House Speaker Mike Johnson refused Wednesday night to commit to putting a Senate-passed immigration deal on the House floor, warning that “the devil is in the details.”
“I don’t yet know what they’re going to propose. There’s been lots of rumors about it, but I’m very hopeful that they will give us something meaningful that is very close to what we’ve sent over from the House,” Johnson told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “The Source,” referring to the partisan House-passed border bill known as HR 2.
Despite the White House and Democrats rejecting H2, Johnson insisted Wednesday night that it be the basis of any immigration deal. “I think we had productive discussion today at the White House because I told them, it doesn’t matter to me what you label it, I don’t care what you call it, HR 2, but those elements are really important,” he said.
Johnson’s comments come hours after top congressional leaders met with President Joe Biden on the border and Ukraine funding at the White House. While some Democrats projected optimism following the meeting, the speaker’s insistence on prioritizing border policy throws the potential for agreement into question.
A number of House Republicans have said that they would only accept a border deal that resembles that immigration bill, which passed in the House last year. Democrats, meanwhile, have said they would never accept HR 2.
During the meeting on a national security supplemental aid package that could send aid to Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan and the US-Mexico border, Johnson indicated to Biden and other lawmakers present that it ultimately would not need to include the House Republicans’ hardline border security package in its entirety or its exact form. He communicated that “it’s not HR 2 or bust,” one source familiar with the meeting said.
“We’re not insistent upon a particular name of a piece of legislation, but we are insistent that the elements have to be meaningful,” Johnson told reporters at the White House following the meeting.
The Louisiana Republican warned later Wednesday that anything significantly less than HR 2 would be “dead” on the House floor.
“If the bill looks like some of the things that have been rumored, of course it’s dead in the House, because it wouldn’t solve the problem. You can’t just do pieces of this and leave for example, parole, untouched, leave the current broken parole process untouched, because it’s a giant loophole that would allow all these people to continue to come in,” he told Collins.
Pressed on several senior GOP senators’ comments that a compromise would be a good deal by any measure, Johnson said: “If the best we can get does not solve the problem and not stem the flow, then it will not be acceptable in the House side and I have said that very clearly from day one, we have to solve the problem.”
Johnson argued that the House GOP still hasn’t received satisfactory answers from the Biden administration on its plan for continued aid to Ukraine, after the White House emphasized the urgent need for further funding during the earlier meeting.
“We all oppose Vladimir Putin and the barbarism and the aggression that he’s shown there, and he must be stopped. But what’s happening in Ukraine right now, that status quo cannot be maintained. It’s unacceptable,” he said. “We cannot spend billions of dollars without a clear strategy articulated and I told the president in the meeting today again, as I’ve been saying repeatedly, ‘Sir, you have to articulate what the strategy is. What is the endgame?’”
Congress, the speaker said, will avoid a government shutdown at the end of the week by passing a short term funding extension, called a continuing resolution, so that they can continue working on full year spending bills. After passing one such extension in November, Johnson had said they were finished with them, but when pressed by Collins, he refused to rule out the possibility of more stopgap resolutions.
“I sure hope they’re not necessary,” he said. “We shouldn’t have to make that decision, because by setting the dates now in March 1 and March 8, we’ll have enough time to get that process done. And I’m convinced that we will because you have people