WhatFinger


The speaker will get his immigration bill, but it will cost him his job

GOP support for amnesty alienates conservatives



There were two heavy lifts ahead of the Republican Capitol Hill leadership, the farm bill and amnesty for illegal immigrants, before they could skip town for the July 4 recess.
The House GOP leaders are still stunned and confused about the unlikely combination of Tea Party rebels and mischievous Democrats that defeated the farm bill. In his daze, Speaker John A. Boehner’s team has pushed the farm bill to the left and is now moving full speed onto immigration. The June 25 vote on ending debate on the amendment to the amnesty bill in the Senate was the test vote. The 1,200-page amendment was a complete replacement of the original 1,000-page bill reported out of the Judiciary Committee, crafted by GOP senators John H. Hoeven III and Robert P. Corker Jr. The 67-27 margin was not the 70-vote threshold Democrats hoped for, but it is enough to not only shut down a filibuster—it could override a veto.

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After the 2010 election when the Tea Party handed the House and more of the Senate to the Republican Party the Democrats went into a panic. Their great fear was the combination of the Tea Party passion and the GOP infrastructure would create a generational majority. Fortunately for the Democrats, the GOP leaders loathe the Tea Party more than they do. Nothing exemplified this more than the Senate floor for the Hoeven-Corker cloture vote. Once it was clear the Democrats had the votes, one-time Tea Party favorite Sen. Marco Rubio (R.-Fla.) was bouncing around the well in front of the clerks like a schoolboy, ignoring conservatives and chatting up with Democrats and GOP establishment types like Arizona’s Sen. John S. McCain III and South Carolina’s Lindsay Graham, who playfully poked Rubio in front of the clerk’s desk. Joining the fun was Maine’s Sen. Angus King, an independent and Tea Party flirt, who caucuses with the Democrats. The freshman smiled broadly as he backslapped Graham. The most galling display was when Rubio stood next to his new friend, the sex-scandal-addled Sen. Robert Menendez (D.-N.J.), who taunted the gallant opponent of Democrat’s illegal immigrant agenda, Sen. Jefferson B. Sessions (R.-Al.): “There is still time for a late conversion—you want to be on the right side of this.” Sessions demurred and did not change his no-vote. With the close of debate, the Senate will quickly approve the “amendment” and the underlying bill, which are now the same thing by Thursday evening, depending on whether conservatives force the Democrats to use up all of the allotted time for debate. Look for clever Republicans who supported Democrats on the procedural fights that secured their victory to vote against final passage of the bill as a ruse to deceive the voters back home. It is a practice that truly illustrates the GOP’s contempt for the voters. In the House, Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte (R.-Va.), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee is putting the final touches on his version of the illegal immigrant amnesty bill that might be ready before the House takes off for Independence Day. Some conservatives on Capitol Hill imagine that the 195-234 defeat of the farm bill in the House means the immigration bill can be stopped, too. First of all, the farm bill was merely delayed and is very much coming back from the grave in August. To teach the GOP a lesson, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) pulled back more than a dozen Democratic votes to sink the bill. In the next round, Boehner prefers to make her happy than give anything to the 60 Tea Party rebels. Still feeling the sting from Pelosi’s strategic withdrawal of support, Boehner and Goodlatte will make sure the House GOP’s immigration bill meets her requirements—even if a majority of the GOP conference opposes the bill. Second, the House GOP leadership has already told conservatives that unlike its posture in other fights, it will publicly criticize opponents of the immigration bill as both obstructionist and insensitive to ethnic minorities. This scorched earth approach might be a bluff, but conservatives treat the “hatred card” like Kryptonite and will have to back off for now. In the long term, we will look back at this summer as the end of the Boehner speakership. Because there are no suitable rivals to challenge the Ohioan, an uneasy truce holds. The speaker will get his immigration bill, but it will cost him his job. When the farm bill fight resumes, Boehner might get that one, too. But, it is in that fight that the next GOP leader will emerge.


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Neil W. McCabe -- Bio and Archives

Neil W. McCabe is the editor of Human Event’s “Guns & Patriots” e-letter and was a senior reporter at the Human Events newspaper. McCabe deployed with the Army Reserve to Iraq for 15 months as a combat historian. For many years, he was a reporter and photographer for “The Pilot,” Boston’s Catholic paper. He was also the editor of two free community papers, “The Somerville (Mass.) News and “The Alewife (North Cambridge, Mass.).”


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