Thread: One Republican Leader Who’s Offering Hope for an Immigration Bill

One Republican Leader Who’s Offering Hope for an Immigration Bill

Dec 4, 2014, 5:50 PM ET
By JIM AVILA and SERENA MARSHALLJIM AVIL
Senior National Correspondent

Committee chairman Rep. Pete Sessions speaks duirng a House Rules Committee meeting, Aug. 1, 2014, in Washington.
Alex Wong/Getty Images

The House of Representatives voted today to block President Obama’s executive action on immigration, but in a different room of the Capitol Republicans may have been offering a brief glimmer of hope.

The powerful Republican chairman of the House Rules Committee, Pete Sessions of Texas, said on the record that only the extreme members of his party want to deport non-criminal undocumented workers.

“There is no one in responsible Republican leadership, elected officials, who has said we should deport 13 or 11 million people,” Sessions said Thursday at a hearing on the president’s executive actions on immigration. “That is not what this effort is about.”

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Sessions went on to promise that he and Virginia Republican Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, would work on a bill in the new year.

"To have a well-understood agreement about what the law should be and how we should as communities, and farm communities, and tech communities create circumstances where we can have people be in this country and work,” he said. "And where not one person is quote ‘thrown out or deported.’ Where we do keep families together, but we do so under a rule of law of understanding."

Ross D. Franklin/AP Photo

PHOTO: Two young girls watch a World Cup soccer from their holding area where hundreds of immigrant children are being processed at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Nogales Placement Center, June 18, 2014, in Nogales, Ariz.

The Texas congressman vigorously opposes the action taken by Obama, asserting that it oversteps presidential power. But he invited Democratic Congressman Luis Gutierrez of Illinois to help develop an immigration reform bill to replace it. Speaking directly to Gutierrez, who attended the Rules Committee hearing as a witness, Sessions vowed to work together.

“I’d ask that you to come back to the table… and work on this and I think you will find reasonableness will abound,” he said.
But Gutierrez remains skeptical about Republican action.

"Every time we have another vote to deport all 11 million immigrants and their families someone on the Republican side says, 'Oh, Luis. Just wait. The day when Republicans seriously address immigration, visas, border security and legal status is coming someday soon.’ But it never seems to come,” Gutierrez told ABC News. “It is always a higher priority to send a symbolic but meaningless message to the base that they are ‘getting tough’ rather than a serious message to the American people that they are getting serious about the immigration issue.”

Today, the House voted 219-197 to narrowly approve the Executive Amnesty Prevention Act, a bill that aims to prevent the president from implementing his executive actions. Although the bill is dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate, it may provide enough political cover to Republicans to prevent a government shutdown next week.

“The structure and stability of our democratic system depends upon the president executing the laws passed by Congress—not unilaterally rewriting them,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California, wrote in a statement after the vote. “Today, the House made it very clear what the president is constitutionally and legally obligated to do.”

The president said during his announcement on executive action for immigration that should Congress pass a bill, it would trump his executive authority and he’d sign it into law.

“To those members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer: Pass a bill,” he said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZefRXKIIhnA#t=14392

The video is the entire rules committee hearing and is somewhat lengthy, but very interesting and revealing.

The First RINO to Be Primaried in 2016 Will Be…

December 8, 2014 By Matthew Burke


“The defeat of House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (TX-32) should be the number one goal of every Republican primary voter in Texas Congressional District 32, and every conservative donor, activist and organization across America,” writes Conservative HQ on Monday, a site ran by legendary conservative activist Richard Viguerie, author of the book,Conservatives Betrayed, How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause.

Congressman Pete Sessions (not to be confused with Senator Jeff Sessions, who actually believes in the U.S. Constitution), caused a firestorm among Tea Party conservatives when, after initially condemning Obama’s unconstitutional amnesty executive order, he now has performed a complete flip-flop, promising to use all of his “assets and resources” to make sure that not one person is “thrown out” or “deported,” a new stance that has open borders communist Chicago Rep. Luis Gutierrez literally overflowing with joy.

“My heart was filled with a lot of joy when you said that people who are working here, who don’t present a danger, basically should be set aside, that those aren’t the people we should be going after,” Gutierrez said about Pete Sessions statement in support of foreign invaders.

From the seething statement entitled, Primary Target Acquired:

Conservatives have not forgotten that Pete Sessions, along with the now defeated Eric Cantor, was the architect of last summer’s discredited (and ultimately withdrawn) House Republican strategy of “deem and pass” Obamacare funding.
But Pete Sessions’ latest betrayal – using his powerful Rules Committee Chairmanship to end run regular order and surreptitiously insinuate anti-conservative language into the House’s alleged anti-amnesty bill – should bring conservatives into open and continuous confrontation with him.
And we conservatives should make no mistake about it – this is not some gentlemanly policy debate where we can have a family disagreement among Republicans about whether to cut spending in program “A” or program “B.”

This is a Republican leader openly declaring he is joining Democrat Rep. Luis Gutierrez, one of the most radical liberal open borders Democrats, to thwart conservatives and grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.

“The insult and outrage Pete Sessions offered to the millions of grassroots conservatives who just worked and donated and voted to give Republicans the largest House Majority they have had since 1947 cannot be overstated,” the statement continues.

Rep. Sessions, who spent many multiples of Republican challenger Katrina Pierson, a Tea Party activist, in this years primary election, defeated Pierson 63.6% to 36.4%, due largely to his large corporate donors.

“If we have a country left come 2016, and Pete Sessions is still in office, I may consider another run,” Pierson wrote in an email to Breitbart.

WATCH - Daily Caller video at link


http://www.tpnn.com/2014/12/08/the-first-rino-to-be-primaried-in-2016-will-be/