President Barack Obama’s ambitious immigration reform plan may not see the light of day as Paul Ryan, the new Speaker of the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives, has made it clear that he cannot work with “a president who has proven himself untrustworthy on this issue”.
In his first comments on the subject as Speaker, Ryan said in a series of Sunday interviews that President Obama cannot be trusted on the immigration issue as he has circumvented Congress with an executive order to shield deportation of millions of illegal immigrants. Ryan’s reference was to Obama’s executive orders last year to protect up to 5 million undocumented persons from deportation, followed by issuance of work permits to those with clean records. Obama asserted at the time that he had the legal authority to act, but his orders were soon enough challenged by several States and the matter is still pending before a federal appeals court.
The immigration overhaul has remained stuck in Congress since June 2013, when the then Democrat-controlled Senate passed a bipartisan immigration reform legislation but the Republican-dominated House of Representatives refused to take it up. The House inaction prompted Obama to take the executive action route in November 2014.
Ryan, like predecessor John Boehner, was emphatic in his comments on the subject on Sunday and went a step further to indicate that the immigration reform issue was as good as dead until the end of Obama’s tenure in January 2017.
“look, I think it would be a ridiculous notion to try and work on an issue like
this with a president we simply cannot trust on this issue,” Ryan told CBS’s “Face the Nation”, adding, “He tried to go it alone, circumventing the legislative process with his executive orders, so that is not in the cards.” On NBC’s “Meet the Press”, Ryan said: “The president has proven himself untrustworthy on this issue because he tried to unilaterally rewrite the law himself. Presidents don’t write laws. Congress does.”
While the Ryan comments are bound to disappoint the White House, they are sure to appeal to the hardcore conservative fringe of the Republican Party that had made the going difficult for Boehner on a number of issues vis-à-vis the Obama administration, prompting him to quit.