Thread: White House Offers Stealth Campaign to Support Immigration Bill

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Published: June 20, 2013
New York Times


Doug Mills/The New York Times
The office where Obama aides are coordinating strategy on overhauling immigration laws.

WASHINGTON — The hide-out has no sign on the door, but inside Dirksen 201 is a spare suite of offices the White House has transformed into its covert immigration war room on Capitol Hill.

Strategically located down the hall from the Senate Judiciary Committee in one of the city’s massive Congressional office buildings, the work space normally reserved for the vice president is now the hub of a stealthy legislative operation run by President Obama’s staff. Their goal is to quietly secure passage of the first immigration overhaul in a quarter century.

“We are trying hard not to be heavy handed about what we are doing,” said Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council and the president’s point person on immigration.

Six years ago President George W. Bush publicly sent cabinet secretaries to roam the Capitol building daily to try to woo Republican senators for a similar immigration bill. But this time, high-profile help from the White House is anathema to many Republicans who do not want to be seen by constituents as carrying out the will of Mr. Obama.

So while lawmakers from both parties are privately relying on the White House and its agencies to provide technical information to draft scores of amendments to the immigration bill, few Republicans are willing to admit it. Some are so eager to prove that the White House is not pulling the strings that their aides say the administration is not playing any role at all.

“President Obama’s concept of engaging Congress is giving a speech that nobody up here listens to,” said Alex Conant, a spokesman for Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, who is an important supporter of the immigration legislation. “If passing legislation is like making sausage, then this White House is like a bunch of vegetarians.”

As senators near a final tally on the 867-page bill before the July 4 holiday, immigration supporters acknowledge serious risks in Mr. Obama’s approach: leaving the public advocacy for a major piece of his legacy in the hands of others. If the bill fails to become law, Mr. Obama will be open to criticism from Hispanics that he did not put the weight of his office behind the legislation.

But Mr. Obama has made some careful public efforts, including a speech last week at the White House in which he strongly endorsed the legislation. On Tuesday while on Air Force One in Europe, he called a Democratic negotiator, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, to reinforce his opposition to part of a Republican amendment that would have what the administration views as unrealistically tough requirements for border security.

Inside Room 201, the administration has gathered a collection of its own Congressional lobbyists, policy specialists and experts from an alphabet soup of the agencies that will have to put the immigration legislation into effect if it passes. They all moved into the vice president’s offices on June 10, setting up laptop computers and thick binders filled with proposed amendments on an oval conference table.

“We have folks who know the Senate really well, who know the players, who have been through this before so they know exactly what Senate staff needs,” Ms. Muñoz said. “We are deeply, deeply engaged.”

The group is led by Ed Pagano, Mr. Obama’s chief liaison to the Senate and a former chief of staff to Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He is joined by Felicia Escobar and Tyler Moran, senior advisers at the Domestic Policy Council, and Esther Olavarria, director for immigration reform for the National Security Council staff. Some days, Ms. Muñoz and Miguel Rodriguez, the president’s chief Congressional liaison, are there too.

On one day this week, those at the table included two representatives from the Justice Department, a homeland security official, a State Department official and someone from the Department of Labor. Throughout the day they pored through proposed amendments, offering suggestions to the staff of the senators who offered them and flagging problems that might arise.

At one point, Mr. Pagano, Ms. Escobar and the other White House advisers huddled for 45 minutes in the smaller of the two rooms with Mr. Leahy’s top aides. Working from spreadsheets, they discussed each of the 10 amendments that Mr. Leahy was likely to bring to the floor for a vote that day.

“When Republican amendments are filed and we are trying to decide, ‘Can we accept this? Can we accept this without some modifications?’ they are the ones who tell us, ‘This is quite doable,’ ” said one Democratic Senate leadership aide, who requested anonymity to talk about legislative strategy.

Passage of immigration legislation is critical to Mr. Obama’s legacy but could also help Republicans repair their image with Hispanics — a rare confluence of political interests that has stoked optimism among supporters that it will pass the Senate in the next several weeks.

Mr. Obama’s political advisers say they are confident he will get the credit he deserves if the bill passes later this summer, even as those on Mr. Bush’s old team say an in-your-face approach worked best for them. (Although that immigration bill ultimately failed.)

