House Republicans vented their anger at President Obama Wednesday by denying him the funds he needs to carry out his executive immigration action.

But will that be the epitaph for immigration reform during the Obama years?

To hardliners like Rep. Steve King (R) of Iowa, yes. But a more moderate group of Republicans still sees a glimmer of hope for moving forward on immigration reform – not as a single, comprehensive bill but on smaller pieces that could get bipartisan support.

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The template for that would be December’s vote to fund most of the federal government through September, said Rep. Tom Cole (R) of Oklahoma. The bill passed with the support of roughly two-thirds of Republicans and one-third of Democrats, sidelining dozens of hard-line conservatives.

“That’s the only formula that’s really going to work in this situation,” says Representative Cole, a close ally of the speaker, in an interview with the Monitor. Ditto for any other major reforms that Congress might tackle in the next two years, he adds.

It might not work. An attempt by House Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio to move immigration reform forward last year never even got past the discussion stage. But the situation might be different this time. Not only can House Republicans count on the GOP-controlled Senate as an ally, but Republicans’ need to woo Hispanic voters ahead of the 2016 presidential elections could shift the political calculus.

“John Boehner has made no secret of the fact that he wants us to attack this problem,” Cole says, but first, “you’ve got to let him play out his hand.”

That meant moving forward with the effort Wednesday by House Republicans to block funding for Mr. Obama’s executive action, which was attached to a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security. It now moves to the GOP-controlled Senate but it is highly unlikely to survive a Democratic filibuster there. The White House also has threatened a veto.

The House’s move “is primarily a reaction to the president, whom we think is overreaching, and we’re going to have this fight,” Cole says.

But his eye is already on areas of potential agreement among some Republicans, Democrats, and the White House, such as better border security, more high-tech visas, as well as a seasonal program for agricultural workers, which especially affects Republican districts.

“It behooves us to follow with some other things that we know Democrats and the president can accept,” he says.

Representative King, one of the most conservative members of the House, dismisses such talk. Obama’s November executive action to defer deportation for millions of undocumented immigrants showed that “the president has proven he’s less trustworthy than before. So … there isn’t much merit in the idea of going down a path and thinking that we can do something to improve immigration policy when we have a president who thinks he’s the king of America,” he told a small group of reporters on Tuesday.

Immigration reform, he said, will have to wait for another president.

Cole doesn’t deny the anger over Obama’s actions, which is widespread. But he says that things have changed since last January, when Boehner failed to persuade House Republicans to back a set of “principles” on immigration reform due to lack of trust in the president and concern about the mid-term elections.

House Republicans also were worried that the Democratic-led Senate would take any bill they passed and try to turn it into the comprehensive reform bill the Senate passed in 2013.

“The fear was always that if you got into that [and sent House bills over to the Senate], you’d see the full Senate bill attached, and kicked back to us. So the decision was made not to go ahead,” Cole says.

That concern is now gone.

The upcoming presidential election has also altered the landscape. Presidential elections tend to draw far more Democratic voters than midterms do, making Republican senators – and the Republican presidential candidate – vulnerable. Appealing to Hispanic voters, who traditionally lean Democratic, through immigration reform might be one way to undercut that advantage.

If moving ahead means following December’s budget-vote formula, one key pro-immigration reform Democrat is all for it. When asked whether the budget model might work for immigration reform, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D) of Illinois, said “absolutely it is possible.” Despite his admittedly “harsh” language on reform, he said he – and the president – are still willing to listen to Republican ideas.

“I’m willing. We are all waiting,” he said, pointing to the many concessions he made as a member of a House “gang of eight” who tried to hammer out a bipartisan compromise.

For his part, House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R) of Virginia is in no hurry. He told reporters at a Monitor Breakfast that immigration would be “a very hot topic” at a two-day retreat for House and Senate Republicans in Hershey, Pa., that begins Wednesday. And while he says his committee is reviewing and revising the immigration bills passed in the last Congress, he won’t be rushed.

“For the committee, I think it’s most important for us to stay focused on getting it done right, rather than getting it done under any particular timeline, or for any political purpose, because this is going to endure well beyond 2016.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Shunning a White House veto threat and opposition within their own party, House Republicans approved legislation Wednesday to overturn President Barack Obama’s key immigration policies and expose hundreds of thousands of younger immigrants to expulsion from the U.S.

