Stephen Miller was met with an “uncomfortable silence” when he tried to demand loyalty from Texas House Republicans during a closed-door meeting, according to reports.
The White House deputy chief of staff met with Texas lawmakers last week to try to push them to pass more hardline immigration policies in the red state.
The four-hour meeting got off to an embarrassing start for the top Donald Trump ally when Miller asked, “Do we have a RINO problem in Texas?”—using the insulting acronym for “Republican in name only” that MAGA supporters use against GOP lawmakers deemed too moderate or insufficiently loyal to the president’s ultra-conservative agenda.
“There was no answer—it was just uncomfortable silence,” State Rep. Tom Oliverson, the chairman of the Texas House Republican Caucus, told The New York Times.
Fellow state Rep. Charlie Geren also walked out of the room after becoming frustrated with Miller’s questions about “RINOs” in Texas, according to the conservative website Current Revolt, which first reported on the meeting.
Oliverson believes Miller brought the Texas House Republicans together as part of a broader push to advance the administration’s hardline policies at the state level, knowing it would be more difficult to pass them at the federal level.
That effort could become even more challenging after the midterms, when Republicans could lose control of the House, and possibly the Senate, amid a growing backlash against Trump’s erratic second term.
“He [Miller] sees conservative states like Texas and Florida as partners with the federal government,” Oliverson told the Times. “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 questioned why the GOP-dominated Texas Legislature had not passed a law limiting public education funding to U.S. citizens. The historic Supreme Court decision Plyler v. Doe ruled in 1982 that states must provide funding for the education of undocumented immigrant children.
Miller, the architect of Trump’s most hardline immigration policies, also questioned the Texas Republicans on why they had not passed bills preventing undocumented immigrants from renting property in the Lone Star State.
When asked if he believed there was a “RINO” problem in the Texas Legislature, Oliverson said there is plenty of finger-pointing among Republicans.
“Everyone to the left of them is a RINO,” he told the Times. “And everyone to the right of them is crazy.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
