Grassley tells House GOP upset by bipartisan border talks, don’t ‘hold out for perfect’

Iowa Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley on Wednesday called out House Republicans who have been vocal in opposition to any potential proposal that emerges from the Senate over talks to cut a bipartisan deal on border security that is key to unlocking aid for Ukraine and Israel.

Republicans and Democrats remain at odds on a potential agreement, and Senate Republican negotiators have expressed doubts they can secure a deal that House Speaker Mike Johnson could bring to the House floor and be palatable enough among conservatives to pass. House Republicans are insisting on wholesale changes to U.S. border and immigration policies.

Democratic leaders say they are open to the border talks but also warned Republicans about taking too hard a line.

“All I can say is every Republican in the House of Representatives, as almost every Republican in the Senate, has been complaining for the last three years under this administration” about the increase in illegal crossings and the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, Grassley told reporters Wednesday during a conference call.

“And if you’re going to hold out for perfect, we’re not going to get anything done and you’re going to have another two or three million people coming (across) this border in the last year of this presidency,” Grassley said. “I think it’s no doubt Democrats seem to recognize that we need real border security to be a part of this package. And if we got such a thing in this package, I would hope House Republicans would say this is about the best you can do.”

Grassley stressed Senate GOP negotiators “are turning down every Democrat proposal that we would call window dressing.”

“We’ve got to have something strong,” he said.

House and Senate Republicans have made clear that they will not support additional aid for Ukraine unless it is paired with border security measures to help manage the influx of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Republicans hope that Democrats will feel political pressure to accept some of their border proposals after illegal crossings topped a daily average of more than 8,000 earlier this fall.

President Joe Biden, who is running for re-election next year, has faced pressure, including from fellow Democrats, over the migrant flow.

The Biden administration is asking Congress for $106 billion in emergency funding that includes aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, along with $14 billion to bolster the immigration system and border security. Money would go toward hiring more Border Patrol agents, immigration judges and asylum officers.

Republicans have proposed changing the asylum system for migrants by requiring asylum-seekers to prove in initial interviews that they have a credible fear of political, religious or racial persecution in their home country before advancing toward asylum in the United States. The group, though, has reached an impasse over how to deal with the humanitarian parole system that the Biden administration and others have used in urgent situations to allow certain migrants into the United States on a temporary basis, including to admit Afghans after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and Ukrainians following Russia’s invasion.

Senator not interested in repealing Affordable Care Act

Grassley also shrugged off former President Donald Trump's latest push to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, which failed on the Senate floor in 2017.

Trump, the current Republican presidential front-runner, posted on his social media platform Truth Social over the weekend that he’s “seriously looking at alternatives” to replace the health care law if he wins a second term.

The former president said the failure to repeal the health law six years ago while he was in office was “a low point for the Republican Party.”

Grassley and Iowa Republican U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst were among 49 Republicans to vote for a controversial “skinny repeal” bill in July 2017 as they continued trying to change former President Barack Obama's signature health care law. A 51-vote majority killed the bill.

Grassley said Republicans are working to bring health care costs down, but have little interest in rehashing the fight to repeal and replace the health care law, which has proved increasingly popular for its consumer protections to bar insurers from turning away or charging higher prices for people with preexisting conditions, and policies enabling young people to stay on a parent’s insurance plan until age 26.

“I have not been in any discussion about eliminating Obamacare since 2017, or 2018 at the latest,” Grassley said. “But I hear an awful lot of Republicans talking about health care. And it would be nice to have Trump tune in on some of this stuff.”

He and others in the Senate have introduced bipartisan legislation aimed at reining in health insurance costs, lowering prescription drug prices and providing transparency in drug pricing.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

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