President Obama on Immigration: Why Wait?

Politico

By Seung Min Kim and Carrie Budoff Brown

November 14, 2014

President Obama on Immigration: Why Wait? 

An internal debate over the timing of President Barack Obama’s executive order on immigration has raged for months, with White House officials gaming out options to minimize the collateral damage yet failing to reach consensus on the best moment to act before their year-end deadline.

But a sequence of events since Election Day has helped smooth out differences of opinion and clarify the White House’s thinking: Why wait?

 

Democrats no longer have to worry that the Senate runoff in Louisiana will tip the balance of power. The West Wing assumes Republicans will use immigration to gum up the government funding bill no matter when Obama announces the executive actions. And the pressure to move quickly only intensified this week as details of the plan leaked, giving Republicans free rein to bloody it.

 

Now the White House is working on a timetable that wasn’t anticipated even days before the election.

 

Obama will make the final decision on what to include in the executive actions and when to announce it once he returns Sunday from an overseas trip. There are Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and some White House officials, who prefer that Obama wait until after Congress meets its Dec. 11 deadline to fund the government. But some administration officials said they wouldn’t be surprised if he green-lighted an announcement soon after deciding on the policy early next week.

 

Obama showed his impatience over the issue Friday during a press conference in Yangon, Myanmar.

 

“They have the ability to fix the system. What they don’t have the ability to do is to expect me to stand by with a broken system in perpetuity,” Obama said of congressional Republicans. Reform “is way overdue. And we’ve been talking about it for 10 years now and it’s been consistently stalled.”

 

Ever since Obama decided to delay taking unilateral action until after the election and before a self-imposed deadline at the end of the year, people close to the process said they didn’t expect the president to act before Thanksgiving. When the Congressional Hispanic Caucus met with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough in September, the lawmakers left with the impression that nothing would happen until December. Before the election, the White House had set an internal deadline of next Friday to ready the proposal, but remained undecided on when to roll it out.

 

“The conversation has evolved even from a few days ago,” said Angela Kelley, an immigration strategist at the left-leaning Center for American Progress who has close ties with the White House.

 

Perhaps the most important factor in the shift is the one-sided debate that’s taken place in recent days. Republicans have seized on the reports that Obama is preparing to shield up to 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation and vowed to use every tool possible to thwart the effort. Immigration advocates haven’t been able to fight back because they don’t know what the president is actually planning to do.

 

“Right now, the Republicans, they’re able to define it however they want,” Kelley said. “It is galvanizing the other side. All we’ve got is drips and drabs from newspaper stories.”

 

Advocates expect him to protect undocumented immigrants with children who are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents, but how he structures the programs will make a big difference. The administration has floated requiring an undocumented immigrant to have been here anywhere from five to 10 years in order to be protected from deportations — a distinction that would have a large impact on the total number.

 

A senior administration official said Friday that the 5 million figure was at the upper limit of what the president is considering.

 

The factor most likely to prevent a quick announcement is the debate over government funding.

Conservatives are rumbling about using the must-pass measure to block the immigration action — a threat that is worrying House GOP leadership. And some Senate Democrats quietly acknowledge that a sweeping order on deportations would likelymake the funding bill even harder to pass.

 

“Privately, we’d prefer to see [executive action] wait until after the omnibus,” one senior Senate Democratic aide said.

 

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the likely incoming chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, is pressing lawmakers to include language in the funding measure that would ban the Obama administration from using money to implement executive actions.

 

If that doesn’t succeed, Sessions wants a short-term funding measure that would carry through the new Republican majority in the Senate.

 

House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) said it would “make it very difficult” to pass the funding measure if Obama goes ahead with his executive action plans. And Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) spearheaded a letter that is calling for language to bar Obama from using funds to implement executive actions on immigration to be included in any funding bill.

 

Salmon said the House has the ability to block Obama’s actions through funding bills and should take advantage of it.

 

“At the end of the day, we have that tool,” Salmon said Friday. “To not use it would be malpractice, I think.”

 

The conservatives want to restrain Obama through the spending measure even if he hasn’t yet announced his immigration plans. But if Obama unveils executive action before Congress has passed the funding bill, it would help give Republicans something tangible to seize on and lend traction to their efforts to pressure Obama.

 

“I have no interest in shutting the government down,” Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) said. “But I do not think the president has the power to do this, and we need to be prepared to stand up to that.”

 

Immigration is also sure to be an issue in the battle to confirm the new attorney general. Senate Republicans are already preparing to use the confirmation of Loretta Lynch, a U.S. attorney in New York, as a proxy war over immigration actions.

 

Though Republicans have signaled that they will press the executive action issue with Lynch during her confirmation hearings no matter what, multiple Republican aides said immigration will surely play a much larger role in the hearings if Obama does move forward on immigration unilaterally.

 

Though no formal decisions have been made, Senate Democratic leadership is largely leaning toward pushing Lynch’s nomination into the new Congress, when Republicans will be in charge. If Obama indeed acts soon on immigration, that means the executive action will be public by the time Lynch comes before the Senate to be confirmed.

 

“Do not underestimate — for a second — the capacity of this nomination to get caught up in the executive action,” said one Senate Republican aide.

 

Senior administration officials have said they’re concerned about the Republican backlash, but they’ve concluded from the election that voters want results from Washington. The positive response this week to Obama’s landmark deal with China to cut greenhouse gas emissions, officials said, supports their conclusion that Obama can’t hold back because of fears over how the unilateral actions would be received by Republicans.

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com