Today, the House Judiciary Committee held yet another hearing on whether or not President Obama is enforcing immigration law — contrary to what Republicans keep claiming, he is, to the tune of $18 billion every year. And Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), a champion of immigration reform and a critic of the House Republicans’ inaction on legislation, was on hand to make it clear what he thought about the charade.
Castigating House Republicans for stonewalling after they’d led immigrant families to believe a solution might be on hand for the separation of families, Gutierrez called the event “another do-nothing hearing in a do-nothing Congress to arrive at do-nothing legislation”:
This is political theater. That’s why we’re here. We’re not here to really hear about your interpretations of the Constitution, as wise and as well-founded as they are. Let’s skip over the obvious. The obvious [point of the hearing] is, ‘We had some principles on immigration reform. We don’t want to deal with them, so why don’t we blame the president?’ So what we have here is another do-nothing hearing in a do-nothing Congress to arrive at do-nothing legislation.
What are we doing here? We’re doing nothing. We have a problem in America: 11 million [undocumented] people. They need help. And you know what really, really hurt me the most was that we raised the expectation. We said to those people there’s hope.
When the speaker said this is hard, I said, ‘So what’s new?’ That’s what we were sent here to do: hard things.
Watch the video below:
