President Obama won’t take executive action on immigration until after the November elections, but it’s not likely to help him anyway.
That’s the consensus of Republicans and Democrats alike who say the White House was spooked by the political ramifications of the president issuing millions of deportation deferrals ahead of an already difficult election.
Yet Obama’s caution likely won’t insulate the White House from the same blowback he would have received had he gone through with his original timeline.
Because the president’s plan is seen as inevitable, Republicans will not relent in their attacks. And now they are accusing him of acting out of political desperation rather than being honest about his intentions.
“The only thing that is more shocking than Senate Democrats’ support for the president’s planned executive amnesty is the cravenness of asking him to proceed beginning the day after the midterms,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., a vocal opponent of the president’s immigration-reform efforts. “They don’t care what [voters] want, or what you think.”
The White House certainly stoked expectations for an imminent blueprint on immigration. For weeks, White House officials said the president would move forward on his advisers’ recommendations by the end of summer.
But then vulnerable Senate Democrats got angry — and their concerns did not fall on deaf ears at the White House.
“The reality the president has had to weigh is that we’re in the midst of the political season, and because of the Republicans’ extreme politicization of this issue, the president believes it would be harmful to the policy itself and to the long-term prospects for comprehensive immigration reform to announce administrative action before the elections,” said a White House official. “Because he wants to do this in a way that’s sustainable, the president will take action on immigration before the end of the year.”
Republicans now say the White House has itself to blame for finding a way to anger both wings of the Democratic Party.
“They let it hang out there in August,” said Republican strategist Ron Bonjean. “They let it snowball into a huge boulder without thinking about how to manage it. Maybe the White House is dealing with too many issues right now.”
Immigration looms so large over the president’s agenda that it followed him overseas on his trip to a NATO summit in Wales. In between fielding questions about the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and Russian aggression in Ukraine, Obama was forced to address his apparent delay on immigration.
The president didn’t exactly hide the content of his plan, but just remained coy about the timing of its release. The White House then decided to dump the news of the new immigration timeline on a sleepy Saturday morning.
Obama’s aides are trying to put the blame for the delay on a gridlocked Congress.
“The president is confident in his authority to act, and he will before the end of the year,” insisted the White House official. “But again, nothing will replace Congress acting on comprehensive immigration reform and the president will keep pressing Congress to act.”
Supporters of executive action on immigration reform say the president is badly misplaying his hand, allowing Republicans to score points and angering his base by slowing reforms long sought by progressives.
“We are bitterly disappointed in the president and we are bitterly disappointed in the Senate Democrats,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a group pushing immigration reform. “We advocates didn’t make the reform promise; we just made the mistake of believing it. The president and Senate Democrats have chosen politics over people; the status quo over solving real problems.”
“This delay is a betrayal of the Latino community and is certainly one of the single biggest attacks on Latino families by the Democratic Party in recent memory,” added Arturo Carmona, executive director of Presente.org.
Such sentiment is reflective of the rocky relationship between Obama and the Latino community. Hispanic voters overwhelmingly supported the president both in 2008 and 2012, but they still remain suspicious of his intentions, as Obama has presided over a record number of deportations.
“Hope and more of the same,” lamented one immigration activist who has met multiple times with White House officials. “That’s the story of this president.”
