Immigration Reform in a Republican Controlled Senate, Pt. 8

By Stanley Renshon on May 1, 2014

Perhaps the most basic reason why it is important for a Republican Senate majority to pass their version of an immigration reform bill is contained in the following sentence from an article in the Washington Post describing House Speaker John Boehner's message on immigration: "That the House may one day act independently of the Senate but won't seriously engage on the subject until his colleagues reach a level of trust with Obama, who they say has openly disregarded federal law in an attempt to advance his political agenda."

The key part of that sentence is the reference to "the House acting independently of the Senate".

As it stands now, the 2013 Senate bill is the only major immigration bill to have passed through the Judiciary Committee and then been passed by the Senate as a whole. House Republicans have been reluctant to pass any immigration legislation for several reasons:

  • They understandably don't want to get into a public fight while trying to reconcile different views of what should be in an immigration bill before the 2014 congressional elections.
  • They don't want to pass any bill that would fracture their base's support before the 2014 congressional elections.
  • They don't want to pass a House immigration bill while the Senate is still controlled by Democrats because doing so might well require some form of House-Senate conference, which Senate Democrats could well dominate, resulting in a 2014 clone version of the Democrat's 2013 Senate immigration bill.
  • They don't want to pass a House immigration bill because there is a chance that the Republicans will gain control of the Senate. Were that to happen, the 2013 Democratic bill would be dead in the new Congress, and it would likely be a Republican bill that would pass out of the Judiciary Committee and be taken up by the full Senate.

In several previous posts (see here and here), I took up the question of if, and why, Senate Republicans who voted for the Senate Democrats' immigration bill in 2013 would be likely to vote for a more-focused Republican bill in 2015. For a number of reasons, I concluded that they would.

What of Democrats? What of the president? Would they agree to any bill that didn't substantially match the bill that the Democrats passed, with some Republican help, in 2013?

Surprisingly enough, the answer may be yes. It is actually possible that the president might very well decide to discuss and sign a Republican immigration bill. Why? A Politico headline answers that question: "President Obama needs legacy, GOP needs votes." The first part of that headline is undoubtedly true.

The president entered office thinking of himself as, and aspiring to be, a "great" president. He has been anything but, and his presidency is hemorrhaging public support.

As it stands now, President Obama is, at best, an average president, and in danger of becoming viewed as a mediocre one.

However, leaders who see themselves as "transformational" and aspire to be "great" will not easily settle for being seen historically as "average", or worse. The gap between the president's expectation that history will view him as he views himself, coupled with his actual lackluster record, has introduced into the president's political calculations a legacy hunger.

And in that hunger, lies the GOP's chance for real immigration reform.

Next: The House-Senate Conference Committee Dilemma, Pt. 1