Results 1 to 5 of 5

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

  1. #1
    Senior Member CountFloyd's Avatar
    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    Occupied Territories, Alta Mexico
    Posts
    3,008

    Sharp Split With G.O.P. Leaders Hurt Bush on Immigration Pla

    June 25, 2006
    Sharp Split With G.O.P. Leaders Hurt Bush on Immigration Plan
    By THE NEW YORK TIMES

    This article is by Adam Nagourney, Carl Hulse and Jim Rutenberg.

    WASHINGTON, June 24 — For the White House, the Congressional picnic last week seemed like the perfect setting to mend strained relations with Republican allies on Capitol Hill: President Bush and his advisers eating taquitos and Mexican confetti rice on the lawn of the White House with Republican Congressional leaders.

    But moments before Mr. Bush was to welcome his guests, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert told the president that House Republicans were effectively sidelining — and in the view of some Congressional aides probably killing — what had become Mr. Bush's signature domestic initiative of the year: an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws.

    That disappointing news for Mr. Bush signaled the apparent collapse of a carefully orchestrated White House strategy to push a compromise immigration bill through Congress this summer — and in the process invigorate Mr. Bush's second term with a badly needed domestic victory.

    The decision by the House leadership to defy the president after he had put so much prestige on the line — including a rare prime-time Oval Office speech for a domestic initiative — amounted to a clear rebuke of the president on an issue that he has long held dear.

    An account of the administration's push for the initiative, based on interviews with members of Congress and senior White House and Congressional officials, shows that Mr. Bush's immigration measure was derailed by an overly optimistic assessment by the White House of the prospects for building a bipartisan coalition in support of the bill and a fundamental misreading of the depth of hostility to the measure among House Republicans.

    White House and Congressional Republican leaders acknowledged a sharp division over whether to focus on the short term or on the party's long-term political prospects. Mr. Bush's aides saw the House bill, which would make it a felony to live in this country illegally and would close off any chance to win legal status, as a threat to their attempts to broaden the party's appeal to Hispanic voters.

    House Republican leaders saw Mr. Bush's approach, calling for tougher enforcement and avenues to legalize the illegal workforce as well as leaving a possible path to citizenship, as a threat to House Republicans already fearful of losing control of this fall's elections by angering Republican voters who viewed the plan as amnesty.

    Mr. Bush's first attempt to advocate for the measure was described even by allies as initially muddled and tentative, permitting opponents to build a case against it before he made his Oval Office address. Republicans' apprehensions were cemented in June, when, in a special election for a vacant Congressional seat in California, Brian P. Bilbray, who ran on a pledge to build a fence along the border with Mexico, was elected after explicitly running against the president's position on immigration.

    Coming in the same week that the White House showed effectiveness in rallying Republicans behind the war, the setback raised questions about Mr. Bush's chances to achieve major domestic victories from a solidly Republican Congress. Unless a compromise is reached, it will mark the second time in two years, after Social Security in 2005, that Mr. Bush has failed to steer his major domestic initiative through the friendly terrain of a Republican Congress.

    "This immigration legislation is very important, and if he doesn't get something in his administration, it will hurt his legacy domestically," said James A. Thurber, a presidential scholar at American University. "Immigration splits the party in a way that makes it very difficult."

    White House officials said they could point to several areas of progress in Congress — on extending tax cuts, pushing a line-item veto and overhauling the pension system. They said that they were under no illusions about the difficulties facing the immigration plan, but that it would never have gotten this far without the president, who will keep pushing for it.

    "We believe by being patient and sticking with it, in time people are going to be pretty happy with what the president proposes," said Tony Snow, the White House spokesman.

    But several analysts were skeptical, noting that in just the past week a candidate for governor in Arizona called for building prison camps for illegal immigrants, while the first campaign advertisement for Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who many believe is the most endangered Republican in the Senate, featured Mr. Santorum talking about stringent border measures.

    From the start of the year, after House Republicans passed a tough immigration measure that Mr. Bush's political advisers worried would undercut their effort to appeal to Hispanic voters, the White House tentatively pushed a more moderate bill that was gathering support in the Senate.

    But Mr. Bush was criticized by both sides for not being forceful enough, in not taking a public stand on specifics and permitting conservative members of the House to define the debate on their terms. Aides said the president was trying to stay above the discussion so he could remain flexible enough to broker a compromise.

    Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said that during one strategy session Mr. Bush had told the senator that he could not be identified as publicly supporting the Senate bill. "Don't quote me, Arlen," Mr. Specter recalled the president saying, implying that Mr. Bush had spoken approvingly of the legislation.

