Senate’s Border Bill Fails (Video)

Our government has become completely dysfunctional. Nothing useful, positive or productive can happen as long as Reid is Senate Majority Leader and Barack Obama is POTUS. The next two years are really about mitigating the damage the community organizer incurs and running out the clock until 2016. That’s really about all this weak kneed GOP can handle.

Via the Blaze:

The Senate on Thursday night failed to advance a $2.7 billion bill to address the southern border crisis, just hours after the House Republicans had to pull their own bill from consideration due to a lack of support.

Together, the two votes show just how difficult it will be for Congress to agree not only on how much to spend to resolve the border crisis, but how to spend it.

In the Senate, Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) led the Republican effort on Thursday to include language that would defund any new Obama effort to expand DACA. These two senators said that overhanging threat from Obama would outweigh any attempt to stop the flow of immigrants.

But like so many other bills in the Senate over the last few years, Democrats didn’t give senators a chance to amend the bill. That prohibition led an outraged Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to storm onto the Senate floor and demand that Democrats start allowing real debate and real consideration of amendments on bills.

“Is that a hell of a lot to ask here?” McCain said. “I don’t think so.”

Sessions made an attempt to force Democrats to allow a vote on tougher language, but because Republicans are the minority party, it failed in a 43-52 vote. Sessions warned that failing to add language blocking further amnesty programs from Obama would be a “hammer blow” to millions of unemployed Americans.

“We have the power to block this action,” he said of Obama’s expected policy change. “We have a duty to block that action.  We can do that today by supporting my motion here today.”

“The vote we are about to have will be a vote on whether to support the president’s illegal executive amnesty, or to stop it,” he added.

Sen. Sessions said that by shooting down his motion to vote on Sen. Ted Cruz’s bill,  Senate Dems essentially voted to enable Obama’s unlawful executive order that would provide amnesty and work permits to 5-6 million illegal immigrants.

The President’s planned action would be in contravention of plain law, and at the expense of unemployed Americans.  Senate Democrats voted in lockstep to block Sessions’ motion and to thereby back the President’s executive amnesty—only Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) dissented.  Senate Democrats, who had previously intimated public concern over the illegal actions, sided with Majority Leader Harry Reid and voted to enable and encourage the President’s planned unilateral amnesty and work permits.

UPDATE:

This is scary:

Via Weasel Zippers: Border Bill Back On Deck, Members Plan To Take Action Before Recess:

Via Townhall

Update (Amanda): House leadership announced that members will stay until a vote on border legislation takes place. Currently, there is no set schedule for the vote. It could take place late Thursday or Friday.

#BREAKING House GOP plans to hold another conference in morning on border Source says “almost every mbr said stay..it was pretty hot.”
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) July 31, 2014

#BREAKING Sr Hse GOPer after border mtg: I know 1 thing, we’re not leaving here until we get the votes.”
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) July 31, 2014

Has anyone in Congress figured this out, yet:

Via Ann Coulter: THE LOOPHOLE IS OBAMA:

The law is not — as George Will suggested on “Fox News Sunday” — a general humanitarian mandate allowing all 2 billion poor children of the world to show up at our border and be told, “Welcome to America!” It’s a law to combat sex trafficking.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Vice President Joe Biden wrote the law — and Feinstein isn’t stupid. She’s well aware of illegal immigration. That’s why the law specifically excludes two huge categories of illegal aliens from getting hearings: (1) Mexicans; and (2) children who have relatives in the U.S.

Those cases look more like illegal immigration than sex trafficking. (Didn’t anyone wonder why Mexican kids are excluded?)

Mexicans make up the lion’s share of illegal immigrants in the U.S., and children with relatives already living in the U.S. are probably just trying to rejoin family — not trying to escape a fiendish kidnapper about to sell them into sex slavery.

According to last Friday’s New York Times, almost 90 percent of the 53,000 illegal alien kids given refugee status since October have already been transferred to parents or relatives living in the U.S. By the law’s clear terms, those 47,000 kids should have been summarily turned away at the border — just as Mexican children are.

(Democrats wailing about a “humanitarian” crisis — after calculating the precise number of voters they need — evidently don’t care about the Mexican kids.)

No law needs to be fixed. The only thing that needs to be fixed is the president.

Cruz weighs in: Democrats are Perpetuating the Border Crisis:

1. Reid’s do-nothing Senate has abdicated all responsibility

 WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, today released the following statement regarding the Senate vote this evening on border funding legislation:

“Today Harry Reid blocked all consideration of legislation to stop President Obama’s amnesty. By refusing any debate or even a vote on legislation to stop Obama’s amnesty, Senate Democrats are cynically choosing to perpetuate the crisis.  Every Senate Democrat but two voted against taking up legislation to stop President Obama’s amnesty.  They now own this crisis; each bears responsibility for enabling the President to march forward with plans to give amnesty to millions more who arrived in our country illegally.

“The evidence shows that the crisis at the border is a direct consequence of President Obama’s lawlessness, and the surge of unaccompanied children trafficked to the United States by drug cartels and transnational gangs will not ebb until Congress restrains the President from taking any further executive action.

“The House of Representatives is working hard to solve this crisis, but Harry Reid’s do-nothing Senate has abdicated all responsibility.

“Last week, I introduced the Protect Children and Families Through Rule of Law Act that would stop President Obama’s amnesty. Faced by an extreme president who refuses to follow the law, Republicans should unite to stop the amnesty that is causing tens of thousands of children to be victimized by violent coyotes and drug cartels. The responsibility for the pain and suffering experienced by those children who are exploited by dangerous criminals and the associated burdens imposed on our border towns and cities now lies directly on Senate Democrats who would rather put hundreds of thousands more children and countless Americans at risk than stand up to the out-of-control and lawless president.”

Linked by Doug Ross, thanks.