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| The Waiting Game Photographer Charles O'Rear / U.S. National Archives Used under Creative Commons license |
On
Wednesday this week, John Boehner confirmed that comprehensive immigration
reform efforts on Capitol Hill are dead this year. Apparently, House Republicans just aren’t up
for it.
Speaking
to reporters, Mr. Boehner said that House Republicans are still working on a
deal, but “The idea that we're going to take up a
1,300-page bill that no one had ever read, which is what the Senate did, is not
going to happen in the House.” He continued, “And frankly, I’ll make clear we have
no intention of ever going to conference on the Senate bill.”
Unfortunately,
this means that a broad bill that would include a path to citizenship for the
11 million undocumented immigrants already in the country will have to wait
until 2014.
The
Republican-controlled house has taken a piecemeal approach to immigration
reform, working to pass individual bills to address border security or to
overhaul the guest worker program. The
concern of the House Republicans is that these smaller wills will be swallowed
up in a conference committee with the Senate’s larger plan. Mr. Boehner has made it clear that he won’t
let this happen.
For more on this story, check out this New York times article.
