While Spanish-language media is furious at the House GOP’s latest excuse for not passing immigration reform, liberal commentators are ridiculing Speaker Boehner and his timidity in the face of the House Tea Party/conservative/Steve King wing.
Yesterday, both Jon Stewart of the Daily Show and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC skewered House Republicans for their continued obstinacy on immigration reform in an environment where, one by one, all of their excuses have been stripped away. The border is more secure than ever, Republicans are free to pass legislation piecemeal, and reform doesn’t even have to be implemented until Obama is out of office. Yet Republicans continue to insist that they can’t pass reform, because they just don’t trust Obama.
“That doesn’t make sense!” Jon Stewart said during his segment. “We have an urgent issue in this country, immigration, that strikes at the very heart of who we are as a people, that we must solve, but we can’t, because the only way of keeping the president on enforcing our current disastrous immigration law is to talk about, but not deliver, a better one.”
Stewart mentioned that House Republicans don’t exactly have a stellar history of enforcing enacted law. In this Congress alone, they’ve voted 48 times to repeal Obamacare, blocked countless federal nominations, and voted to gut bills already passed into law (like Dodd-Frank).
Meanwhile, Rachel Maddow, on her show pointed out that House Republicans in the last few months have actually ignored anger from right-wing conservatives in order to pass the debt ceiling, the farm bill, and the spending bill. As she asked, “If Republicans don’t really care what these conservatives have to say on the debt ceiling and the farm bill and the spending bills, why can’t Republicans not care what these groups have to say on immigration?”
The Daily Show
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Maddow immigration segment begins about 5 minutes in:
