Cuellar: GOP lawmakers ‘irresponsible’ to reject border bill when ‘nobody has seen the text’

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) said it is “irresponsible” to reject a bipartisan border bill “without even reading it” in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Saturday.

“The crisis at our Southern Border should not be about party politics. The entire nation is finally feeling the burden that border communities have felt for years,” Cuellar’s post read. “It is irresponsible to reject a bipartisan border security bill without even reading it. We have a crisis at our border that demands solutions now.”

“Democrats and Republicans must come together to get the job done,” Cuellar continued.

Cuellar also included a clip of a recent interview he did on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in which he questioned how someone could push back against a bipartisan border bill that they haven’t read.

“Nobody has seen the text,” Cuellar said.

House Republicans appear to be close to striking down a chance at border legislation, despite a history of wanting changes to border and migration policy tied with more Ukraine

In a Dear Colleague letter last Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Senate legislation on border security and Ukraine aid, if the proposed terms that came out so far were accurate, would be “dead on arrival” in the House.

“I wanted to provide a brief update regarding the supplemental and the border, since the Senate appears unable to reach any agreement,” he wrote. “If rumors about the contents of the draft proposal are true, it would have been dead on arrival in the House anyway.”

GOP members in the House are painting upper chamber colleagues recently as sellouts who want to compromise with Democrats.

“This is why we don’t listen to the Senate Republicans,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) said in a Fox News interview. “What they did in the Senate is once again some ham-handed deal that would help the Democrats save face, give Republican leadership an ability to say that they did something. And if it became law, the American people would quickly realize nothing changed, except that the politicians patted themselves on the back”

“We’re just not interested in that,” Donalds added.