George P. Bush Urges Immigration Action

July 10, 2012, 12:01 pm

George P. Bush Urges Immigration Action

By JEFF ZELENY

George P. Bush said on Tuesday that “it’s never too late” for Mitt Romney to take a leadership role in the immigration debate, but he acknowledged Republicans were outflanked by President Obama’s election-year decision to allow hundreds of illegal immigrants to remain in the country without fear of deportation.

“Governor Romney had an opportunity to get in front of the president on the issue,” said Mr. Bush, 36, the son of former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida. “But the president clearly has taken the initiative on it.”

Mr. Bush, who is urging younger voters to increase their participation in the 2012 election through his political action committee called MavPAC, said he hoped Mr. Romney would still “formulate a plan — a more comprehensive plan” on immigration. But he added, “Leading up to Election Day, it’s very difficult to get anything so controversial through, so we’ll see.”

The White House announced a policy last month that would clear the way for young illegal immigrants to come out of the shadows, work legally and obtain driver’s licenses and many other documents they have lacked. The temporary reprieve could benefit at least 800,000 young people.

The decision fell short of Mr. Obama’s pledge to pursue a broad overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws during his first term. Yet Republicans concede the move is likely to help the president’s appeal to Hispanic voters who could play an influential role in the presidential race.

Mr. Bush, who was on a trip to Washington to promote his political action committee, told reporters over breakfast that the Republican Party needed to broaden its outreach to younger voters and search for an “honest solution to the immigration problem.” He said both parties should commit to a bipartisan plan that recognized a “need for labor in our country and the need of enforcing, for purposes of national security, our immigration laws.”

Like his father, Mr. Bush is a fluent Spanish speaker who has been an outspoken advocate for overhauling the nation’s immigration laws. His mother, Columba Bush, was born in Mexico.

“Regretfully, this has become an issue that has ended and created political careers,” Mr. Bush said. He added, “This is such a complicated question, it’s not going to be solved by one party alone.”

Mr. Bush, the nephew of George W. Bush and grandson of George H.W. Bush, is a lawyer and managing partner of an investment firm in Texas. He and Jay Zeidman, who worked in the Bush White House, are national co-chairmen of MavPac, a political action committee to help younger political candidates and to increase activism among younger voters.

The committee is focusing its work on Ohio and Florida, two key battleground states in the 2012 presidential election.

Mr. Bush, who has worked on the campaigns of his father and uncle, demurred when reporters asked whether he intended to enter the family business of politics. He said, “I’d be open to it. I just don’t have an overwhelming urge to do it right now.”

George P. Bush Urges Immigration Action - NYTimes.com

Condoleezza Rice Speech Calls For Immigration Reform, Fixing Wealth Gap

Posted: 07/10/2012 10:00 am

WASHINGTON -- As presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney continues to mull over whom to choose as his running mate, one name has started to be brought up more often -- former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Fueled by comments from Ann Romney last week that her husband is considering choosing a woman as his VP nominee, many have speculated that the Stanford University professor may make her way back onto the political stage.

Rice has denied on several occasions that she is interested in the job, most recently to CBS's Charlie Rose. Her standard line is that she loves policy, but has no interest in politics. But that hasn't stopped Beltway pundits from speculating as to what Rice could bring to a joint ticket. On the one hand, Rice's experience would help balance Romney's lack of foreign policy bona fides. On the other hand, she worked for George W. Bush, the least popular U.S. president still alive -- which could make her a liability.

Despite her insistence that she has no interest in being Romney's #2, Rice has, intentionally or unintentionally, made herself seem more available after recent appearances she has made at Republican political functions.

In late June, Rice gave a speech to an elite group of Republican donors at a resort in Utah. Her remarks weren't released to the media, but attendees described the former diplomat's "impassioned plea" for renewed U.S. leadership at home and abroad as "spectacular," and the crowd reportedly gave her two standing ovations.

We don't know exactly what she said, but it was most likely very similar to the speech she delivered two days later to a group of human resources executives in Atlanta. Roughly the same length as her remarks in Utah, the 15-minute speech tackled the same themes she was reported to have spoken to the Romney donors about. She was equally as well received in Atlanta as she was in Utah.

While Rice's office has yet to confirm that they were the same speech, the similarity makes sense -- public figures on the lecture circuit typically have one stump speech, which they tweak for different audiences.

Click here to listen to the speech recorded in Atlanta by HuffPost.

In Utah she opened with a joke about the vice presidential speculation, which likely played well because the crowd included VP short-listers like Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and New Hampshire Sen. Rob Portman. Over the course of her talk, she framed the past decade in terms of three "great shocks": 9/11, the worldwide financial crisis and the Arab Spring.

The crises, she said, demanded a response rarely discussed during an election centered on domestic policy debates: American global leadership.

"If this international system that is reeling from these three great shocks is going to find power again, it's going to do so because somebody steps up to take leadership," Rice said.

"It's going to do so because there's always a country that leads. There's always a country that has a view of how human history ought to unfold. And the United States of America has had a view. It is that free markets and free peoples ought to lead the future."

