I actually think that Harry Reid is correct. The Senate is going to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill. I kind of doubt that all the Democrats will vote for it, but I still think they can get to 60 votes. What I have a much harder time imagining is a bill coming out of the House. If a bill does come out of the House, something out of the ordinary is going to have to happen. The House Judiciary Committee isn’t going to write a bill that House Democrats can support. And that means that Senate Democrats wouldn’t support it, either. One way for the House to try to pass something is to take the Senate bill and then restrict the amendments somehow. To do that, Boehner will have to hope he can control his Rules Committee.
The whole effort would involve some Kabuki Theater. Ordinarily, the House Judiciary Committee would mark up a bill, pass it, and send it to the Rules Committee. The Rules Committee would decide how much time to allow for debate, how many amendments were allowed, and whether the amendments needed a majority or a supermajority to pass. Once the bill was passed, it would be sent to the Senate. Actually, there would be conferees elected to negotiate with the Senate’s conferees. They would have to create one bill out of the two versions provided by each chamber. And then that bill would have to be passed in each chamber and then sent to the president for his signature.
The problem is that it might not be possible to reconcile the two bills if they are radically different. Knowing this, if the House leadership wants to actually pass a bill, they probably should not ask the House Judiciary Committee to work on a bill at all. Any changes to the Senate bill should be minimized, and come through the amendment process. Yet, how do you orchestrate something like that? It won’t look good, nor will it sit well with conservatives, if the House decides not to legislate their own version of immigration reform.
So, one option is to plan for failure. To do this, you need to convince a few members of the Judiciary Committee to oppose any bill that the chairman marks up. This can be done from the left or the right, or a combination of both. If Judiciary can’t agree on a bill, then the leadership has the excuse they need to just use the Senate version as their framework. They can allow a couple of conservative amendments that might be poison pills, but they can limit them and hope to fix them in the Conference Committee with the Senate.
I don’t know if John Boehner can pull something that complicated off, but hopefully he has someone smart on his staff who can explain it to him.
The alternative is to walk into a trap. Imagine that the Senate passes a bill with fairly broad bipartisan support. Everyone gets excited and celebrates. Meanwhile, the House passes a bill that is opposed by almost all the Democrats, the administration, and all the immigration advocacy groups. They go to Conference and either can’t come to an agreement or they do come to agreement but then the House Republicans refuse to pass it.
The House Republicans won’t be able to argue that it wasn’t a bipartisan bill because the Senate passed it (possibly twice). They’ll look a bunch of racists. They’ll do severe damage to their standing with moderates, immigrant groups, and people of color. Even the business community will be furious with them.
Speaker Boehner is already weak. He can’t allow that to happen.
I’m going to guess that the eventual solution will be a discharge petition. There’s probably a good number of Republicans in Sunbelt districts who will want to look like moderates on immigration. The Republican Establishment (including Boehner) will encourage them from behind the scenes (as opposed to threaten them with banishment to the basement, which is the usual reaction to supporting Democratic discharge petitions). It will be done late in the session (like Spring 2014) so it’s no longer practical to mount a primary.
There will be an exciting floor fight with a lot of poison pills but I think there is actually a majority in the House supportive of mild immigration reform so I think the truly toxic ones will be defeated.
I believe Reid can believe 45 Dem votes.
and, so, it can pass one of two ways:
Turtle Lips can bring 15 votes so that it can pass the 60 vote threshold.
Turtle Lips can have it brought to the floor so that you can get an up or down vote…which means all he’d have to bring is 5 votes, and then Ride or Die Joe can cast the 51st vote.
I’m guessing there are perhaps somewhat north of 140 democratic votes for immigration reform in the house. I am doubtful that there are better than 30 Republican votes.
You can probably move that democratic number close to 170, but that’s the ceiling. I don’t see 50 Republican votes for this unless Republicans in the Senate overwhelmingly support it, and maybe not even then.
My guess is the most likely path to a bill involves Rubio and Ryan getting in a position to take credit for it, as they both have an interest as potential 2016 candidates to get more than a quarter of the Latino demographic in a general election.
The first consideration is if both of them really want to get a bill done, and if so can they (and I presume the anti-tax, anti-spending high rollers in the conservative movement) tamp down the border warriors enough to live with whatever path to citizenship is in the legislation.
There’s a way I can see this happening if the right-wing media sells it as Rubio and Ryan showing great leadership on the issue. OTOH it’s still tugging at the gordian knot that is today’s conservative coalition. What happens if the Joe Arpaio conservative Republicans don’t go along?
So, The Hill has a piece on a secretive group of House members who have been working on immigration reform for 4 years. Only one problem:
So, like I said, it’s probably best to have this group’s effort fail in the Judiciary Committee. Blame it on King and Gohmert and then bring the Senate bill to the floor with limited opportunities for amendment.