NPR
(Opinion)
By Mara Liasson
February 26, 2015
As
the Republican Congress tried this week to get itself out of the box it
put itself in, President Obama was in Miami, aggressively ratcheting up
the political pressure
on the GOP on the issue underlying the standoff over funding the
Department of Homeland Security — immigration. Here are three reasons
why the president is winning this fight:
1. Congress can't stop him from implementing his executive actions on immigration.
Congress
can shut down the Department of Homeland Security, but even that won't
stop the president from using his prosecutorial discretion to give as
many as 10 million
people effective protection from deportation. A Texas judge may have
stopped him from offering work permits or papers to individual
immigrants, granting them temporary legal status, but the judge never
disputed the president's power to decide how to prioritize
law enforcement. It estimates that only 1 million of the 11 million
immigrants here illegally are recent border-crossers or have criminal
records.
2. House and Senate Republicans can't get on the same page.
On
this issue Democrats, for a change, are united. House Speaker John
Boehner told his Republican colleagues that he and Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell haven't
spoken in two weeks, although they did finally have a meeting Wednesday
afternoon. And while McConnell was willing to throw in the towel and
allow a "clean" DHS funding bill, Boehner can't get his conservatives to
agree. The Republican leadership is convinced
it will be blamed for shutting down DHS at a time when the American
people are increasingly concerned about terrorist threats. But the
conservative base is not convinced. Democrats feel they have the upper
hand, with a message that, at its simplest and crudest,
says: Republicans played politics with the nation's security in order
to force the president to deport more hardworking Hispanics.
3. The president's position is more popular.
What
the president wants to do — bring out of the shadows immigrants who
have been in this country for a long time, have U.S. citizen children,
and clean records — is
wildly popular with Hispanics. The broader public supports the
substance of the policy, even if polls show lower support for the way he
went about it — acting unilaterally. But the president's action is
extremely unpopular with the conservative base of the
Republican Party, which calls it "executive amnesty".
This
is the wedge that the president is trying to exploit with trips to
heavily Hispanic Florida and interviews on Spanish-language television.
Three years after Mitt
Romney lost the Hispanic vote 71 to 27 percent, Republicans still
haven't figured out how to reach out to the fastest growing ethnic bloc
in the electorate without alienating their conservative base.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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