Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), a member of the Senate’s bipartisan Gang of Eight on immigration, has really high hopes for the chamber’s immigration reform bill. In fact, he thinks that the impact it can have on the nation is akin to that of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Schumer made the comment about the bill’s potential on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday morning.
“I think the pressure is going to mount,” Schumer told “SOTU” host Candy Crowley. “This has the potential of becoming the next civil rights movement.”
He then tried to placed the burden on House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), arguing that if Boehner doesn’t pass the Senate’s bill it’s going to infuriate Americans.
“I could envision in the late summer or early fall, if Boehner tries to bottle the bill up or put something in without a path to citizenship, if there’s no path to citizenship, there’s no bill,” Schumer continued. “But if he puts something, if he tries to bottle it up or do things like that, I could see one million people on the mall in Washington, on the platform would not be the usual suspects, but the leaders of business, the leaders of the Evangelical movement, the leaders of hi-tech, as well as most Americans pressuring the House to act. I think they’re going to have to act whether they have a majority of Republicans or not.”
Boehner has already announced that he will not support any immigration reform legislation that doesn’t meet the requirements of the “Hastert Rule” – that it has the support of the majority of the majority party in the chamber – thus making it unlikely for him to support the bill as it stands. Many of the more conservative members of the House GOP believe that the bill shouldn’t include amnesty for the 11 million illegals already in the country and do not believe the bill does enough to secure the nation’s borders.
Watch Schumer compare the immigration reform to the Civil Rights Movement below.
