VOX by Dara Lind 4/19/2018
There are still a few Republicans in Congress who are interested in addressing the status of the 690,000 or so young unauthorized immigrants facing the loss of their temporary deportation protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. And they’re beginning to turn up the pressure on House Republican leadership to bring a bill to the floor.
Or rather, four bills.
Moderate Republican Reps. Jeff Denham (R-CA) and Will Hurd (R-TX), together with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, announced a resolution Tuesday that escalates — slightly — a DACA fight that looked dead for the year. It’s probably not a coincidence that Hurd and Denham are two of the House members most at risk of losing their seats to Democrats in November.
Their proposal: to use an obscure House rule called the “queen of the hill†to hold votes on four different immigration bills. Two of the bills they have in mind would give permanent legal status to DACA recipients; a third would be the conservative bill written by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) that the conservative House Freedom Caucus has been pushing, which would grant temporary status to DACA recipients in exchange for deep cuts to legal immigration and beefed-up interior enforcement; and the fourth bill would be up to Paul Ryan to decide.
Which bills come to the House floor is pretty much up to the speaker, and it’s not clear that Paul Ryan (who has been squeamish, as speaker, on immigration) is on board. But here’s where it gets interesting. The backers of the “queen of the hill†plan say they have 240 members in support of their procedural gambit — enough, if they wanted, to override Ryan and force the votes to the floor. The question is just how far Denham and company are willing to go.
The “queen of the hill†rule: the bill that gets the most votes wins
More:
https://www.vox.com/2018/4/19/17253856/daca-congress-immigration-news
