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.