DREAM Act Portal Forum - Gutierrez wasting no time in push for WH action on immigration

The problem was is and will be the House. The Senate did pass a CIR bill in 2013, a CIR bill mind you that was a further compromise than everything discussed before in order to assuage Republican concerns.

In theory, Republicans have to pass something to improve their chances for 2016, but it won't work this way, because a sizeable part of their House caucus has a different set of incentives. For those people what matter is their reelection and that reelection goes through the hard line restrictionists which comprise a descent chunk of their primary electorate. These people look at Cantor's defeat as a warning for not to do and one of the things not to do is pass any serious CIR.

Moreover, before the actual 2016 general election, there's going to be a hotly contested presidential primary in which people like Ted Cruz will demagogue the issue; the effect will be that even moderate Republicans open to CIR will backtrack and toughen their position.

So, good luck trying to see CIR in the next couple of years. At best, they might pass some bills in order to try save face that aren't going to be signed by Obama for good reason. For example, they might sign a bill with strong security measures and send it to Obama. Obama won't sign that without reassurance that some form of legalization will pass and Republicans are simply going to use that as an excuse in order to pretend they tried to do something but the President stopped it.

The worst part is that thanks to natural gerrymandering, House Republicans seem to have a stranglehold on the House for the foreseeable future with some people believing that Democrats won't get a serious chance until 2020 or 2022.

So yeah, at the moment Executive Action is the best hope, but the midterms didn't help.