As I’m writing this, White House spokesman Jay Carney confirms that President Obama will pivot — not to jobs, silly! — from the budget mess to the immigration mess. But don’t worry your heads thinking that he’s going to go centrist and bi-partisan and do something right. He is going to go after yet another divisive partisan battle on the heels of the current divisive partisan battle, before this one is even over.
President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that stalled immigration reform would be a top priority once the fiscal crisis has been resolved.
“Once that’s done, you know, the day after, I’m going to be pushing to say, call a vote on immigration reform,” he told the Los Angeles affiliate of Spanish-language television network Univision.
He loves to make these promises to the Spanish-language media. But don’t call it pandering.
“There’s something in that bill [the Gang bill that passed the Senate but died in the House] for everyone!” Carney says. And by everyone, he means no one who wants real security on the border or who thinks it unwise to promise any form of amnesty for those already here illegally, drawing even more workers into an already tight labor market. He means, there’s something in it for Democrats who want to import millions of new voters, and there’s something in it to cause the Jennifer Rubins of the world to go off on Republicans again. There’s something in it for Democrats to demagogue and for Republicans to be divided about, again. It’s a whole new, very old and tiresome, fight.
The question before us is, does Obama intend to push immigration reform so that it rolls through a war-weary GOP-controlled House, or is he going to push immigration reform so that it gets rejected again while the fight deflects attention from the Obamacare rollout mess, and he gets to use the immigration bill’s failure as a campaign issue next year?
Or is it all of that? A heads-Obama-wins-tails-Republicans-lose sort of thing. If he gets it passed, he gets what he wants in policy and the GOP base is demoralized by yet another sellout. If it fails, he gets his campaign issue, and a divided GOP. All the while, another fight steals air from the Obamacare flop.
While we await the opening bell in that fight, it’s a fine time to note that Barack Obama is community organizing the country, making one demand after another, always escalating tensions while claiming that he isn’t, pitting Americans against one another for his own fun and profit, constantly picking fights with two and three purposes in mind, always to advance him and his party by whatever means are necessary. In the debt fight he is winning and may wrest the power of the purse from Congress. A reasonable man who really loves this country would just simply let people be for a while. But that’s not how Barack Obama does business. We’re never going to get a second’s peace from this guy.
We have three more years of his shenanigans to deal with. At least.
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