Stephen Miller encouraged Texas Republican state legislators to challenge a decades-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent
The White House deputy chief of staff views GOP-led state legislatures as a workaround to get anti-immigration laws on the books that wouldn't need to pass through the gridlock in Congress, especially as Republicans at this point appear likely to lose their House majority and possibly the Senate, reported the New York Times.
“He sees conservative states like Texas and Florida can be partners with the federal government,” said state Rep. Tom Oliverson, chairman of the Texas House Republican Caucus. “We can be a place where some of those ideas can be tried out because they’re difficult to do at the federal level.”
Miller met with Texas Republicans for more than four hours and demanded to know why the GOP-dominated legislature had not passed a bill to restrict public school funding to children who are citizens or are “lawfully present in the United States," which would break a precedent set in 1982 by a ruling in Plyler v. Doe that found states must pay for elementary school education for children regardless of their immigration status.
“There’s a lot of people that believe that that ruling has some pretty faulty logic associated with it,” Oliverson said. “He challenged us, and he encouraged us, and he asked us to partner with him."
Miller's proposal, if passed into state law, would cut education funding for an estimated 100,000 students out of more than 5.5 million schoolchildren in the state, the Times reported. It appears to be intended as a model for other red states to follow, according to the report.
"[It seems to be an effort from the White House to pressure lawmakers into passing extreme immigration policies that don’t reflect the needs of our state," said state Rep. Ramon Romero, a Democrat and the chair of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus.
Miller led off the meeting, which included Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, with a loyalty test that landed awkwardly, according to Oliverson.
"Do we have a RINO problem in Texas?” he said, using an acronym for “Republican in name only” that is used by conservatives to disparage party moderates.
“There was no answer — it was just uncomfortable silence,” Oliverson said.