Anti-Immigrant Republicans Lash Out At GOP Leaders

On Saturday, the House of Representatives passed the Affordable Health Care for America Act by a vote of 220-215.  The historic vote came after Minority Whip Eric Cantor's (R-VA) motion to recommit -- a last-ditch effort to stall a bill by sending it back to committee for changes -- failed.   

As explained by the New York Times, "Motions to recommit are often politically devious, carefully designed to bait members of the majority to vote in favor of it." Most observers expected Republicans to use the motion to force a vote on whether to bar undocumented immigrants from purchasing insurance, but Cantor decided to use it on tort reform instead.  The motion was easily defeated, allowing a final vote on the bill. 

Now, some anti-immigrant Republicans are criticizing party leaders for making tort reform the party's last stand.  According to Roll Call, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) believes that using the motion on immigration "would have killed the bill." He also implied that the decision was based on future political considerations rather than a commitment to defeating the bill:

"If we had done that right, the bill would have been extremely unlikely [to pass], if we'd brought up the illegal immigration motion to recommit," said Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), ranking member on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law. "That would have been the coup de grace. It would have killed the bill."

King estimated the bill would have gone down with about 235 votes if the illegal immigrant provision had been attached. [...]

"We should be able to come up with something to put them in a box on a bill this big," he said. "I wanted to put everything into killing the bill. I wasn't interested in anything that had later political calculations. Whenever you get something this bad, when you have a chance to kill it, you have to kill it."

Reps. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) and Michele Bachmann (R-TX) also expressed frustration over the decision. "It sure would have seemed to made sense to include it," Gohmert said, sarcastically adding, "but I'm sure whoever made that call had an incredibly brilliant reason not to." And Bachmann said, "I don't know what their thinking was."

A Republican aide went even further: "Whoever thought this was a good motion to recommit is a freaking moron, and we will be in the minority forever because of stuff like this," the aide lamented. "They are fools, pure and simple. ... Our leadership dropped the ball."