Kevin McCarthy: GOP ‘Very Close’ to Immigration Deal

McCarthy’s apparent zig-zag towards an amnesty, in cooperation with retiring Speaker Ryan, defies the shocking 2016 election results and threatens to spit the party again, say immigration-reform advocates. Rachel Bovard, a conservative organizer, and a former Hill staffer, writes in American Greatness:

Allowing this amnesty effort to move forward presents a real risk to the future of the party, and also to the House’s leadership. Mishandling of immigration policy has already played a role in bringing down one speaker. It has arguably tainted the legacies of senators and at least one Republican president. If amnesty passes the House next month, the repercussions will bang like a gong in the upcoming midterm elections and the race to replace Paul Ryan as speaker. But the action will resonate far beyond the four walls of the House Chamber, as yet another decades-long political promise is shredded by a Republican party already knee deep in broken commitments and diminished credibility.

In June 2014, Rep. Eric Cantor, McCarthy’s predecessor as Majority Leader, lost his seat because of his closed-door push for amnesty.

But McCarthy and Ryan may just be trying to engineer a pre-election Congressional deadlock to avoid retaliation either from voters who want higher wages and the business donors who want lower wages, said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies.

In recent weeks, more GOP business donors have declared they will close their checkbooks unless the GOP endorses another cheap-labor amnesty.

McCarthy’s statement “all seems like platitudes and keywords that he’s been instructed to include by his staff, or he thinks will placate people, without really offering any insight into what is possible or likely,” she said, adding:

He is either trying to be deliberately vague because he doesn’t want people to know what is being contemplated, or he is trying to offer the kind of chameleon-like terms that allow people to hear what they want to hear. That gives him maximum maneuvering room to push through what he wants … [The terms] are slippery enough that they can be used to describe anything — the [2013] Gang of Eight used these kinds of words to describe their preposterous bill. [Democratic Sen.] Dick Durbin [used the same terms] when he went to the White House with this ridiculous deal that they wanted Trump to sign off on.

“Securing the border” doesn’t mean anything  …. [in contrast to] specific commitments, such as building the wall, reducing legal immigration numbers, or increasing detention capacity.

In February, the GOP’s leader in the Senate. Sen. Mitch McConnell engineered a four-bill deadlock that allowed roughly 12 GOP Senators to vote for cheap-labor sought by donors and also for immigration improvements sought by voters. Since February, McConnell has resisted calls to schedule another immigration vote.