When it comes to passing a comprehensive immigration reform bill President Obama just doesn’t matter that much.
—
Politico had a piece yesterday highlighting problems with the stalled effort to pass comprehensive immigration reform this year. According to a number of prominent Republicans the article quotes, the big hold up is either the fact that the bill is too big, or is because Republicans don’t trust President Obama. As Florida Senator Marco Rubio put it:
A comprehensive, single piece of legislation on any topic, but especially on immigration, is going to be very difficult to achieve…[w]e keep talking about the same issue now for 15 years, and everybody is doing this all-or-nothing approach. And all-or-nothing is going to leave you with nothing.
Rubio is right that passing big bills is harder than passing resolutions honoring mom and apple pie, but this is still a pretty pathetic excuse. I mean, why not just say that you wrote a great immigration bill the other day but your dog ate it?
The reality is that passing bills, yes big complicated bills to address big complicated problems, is sort of what Congress is supposed to do.
Moreover Rubio is totally obscuring the real reason that a comprehensive immigration reform bill isn’t being passed: Republicans in the House won’t let it be brought up for vote. To review, the Senate passed a bipartisan (and yes big and complicated) bill last summer with a large majority. President Obama has promised to sign such a bill into the law if it gets to his desk. So all that is needed is for it to pass the House of Representatives as well. And the good news is that most observers think that such a bill could be passed in the House with a bipartisan coalition of almost all Democrats and a significant chunk of the Republican caucus as well.
So what’s the hold up? Well simply but Republicans in the House don’t want the bill to come up for a vote because they know it would pass. The modern House of Representatives is run by what some like to call a “party cartel.” That’s to say that legislation only gets to come up for a vote if a majority of the majority is willing to let it (some people like to call this the Hastert Rule.) So while a majority of the overall House might want to pass an immigration reform bill, a majority of the GOP caucus can block this by just never letting it come up for a vote.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that a bill could be passed if Republicans wanted it passed, but since they don’t, it will never be voted on. Or in other words the complexity of the bill has little to do with why the effort has stalled.
Like The Good Men Project On Facebook
Photo by Charles Dharapak/AP
The post Immigration Reform Is All About The Republican appeared first on The Good Men Project.