Quote:
House Republicans will have a meeting of the minds Wednesday, but it remains unclear if the fractious group of lawmakers will be able to reach a consensus on a path forward with immigration reform.
Despite pressure from the Senate, which last month convincingly passed a bipartisan plan, and calls from the White House and advocacy groups asking for haste, there is no indication House lawmakers feel the same sense of urgency to pass legislation.
One thing House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has made clear is that his chamber will craft its own immigration bill rather than take up the Senate version.
"We all believe that if we're going to go forward on immigration reform, the first big step is you have to have serious border security because without serious border security, what you're going to end up with is the same thing we saw after the 1986 act," Boehner said Tuesday. "We believe that a commonsense, step-by-step approach is the right way. We've talked about it for months. We're going to talk to our members about it tomorrow."
Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei write in Politico that the deliberative pace in the House could cause the push to reform the immigration system to stall out:
Republicans walked away from their 2012 debacle hell-bent on fixing their problems with Hispanics. Now, they appear hell-bent on making them worse.
In private conversations, top Republicans on Capitol Hill now predict comprehensive immigration reform will die a slow, months-long death in the House. Like with background checks for gun buyers, the conventional wisdom that the party would never kill immigration reform, and risk further alienating Hispanic voters, was always wrong -- and ignored the reality that most House Republicans are white conservatives representing mostly white districts.
These members, and the vast majority of their voters, couldn't care less whether Marco Rubio, Bill O'Reilly and Karl Rove say this is smart politics and policy.
As Boehner seeks to wrangle his unruly conference, he is not getting any help from the top Democrat in the Senate. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., charged Tuesday that the speaker was having difficulty controlling his members on a wide range of issues, including immigration.
"Speaker Boehner is trying to decide where he is. Pick an issue. How about the farm bill? Last year's farm bill, this year's farm bill. He has dissension in his own ranks. We know that," Reid told reporters at a Capitol Hill stakeout. "He is saying the bipartisan bill that we have done, he is not going to touch that. Well, we're going to continue to press. The American people, the vast majority of the American people, Democrats and Republicans, support what we did."
The Senate proposal would create a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country and would bolster security along the southern border through the hiring of additional border patrol agents and completing 700 miles of fencing. It passed late last month on a 68 to 32 vote, with 14 Republicans joining all 54 Senate Democrats to back the measure......link
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Still the same old stuff we have been hearing. The main point is
1. No vote on the Senate bill
2. Border security first
3. Requires majority of republicans votes.
4. Possible path to citizenship for dreamers (I think they are just saying it because they know the senate won't allow a Dreamer only bill and there is no time left for the passage anyway if CIR fail)
5. Overall, what comes out of this meeting is not positive for CIR.