“There’s nothing like having the White House represented in the negotiations,” Carlos Gutierrez, Mr. Bush’s second commerce secretary and a top immigration adviser, said in an interview. “It saves time. It saves effort. It just makes things more agile, more transparent.”

Mr. Gutierrez and others on Mr. Bush’s team concede that the current situation is very different. In 2007 the Republican White House believed that loudly demonstrating Mr. Bush’s support for the immigration overhaul would be helpful to Republican senators who needed to explain their support back home. This year, Republicans would recoil at such a display from the Democratic president.

“The big thing is getting a primary challenger from the right,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “That’s what really worries Republicans.”

In the meantime, two Republican aides said emphatically that White House officials had not participated at all in the drafting of the bill by the bipartisan group of senators.

But White House and administration officials have been in frequent touch with Republican senators as the lawmakers have to come up with dozens of amendments on tighter border security and other parts of the bill they deem insufficient. White House officials declined to name them.

Mr. Pagano’s team is planning to remain in Dirksen 201 for as long as the immigration bill remains on the Senate floor — clandestine, but not completely invisible.

“People know where to find them,” a Democratic aide said. “It’s like going to the nurse’s office. They know where it is.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/us...nted=all&_r=1&

Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council and the president’s point person on immigration.

Well, that figures. LaRaza is running the White House.


NY Times Buries La Raza History of Obama's Amnesty Pusher, Cecilia Munoz

Published: 5/6/2013 2:07 PM ET
By Clay Waters

The New York Times continues to nudge Obama from the left on amnesty for illegal immigrants. The latest: Michael Shear's Saturday profile of Obama's chief amnesty pusher Cecilia Munoz (pictured), a former lobbyist for a radical pro-Hispanic group -- "Obama's Defender of Borders Still a Voice for Migrants."



Buried in the third-to-last paragraph was Munoz's history as a lobbyist for the left-wing separatist group National Council of La Raza ("La Raza" means "the race"). Not mentioned at all was Munoz quoted in the Times itself in February 2008 accusing conservative personalities like Sean Hannity of spreading disinformation from "hate groups," and being distinctly unsympathetic to the free speech of commentators opposed to amnesty for immigrants.

Shear wrote:

For two decades, Cecilia Muñoz was a fiery immigration rights lobbyist who denounced deportations, demanded change in Congress and once wrote of “that hollow place that outrage carves in your soul.” When she was invited to a White House briefing in 1997 on immigration, Ms. Muñoz, who was born in Detroit, was furious after staff members asked twice if she was an American citizen.

But after a call from Barack Obama in 2008, Ms. Muñoz crossed to the other side to help push the administration’s promised immigration overhaul -- only to find herself defending a border enforcement policy under which nearly 1.5 million people have been deported in four years. Critics denounced her as a traitor and demanded that she resign.

“She did become, in some ways, the face of the president’s policy,” said Angela Maria Kelley, a friend of more than 20 years and a fellow immigration activist.

Other activists said Ms. Muñoz was championing deportation policies far worse than the ones she had fought against. She was “deployed to defend the indefensible,” said Pablo Alvarado, whose day laborer organization was repeatedly at odds with her.

Now, as Mr. Obama is in Latin America this week as the first president in decades with a chance to get an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws through Congress, Ms. Muñoz’s loyalty in the face of her battering appears to have paid off. After four long years, she has helped Mr. Obama prod a reluctant capital toward citizenship for more than 11 million illegal immigrants.
....
In the weeks ahead, Ms. Muñoz will have a crucial role in trying to keep the immigration bill from unraveling in the face of opposition from conservative radio hosts and Republican lawmakers, some of whom have seized on the Boston Marathon bombings as a reason to delay action.

Shear sympathized with Munoz's internal struggles between her leftism and the Obama administration's bow to political reality.

Her battles were taking a very long time. In 2011, Ms. Muñoz was the designated administration official to defend the deportations -- which often separated children from parents -- in a tough PBS documentary, “Lost in Detention.” On camera, she said that hundreds of thousands of deportations had been mandated by Congress, and she left unstated the reality that being tough on deportation was critical to getting Republicans on board with an immigration overhaul.

