonna buckle and I’m gonna give in. I’m not gonna give in, and you’re never going to out-border me.”
Rep. Roy, for his part, has characterized the bill as moderate, saying, “My bill is pretty simple in that you shouldn’t be releasing people into the United States. You got to detain or turn away or use Migrant Protection Protocols in order to stop the flood.”
Continuing, he added, “Stop the flood, Border Patrol can breathe, we can do our job, we can actually take care of people who want an asylum claim, you can manage the beds, you can do what needs to happen at the border to protect migrants and Americans alike. No one can object to that in good faith, in my opinion.”
But Gonzalez won’t back it, setting up a major problem for the House GOP and its razor-thin majority.
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