How Immigration Reform Died
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http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.c...A-476F25D17BFF
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Immigration reform’s slow but steady failure exposes how an ideologically diverse and powerful network of supporters couldn’t bend the one group that mattered: House Republicans. Proponents turned their attention late to the House because of a longer-than-expected Senate debate, and once they did, the GOP’s political will had faded and hard-liners made inroads with newer lawmakers that were difficult to reverse, according to interviews with several dozen key participants on both sides of the battle. Last summer, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) privately told the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference that if reformers won the August recess, then Republicans would move a bill in the fall. But the Syria crisis, the government shutdown and the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov consumed attention through the end of 2013. By the time Boehner released a set of immigration principles in January, Republicans saw little short-term benefit to tackling a divisive issue just as their midterm election prospects were strengthening. As recently as this month, however, there was more movement in the House than previously known. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) had been quietly shopping a PowerPoint presentation of a border enforcement and legalization bill to his colleagues and secured soft commitments from at least 120 Republicans, according to multiple sources familiar with the process. But then Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) lost his Republican primary election. And young children from Central America crossed illegally over the southwestern border in record numbers. Those two unforeseen events killed any remaining chance for action this year. For their part, reformers underestimated how impervious most House Republicans would be to persuasion from evangelicals, law enforcement and big business, and how the GOP’s animus toward Obama over health care and executive actions would bleed into immigration reform. “It’s one of the most frustrating moments that I’ve had,” said Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), a member of the Senate Gang of Eight. “The Senate passage was historic, it was real momentum and to see it totally find itself in a dark hole in the House of Representatives is incredibly disappointing not only to me personally but to millions of people across the country.” Attention will soon turn to how Obama uses his executive authority to provide relief for undocumented immigrants. It will be the next test in the strained relationship between the president and his progressive allies, who are demanding another round of administrative actions. Obama tried in that tense March session to convince the advocates that he understood their fight. But the president’s attempt to highlight his commitment to comprehensive reform going all the way back to his Senate days only incensed the group, which interpreted his remark as a knock on their own dedication to the cause. “We’ve been working on this issue long before you got to the White House,” Angelica Salas, director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, told Obama. “And we will be working on it long after you leave, if necessary.” EARLY OPTIMISM The strong bipartisan vote for the Senate bill exactly one year ago Friday was hard, at first, for the House to ignore, even among the leaders who said they wouldn’t take cues from the upper chamber. Within weeks, Boehner issued a challenge to a pro-reform group. Nearly all House Republican leaders blocked off time to meet with about 30 members of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference in Cantor’s conference room in the Capitol. Starting with Boehner, each lawmaker went around the table to stress the need to pass immigration reform. According to two attendees, Boehner told the assembled advocates to go out and win August. “He promised us in that meeting that if we can just make the August recess of 2013 go smoothly and not be a riot around the country, that we would be able to get back after the August recess,” recalled Robert Gittelson, vice president of governmental affairs for the NHCLC. At one point, the Rev. Daniel de Leon, a California pastor, asked House Judiciary Committee Bob Goodlatte about family reunification — a critical issue for religious communities. The normally reserved Virginia Republican — whom some advocates viewed as an obstacle to reform and who oversees immigration legislation in his committee — began to cry and choked up completely, two people inside the room recalled. About a minute later, Goodlatte regained his composure. Apologizing for the abrupt tears, the former immigration attorney discussed how the issue is a deeply personal one: His wife Maryellen’s parents were first-generation immigrants from Ireland, he explained, and throughout his legal career, Goodlatte helped immigrants from more than 70 nations come to the United States. Reformers largely won the August recess — there was no tea party-inspired revolt pressuring congressmen to oppose reform when they returned to Washington. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) was mocked for hosting a rally against immigration reform in Richmond, Va., near Cantor’s district that drew only about 50 people. Images of the congressman standing alone under a gazebo at a public park made the opposition look weak, even a bit embarrassing. But that still didn’t convince House Republicans to act. CONSERVATIVE BLOWBACK In January, King held a key piece of paper in his jacket pocket during the immigration discussion at the House GOP retreat in Cambridge, Md. Scribbled on it was a list of about 50 names of fellow House Republicans that King considered allies, having talked personally to each of them and urged them to speak out against immigration reform. Now, he would need every one of them as the GOP leadership introduced principles that included legalization for most undocumented immigrants. Many of the 50 had cycled through a series of meetings that King and Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.) began in February 2013, when King became convinced that an overhaul was coming. “I said, ‘I’m going to fight it all the way. And I’m going to die on the hill if that’s gonna happen,’” King recalled in a recent interview. “That’s what I said: ‘I’m going to die on the hill.’ And so that’s why I began to mobilize.” The reason for the early meetings was simple: Nearly half of House Republicans were either freshmen or sophomores who weren’t around for the last major immigration fight in 2007. With some key exceptions, these lawmakers were blank slates on immigration policy. “The new Republicans in the House and Senate — you know how their mind worked?” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a key senator involved in the effort. “It was, ‘We need to end the lawlessness at the border and build a fence but I love immigrants and I really think we should welcome immigrants and we need more immigrants.’” “Well, that sounds good on the campaign trail, but few of them had actually read data about we admit a million on a path to citizenship every year, we have 600,000 guest workers in addition every year,” Sessions continued. “Few of them had asked themselves, in a time of high unemployment and slow growth, you want to increase the number?” There were three tiers of meetings: The first was primarily members-only on the House side. Then communications aides from House and Senate offices met to discuss messaging tactics. Finally, there were broader staff huddles involving policy and communications hands. A couple dozen Republican offices from both ends of the Capitol regularly participated. House members tried to meet weekly when they were in Washington, usually in King’s office but sometimes in other Hill locations to strategize their foes’ next move. When aides met, they would pore over the polling and studies available to make their case, and figure out how to loop in outside allies, such as talk-radio hosts. Sessions and Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) were the most active senators, while Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) played supporting roles. Key House lawmakers included King and Reps. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Lamar Smith (R-Texas), John Fleming (R-La.), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) and Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), among several others, according to lawmakers and aides involved. Reform opponents felt they notched victories in multiple key stages. Boehner declared quickly and often that the Senate bill was a nonstarter in his chamber. But after conservatives whipped up paranoia that any small-bore House immigration bill could be negotiated with the sweeping Senate bill, Boehner said last November there would be no such formal House-Senate conference. The speaker tried to move the issue forward on his terms at the January retreat, releasing the one-page set of principles that included a statement for legalization of undocumented immigrants for most groups — a major shift for the House GOP. But opponents had already put the conference on notice by the time the principles were unveiled. Before the retreat, Sessions and his aides delivered a 30-page memo to every House Republican office — both digital and hard-copy versions. In it, Sessions outlined what he called the “negative impact” that current immigration plans would exert on “American workers, taxpayers and the rule of law.” Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly also blanketed Republican lawmakers shortly before the retreat with polling numbers on immigration that King considered a vital resource. During the retreat, King deployed his own rapid response — tweeting reporters and others closely watching the private session: “#NoAmnesty #GOPRetreat: Intense debate on immigration inside now. 3-4 to 1 don’t trust the president and demand he secure border first.” In an interview at the time, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) said the sentiment in the room could be divided into three camps: Republicans who were eager to move on reform (he counted himself in this group); lawmakers who would never vote for an overhaul; and a wide middle swath who might have been open to the leadership’s plan but said their deep distrust of Obama was a significant barrier. Still, the narrative that survived the retreat was one of fierce conservative blowback. Rush Limbaugh railed against legal status as “the end of the Republican Party. Why would they preside over their own demise?” Laura Ingraham warned that Republicans who backed it “are in violation of their oath of office.” It was also unclear whether there was an outside strategy for promoting the House GOP principles by backers off the Hill. Advocates were largely unaware of details in the tightly-guarded document — leaving them on their own to read the tea leaves from Republican leadership and prepare for the response from the rank and file. “The principles, we underestimated the backlash on those,” said Kevin Appleby, director of migration policy for the pro-reform U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “We could’ve been prepared with our folks calling and saying, ‘Support the principles.’” .... Diaz-Balart had planned to inform House leaders two days after Cantor’s primary reelection that a majority of the conference had shown interest in his bill, according to sources familiar with the process. He wanted a week to firm up the numbers and a commitment to bring it to the floor. There was no guarantee the plan would’ve succeeded where many others failed. Diaz-Balart had not shown a bill to his colleagues. But the Republican never had a chance to make the pitch to leadership because of a dramatic twist nobody ever considered that helped kill reform: Cantor lost. SECOND-GUESSING The reasons for Cantor’s surprising defeat are complex, but in the post-mortems, the role of immigration reform quickly hardened into conventional wisdom: His support of incremental immigration measures hurt him, and as a result, other Republicans wouldn’t want to touch the issue. Images of unaccompanied minors surging across the southwestern border only reinforced conservatives’ views that the border isn’t secure. But its demise was nearly assured even before then, the casualty of missed opportunities, short-term political calculations and unmet expectations. The Senate debate took longer than the White House had wanted, allowing the lessons of 2012 to fade for House Republicans. The cause suffered a psychic blow when Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a conservative essential to passing the Senate bill, decided not to get involved in the House debate. Reformers now acknowledge that they made a costly mistake by not focusing more of their firepower on the House earlier, even before the Senate bill gained traction. “It didn’t take a political genius to see that the House was challenging,” said Cesar Vargas of the pro-reform Dream Action Coalition. “We should’ve focused on the [Raul] Labradors, the Cantors back then, when there was more momentum, more encouraging pressure.” Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), part of the bipartisan group of eight House lawmakers who tried and ultimately failed to hammer out their own comprehensive bill, said the lack of attention to the House early in 2013 was a “huge problem.” “As we began the fight, every resource, all energy, all focus, was on the Senate,” Gutierrez said. .... Still, others believed some immigration advocates wrote off too many House Republicans as unpersuadable. One example cited in numerous interviews was that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spoke out forcefully for an overhaul, but never punished lawmakers who weren’t pro-reform by refusing donations or endorsements. “There’s the Steve Kings who you’re never going to get … and the John Carters, who you basically have,” said Tamar Jacoby, president and CEO of the business group ImmigrationWorks USA. “But there are a lot of people in the middle. I don’t think we, enough, took the argument to them.” .... Despite the lack of action, reformers said an evolution has occurred. The debate is no longer about whether an overhaul of the system must occur, but rather when it should be done. After their struggle over the past year, some activists said their only solution might be a long-term strategy to flip control of the House back to Democrats, while holding the Senate and the White House. “Our biggest mistake was that we believed Republicans wanted to change course after the 2012 election,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, who has been working on the issue in Washington for more than two decades. “I don’t believe we will make that mistake again.” |
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Originally Posted by 2Face
I personally knew that if he wins he's not going to be touching DACA.
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Originally Posted by 2Face
I hope Trump wins second term.
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Originally Posted by BestBefore1984
Tranny is not derogatory term dummy
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