Her difficult position was not lost on her friends. “You could see the pain in her face,” Ms. Kelley said, speaking of Ms. Muñoz’s demeanor under questioning in the documentary.
....
She earned a degree in English and Latin American studies from the University of Michigan, eventually became the top lobbyist at the National Council of La Raza and was married with two teenage daughters by the time Mr. Obama offered her the White House job. She at first said no, but reconsidered when Mr. Obama appealed to her on the phone the next day.

http://www.mrc.org/articles/ny-times...-cecilia-munoz

As a "Domestic Adviser" to the White House it is apparent that her domestic interests are for the benefit of illegal foreign nationals based only on their ethnicity and not the american people that have to be skinned financially to support them.

The Gang of Nine: It's Obama's Bill

June 21, 2013

Windows Media

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Jay Carney. They went to White House today, the press briefing, and a reporter said, "Senator Graham said that the agreement that they've reached in the Senate that guarantees some extra Republican votes," this is the Hoeven-Corker amendment, "virtually militarizes the border here, Jay." What...? Are you kidding me? So they want us to believe that 20,000 more Border Patrol agents and the increase in technology and so forth, the biometric stuff, militarizes the border? "It adds 20,000 new agents, 18 drones," surveillance drones, "and 350 miles in fencing at a cost of more than $30 billion.



"Does the president support this, Jay?

"Is the president in favor of this amendment, Jay?"

CARNEY: This agreement would constitute a breakthrough on the bipartisan effort, and we applaud the tireless work that has gone into it and the broader effort. Y'know, I don't have specifics. The amendment hasn't been filed. But remember that the president insisted -- now two years ago, when he put forward his principles for comprehensive immigration reform -- that border security, enhanced border security be part of it. His commitment to border security has been demonstrated by his record on this issue since he took office by the increase already in the -- a substantial increase number of --
RUSH: Okay, look, I can't listen to this. Stop it. There isn't any border security. They haven't done anything to secure the border. This isn't gonna secure the border. This is another one of these supposed stopgap measures. Now we're "militarizing the border" and now we're gonna put all these agents in place and they can't get their green card 'til all this happens and so forth. What are they gonna do, sit there and twiddle their thumbs?

See the fact is, I think, folks, that we are suspicious. We don't trust that they're gonna do what they say. We don't think they want to secure the border. In fact, we know they don't. We know that Washington does not want to secure the border, and there isn't any trust with this. So they claim they've got their 60 or 61 votes now, and I think if they had them, they'd be doing the vote. They'd get this locked down. McCain says (impression), "This isn't right!

"We've got 61 votes, so we need to get the business community out there soliciting other people, and these religious people! Get them out there." Why, if you've got your 61 votes? "It's 'cause we want to win it in the House, Limbaugh! If we don't win it in the House, we lose." I don't know, folks. It's the same old, same old. I didn't get to this earlier this week and I really wanted to 'cause this... If it's not the biggest See, I Told You So in the history of this show, it's close.
There was a Gallup poll back on the 19th, two days ago: "Obama's Job Approval Easily Outpaces US Satisfaction." In fact, this Gallup poll, without it saying so, was a poll of the Limbaugh Theorem. "President Barack Obama's job approval rating thus far in 2013 has averaged 24 percentage points higher than Americans' satisfaction with the direction in which the country is going," and Gallup is flummoxed!

"All of this suggests Obama does not receive the full brunt of Americans' blame for the nation's economy and other factors that may be contributing to their general dissatisfaction with the country's direction." Again, "Obama's job approval rating thus far in 2013 has averaged 24 percentage points higher than Americans' satisfaction with the direction in which the country is going." There you have it.
That is the Limbaugh Theorem.


Whatever is happening is not attached to him, and the Gallup poll has just made my point. Now, there's a story here about the New York Times. "Obama Secretly Helps Republicans Push [Amnesty]." This is another point. This is the Limbaugh Theorem plus. "White House Offers Stealth Campaign to Support Immigration Bill -- The hide-out has no sign on the door, but inside Dirksen 201 is a spare suite of offices the White House has transformed into its covert immigration war room on Capitol Hill.