From there, Rice pivoted to a controversial issue, especially among Republicans -- comprehensive immigration reform.

"It doesn't matter where you came from, it matters where you're going," Rice said. "That belief has led people to come here for generations from across the world, just to be a part of that. Frankly, it hasn't mattered whether it was Sergei Brin, whose parents brought him here at 7 years old from Russia and he founds Google, or the guy who came to make five dollars and fifty cents. They are the same ambitious, risk-taking people and America has been able to gather them."

For Romney, however, Rice's public support of immigration reform may alone be enough to disqualify her from VP consideration.

Despite recent claims that he plans to implement an immigration reform plan if elected, Romney has yet to offer any details about what such a plan might look like.

He has said that he opposes immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for any of the 12 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States -- what he calls "amnesty" plans. Instead, he has proposed that illegal immigrants be convinced to "self-deport," and return to their home countries in order to re-apply for immigration to the U.S.

But immigration wasn't the only element of Rice's speech that was out of sync with Romney's platform.

The former secretary of state also singled out "huge inequities between the rich and the poor" as the main reasons that "places like Brazil and India, great multi-ethnic democracies that are countries that have a lot of potential ... are having trouble reaching that potential."

"Brazil is indeed Sao Paulo and Rio," she said, "but Brazil is also the [shanty-town] hills above Rio. And India is of course Mumbai and Bangalore, but India is also Calcutta."

Rice paid no heed to the fact that economic inequality is an issue, politically speaking, that belongs to Democrats, and President Barack Obama has made no secret of his plans to capitalize on voter frustration over the wealth gap.

Despite a heavy focus on issues abroad, Rice made several significant points regarding economic inequality in the U.S.

"Americans are not united by blood or ethnicity or religion or nationality," she said. "We are united by a creed. You can come from humble circumstances and you can do great things. And if that's ever not true, then this society will rip itself apart."

"This has been the country that has been the most capable of mobilizing human potential, because it hasn't mattered where you came from, it's only mattered where you're going," she said.

Christina Wilkie: Condoleezza Rice Speech Calls For Immigration Reform, Fixing Wealth Gap

July 10, 2012, 12:26 p.m. ET.

Immigration Reform Flaker

Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona once distinguished himself as a strong conservative supporter of comprehensive immigration reform. Not anymore..

By JASON L. RILEY

Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona, who is running to succeed retiring GOP Sen. Jon Kyl, may have caught a break over the weekend when the Arizona Republic reported that a company co-owned by Mr. Flake's chief Republican primary opponent, Wil Cardon, had been caught hiring illegal aliens.

"A Subway franchise company co-owned by Cardon was fined three years ago for federal violations related to the failure to document the legal status of more than 150 employees suspected of being illegal immigrants," the paper reported. A spokesman for the Cardon campaign told the paper that the candidate had a 28% stake in the company and that others were responsible for day-to-day operations, including hiring.

Mr. Flake has always been the likely nominee and the GOP's best shot at holding the seat. But until now, all of the momentum in the race seemed to belong to Mr. Cardon, a self-funding political rookie who enjoys strong tea party support. A recent Public Policy Polling survey showed that Mr. Flake's 49-point lead in the polls in February had shrunk to 22 points by early June. And last month, Mr. Cardon picked up the endorsement of Congressman Trent Franks, one of Mr. Flake's fellow House members.

Mr. Flake has represented suburban Phoenix since 2001 and distinguished himself as, among other things, a champion of comprehensive immigration reform that includes not only more border security but also viable guest worker programs to meet U.S. labor market demand and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers already here. These days, he sounds more like Arizona's Sheriff Joe Arpaio, denouncing comprehensive immigration reform as "a dead end" and saying it's no longer "possible or even desirable." He touts his support for walling off the Mexican border and suggests (incorrectly) that illegal Latinos drive violent crime in the U.S., telling one interviewer that "virtually all" of the people entering the country illegally today are tied to smuggling rings and drug cartels.

Mr. Flake, who is also known as a staunch fiscal hawk, apparently believes that kind of immigration rhetoric is necessary to win over Republican primary voters. Perhaps. But such talk by GOP pols in heavily Hispanic Arizona, a dependably red state, might also explain why a survey last month had President Obama trailing Mitt Romney there by only 3 points.

A Senator Flake would surely be an additional vote for spending restraint in the Upper Chamber. Unfortunately, he might also be another vote for the immigration status quo that he once bravely fought to change.

Immigration Reform Flaker - WSJ.com

The whole Bush family is full of traitors to America that bear a large amount of responsibility for the deaths and injuries of Americans committed by their illegal alien invasion army.

W

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ALIPAC

The whole Bush family is full of traitors to America that bear a large amount of responsibility for the deaths and injuries of Americans committed by their illegal alien invasion army.

W

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The majority of the country will agree with you. The family will go down in history as the most corrupt and damaging family this country has ever been subjected to, other than the Kennedy family of course. If that does not show you what money can buy, nothing will. However the Bush family has finally worn out their welcome with the American people. George P. Bush can pretty much hang it up along with his dad. They should all be grateful that none of them are in jail.

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