New York Times
By Jonathan Weisman
February 6, 2014
WASHINGTON ― Facing growing resistance from conservatives, Speaker John A. Boehner on Thursday cast strong doubt that he could pass an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws this year, leaving it to President Obama to win the trust of his balking Republicans.
Mr. Boehner began his weekly news conference by saying that for 15 months he had pressed for immigration measures to address border security, new worker programs and the 11 million illegal immigrants in the country. But, he added, “I’ve never underestimated the difficulty in moving forward this year.”
“The American people, including many of my members, don’t trust that the reform that we’re talking about will be implemented as it was intended to be,” he said, citing executive actions by the Obama administration that have changed or delayed implementation of the president’s health care law. “There’s widespread doubt about whether this administration can be trusted to enforce our laws, and it’s going to be difficult to move any immigration legislation until that changes.”
The comments came two days after Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, cited “irresolvable conflict” between the House and the Senate and said, “I don’t see how you get to an outcome this year with the two bodies in such a different place.”
Even Republicans modestly supportive of immigration legislation have said this election year is not the time to move forward. Doing so, they say, would only splinter the party and detract from the attention Republican candidates are trying to focus on Mr. Obama’s health care law and sagging approval ratings. By casting the issue as one of trust in the president, Mr. Boehner tried to lay the blame at the White House’s feet for what appears to be a quickly flagging immigration push.
“The reason I said we need a step-by-step common-sense approach to this is so we can build trust with the American people that we’re doing this the right way,” Mr. Boehner said. “And, frankly, one of the biggest obstacles we face is the one of trust.”
At their retreat last week, many Republicans rejected the House leadership’s one-page “standards for immigration reform” outright, and others said now was not the time for a legislative push on a number of contentious issues in an election year with trends going their way. More-conservative members in the House reject conferring a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, calling it “amnesty” for those who have broken the law.
The opposition has grown more fierce. The conservative activist L. Brent Bozell called for the entire House Republican leadership to be replaced, and on Wednesday, his group, ForAmerica, blitzed the speaker's office with thousands of phone calls to jam the lines and protest his immigration push. Representative Raúl Labrador of Idaho, an early negotiator on immigration and now a fierce opponent, told the newspaper The Hill that a Boehner immigration push this year “should cost him his speakership.”
Asked what he thought Congress could accomplish this year, the speaker cited legislation to permanently block sharp cuts to Medicare health providers that have been looming for years, a change to the federal flood insurance program, and terrorism risk insurance.
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