"Strategically located down the hall from the Senate Judiciary Committee in one of the city’s massive Congressional office buildings, the work space normally reserved for the vice president is now the hub of a stealthy legislative operation run by President Obama's staff. Their goal is to quietly secure passage of the first immigration overhaul in a quarter century." Now, two days ago -- I just shared it with you -- Gallup embraced and explained and illustrated the Limbaugh Theorem.

Now even the New York Times is embracing it, too, since this article reports how the White House is using a secret operation on Capitol Hill to ram through amnesty. But it turns out if you read this story, things are even worse than we thought, because even some Republicans are helping to shield Obama's involvement. In fact, even the New York Times says that these Republicans, quote, "do not want to be seen by their constituents as carrying out the will of Mr. Obama."

That's why today I have begun say, "We don't trust Washington."
This is not a Democrat-specific problem, folks. This is a ruling class Washington versus us in the country class situation. The ruling class does not wanna secure the borders. They want as many people crossing them as can be managed -- and "managed" as they define it.

This New York Times story says, "[W]hile lawmakers from both parties are privately relying on the White House and its agencies to provide technical information to draft scores of amendments to the immigration bill, few Republicans are willing to admit it."

Now, again, it's the New York Times, so you have to take that under advisement. But the New York Times says Republicans are deeply involved, but they don't want you to know it. They don't want to admit it because they want to prove the White House is not pulling the strings. But the White House is! This is a "stealth" White House operation. The Hoeven-Corker amendment could well be an Obama administration idea submitted in this war room and then two senators were cherry-picked to put their names on it.

I don't know that that's the case, but this story in the New York Times makes it entirely possible. The New York Times story says that some Republicans, quote, "are so eager to prove that the White House is not pulling the strings that their aides say the administration is not playing any role at all," and they point to a spokesman for Marco Rubio. A spokesman for Rubio has denied that the president's involved in this at all. So, look, I can only tell you what the New York Times is saying.

It's up to you whether you want to believe it or not. The New York Times, essentially, is saying here that Obama and the White House are pulling Rubio's strings. Remember that story we had? I asked Rubio about this on the phone. It wasn't on the air, but we had a story that Schumer was playing Rubio, and then the New York

Times story hit. "No, no, no! The White House is doing this, not Schumer."

Now this New York Times story seems to add weight to that.
If Rubio is involved, the White House is blowing his cover, or the New York Times is. The New York Times points to Rubio's spokesmen as one of the Republican spokesman denying Obama's involvement here.

So it would appear that the Republicans don't want you to know that Obama's involved in this, but the New York Times has just taken care of that. The New York Times is now saying that Obama's running this show in the Senate, that it isn't Schumer, that it isn't Dingy Harry, that it isn't any Republican.

It's not even the Gang of Eight!

It's Obama running this immigration show.

Which is kind of interesting because... Well, the fact that Obama is running it and nobody knew about it, that's the Limbaugh Theorem.

But the Times has come along now and blown that out of the water and said that Obama is running it, which tells me that they think they're on the verge of it happening, and it tells me that for some reason they do want Obama getting credit for this (the New York Times does), which is a puzzlement, because the American people don't want this.

And Obama's success has been his detachment from things happening that the American people don't want. They don't want this. So we'll just have to keep a sharp eye as we have been doing. The Washington Examiner has a story: "President Obama was behind the effort to table Sen. John Cornyn's border security amendment, Politico’s Carrie Budoff Brown and Manu Raju report this morning." So it's the Washington Examiner just repeating what The Politico has sourced.

"According to the report, Sen. Chuck Schumer, came up with his idea of a 'border surge' after President Obama refused to accept the idea of a 90% trigger -- a component of Cornyn’s amendment blocking citizenship for existing illegal immigrants unless a 90% apprehension rate of potential border crossers was reached," and Schumer was prepared to try to make that happen in a watered-down way, and Obama heard about it.



Obama said, "Ain't no way that that Cornyn amendment's getting anywhere," and Obama told Schumer, "You shelve it, table it, get rid of it," and that's what happened. So the media is making it clear that this is Obama's baby. He's running it. And by "Obama," we mean, "the administration," and by "the administration," it's Obama. He's maybe not on the phone personally, but people who know what he wants are on the phone, and they're running this bill.