The 236-191 vote came on a broad bill that would provide $39.7 billion to finance the Homeland Security Department through the rest of the budget year, legislation that lawmakers of both parties said was sorely needed to pay for counterterrorism, cybersecurity and other priorities at a moment when the Paris terror attacks have underscored dire threats.

Democrats accused Republicans of putting that money at risk by attaching veto-bait amendments on immigration, and some Republicans voiced the same concern. But House GOP leaders and most of their rank and file accused Obama in turn of reckless and unconstitutional actions on immigration that had to be answered.

“This executive overreach is an affront to the rule of law and to the Constitution itself,” said House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio. “The people made clear that they wanted more accountability from this president, and by our votes here today we will heed their will and we will keep our oath to protect and defend the Constitution.”

But Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., who chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said the Republicans were simply pandering to the far right.

“Shame on Republicans for attacking the Latino community,” Sanchez said. “Republicans are consciously targeting millions of families who work hard, contribute to our communities and are just trying to give their children a chance at the American dream.”

One of the immigration amendments, approved 237-190, would undo executive actions that Obama announced in November to provide temporary deportation relief and work permits to some 4 million immigrants in the country illegally, mostly people who have children who are citizens or legal permanent residents. The amendment also would cancel earlier directives to immigration agents aimed at giving them discretion in focusing deportations on criminals.

A second amendment would delete Obama’s 2012 policy that’s granted work permits and stays of deportation to more than 600,000 immigrants who arrived in the U.S. illegally as children under age 16. That measure passed narrowly, 218-209, as 26 of the more moderate Republicans, some representing large Hispanic populations, joined Democrats in opposition.

The underlying bill passed on a mostly party line vote, with 10 Republicans voting “no” and two Democrats voting “yes.”

But even with Republicans in control of the Senate, the bill faces tough sledding there. Republicans are six votes shy of the 60-vote majority needed to advance most legislation, and some GOP senators have argued that the Homeland Security bill shouldn’t be the vehicle for a contentious debate on immigration.

Within the House GOP, too, there’s frustration from some centrist lawmakers that two weeks into a new session of Congress, with a bigger party majority in the House, the most conservative lawmakers are still calling the shots, successfully pushing leaders for a vote to undo the 2012 policy dealing with younger immigrants known as “Dreamers.”

“If we were just specifically dealing with the November overreach of the president, you’d have Democrats who’d be voting with us on that piece of it but we’ve gone well beyond that,” said Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif. “We’re passing a bill for political reasons, a bill that has no ability to pass the Senate.”

Before leaving town for a two-day retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Republicans also steered the House to approval of legislation to ease the landmark Dodd-Frank law, which aimed to rein in banks and Wall Street. The new legislation would give U.S. banks two extra years to ensure that their holdings of certain complex and risky securities don’t put them out of compliance with a new banking rule. The Dodd-Frank changes, approved 271-154, also face an Obama veto threat.

Given the growing importance of Latino voters, Wednesday’s immigration votes could end up raising questions in the 2016 presidential election for the eventual GOP nominee. Potential candidates weren’t touching the issue Wednesday. Requests for comments from former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former GOP nominee Mitt Romney went unanswered. At an event in Manchester, New Hampshire, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky refused to say if he would back his House colleagues’ efforts.

Democrats, on the other hand, were eager to weigh in.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois warned Republicans they were igniting “the mobilization of an immigrant community throughout this nation that will be the death knell to the future of your party.”

Wednesday’s votes were set in motion late last year, after Obama infuriated Republicans by announcing executive moves on immigration not long after the GOP swept the midterm elections. Republicans passed full-year spending bills for most of the government but kept the Homeland Security Department on a short leash in order to revisit the issue when they would be in full control of Congress.

Yet given Obama’s veto pen and Senate rules granting significant rights to the minority party, it’s not clear that the GOP has much more leverage now than it did before. House and Senate Republican leaders have ruled out a government shutdown or any disruption to Homeland Security funding, so it appears likely that once the House bill is rejected by the Senate or vetoed by the president, the House will have to accept a version with less contentious language on immigration.

Current Homeland Security funding expires at the end of February, so House leaders have given themselves more than a month to find a solution. It’s expected to be a topic of debate at the Hershey retreat.

___

Associated Press writers Alan Fram, Connie Cass and Marcy Gordon in Washington, Steve Peoples in San Diego, Michael Mishak in Miami and Kathleen Ronayne in Manchester, New Hampshire, contributed to this report.

