GOP’s Raul Labrador quietly emerging as middleman for immigration reform

By Rosalind S. Helderman, Feb 05, 2013 03:46 PM EST
The Washington PostUpdated: Tuesday, February 5, 7:46 AM

BOISE — Raul R. Labrador is the only Puerto Rican, Mormon, tea-party immigration lawyer in Congress, which the Idaho Republican figures makes him the perfect bridge between the GOP’s hard-line resistance to an immigration overhaul and the urgent sense among Democrats that the November election won them a free hand on the issue.

Labrador spent his first two years in Congress earning and burnishing a reputation as not just a “no” but a “hell no” vote on just about every spending and fiscal bill that has come across his desk. But on immigration, he is seeking a different role.

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Elected to the House in the tea party wave of 2010, he has been conducting quiet talks with Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.), one of the House’s leading liberal immigration advocates. Recently, he requested a meeting with President Obama, the nemesis of many in his party and his congressional class, to discuss working together on the issue.

And he’s expressed a willingness to act as an evangelist for reform, offering to travel the country to conservative districts to explain why fixing a broken system does not mean offering amnesty.

“Because I’ve proven myself to be a conservative, people are willing to listen to what I have to say on this issue,” he said last week over lunch a few blocks from the Idaho Capitol.

The position could cast Labrador as something of the House’s version of Marco Rubio, the conservative Florida senator who last week signed onto a bipartisan framework for immigration change and has been working relentlessly to sell it on right-wing TV and radio.

But already, there is pressure back home for Labrador, even as he has carefully positioned himself a little to the right of Rubio. He has offered pointed criticisms of the Senate plan his Florida colleague has been working so feverishly to promote — a sign of the treacherous minefield immigration legislation will face this year in the GOP-held House.

Skepticism about the effort runs deep among House Republicans and is likely to be on display Tuesday, as the House Judiciary Committee holds the first of what its chairman has promised will be a long series of hearings on the issue.

It will be Labrador’s first chance to publicly test his new role. Despite tangling with House leaders in recent months, he was named to the key panel in December, a sign the leaders plan to lean on him as a critical liaison in the immigration discussion.

Labrador — whose first language was Spanish and who speaks English with a slight accent — has been pushing changes to the law since his first campaign. He said his own election challenges the party’s conventional wisdom about what its voters want on the issue.

“I don’t think he read the party right,” Labrador said of 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who veered to the right on the issue and advocated encouraging undocumented immigrants to “self-deport.”

“He could have been a leader,” Labrador continued. “It’s one of the stumbling blocks that I see for some Republicans. They’re moderate on every other issue, and they think this is the one issue where they have to become conservatives.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/gops-raul-labrador-quietly-emerging-as-middleman-for-immigration-reform/2013/02/05/a6b91fae-6ede-11e2-ac36-3d8d9dcaa2e2_story.html