Thread: House: Senate immigration bill DOA

House: Senate immigration bill DOA
Raul Labrador, Tom McClintock and Ted Yoho outwardly dismiss the Senate bill. | AP Photos


By JAKE SHERMAN and SEUNG MIN KIM | 6/19/13 10:06 PM EDT
Senators, powerful outside groups and the White House are working intently to ensure that the Senate produces an immigration bill that could glide through the Republican House.
Wait until it reaches the parallel universe of the House of Representatives.

Immigration reform: The new Boehner rule?

10 wild immigration quotes

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In their world, the Congressional Budget Office assessment that the immigration overhaul would slash the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars means squat.
“Smoke and mirrors,” Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) said. “It’s not a rational study.”
(Also on POLITICO: Landrieu: 'Obnoxious' prevails in Senate)
If 70 to 80 senators vote for the bipartisan bill — which some in the Senate are aiming for — the House would barely feel pressure to take up the bill. Most conservatives instead would see passing the legislation as an act of mass stupidity.
“I don’t know, Mother always told me that if 70 people jump off a cliff, you shouldn’t follow them,” Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) said. Rep. Raul Labrador, an Idaho Republican respected on immigration issues, mocked fear of a large Senate vote, saying, “Oooh, I’m scared.”
Forget Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — boldfaced conservatives who helped craft the Senate’s bill. House Republicans say their imprimatur might even hurt the prospects of the bill among rank-and-file Republicans.
(PHOTOS: At a glance: The Senate immigration deal)
“If you looked at my campaign, it’s the people that have been here — the career politicians — that have led us to where we are at or failed to prevent” a broken immigration system, said freshman Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.), adding that if “100 of them over there” voted for the bill, it “won’t help me.”
It’s easy and, indeed, common to dismiss House members as a bunch of political novices who will fold under the intense pressure of public opinion. Gallup released a poll Wednesday that found 87 percent of Americans support a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants — the heart of the Senate’s bill — showing that public opinion leans heavily toward the upper chamber’s plan.
But the truth is most House Republicans don’t care. They view the Senate — and their colleagues, including Republicans — with intense distrust. They have been jammed by the Senate time and time again. Recently, they were forced to pass the Senate’s fiscal cliff deal, which raised taxes on the rich. Gerrymandering means the political realities of 2012 haven’t caught up with House members. The Senate is operating in a different political environment, where bipartisan agreements are viewed favorably. In the House, the idea of a two-party solution to a problem as thorny as immigration is met with scoffs in many quarters.
(Also on POLITICO: Ted Cruz unhappy with Gang of Eight 'bragging')
“Remember what M. Stanton Evans said about that,” McClintock said, referring to the conservative writer. “He said there are two parties, there’s the evil party and stupid party. There’s always that corollary that when they get together with a bipartisan solution, it ends up being something evil and stupid.”
The size of the bill — and the fact that it tackles a tangle of issues together — reminds Republicans of President Barack Obama’s health care law.
“We don’t do big things very well around here,” Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Mike Kelly said.
Conversations throughout the House Republican Conference — with the people that elect Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy — lay bare a reality diametrically different from the conventional wisdom that’s led people to believe that the Senate bill could pass muster in the House.

The idea that the House could simply take up the Senate bill ignores the fact that Boehner is under fire of late for even hinting at considering legislation without the support of the majority of Republicans. To put it mildly, the Senate bill falls into that category.
Of course, a massive political groundswell in favor of the Senate legislation could change the calculation. But at this point, that seems miles and miles in the distance and months and months away.

“I don’t think it makes any difference,” Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) said of the Senate bill. “My sense is we’re going through a very different process. Whatever emanates from there, our process is going to be so different that there won’t be an apples-to-apples comparison.”
Pompeo added: “Those are all great people, but they haven’t come out with anything I can support. That’s fine. We’ll produce ours.”
While Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is rushing to approve something before the July 4 recess, the House doesn’t feel the same urgency. A bipartisan group of House members are trying to squeeze out their own legislation, once again, to wrap things up.
The House is marking up its own package of bills — Boehner wants the House to pass some sort of smaller immigration legislation on June 28, ahead of the July 4th recess. The Judiciary Committee passed Rep. Trey Gowdy’s enforcement bill this week. The committee has moved on to another bill, dealing with agricultural workers.
“We’re not doing this because we don’t have anything else to do,” said Gowdy, who chairs the House’s Immigration subcommittee. “There’s an expectation that the House will be a participant in this debate. If they don’t like it, they can take it up with the framers. We don’t have a unicameral system of government.”
The conservative resistance was encapsulated in a rally outside the Capitol all day Wednesday, when a handful of House Republicans stood before a large crowd of supporters and took turns denouncing the state of immigration reform in Congress — in both chambers.
During the demonstration, one House Republican, Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, said the post-Watergate Congress that established the CBO molded it to ensure conservative legislation would “always be scored poorly.”
Conservatives in the House believe they were burned by previous cost estimates from Capitol Hill’s official budget scorekeeper on Obamacare, whose price tag has been adjusted several times since its initial release.
So even the good news that came in the analysis Tuesday evening — that the Senate immigration bill would slice the federal deficit nearly $900 billion over two decades — fell on cynical ears.
“We saw in Obamacare how the CBO, the methodology of the CBO, can be manipulated,” said Rep. John Fleming (R-La.), who earlier criticized the agency’s numbers on the immigration bill at the tea party rally. Instead, Fleming listens to The Heritage Foundation, whose study on the costs of immigration reform are hotly disputed.
The CBO has Senate skeptics, too.
“As I recall, their score of Obamacare was that it was going to save a bunch of money,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) Wednesday. “That proved not to be true.”
Gowdy has spoken with Rubio, Graham and Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) about the Senate bill. He said he has shaken McCain’s hand “twice” during his first three years in Washington.
In the middle of an interview off the House floor, Gowdy pointed at Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and said that he had “more cachet within the [House GOP] Conference than any vote total coming out of the Senate.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/0...#ixzz2WjIuNJUu

In their world, the Congressional Budget Office assessment that the immigration overhaul would slash the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars means squat.

With one of their first sentences in this 'report' Jake Sherman and Seung Min Kim show they have no credibility while possessing extreme bias. Using language like this also conveys that the authors are more interested in speaking to their audiences like street thugs more than journalists.

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Dont believe anyone that tells you this bill wont pass the house! That is sheer enemy propaganda.

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