President Obama is not second-guessing his decision to delay executive on immigration reform until after the midterms, even though the move didn’t spare Democrats from getting trounced on Election Day, the White House said Thursday.
“The thing that the president was most focused on was protecting the issue of immigration reform and making sure that it was an issue that continued to be a viable one in Washington, D.C., one that’s viable in the United States Congress and one that has bipartisan support,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said. “And the fact is had the president made this decision in the months before the election, that had the election turned out the same way, we would be sitting here discussing how the issue of immigration would be dead for a long time because Republicans would be running around saying [Democrats lost] because [of] the president’s executive action.”
Obama is now in a tough spot, given that his executive order will alienate the very Republicans who seem more open to working with the White House in the wake of taking control of the Senate.
Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Thursday that the president is “going to burn himself” on immigration, accusing the White House of ignoring the message voters sent on Election Day. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Wednesday equated executive action on immigration reform to “waving a red flag in front of a bull.”
The president, however, has calculated that he can’t afford to back out of his pledge to the Hispanic community, who mostly stayed home on Election Day.
“We have the president who still has the capacity to act on his own using his executive authority to solve many of the problems associated with our broken immigration system,” Earnest insisted. “And the president’s determined to move forward on that before the end of the year.”
