POLITICO
By Donovan Slack
10/30/12 11:27 AM EDT
Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday said that he and President Obama have been breaking their necks trying to get immigration reform.
"Right now, you’ve got the president and I and a lot of Democrats out there breaking our neck trying to get a real immigration law that takes millions of people out of the shadows, making sure that 'Dreamers' don’t have to go back in many cases to countries they’ve never been," he said in an interview with the Enrique Santos radio show.
The vice president urged Latino listeners to vote for him and Obama so Republicans would be spurred to join them in passing an immigration law. He said if they turned out in large numbers and pushed Obama and Biden to victory, it would send a message to the GOP.
“If the Latino vote comes out, the Hispanic vote comes out and changes the election, all of a sudden those guys who paid no attention to you, no attention to the Hispanic community, no attention to the Latino community. All of a sudden theyre going to say, 'Oh my Lord I guess we better get in line with the president. I guess we better start moving in the direction of paying attention to this incredible, this incredible pool of talent we have out there. So this is a chance to gain influence that’s almost disproportionate to the impact that you may have directly in the election."
The president said in a Univision forum in September that he takes responsibility for failing to pass immigration reform -- he prioritized health care and the economy in the first years of his term -- but he also blamed GOP members of Congress for blocking his agenda. “In our branch, in our system of government, I am the head of the executive branch. I’m not the head of the legislature, I’m not the head of the judiciary. We have to have cooperation from all these sources in order to get something done," Obama said at the forum. "So I am happy to take responsibility for the fact that we didn’t get it done, but I did not make a promise that we would get everything done, 100 percent when I was elected as president.”
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