Skip to footer

Whew! House Passes Supplemental!

The House passed a $694 million border bill that's better than nothing. Had the House tried to pull off what the Senate got away with, they would have been attacked mercilessly.

|
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
House majority whip Steve Scalise (R) of La. (l.), House majority leader Kevin McCarthy (R) of Calif. (r.) and others, arrive for a closed-door meeting of House Republicans on Capitol Hill on Friday to deal with the border crisis. After the measure derailed on Thursday, a revised version of the border supplemental spending bill passed the House, 223-189.
  • By John Feehery Guest blogger

Some late-night observations about the House-passed Supplemental bill:

  • It’s not a perfect bill. It’s probably not even a very good bill. But it is better than nothing. Much better than nothing.
  • The media has a double-standard when it comes to the House and the Senate. The House sweated to pass their supplemental. The Senate didn’t bother to break a sweat and left town without even trying. Had the House tried to pull off what the Senate got away with, they would have been attacked mercilessly.
  • Now, the House doesn’t have to come back for the August break and, ironically, neither does the Senate.
  • The House leadership played this exactly right. They scheduled the vote on Thursday, which gave them an extra day to actually pass this without losing their weekend. Brilliant.
  • They also had plenty of stuff they could jettison and other stuff they could use to make the bill more passable. So they added some stuff and took out some other stuff, and got a bill that 218 Republicans could stomach.
  • This whole crisis hurts Obama more than House Republicans. Even if the House Republicans did nothing, the president and his party are taking more heat for the whole situation. But the GOP is in far better shape now that they passed something.
  • By passing this House bill, the Republicans have set the terms of the conference negotiations. Nobody thought that the president was going to get his entire supplemental request, even out of the Senate. That number is now likely to be much lower because the House went first. If the Senate tries to far exceed that number, they will be attacked for being profligate with taxpayer money, a position that most Red State Democrats don’t want to be in going into the November election.
  • These bills won’t help Republicans with Hispanic voters and will probably hurt the cause, and they better understand that going into this election. If they don’t do something later this year on immigration reform, they better plan on doing something early next year.
  • This is a pretty nice victory for Rep. Steve Scalise (R) of Louisiana and his new whip team. It has been a baptism by fire for the new leadership team, and while it might seem like a rocky start, it is far better to win than to lose. Scalise deserves credit for listening to his members and working with the speaker and the majority leader to craft a solution.
  • Sen.Ted Cruz (R) of Texas made a fool out of himself by once again pretending to run for speaker of the House. His strategy is pretty simple.  Block any progress and then blame both the House and Senate leadership (on both sides) for the lack of progress. It is a cynical strategy first deployed by former Sen. Jim DeMint (R) of South Carolina. At some point, he needs to be held accountable.

John Feehery publishes his Feehery Theory blog at http://www.thefeeherytheory.com/.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Whew! House Passes Supplemental!
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Politics-Voices/2014/0802/Whew!-House-Passes-Supplemental
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe