New York Times
By Ashley Parker
March 26, 2014
WASHINGTON
— House Democrats will carry out a long-shot legislative maneuver on
Wednesday that is intended to bring a broad immigration bill to the
House floor for a vote
— or, at the very least, to increase the pressure on Republicans to
move forward on some form of overhaul before the end of the year.
The
maneuver, known as a discharge petition, would require 218 signatures
and allow House Democrats and Republicans who support the immigration
legislation to circumvent
the Republican majority and bypass the regular committee process.
House
Democrats are calling the effort the #DemandAVote petition, and they
hope to force Republicans to take up the immigration bill, which largely
mirrors the broad measure
the Senate passed last year. The bill has 200 co-sponsors, including
three Republicans, and it is officially known as the Border Security,
Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act.
Like
the bill the Senate passed, the House measure includes a path to
citizenship for the 11 million immigrants who are in the country
illegally.
Representative
Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, said Tuesday that
Democrats were simply asking for a vote on an issue they believed would
pass with bipartisan
support.
“Despite
the huge benefits for our fiscal health and our nation’s vitality, not
to mention the overwhelming support of the American people, House
Republicans continue
to block a vote on comprehensive immigration reform,” Ms. Pelosi said.
“Enough is enough, and Democrats are demanding a vote. It is time for
Republicans to stop catering to the most extreme, anti-immigrant wing of
their caucus, and allow a vote on the bipartisan
immigration reform our nation so urgently needs.”
Senator
Charles E. Schumer of New York, one of the Democratic architects of the
Senate bill, had previously floated the idea of a discharge petition.
House
Democrats have tried to use the maneuver to push other legislative
goals like extending unemployment insurance, raising the minimum wage
and encouraging equal pay
for women. Although the petitions have raised the visibility of those
signature Democratic issues, they have not led to a vote on the House
floor.
Any
discharge petition in the current Congress would require the support of
more than a dozen Republicans, an unlikely prospect because it would
require them to defy their
party’s leadership. The last successful discharge petition was in 2002
and helped win passage of a major campaign finance law.
Ms.
Pelosi has acknowledged that a discharge petition on immigration will
probably not succeed either. “We’ll never get to 218 on the discharge
petition because the Republicans
generally won’t sign,” she said this month in an interview on Sirius XM
Radio. “The outside mobilization is saying all we want is a vote.”
The tactic will keep the pressure on House Republicans to offer their own immigration legislation.
A
spokesman for the House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, used Ms.
Pelosi’s own words to sum up the speaker’s views on the Democrats’
maneuver. “Representative Pelosi
has said publicly that this effort is pointless and doomed to failure,”
said the spokesman, Michael Steel. “We agree.”
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