Wall Street Journal
By Neil King Jr.
January 3, 2014
One of Washington’s top conservative pressure groups, Heritage Action, now says any attempt at fixing the country’s immigration laws should be put off not just for this legislative session, but until President Barack Obama is no longer in the White House.
In an interview to air Saturday on C-Span, the group’s chief executive, Michael Needham, said that Republicans should resist the call for an overhaul of the country’s immigration laws until after the 2016 election, at which point he hopes the GOP will control both the Senate and the White House. Many GOP leaders believe strongly that the party must make headway on the immigration front to rebuild trust with Hispanic voters, who have swung heavily toward the Democratic Party in recent presidential elections.
“You don’t do something as big and bold and comprehensive as immigration reform if you have a president of the United States who has demonstrated ill faith in how he wants to use this issue for political means and not for getting good policy,” Mr. Needham said of Mr. Obama.
“We should wait until we have a policy environment that is more conducive to solving the problem,” he said.
The remarks provide another signal that Heritage Action will oppose even incremental attempts to move ahead on changes to the country’s immigration laws this year, a path that House Speaker John Boehner has hinted he plans to pursue.
Mr. Needham and Heritage Action, the activist arm of the Heritage Foundation, played a major role in several of the biggest dustups in Congress last year, including the push to defund the president’s health-care overhaul that led to the October government shutdown.
A number of top Republicans, including Mr. Boehner, have taken shots at the group recently for its role in sowing divisions among congressional Republicans. After the House passed the compromise budget deal last month, Mr. Boehner lambasted outside conservative activist groups for “using the American people for their own goals.”
In in the interview, part of C-Span’s Newsmakers series, Mr. Needham offered an olive branch of sorts to Mr. Boehner. “John Boehner calls himself a conservative, and is a great conservative, but I have disagreed with some of his play calls as speaker,” he said.
At the same time, the 31-year-old chief executive of Heritage Action made clear that his own unease with the Republican Party runs deep.
“Seventy-two percent of the public doesn’t like the Republican Party. I am one of those right now,” he said. “The Republican Party needs to find its soul. It needs to find who it stands for.”
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