A White House spokesman fired back at Speaker Paul Ryan on immigration Monday by saying the Wisconsin Republican is the one who cannot be trusted on the issue.
“It’s particularly ironic for Speaker Ryan to make that claim when Speaker Ryan himself was instrumental in putting together the agreement and blocking its consideration, even though he knew it would have passed,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest. He was responding to Ryan’s argument, first made Friday, that Obama cannot be trusted when it comes to immigration.
In 2013, Ryan encouraged House colleagues to forge a bipartisan plan to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws. But after a sweeping bipartisan plan passed the Senate, he eventually worked to keep the House from following suit. Leadership never brought it to the floor and the effort died at the end of 2013.
Ryan repeated during Sunday morning talk show appearances “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.”
Earnest said he took the comment “with a healthy sense of irony that apparently is not shared on the other side of the aisle,” given Ryan’s for-it-before-he-was-against-it stance in 2013.
Ryan’s website still says he supports comprehensive immigration reform, including allowing illegal immigrants to “get right with the law” and eventually become citizens.
But he said that because Obama took executive actions to defer some deportations after similar legislation died in Congress, he doesn’t trust the president enough to pass comprehensive immigration legislation while Obama is in office.
“He’s welcome to disagree with that,” Earnest said about Ryan’s stance on the executive orders. “But it’s hard for him to make the claim the president hasn’t acted in good faith on immigration when Speaker Ryan actively thwarted a compromise he himself helped to broker.”
“For him to come back and claim it’s somebody else’s fault? It’s preposterous,” Earnest said.
