Exclusive: Whip Emmer Details How House GOP Passed ‘Strongest’ Border Bill to ‘Ever Hit the Floor’

The House passed a sweeping border package Thursday that Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) said was the “strongest” legislation on the issue to ever come to the House floor for a vote.

Emmer, speaking in an interview in his Capitol Hill office on Friday, detailed to Breitbart News how an eleventh-hour huddle with roughly three dozen members, just one day prior to the bill vote, was, in part, what led to the Secure the Border Act narrowly passing with two Republican defectors and no Democrat support.

A small section in the 213-page bill about drug cartels was a top point of contention.

“We started in here with I think it was probably four or five members … before we were done, it was 40 members in here,” Emmer said as he looked around his office and recalled where members were sitting.

The provision, found in section 123, initially pit responsibility on Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to produce a report on whether to designate Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

“The real issue, turns out, in the language that was in there, if you’re going to give these two worthless bureaucrats any more responsibility, our membership is going to go crazy because they’re just not doing anything,” Emmer said.

An amendment to the bill moved the responsibility from the executive branch to Congress to make the foreign terrorist determination through a task force. The task force will be led by Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), who had initially been one of the most vocal opponents of the cartel section.

Emmer said his whipping efforts also included emphasizing that the bill was the “strongest border legislation to ever hit the floor” of the House. Not since President Bill Clinton’s border overhaul in 1996 has a comprehensive package seen success in Congress.

Emmer said, “I was just reminding people, ‘You’ve got to understand, what you’re about to do is historic. It hasn’t been done since before the Bush administration.’ I said … ‘It failed in ’08, failed in ’11, failed in ’13, failed in ’14, and this one’s not going to fail.”

The package is a combination of bills that began mostly in the House Homeland Security and Judiciary Committees.

It requires construction on the incomplete border wall to resume immediately, allocates funding for retention bonuses for U.S. Border Patrol agents, and withholds federal funding from any nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that continue their well-documented practice of aiding illegal migrants with food, shelter, and travel.

It also makes reforms to the broken and abused asylum process and mandates E-Verify, which requires employers to check that they are hiring workers who are not living in the country illegally.

Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) specifically thanked his top immigration aide in a floor speech ahead of the bill’s vote.

“I want to thank the staff,” he said. “Andrea Loving and her staff did an amazing job.”

Loving, the committee’s chief counsel on immigration, has worked on Capitol Hill through four presidential administrations. One of the original authors of the border package, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), described her as the “single most important person in crafting” it.

“She combines years of expertise on the issue with a passion that has not dimmed over her many years serving the American people,” McClintock told Breitbart News. “If we succeed in restoring the integrity of our nation’s sovereignty and the security of our borders, she and her team will be the unsung heroes in this story.”

Emmer credited Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) with his “big role” in uniting the conference once the legislation had been packaged.

Echoing Emmer, Roy told Breitbart News that “as it relates to border security, this bill is, in truth, honestly stated, the strongest border security bill that we’ve ever moved.”

“This bill is a rock-solid bill that had virtually unanimous Republican support,” Roy said, adding that it aligns “almost item by item” with the Texas GOP delegation’s border plan that Roy and others secured seeing a floor vote for as part of the speaker race negotiations in January.

While the Senate now faces pressure to unite around a bill — whether it be some version of the House’s newly passed bill or another — that addresses the ongoing border crisis, the House as a next step is likely to examine whether Mayorkas, who has overseen a jaw-dropping five million-plus illegal migrant encounters since taking office, is impeachable.

In House Republican leadership’s strongest remarks on the issue yet, Emmer told Breitbart News the Biden administration’s top border official “should be impeached.”

“This, to me, is the greatest malfeasance, and malfeasance is — it’s not a failure to act — it’s an intentional failure to act. Mayorkas should be impeached,” Emmer said.

Roy, perhaps one of the most outspoken members on border issues, was harsher when asked if he agreed with Emmer on impeaching Mayorkas.

“Impeachment is the nicest thing I can say about that son of a bitch right now,” Roy said.