Then there is this story: "Thirteen female senators in favor of 'comprehensive immigration reform' introduced a so-called 'female amendment' on Wednesday to the Gang of Eight's immigration bill in an attempt to garner the support of more women voters. The amendment would create a 'Tier 3' point system that would add 30,000 more visas without reducing the number of visas in other merit-based tiers.

"Sens. Mazie K. Hirono (D-HI) and Patty Murray (D-WA) teamed up with 10 other Democrats and one Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), to sponsor the bill. ... They claimed employment-based visas 'favor men over women by nearly a four-to-one margin as they place a premium on male-dominated fields like engineering and computer science.'" So what these women want is language that doesn't ace women immigrants out of the green card process. Of course, I shared with you Mazie Hirono's column saying (summarized), "We can't let 13 years go by here without granting 'em welfare benefits. We can't let 13 years go by! We can't do that. That's unfair to make them wait 13 years."

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You know, look, folks, according to the New York Times, it's not even the Gang of Eight. It's one of two things. It's the Gang of Nine with Obama as part of it or it's the Gang of One, and it's all Obama. Because the New York Times is making it plain that Obama is directing what happens on the immigration bill and that the Republicans involved don't want anybody knowing that. The Republicans don't want that to get out.

We understand the Democrats trying to shield Obama, but Republicans? So this Hoeven-Corker amendment is really the Obama amendment. It was Obama's idea, possibly, and they found a couple guys to put their names on it. Bob Corker is a good guy. You know, he's a Democrat -- I'm sorry, a Republican from Tennessee. This afternoon in Washington on the Senate floor after the Gang of Nine decided to accept the amendment, he went on the floor of the Senate and said this...

CORKER: I want to thank the majority leader for his leadership in this effort, and for his comments earlier. By filing cloture today on this amendment, it's gonna give everybody in this body and in the nation [time] to read this piece of legislation for 75 hours before the cloture vote occurs. I want to thank the senator from New York. My last call last night at 12:33 was with him, and my first call early, early this morning was with him. I want to thank him for the way he has worked with us to try to work through the Republican sensibilities so we have a bill that not only meets the needs of the Democratic side of the aisle but we have a bill that meets the needs of the Republican side of the aisle, which is why we all came here.

RUSH: There you have it. Senator Corker went to the floor of the Senate to thank Senators Schumer and Reid for considering the Republicans. "Thank you for thinking of us, and thank you for including what we want in the bill. You're great guys," and folks, it's kumbaya time, 'cause we have bipartisanship now. We have a bipartisan agreement on the Hoeven-Corker amendment, and Schumer and Reid have just been thanked for acknowledging "Republican sensibilities," i.e., desires and concerns.



The Democrats get what they want and the Republicans get what they want, and now we've got 75 hours to read the bill. Now, what this means is that the Senate immigration vote is going to be 75 hours from now. If this is followed, it's 75 hours to do whatever, because it's 75 hours before the cloture vote on the whole bill. That's it.

Twenty-four hours in a day, 48 hours in two days, and 72 hours in three days. So basically three days from now they're gonna have the cloture vote, meaning the vote on the Senate immigration bill.
Again, I just feel like I must go through this again. This amendment, the Hoeven-Corker amendment, here's what it does. It doubles the number of Border Patrol agents to 40,000. (interruption) I'm sorry. It's 75 hours to read the bill and have a cloture vote on the amendment, not on the whole bill. I got that wrong. There's 75 hours to not read the amendment and then vote on the amendment since the Gang approved it; then there's 75 hours, and they'll vote on the amendment.

They'll have cloture vote on the amendment in 75 hours, not the whole Senate bill. I take that back. It's not the whole Senate bill. I correct myself. Anyway, the Hoeven-Corker amendment doubles border agents to 40,000. It beefs up by $3 billion this biometric technology and enables them to better determine who has overstayed their visas. And we had a sound bite from earlier today of one of these guys, I think was Corker again, explaining what's great about this.