    In April, Mr. Bush brought Joshua B. Bolten on as the new chief of staff, shaking up a White House that had been criticized as adrift and ineffective. With a new team in charge, Mr. Bush took a more forceful stand, using the issue as a way to reassert his leadership. In a speech televised in prime time, he supported the enforcement measures advocated by conservatives and called for sending National Guard troops to the border, but he also said that some illegal immigrants should be allowed legal status.

    White House officials now credit Mr. Bush's address with providing impetus for the compromise bill that was passed by the Senate. And the administration devised plans for a high-profile campaign to position the president as a strong advocate for compromise.

    But House Republicans said they never stopped pressing the case to the White House that the bill was a political disaster for endangered incumbents, and they were baffled at what they said was the failure of Mr. Bush's aides to appreciate their conviction. One lawmaker said House Republicans who attended two closed-door briefings on the issue by the White House deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, and others, kept waiting for the administration to reverse their concerns that passing the bill would be politically damaging for Republicans; they said the administration never made a convincing case.

    White House aides said Republicans had overestimated the bill's political liabilities and underestimated the long-term damage it could do to the party if Republicans were identified among Hispanics as anti-immigrant. "This is a bad trajectory for the Republican Party right now," said a senior Republican official who was granted anonymity to discuss the unusual friction in the Republican ranks.

    Positions hardened when members of Congress went home for recess at the end of May and were confronted by constituents agitated over the issue. They returned to Washington to the news that Mr. Bilbray had narrowly won.

    When House Republicans met for a conference that Wednesday, conservative members seized on the Bilbray victory as vindication of their argument that embracing the Senate and White House position would be poison in the fall elections, according to one participant in the meeting who was granted anonymity because the meetings were private.

    Mr. Hastert and the House majority leader, John A. Boehner, told Mr. Bush in the Oval Office that the already long odds for passage of an immigration bill before the summer break had faded even more. But, aides said, the president, who has been concerned about the issue since his days as governor of Texas, where immigration was an important political and cultural issue, responded that he would not let up.

    Over the next few days, Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York, the head of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, went to Mr. Boehner and Mr. Hastert and, using polling data and pointing to what he described as politically implausible sections of the bill, warned of the consequences of enactment of the Senate legislation

    "Reynolds made clear to the leaders that the House had already staked out its position and from a political standpoint it would be irresponsible to accept a bill that was much different," said Carl Forti, his communications director. He said Mr. Reynolds told House leaders that supporting the bill would be "suicide for some of our members."

    The White House and its supporters pointed to a poll that found strong support among Republican voters for a bill that allowed illegal immigrants to "earn" legal status.

    And senior White House aides argued that fellow party members were over-interpreting the meaning of Mr. Bilbray's victory in a traditionally solid Republican area. "We're happy he won," Mr. Snow said Friday. "But he barely got 50 percent."

    When Mr. Hastert announced that he was postponing action on the bill until after a series of hearings around the country, the White House described the delay as temporary.

    But in the Senate, the reaction to the House move was quite different.

    "Thank God for the House," said a senior Senate Republican strategist, who was granted anonymity in order to discuss the party's concerns about the debate.
    It's like hell vomited and the Bush administration appeared.

  2. #2
    Senior Member CountFloyd's Avatar
    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    Occupied Territories, Alta Mexico
    Posts
    3,008
    "Thank God for the House," said a senior Senate Republican strategist, who was granted anonymity in order to discuss the party's concerns about the debate.
    I'll second that!
    It's like hell vomited and the Bush administration appeared.

  3. #3
    traveler's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 1970
    Posts
    125

    Incompetent President

    I will third that. Why does it not surprise me this traitor to the American people eats Mexican food during a pinic....have you ever heard of hot dogs and hamburgers Mr El Bushero? I imagine for the 4th of July he will probably head to his home country and spend the holiday with his brother celebrating his real culture.

  4. #4
    blindman's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 1970
    Posts
    15
    I think Bush has "embraced the culture" and found it preferable to the American culture.

  5. #5
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    May 2006
    Location
    Florida
    Posts
    1,569
    "This immigration legislation is very important, and if he doesn't get something in his administration, it will hurt his legacy domestically,"
    Will hurt is legacy domestically?!?!?!?! You have got to be kidding me. He is in the process of destroying the United States with his little SPP project and they are worried about his domestic legacy?!?!?!?!

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •