WASHINGTON — Republicans say their latest stand against President Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration isn’t about immigration at all — it’s about the Constitution.
Their best hope is that 2016 Latino voters, most of whom support Obama’s actions to keep some undocumented immigrants from being deported, will see it that way, too.
Republicans said after the 2012 presidential elections that it was imperative to win over more Latino voters, and singled out immigration reform as a key opportunity. But as the 2016 election season creeps closer, GOP members of Congress are instead taking to the House and Senate floors to rail against policies that give work authorization to some undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children or are the parents of U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents.
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Some Republicans in Congress, though, have said it’s time to move on from the current DHS battle. Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) told reporters on Wednesday that “we should have never fought this battle on DHS funding.”
Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), another author of the 2013 comprehensive immigration reform bill, lamented on the Senate floor on Wednesday that the president’s actions would make further reform efforts more difficult, but said Republicans should still pursue them.
“To attempt to use a spending bill in order to try to poke a finger in the president’s eye is not a good move, in my view,” he said. “I believe that rather than poke the president in the eye we ought to put legislation on his desk, and we ought to use this time — we’ve already used up two weeks trying to attach measures to a funding bill when we could have used this time to actually move actual immigration legislation.”