Well, these border agents are gonna be "in place." Let me see if I can find it. I know I put it the bottom of the Stack. This should be relatively easy to find. (shuffling papers) Yes, I just found it. Grab audio sound bite number 23. This Bob Corker again. You just heard him thanking Reid and Schumer for okaying his amendment. They got 75 hours to read it now. He was on Fox this morning, and he was asked how his amendment enhances border security.

CORKER: Immigrants cannot get a green card until all 20,000 Border Patrol agents are in place. They cannot get a green card until all $3.2 billion of the technology that the border control has asked for is in place. They cannot get a green card until the exit visa program -- that ... that, candidly, is very important -- is in place. They cannot get a green card until eVerify is in place. So this has the most tangible -- not subjective, tangible -- triggers that you can possibly put in place. Anyone who criticizes this bill because of border security, in my opinion, is just looking a reason to criticize a bill.



RUSH: Okay. (sigh) Now, there's 75 hours to read this thing and to debate it and they're gonna have the cloture vote meaning 60, 60 votes on the amendment. I don't even think they've got that now or they would be voting on it. So the news is that the Gang has approved their amendment. It doesn't mean it's been accepted by the Senate, just the Gang says, "It meets our requirements." But the whole Senate has to vote on it, and 60 Senators have to support it, as I understand this.

I don't know that I've got the 60 votes now or they would vote on it now. Anyway, we're back to where we started the program with this sound bite here. We're gonna double the number of border agents and put them "in place" and the exit visa program will be "in place" and the eVerify will be "in place," and therefore we have the most tangible triggers that you can possibly put "in place." But "in place"?

You could have 40,000 Border Patrol agents clipping their nails.

You could have 40,000 Border Patrol agents playing video games.

It depends on what you're gonna have them do! The same Senate tabled an amendment, the Cornyn amendment, which would have required proof that 90% of those trying to cross the border illegally were apprehended. They voted that down. Now, Senator Corker, who I know is a good guy, says, "Anyone who criticizes this bill because of border security, in my opinion, is just looking a reason to criticize a bill."

Senator, I don't think your amendment secures the border. You could secure the border today with existing law! The fact of the matter is that Washington does not want the border to be secure, but they are very intent on making you think that they care about that, or that they're going to secure it. It's hard. Folks, it's hard not to be cynical here because we've heard all this since 1986. We've heard all of this!
From what I understand, they won't even let this biometric ID of those crossing the border get a vote from the full Senate. That idea, they're not even gonna let that get a vote from the full Senate, 'cause they know (chuckling) that it doesn't have a prayer. Anyway, I just want to tell you something: I never intended this to take up so much time today. I really, really didn't. I did not intend it to take up this much time. It's just that news has continued to flow on this.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: All right. Okay. Let me get this straight. We're gonna have 20,000 new border agents, and who are they? They are union members. Therefore, they're going to be Democrat voters, but they're also going to be contributing dues to the Democrat Party. So under the guise of securing the border, we've just hired 20,000 more Democrat union members paying dues to the Democrat Party. Now, we cannot have photo IDs in this country to vote.

That's considered discriminatory.

That's racist.

We can't have photo IDs to vote, and yet we are supposed to believe that there's going to be biometric tracking? (choking back laughter) Get real! (laughing) Biometric tracking but no photo IDs? You want to hear something else, folks? In the Gang of Eight bill -- which we now know is the Obama bill, which we knew all along was the Obama bill -- is a provision. It's a thousand pages, and there is a proviso in the bill to grant an additional 20,000 visas to low-income, low-educated or unskilled people specifically for the hospitality industry.

That means the SEIU gets a payoff in this bill by having 20,000 visas targeted specially to them. Twenty-thousand low-skilled, low-wage visas granted to people for the hospitality industry. Jim DeMint, who is the former senator from South Carolina, is now the president of the Heritage Foundation. He just tweeted an observation: "Immigration reform should improve the lives, incomes and opportunities of Americans."

The Senate bill doesn't do that. (laughing) Folks, it's... (laughing) I don't know. It's just amazing. Washington wants this so bad, they can taste it. They want this so bad! And all this is is Obama buying a permanent Democrat majority, and it's Washington. It's not Obama; it's Washington! Washington is buying a permanent Democrat majority. That's the way to look at this.

END TRANSCRIPT

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/20...s_obama_s_bill