Republican lawmaker: GOP members 'just don't want to vote for anything'


Republican members of the House are meeting later this morning in the hopes of salvaging a $695 million bill that was pulled from the floor at the last minute yesterday due to a conservative revolt, handing Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) the latest in a long line of humiliating rebukes.
The naysayers — led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who seems to have become a professional thorn in Boehner's side — have offered numerous reasons for their opposition to the bill, which would help deal with a border crisis prompted by an influx of tens of thousands of children from Central America. They say it doesn't go far enough in securing the border. They say it fails to curb President Obama's ability to offer immigrants "amnesty." They say they simply can't trust Obama to enforce the law.
But Rep. Devin Nunes, a Republican from California, hit on another theory that will ring true for anyone who has followed the House's struggles to pass anything that isn't the reddest of red meat. Here's Politico:
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Rep. Devin Nunes, who would have supported the legislation, said there is a group of GOP lawmakers who aren't interested in governing.
"You just had a lot of members who just don't want to vote for anything," the California Republican said. "We have to get to 218 votes or you can't pass anything." [Politico]
The really sad part of this fiasco is that Boehner's bill wasn't even meant to be accepted by the Democratic-controlled Senate (which is considering a $1.5 billion bill) or Obama (who requested nearly $4 billion in funds). The whole point was to blame them for inaction and stubbornness. But in the paranoid world of Republican politics, where an even-further-to-the-right challenger is always waiting in the wings, conservatives can't even do that.
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Ryu Spaeth is deputy editor at TheWeek.com. Follow him on Twitter.
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