Jophiel wrote:
Hilariously, Gbaji claimed that Obama talked the Democrats out of supporting immigration reform...
Incorrect. He talked them into inserting amendments during the committee process that made it impossible for it to pass the House.
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...but the Senate bill passed with 67 votes.
Yeah. Because, as I thought I'd already explained a couple times already, the changes that the Dems introduced into the Senate bill were designed specifically to violate the conditions that House Republicans had stated at the very beginning of the process were required. Both parties in both houses started out by listing things that were deal breakers for them, and the plan was to go forward with a set of low hanging fruit solutions that didn't violate any of those deal breakers. Everyone was on board with this, right until Obama decided to get involved.
You honestly don't remember the whole bit about the White House being initially upset that they weren't invited into the process from day one? The GOP initially met semi-secretly with their Dem counterparts specifically out of a fear that political pressure from the White House would poison the process. Then they had this big press release where they announced that they'd been working on a bi-partisan, bi-house immigration reform. Then it was like Obama's head exploded, his press secretary said nasty things about how congress shouldn't keep the White House out of things if they want them to pass, then the Dems in the Judiciary Committee suddenly got invited to meetings at the White House that the GOP members were not invited to, and then, like by magic, amendments appeared in the bill that violated the House "deal breakers" from the start.
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But Obama supposedly killed it by talking to Democratic Senate leaders and telling them to block reform proposals.
Sigh. Again. For the really really slow. They didn't "block" reform proposals. They added to the proposed bill things that they knew the House GOP would never pass, effectively ensuring that the bill would never become law.
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You get a headache just trying to imagine Gbaji's world.
Um... It's not my world. It's the world of politics. The concept of introducing a poison pill to a piece of legislation is not new, and certainly not something I made up just now. That's exactly what the Dems did. But what's interesting is that initially they were willing to work with the GOP on a stripped down bill that contained only the things everyone could agree on. It was only after Obama became aware of what was going on that suddenly things changed. We can speculate as to how willing the Dems were at any point in going along with the GOP plan, but to suggest that the GOP didn't want to pass any immigration reform at all is completely wrong.
The issue, as I've said from the start, was that the Right and Left tend to have different ideas of what immigration reform should entail. To paint one side as "for immigration reform" and the other as "against immigration reform" is incredibly unfair.