The prospects for immigration reform just got a lot better. Florida Senator Marco Rubio is reportedly completely committed to getting something passed.
Rubio is planning a media blitz to promote the [immigration reform] bill — which is expected to be released early next week — making the rounds on all of the Sunday political talk shows starting this weekend, wooing skeptical conservative radio hosts and pitching the plan to Spanish-language news outlets. The campaign is aimed at building public support for the far-reaching immigration bill that will dominate Capitol Hill’s attention for much of the year.
Meanwhile, in an article on the prospects of any gun violence bills passing the House, The Hill reports something interesting:
While [GOP] party leaders have made a concerted effort to prepare their rank-and-file for a major immigration push this year, they have not done so on the gun issue.
So, Boehner, Cantor, and Co., have been preparing their caucus for a major push to pass immigration reform. And now Marco Rubio is going to try to sell it to conservatives. It seems to me that these are the prerequisites for getting a bill done. Something similar needs to be done on guns and on fixing the sequester.
Rubio is taking a big chance that he will get credit for leadership rather than blame for either failure or for leading on something that is pretty unpopular with conservative Republicans in Iowa.
I don’t think any 2016 presidential contenders are going to step forward on guns, so we’re not going to get that kind of stature. Rep. Peter King wants to work on passing the Toomey-Manchin background check bill, but he’s warring with the dominant southern wing of the Republican Party over the delay in Superstorm Sandy relief. It will be easy for King to round up some votes from the Mid-Atlantic, California, and parts of the Upper Midwest, but he also needs to convince Boehner to allow a vote. Maybe the Newtown parents can take care of that end of it.
On the sequester, I think the president is working the issue in large part through these dinners he has started to have with Republican senators. When the cameras are off, the senators really hate the sequester on pretty much every level you can hate it. They don’t like the meat-ax nature of it. They don’t like what is says about Congress. They have tons of pissed off constituents, many of whom are quite powerful. The trick is figuring out how to agree to the revenues the president wants. They demanded a good faith demonstration by Obama, and he delivered with the Chained CPI offer in his budget. If this thing is being choreographed correctly, someone on the Republican side (like Tom Coburn) will start talking about the president’s offer like it’s worth talking about. And then others, like McCain-Graham-Ayotte is start talking about military cuts again.
I think there is a little too much in the system right now with the Senate set to work on guns and Rubio about to make his pitch for immigration, there isn’t a lot of oxygen left for talking about the sequester. But the timing wasn’t flexible because the budget was already late.
In any case, there is good movement on immigration in both houses, and on guns in the Senate. The sequester is a little off the radar right now, except as a topic going largely undiscussed as the left plays out its assigned role of pillorying the president for his apostasy on Social Security.
