House Republicans Take Foot Off Gas in Drive for Immigration Reform

By: Terence Burlij and Christina Bellantoni
Members stream out of the House Chamber onto the East Front Plaza of the U.S. Capitol on Friday after the last vote before the Independence Day recess. Photo By Douglas Graham/CQ Roll Call

When it comes to the immigration bill, the game plan in Congress is hurry up and wait.

The Senate passed the so-called Gang of Eight's plan last Thursday ahead of Majority Leader Harry Reid's Fourth of July deadline, but House Republicans have made clear they intend to chart their own path on immigration reform and do not appear to be in any rush to pass legislation by a date certain.

House Judiciary Committee Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said Sunday that Republicans would like to duplicate the bipartisan outcome that emerged from the Senate, but that the House version should reflect the fact that the chamber is controlled by the GOP.

"We would love to have a bipartisan group produce a bill, because it would help to inform the House, just like the Senate bill helped to inform the Senate," Goodlatte said on CNN's "State of the Union." "But 70 percent of the Republicans in the Senate voted against the immigration bill. Republicans are in the majority in the House."

Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., a member of a bipartisan group working on a comprehensive proposal in the House, charged that Republicans are not following the Senate model.

"What the House Republicans are doing is giving a Republican solution. And a Republican solution isn't what we saw was successful in the Senate," Gutierrez said on CNN. "What happened in the Senate was that Republicans and Democrats decided that bipartisanship was going to lead to a solution, that compromising was going to lead to a solution."

Gutierrez suggested the decision for whether immigration reform passes or not will likely fall to House Speaker John Boehner.

"There are a majority of Democrats and Republicans that are ready to solve this problem. Will he allow a small group, maybe even a majority of his caucus, to control the debate and the future on this issue? If he decides to do that, we will then end in a stalemate and an impasse once again," the Illinois Democrat said.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., predicted that public pressure on Congress to pass immigration reform would continue to build and Boehner will ultimately bring the Senate plan up for a vote. "Within several months Speaker Boehner will find two choices -- no bill or let a bill pass with a majority of Democratic votes and some Chamber of Commerce-type Republicans. He'll find that the better choice. We'll pass the Senate bill by the end of this year even though most House members don't think so," Schumer said on "Fox News Sunday."

Fellow Gang of Eight member Sen. John McCain said he was "concerned about the task ahead" of lawmakers, but the Arizona Republican added that he also remained "hopeful that we can convince our House colleagues" to move forward with a bill.

For Republicans in the House, a major sticking point is likely to be the pathway to citizenship in the Senate version. Goodlatte signalled that House Republicans might be willing to support a "pathway to legalization" but "not a special pathway to citizenship, where people who are here unlawfully get something that people who have worked for decades to immigrate lawfully do not have."

Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., added that House Republicans would also proceed at their own pace. "We are going to work our will like we have been doing for the past weeks. We have passed four separate bills out of House Judiciary and an additional bill out of Homeland Security. So we are making progress and will continue to do so. And I'm more interested in getting it right than doing it on Senator Schumer's schedule," Gowdy said on "Fox News Sunday."

But President Barack Obama on Saturday told reporters traveling with him in Africa that the ball is "in the House's court," and he would like to see this done on his speedy timeline.

"I do urge the House to try to get this done before the August recess," he said. "There is more than enough time. This thing has been debated amply and they've got a bunch of weeks to get it done and now is the time."

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush had a similar message on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal Monday, urging his fellow Republicans to get on board. Bush, joined by his immigration book co-author Clint Bolick, writes:

Here the GOP's informal "Hastert Rule" requires Speaker John Boehner to have majority support among Republicans before he will bring legislation to the floor for a vote. That means an immigration bill will need a far greater share of Republican House members than the Senate version received (where fewer than one-third of Republicans voted "aye").

This is a tall order. But it is one to which House Republicans should respond.

No Republican would vote for legislation that stifled economic growth, promoted illegal immigration, added to the welfare rolls, and failed to ensure a secure border. Yet they essentially will do just that if they fail to pass comprehensive immigration reform--and leave in place a system that does all of those things.

But tea party activists disagree.

Politico reported Monday that tea party groups "are promising to spend the congressional recess reminding lawmakers who support the Gang of Eight legislation what the base is capable of. Think loud town halls, jammed phone lines and primary challenges down the road -- echoes of Obamacare three years ago."

Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation, told Politico that activists are "more upset about the amnesty bill than they were about Obamacare."

Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., played political pundit, talking about what Republicans need to do "if they ever wanna win a presidential race" and saying she hopes the Senate Republicans who backed that chamber's bill can persuade their House colleagues.

"We wouldn't even be where we are right now had it not been that 70% of Hispanics voted for President Obama, voted Democratic in the last election. That caused an epiphany in the Senate, that's for sure," Pelosi said.

She said she thinks "there are enough" supportive House Republicans to get to the 218 votes needed to pass a bill, but: "The question is do we have to have these Pi r-squared mathematical formulas about what it takes to bring something forth."

At a briefing in Washington Friday hosted by Bloomberg Government, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., suggested that pressure was supposedly off for House Republicans on immigration reform. Diaz-Balart is a player from the chamber's seven-member bipartisan working group on the subject. NewsHour Politics Online Production Assistant Meena Ganesan reported on the event, which also included Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California.

"The assumption that because of the Senate bill, individual members of the House will feel pressure, that's inaccurate," Diaz-Balart said. "I think the real pressure is the pressure to fix an immigration system that's broken."

Without going into any specifics about how the newly-passed Senate version differs from the House bill, Lofgren admitted she could vote for the Senate bill while Diaz-Balart said he thought the group's effort would be a better work-product than the Senate version. He suggested this still-unreleased House compromise would also be the only type of legislation that would pass both the House and the Senate.

The group has been discreet with its process, meeting at length for three years, according to Lofgren. "We've been careful because we wanted to keep the politics out," Diaz-Balart said.

Lofgren also said Friday that a number of the bills they've begun markup on in the House Judiciary Committee have been "absurd." She's expressed outrage over Gowdy's SAFE Act. Repeating a phrase she had used during the hearing on his measure, she said, "To make every undocumented person a criminal, that's unwarranted."

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, meanwhile, told Yahoo News he's considered the fact that the bill is more than 1,000 pages. He said he doesn't know everything that's in it, and he's unsure if senators do, either.

The Morning Line will keep an eye on Congress, the president and national politics through Wednesday, and then we'll take a brief holiday of our own.


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