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It’s easy to forget now, but it was just under a year ago that House Republican leaders presented their principles for immigration reform to their members, in the hope that the one-page document would lead, finally, to a bill the party could support. The entreaty failed, succumbing to election-year fears and a deep distrust of President Obama by rank-and-file members. But the mere release of the principles was significant in putting the historically conservative House leadership on record, for the first time, supporting legal status for undocumented immigrants and even citizenship for many of the so-called Dreamer children.

By Wednesday, however, House Republicans had done, in the description of Representative Luis Gutierrez, an about-face on immigration. In a series of votes on a spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security, the GOP majority moved to block all funding for the president’s executive actions on immigration. Going even further, Republicans voted to stop Obama’s three-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, effectively calling for the deportation of kids brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents.

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“What happened to that principle? You just gave it up?” Gutierrez, the Democratic reform advocate, asked in a floor speech. “It doesn’t mean anything to you anymore? You don’t care about children?” Democrats also assailed the GOP for making the immigration fight on a security bill just a week after the terrorist attacks in Paris.

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Republicans Plot an Immigration Fight

Republicans didn’t even talk much about immigration; instead, they turned to the Constitution, castigating Obama for abusing his authority when he went around Congress to reshape the system on his own. When Boehner gave his speech, he read aloud the 22 times the president himself had said he didn’t have the power to do what he eventually did. (“I am not king. I cannot do these things by myself,” the speaker quoted Obama, in one example from 2011.)

No issue in recent years has illustrated the difficulty Boehner has had in steering his party like immigration. As he likes to remind people, he voiced support for broad reforms on the day after Obama won reelection in 2012. And indeed, the whole point—politically at least—for the Republican establishment’s push to work with the president on immigration in 2013 was to avoid exactly this scenario: a vote that Democrats could spin as anti-immigrant just as the 2016 presidential campaign is getting underway. But at times, Boehner sounded like the reluctant parent disciplining an unruly child. “We do not take this action lightly,” he said, “but quite simply, there is no alternative.” The speaker praised lawmakers who were working to fix the broken immigration system—”especially,” he added, “since I am one of them.”

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“We do not take this action lightly, but quite simply, there is no alternative.”

Republicans do have a point in criticizing Obama for reversing himself on the question of whether he had the legal authority to make such significant changes through executive action. But rather than limit themselves to reversing the moves he made last fall, the leadership added an amendment blocking the DACA program that more than 600,000 people have already signed up for. Even some Republicans balked at that measure, which passed narrowly despite defections from 26 moderates. And the conservative bent to the legislation means it has no chance of getting through the Republican-led Senate, much less being signed into law by the president.

Boehner’s aggressive move may or may not help sooth the conservatives who tried to force him from office last week. But as attention turns to the 2016 campaign and the daunting electoral math for Republicans, what peril will it bring his party?

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This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/House-Republicans-Vote-to-Block-Obama-on-Immigration/384513/

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By Katharina Bart

ZURICH (Reuters) – The Swiss government hopes to negotiate for a right to cap immigration from the European Union so as to keep its access to EU markets when it writes into law a popular vote requiring strict limits on migration.

The referendum passed narrowly almost a year ago despite vehement opposition from the government and from the Swiss banks, drugmakers and other industries that rely heavily on skilled workers from the EU.

This handed the government the problem of how to manage immigration through quotas without angering Brussels, which has said any curb on the influx of EU workers would violate treaties that give Switzerland access to EU markets.

Berne diplomats are now exploring adding a “safeguard clause” that would let Switzerland cap immigration from the EU once certain levels were hit, according to two sources familiar with the matter who declined to be named.

Curbs would be imposed when immigration tops a number that is linked to average immigration in the European Union, but also allows for outliers.

Foreigners made up almost 24 percent of the Swiss population at the end of 2013, one of the highest proportions in any Western economy, up from below 15 percent 30 years ago. Net immigration is about 1 percent a year, about twice that of Germany.

The proposal is meant to reassure Swiss voters that a perceived siege by foreign workers will be tackled, while persuading the EU that one of its fundamental principles, free movement of labor, has not been compromised.

Although Switzerland is not in the EU, it has in effect accepted those principles in exchange for market access.

The government’s proposal has gained support from the business establishment, but will be hard to sell to the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), which launched the referendum.

