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Bucking Boehner, Meadows votes no on budget deal

U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows shows his voter card during a campaign forum at the Edneyville Grange in October 2014.

By Bill Moss, Published: December 12, 2014

Bucking the House leadership, U.S. Rep Mark Meadows voted no on the budget deal that the House passed 219-206 on Thursday night.

The bill that would avert a government shutdown if also approved by the Senate was the source of intense lobbying by both parties, with President Obama urging Democrats to vote yes and Speaker John Boehner holding enough Republican votes to tip the bill across the finish line. The bill passed with 162 Republican and 57 Democratic votes.

“It was more a fight to make sure that the people I represent had a voice,” Meadows said by phone as he was driving home from Washington on Friday. Calls and emails ran “11-1 wanting to just pass a short-term term continuing resolution and see if would find a better way to address some of the issues. It was a very very long day. Any time you have difference of opinion, the safest thing always to do is to side with the opinion of the people that sent you to Washington, D.C., and that’s what I did.”

When it appeared after a preliminary vote that the House did not have the votes to pass the budget bill, Boehner called a timeout so he and the Republican leadership and the White House could secure the votes to pass the bill.

“They spent six hours twisting arms and making side agreements,” said Meadows, a freshman Republican who won re-election last month. “I got personal visits by a number of the leadership members and I got a phone call from the speaker.”

Meadows said he was not concerned that his no vote would cause a government shutdown because House leaders had a fallback measure that would have kept the government running until February.

Constituents “felt like the president had overreached his authority and had eventually bypassed the Constitution,” Meadows said. “So that was a reoccurring theme. The other was really from some of the more pro-immigration folks, who felt that if we didn’t address immigration now (in a more comprehensive way), any hope of getting real immigration reform would be lost, specifically in how we take care of our farmers and secure our borders at the same time … Our failure to address it quickly would put a wedge between any meaningful immigration reform.”

Obama’s approach, in effect granting amnesty to immigrants here unlawfully, has damaged political prospects for bipartisan reform, Meadows said.

“I think the jury is out” on whether Obama’s executive order helps farmers, he said. “What my understanding is right now with the way it’s been approached is that it does not. It addresses perhaps some of the workers so it may provide relief in a small way. There’s a very high probability that it does not help our growers like a guest worker program would do. One grower talked to me and said, ‘Essentially what happens is it doesn’t really help us, and in fact it may hurt us. It has poisoned the well where any reform that really helps us is going to be harder to get.’”

Meadows said he did not know whether his refusal to support the speaker would damage his chances of getting a committee promotion when the 114^th Congress convenes next month.

“To abandon those calls (from constituents) really goes against everything that I ran on,” he said. “I’m hopeful that there is no retaliation but if there is that’s just the way it has to be.”

Joining Meadows in voting no in the North Carolina delegation was fellow Republican Walter Jones. Seven other N.C. Republicans voted yes. Democrats also split. U.S. Rep. David Price voted yes while Alma Adams, G.K. Butterfield and Mike McIntyre voted no.

The bill was opposed by many Tea Party-leaning Republicans who wanted to use the budget to deny the administration funding to enforce Obama's order allowing up to 4 million illegal residents to avoid deportation.