Still a lot of scheming going on in the background, so please keep calling

***

Politico
GOP support on immigration dissipating

By MANU RAJU and CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN | 6/18/13 11:37 PM EDT

Congressional Republicans, who have been more receptive to immigration reform since last November, now appear increasingly unlikely to widely back the Senate immigration bill unless they can extract significant concessions from Democrats.
It all comes down to the battle over border security. Some Senate Republicans are coalescing around a new border security plan as an alternative to Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn’s, demanding acceptance of it as a condition for their support of the overall bill. But top Democrats are balking at initial drafts of their proposal and privately concede there’s little chance the Senate will add even tougher border security language to the bipartisan bill.


Failing to win significant GOP support in the Senate could imperil the bill’s chances in the House, where Republicans are already scoffing at the Senate measure. House Speaker John Boehner is vowing to put a bill on the floor only if it can win support from a Republican majority. Rather than advancing a comprehensive bill, as Democrats demand, a House committee began work Tuesday on an enforcement-only measure mainly backed by Republicans.


(PHOTOS: At a glance: The Senate immigration deal)


Congressional Republicans say the opposition from their activist base to the Senate plan is only growing, making it easier for GOP senators to oppose the Senate bill — particularly if the border security provisions remain largely unchanged.


“If you listen to the number of calls, the emails that our offices are getting right now, the bombardment is pretty one-sided,” said South Dakota Sen. John Thune, No. 3 in GOP leadership. “That’s just the way it is.”
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who was once viewed as a gettable vote, said, “There’s no great groundswell of Republicans telling me to vote for this.”



The landscape could shift if Republicans are able to reach a deal quickly on border security that doesn’t turn off Democrats and if proponents can effectively sell Tuesday’s news that the Congressional Budget Office estimated the proposal would shave $175 billion off future deficits in the next decade.

Still, it was far from certain Tuesday that GOP negotiators could achieve the right balance. Top Senate Democrats are prepared to push forward with a vote even if they can’t win more than just a handful of Republicans, believing public support for the proposal will grow and that Republicans will be eager to avoid a repeat of the political fallout they suffered after the failure of the 2007 immigration bill.


(Also on POLITICO: Reid threatens to file cloture)


Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Tuesday he will move to shut off debate on the bill by next Monday at the latest and voiced confidence that the Senate will have the 60 votes to defeat an expected GOP filibuster. But that leaves little time for Republican Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee and John Hoeven of North Dakota to cut a bipartisan deal on a complex issue that consumed the Senate’s bipartisan Gang of Eight for weeks.


Under the Senate bill, undocumented immigrants could apply for a provisional legal status when the Department of Homeland Security submits a plan to Congress for securing the Southern border. And after a decade-long wait, those immigrants would be allowed to apply for green cards when several more security benchmarks are met: The Southern border security plan is substantially deployed and operational; a system for employers to identify a worker’s immigration status is implemented; and an electronic system for tracking departing visa holders is in place.


The Corker-Hoeven proposal — which would serve as an alternative to the Cornyn plan — lays out specific steps the federal government must take to ensure the border is secure before an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants who will be in the country could apply for green cards or citizenship. The Republicans are considering requiring that the government arrest or turn back 90 percent of individuals trying to cross the border.



In addition, the two senators want to add a series of parochial and targeted measures to sweeten the proposal for wayward senators uncertain whether their amendments will get votes. That list of must-haves would include proposals from Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to toughen restrictions on immigrant access to public benefits and a proposal from Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) to strengthen the E-Verify system, Hoeven said.

The senators plan to present a draft of their proposal Wednesday to their colleagues.“It’s pretty important,” Corker said of the next 24 hours.


Added Hoeven: “To get 12 to 15 [Republicans] that we hope to get, there’s no one amendment. You’re going to need that grouping.”


But move too far to the right, and the bipartisan coalition could shed Democratic support. Several senior Democratic aides said the alternative GOP border plan — as of late Tuesday afternoon — had little chance of winning backing from Democrats, saying the so-called triggers to achieve a pathway to citizenship are too onerous.


“This has been a big bluff,” one Senate Democratic leadership aide said when asked about the Corker-Hoeven plan. “And Republicans keep misfiring by pushing the compromise too far to the right out of fear of the tea party.”


Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a member of the so-called Gang of Eight, which drafted the bill, said it was a “tough assignment” to successfully cut a bipartisan deal in a matter of days, though he said he is hopeful.


“It becomes problematic though when we start saying ‘OK, we have to stop 90 percent, 95 percent, 98 percent of those who try to cross,’” Durbin said. “Those are hard things to measure. And to pin the fate of millions of people on the verification, technology and apprehension, which may vary from day to day, I think would go too far.”


New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who has been privately discussing the proposal with Corker and Hoeven, told his Democratic colleagues at lunch Tuesday that they would reserve judgment until after they see what Republicans unveil, senators said. Schumer is pushing hard to win significant GOP support, up to 70 senators from both parties to pressure the House into action. But both Durbin and Reid believe it makes little sense to compromise further simply to inflate the numbers given there’s no guarantee on House action.


Schumer said Democrats are open to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s idea of writing more specific language into the bill on what the government should include in the border plan, but they are wary of making the path to citizenship contingent upon unrealistic requirements.


“Going for more specific metrics instead of just giving DHS the money but saying you got to do this amount of drones here, that doesn’t violate our principles,” Schumer said Tuesday. “Any trigger they’d send us — obviously we would have to look at very, very carefully because we don’t want to get away from our proposal that the triggers should be specific and achievable.”


If Democrats reject the GOP proposal, it would put Rubio in a political bind. The Florida Republican and prospective 2016 presidential candidate spent months drafting the bipartisan bill, but has demanded further changes to the border security language — and tighter restrictions on illegal immigrants’ access to federal benefits. Rubio praised Corker-Hoeven as “very promising,” saying he supported their effort to specify precisely how the border would be secured, rather than giving the administration blanket authority to do just that.


But asked if he would vote against the Senate plan if the border security language remains unchanged, Rubio said: “Look guys, I’m not going to continue to comment on those issues like that. What I’m focused on now is trying to improve this bill.”


The Corker-Hoeven plan is emerging as an alternative to one offered by Texas Sen. John Cornyn, which is expected to be considered — and rejected — by the Senate as soon as Wednesday.


The Cornyn plan would require both DHS and the comptroller general to certify that a series of border benchmarks have been reached before immigrants could receive green cards. Those requirements include achieving “monitoring capability” at every segment of the Southern border, apprehending at least 90 percent of individuals who try to cross the border, and implementing a fully operational biometric exit system at all air and sea ports of entry. Democrats and some Republicans in the Gang of Eight have called the plan too costly because it would add 10,000 Border Patrol and Customs officers.


“If this bill limps out of here with 60 votes and no momentum, I think it makes the job much harder in the House,” Cornyn said.


Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/0...wns-93027.html