“We want a bill that adheres to the constitutional change, and it doesn’t seem that adding a safeguard clause would do so. It does not set quotas or give priority to Swiss residents,” Silvia Baer, deputy secretary of the SVP, told Reuters on Wednesday.

The EU said it would not take a view until it received an official proposal. Two diplomats familiar with the matter said it would be very hard for the bloc, currently dealing with its own pressures to limit internal migration, to stomach the safeguard clause.

Other proposals for responding to the referendum have ranged from re-running it in the hope of reversing the narrow “Yes” vote to taking a hard line and risking breaking the treaties.

(Reporting By Katharina Bart. Additional reporting by Barbara Lewis in Brussels; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

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House Republicans on Wednesday used their power of the purse to deny funds for President Obama’s “overreach” on immigration – but it is a doomed effort, sure to face a presidential veto, if it even gets that far. And so the next step must be for Congress to challenge the president’s executive immigration action in court, according to a key lawmaker.

If the House effort “doesn’t work out” in the end, then “Congress itself should bring its own litigation because of the separation of powers argument,” said Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R) of Virginia, at a Monitor breakfast on Wednesday. He is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which, in the last Congress, passed several immigration reform bills that were never brought to the floor for a vote.

Congressman Goodlatte was speaking before House Republicans passed a funding measure for the Department of Homeland Security through the fiscal year, along with several amendments that Democrats and the president consider to be “poison pills.”

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The amendments say funds can’t be used to implement the president’s executive action in November to defer deportation for millions of undocumented immigrants, including an amendment that effectively ends the deportation deferral program for certain children of undocumented workers – so-called “dreamers.” 

The package now moves to the GOP-controlled Senate, where Democrats, despite being in the minority, can still block it through filibuster, denying Republicans the 60 votes needed to send the measure to the White House. 

Goodlatte said that immigration will be a “very hot topic” at a joint Republican House and Senate two-day retreat that begins later on Wednesday in Hershey, Pa. The first priority, he said, is to stop the president’s executive overreach on immigration.

“We expect to work very collaboratively with the Senate to see what way that this new Senate can help to challenge a president who is exceeding his authority,” Goodlatte said. 

A slew of state attorneys general have joined in a lawsuit against the administration over his executive action on immigration, but Goodlatte said that the states’ standing and judicial theories are different from those of the House or the House and Senate together.

Still, he said that “no decision” has been made about a potential congressional legal challenge to the president’s immigration moves.

As for actual immigration reform, he said that his committee and the House Committee on Homeland Security are reviewing and revising step-by-step immigration reform bills passed by their committees during the last Congress. They will be “reintroduced and I hope acted upon in this Congress.”

The order would be first bills related to enforcement – such as dealing with the problem of overstaying visas, and then legislation to reform legal immigration, including visas for high tech workers.

The status of the 11 or so million undocumented workers already in the United States “is worthy of addressing,” he said. “But it has to be held back because of the fact that there is not trust on the part of the American people on the enforcement of our laws.”

Goodlatte made it quite clear that his No. 1 priority is to challenge the president’s executive action. His committee will continue to work on reform bills, but the lack of trust in the president to enforce the law and his November executive action have “complicated this considerably.”

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BUDAPEST (Reuters) – Immigration to Europe should be largely halted, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said late on Sunday, demanding a robust EU response to last week’s killings in France.

Orban was speaking after attending a mass rally in Paris to pay tribute to 17 people killed in attacks launched by a trio of Islamist extremists, who were born in France to immigrant families.

The deadly attacks look certain to bolster anti-immigration movements around Europe, and Orban, who has called for migration curbs in the past, said it was time for Brussels to get tough.

“We should not look at economic immigration as if it had any use, because it only brings trouble and threats to European people,” he told state television. “Therefore, immigration must be stopped. That’s the Hungarian stance.”

The only exception, he said, should be for people claiming political asylum.

“Hungary will not become a target destination for immigrants,” he said. “We will not allow it, at least as long as I am prime minister and as long as this government is in power.”

Orban’s right-wing government was elected for a second consecutive term last year. The prime minister said minorities living in Hungary, which has a population of some 10 million, posed no particular problem.

“We do not want to see a significant minority among ourselves that has different cultural characteristics and background. We would like to keep Hungary as Hungary,” he added.

According to the national statistics office (KSH), some 350,000 Hungarians live and worked abroad, most of them in Germany, Britain and Austria.

(Reporting by Krisztina Than; Editing by Crispian Balmer)

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