House OKs border bill after Senate bolts as Obama vows to ‘act alone’

The House late Friday revived and approved a Republican-authored border crisis bill after GOP leaders hurriedly resolved an internal battle that scuttled the vote a day earlier – but with the Senate on recess and the House soon to follow, there’s little chance of any bill reaching President Obama’s desk until the fall.

The president now is vowing to act unilaterally to address the illegal immigration issue.

The House legislation was approved on a 223-189 vote. The new version of the bill adds additional funding for the National Guard and includes policy changes meant to speed deportations of illegal immigrant children surging across the southern border.

“It’s dealing with the issue that the American people care about more than any other, and that is stopping the invasion of illegal foreign nationals into our country,” said Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. “And we got to yes.”

However, a separate Senate bill died on a procedural vote a day earlier, and no more votes in that chamber are scheduled until early September.Even if the Senate were somehow to approve the House bill, Obama vowed Friday he would veto it.

In the absence of any legislation that all sides can agree on, the president threatened to act on his own to address immigration challenges, potentially during the five-week recess.

“I’m going to have to make some tough choices to meet the challenge, with or without Congress,” Obama said Friday, speaking to reporters in the White House briefing room.

He later added: “I’m going to have to act alone, because we don’t have enough resources.”

The vote Friday allows Republicans to at least blunt Democratic criticism.

Democrats on Thursday used the collapse of that vote to hammer Republicans as doing nothing about the surge of illegal immigrant children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

Senate Democrats, though, were not able to muster enough votes to pass their bill either.House Republicans insisted they were the only ones still trying to do something about the border crisis.

“When it comes to the humanitarian crisis on our southern border, President Obama has been completely AWOL,” a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner said.

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