Here’s a timeline for immigration reform.
November 8, 2012: House Speaker John Boehner says: “It’s an important issue that I think ought to be dealt with. This issue has been around far too long. While I believe it’s important for us to secure our borders and to enforce our laws, I think a comprehensive approach is long overdue, and I’m confident that the president, myself, others, can find the common ground to take care of this issue once and for all.”
November 14, 2012: During his first post-election news conference, President Obama responded to a question about immigration reform, “I’m very confident that we can get immigration reform done. … This has not historically been a partisan issue — we’ve had President Bush and John McCain and others who have supported comprehensive immigration reform in the past. So we need to seize the moment. And my expectation is, is that we get a bill introduced and we begin the process in Congress very soon after my inauguration.”
January 28, 2013:Democrats Charles E. Schumer, Richard Durbin, Robert Menendez, and Michael Bennet along with Republicans John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and Jeff Flatt introduce a path to citizenship for most of the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants.
January 29, 2013: President Obama basically agrees with their idea.
April 26, 2013: The Senators, called the “Gang of Eight”, formally introduce Senate Bill S. 744, an 844-page comprehensive immigration bill, but opponents plan to kill it by prolonging the process with amendments and debate.
June 27, 2013: with 14 Republicans joining Democrats to support it, the Senate votes 68 to 32 in favor of S. 744 after adding stronger border security measures and new work visas for high- and low-skilled workers.
July 8, 2013: John Boehner says: “I’ve made it clear, and I’ll make it clear again: the House is not going to take up the Senate bill. The House is going to do its own job in developing an immigration bill”.
Later in July 2013: The House introduces five smaller-scale immigration bills. Although they all deal with such things as increased border security, agricultural worker visas, and a new employee verification system for employees, none of them include what the Senate had wanted, which was offering undocumented immigrants a legal status.
September 17, 2013: President Obama disappoints supporters of a path to citizenship by saying that for him to use executive authority to expand a 2012 decision to suspend deportations of young immigrants brought to the country illegally by their parents was not an option.
December 2013: Boehner hires Rebecca Tallent, director of immigration policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, giving people the hope that he might pursue immigration reform.
December 21, 2013: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says: “I think that John Boehner will conference with the Senate. Why wouldn’t he? He’ll have a lot of pressure from his members now that the [2014 midterm] election is getting closer. Some of his members are in very marginal districts where they need to do something on immigration.”
January 30, 2014: House Republican leadership releases immigration “principles” which included a path to legal status, but not citizenship.
February 6, 2014: Boehner, citing “widespread doubt about whether this administration can be trusted to enforce our laws”, backtracks on the Republican immigration principles because “it’s going to be difficult to move any immigration legislation until that changes”.
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March 5, 2014: Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, calls Obama the “deporter-in-chief”.
June 10, 2014 – House Majority Leader Eric Cantor loses the Virginia primary which ruins any hopes that the House leadership would pursue immigration reform.
May-June 2014: Because of all the Central American children crossing the Southern border, Republicans accuse the president of not adequately enforcing immigration laws.
June 25, 2014: Representative Luis Gutierrez, a Democrat from Illinois, declares that the hope for comprehensive immigration reform “is over”, and tells the House GOP, “We’ve given you time to craft legislation and you failed. The president has no other choice but to act on existing laws to make deportation policies more humane.”
Which brings us to lunch on the Friday after the mid-term elections.
The president had the Republican leadership at the White House for lunch. They were supposed to talk about plans for the next two years.
Those Republicans in attendance asked the president to give them time to work on immigration legislation, warning him not to act on his own.
I guess the last two years was just not enough time for them to do anything.
But President Obama, saying his patience was running short, insisted that he intended to act by the end of the year if the GOP majority continued to do nothing.
This did not sit well with the Republicans, and Senator John Cornyn of Texas said, “The president instead of being contrite or saying in effect to America, ‘I hear you,’ as a result of the referendum on his policies that drove this last election, he seems unmoved and even defiant. I don’t know why he would want to sabotage his last two years as president by doing something this provocative”.
Methinks the GOP may be misreading the election, or they might have acted differently when President Obama was e-elected.
So now the Republicans want everything to come to a standstill until they can start doing what they have avoided doing up to now.
It is going to be a long two years.