Jake Sherman and Ginger Gibson have a good and informative piece in Politico on the way forward for immigration reform in the House of Representatives. At first look, the legislation looks to be in trouble. The primary problem is that Speaker Boehner has promised not to bring the Senate version of the bill up for a vote, has promised to bring nothing up for a vote that doesn’t have the support of the majority of the House Republican caucus, and has assured his caucus that he won’t allow a vote on a Conference Report if the majority of his caucus won’t support it.
So, how on Earth is anything going to pass?
Don’t give up hope, yet, however.
First, let me once again explain how bills become law. At some point, the House will probably pass something related to immigration reform. It doesn’t have to be comprehensive. It doesn’t have to resemble the Senate version in any way. It could be 100% about border security. But some bill will serve as a vehicle to go to a Conference Committee with the Senate.
The way this works is that the House will have a vote on assigning members to serve on the Conference Committee. These members are called “conferees.” There will be a majority vote on this. Either the House agrees to assign conferees or they don’t. The Senate will also go through this process, although their approval of conferees is not in doubt. It matters who gets appointed as conferees. Ordinarily, the chairman and ranking members of the committees with jurisdiction are appointed, but slots are not restricted to them, nor are they guaranteed slots.
Speaker Boehner will not have an easy time convincing the majority of his caucus to assign conferees because he cannot assure them that the Conference Committee will produce a bill that they can support. What he has done, instead, is to assure them that he won’t allow a vote on the Conference Report if the majority doesn’t support it.
In order for a bill to become a law, both Houses have to pass an identical version of the bill. That is what the Conference Report is. House Republicans suspect that the Conference Report will not be a bill that they can support.
In truth, it’s doubtful that the Conference Committee can create a report than the Democrats can support and that the president is willing to sign, that is also acceptable to the majority of the House. In fact, it’s doubtful that they will even try to create something like that. So, the way it looks right now is that the Committee will produce a report than Boehner will reject and that he will not even bring up for a vote.
However, once a report is produced, the only way to judge whether the majority of the House Republicans support it is to do an informal whip count. There is no independent source that can verify if the majority of the House Republicans support it. It could be a close call, or it could be too close to call.
In any case, there will be considerable pressure on the House leadership to convince (or to whip) their members to support the report.
The House appears to be in no hurry to act on immigration reform, with several members predicting that they won’t be ready to vote until the end of the year or even early next year. The longer it takes, the more the 2016 presidential election will emerge as a factor in the Republicans’ thinking. For example, Rep. Paul Ryan, who is part of the leadership team, seems supportive of immigration reform. If he looks like a frontrunner for the nomination and he is arguing that he needs the bill in order to have a fighting chance at winning the presidency, there will be less resistance to passing it.
In this sense, time is on reform’s side. Right now, it looks impossible for the majority of the House to support a pathway to citizenship, but that possibility will grow more likely the closer we get to the 2016 election.
However, the strategy of delay threatens to dampen the momentum for reform created by the 68-32 vote in the Senate. To prevent that from happening, advocates for reform will have to build a movement to pressure the House to stop delaying action.
Ultimately, the House leadership wants to pass reform, but they need to convince their members of the need. They don’t need to convince a majority of their caucus, but they need to get close enough to argue that they have the support they need to test the support they have with a vote.
I wonder what the role of a discharge petition would be. If there are enough pro-reform House members to make it work, while absolving Boehner of responsibility.
Signing a discharge petition when you are in the majority is disloyal and can result in the loss of committee slots. In theory, Boehner could orchestrate such disloyalty against himself to absolve himself of responsibility, but it’s too risky because he would have to rely on people doing his bidding and keeping their yaps shut.
Which we know won’t happen. I do have one question. Will this Senate bill die, if nothing happens in the House, this December or next?
Yes, I believe the House would have to pass something major before the next Congress takes over in January 2015 for the Senate bill to be one the House could go to conference with.
That’s why House Judiciary Chair Goodlatte’s current strategy of passing a series of separate, poison pill bills is being done with the intent of killing immigration reform. You can’t go to conference with a comprehensive bill if you aren’t willing to put one up yourself; it’s the essence of bad faith.
I saw a public appearance this week hosted by Bloomberg News with Mario Diaz-Balart and Zoe Lofgren, who are part of a bipartisan House group which has been working on comprehensive reform “for years” and will be announcing the specifics of their proposed bill soon. The two projected inappropriate optimism about the prospects for a comprehensive bill coming out of the House, which I suppose is their job. The one time they broke from their happy talk was when Lofgren, a member of the Judiciary Committee, talked about what Goodlatte’s doing over there. “The Chairman has decided to pass a series of small bills, many of which are preposterous. It’s very unfortunate,” Lofgren said.
So, they would have to go out of regular order in the House to get something real done.
the choice for Orange Julius
is this Big Business people vs. the crazies..
who is he more afraid of?
I think it likely he’ll lose his leadership position if he allows something to pass without a majority of his own caucus. So my guess is nothing passes. Will Republicans pay a price? Absolutely. Is it self defeating for them? Sure. But there are too many gerrymandered seats in the House that can only be lost by not being insane enough.
It might be the case, but how likely is a reform candidate to get through the primaries? How likely is it for the base to believe that they need to pass reform to win–especially when its clear they are banking on stripping people of voting rights as their main thrust.
I tend to agree. I don’t think the repudiation in 2012 was strong enough. The Rs will double down on the stupid at the national level at least one more time.
It would be interesting to see what Boehner’s district thinks about immigration reform. If I was the Democrat running against Boehner in 2014, I’d be looking to get a lot of mileage about his refusal even to bring the bill up for a vote.
At any rate, I don’t think the momentum is going anywhere. I was just looking at the Univision site, and you can quickly see there that there’s an intense interest in la reforma migratoria. Knowing how crucial the Latino vote is going to be in the near future, they have a chance to flex their muscles here.
You can see right there what it’s really all about, too: Ciudadania para 11 millones. When we say immigration reform we really should say pathway to citizenship, because that’s the fundamental question.
Real reform means a pathway to citizenship, and the ability for undocumented immigrants currently in the country to have some sort of legal status and come out of the shadows in the meantime. It wouldn’t have to be full legal status, with voting rights and everything else, just the ability to not live in mortal fear of an ICE raid.
One of Goodlatte’s ridiculous bills passed out of Judiciary would have the undocumented raise their hand, exit the country and wait in line for the citizenship process.
No.
This has been episode 2,345 of simple answers to simple questions.
Given that the majority on Congress is actually a squabbling band of poo-flinging howler screech monkeys, expecting something to actually come out of that process is insane.
Boehner would have to abandon the Hastert rule to get anything out of Congress, and the screeching and howling would be deafening if he did, and any R who votes for it will be primaried to death by the Teabagger mob.
ON the other hand this bodes well for the Democrats in 2014, if we’re actually allowed to vote by the state howler screech monkeys currently celebrating the death of the Voting Rights Act by racing to prove exactly why Congress passed the Voting Rights Act..