A year ago, a coalition of progressive organizing groups — including CREDO Action, Presente.org, Reform Immigration FOR America (RI4A), Daily Kos, National Council of La Raza (NCLR) and America’s Voice Education Fund (AVEF) — banded together to collect hundreds of thousands of petitions calling on Congress to pass immigration reform with a path to citizenship.
A year later, Speaker Boehner and the House GOP still have not acted, and many of these groups are taking one further step to push them to pass reform.
According to Elise Foley at the Huffington Post today, CREDO Action, MoveOn, and Daily Kos are joining forces again to try and push a discharge petition on immigration through the House. The rarely-used political maneuver would bypass Speaker Boehner’s power to control which bills in the House come up for a vote, and bring HR 15 (the House immigration bill) to the floor.
First, at least 218 House members have to sign it. That requires signatures from all or nearly all of the Democrats, and some 15 to 19 Republicans. Thirty House Republicans have indicated that they would support immigration reform with a path to citizenship. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) agreed with the need for a discharge petition last month. And advocates agree that finding a way to pass immigration reform this year is crucial.
As Becky Bond, political director of CREDO said in a statement:
Every week that we fail to pass immigration reform more families are broken up. Nancy Pelosi has shown leadership time and time again when it comes to the most pressing challenges — she can do so once more by filing a discharge petition and fix[ing] our broken and abusive immigration system.
