Forget President Obama’s prime-time address. Carly Fiorina had his number on “Meet the Press” this past Sunday. And it tells you all you need to know about the failure of our press to hold the president to his own words that she was completely ignored. Fiorina is the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who ran, unsuccessfully, in 2010 on the Republican ticket for the Senate seat held by California’s Barbara Boxer. She brought up immigration in a discussion of how Republicans should react to a president behaving as if the walloping his agenda took at the elections earlier this month had never happened. Fiorina pointed to the elephant in the room: For all the president’s big talk about how much he wants an immigration bill, whenever he’s had an opportunity to advance one, he’s either let it slide or worked behind the scenes to sabotage it. Here’s how she put it: “He sunk comprehensive immigration reform in 2007. He did nothing to push forward immigration reform when he had the Senate, the House and the White House. He said in ’11 and ’12 he couldn’t do anything. And then he delayed his action for the elections. Unbelievable cynicism.” Let’s take them one by one. In 2007, an immigration deal backed by both Republican President George W. Bush and Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy was making its way through the Senate. Publicly, then-Sen. Obama was all for it. Backstage, however, he supported labor-backed poison-pill amendments designed to sink it. In a story at the time on what was going on, Politico described it this way: “The biggest threats to an immigration bill spearheaded by Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy have come from within: Twice this week, senators from his own Democratic Party were poised to back amendments that could have killed the fragile compromise.” A year later, Sen. Obama told the National Council of La Raza this during his campaign for president: “I think it’s time for a president who won’t walk away from something as important as comprehensive reform just because it becomes politically unpopular . . . I will make it a top priority in my first year as the president of the United States of America.” In his first two years in office, President Obama enjoyed lopsided Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate. If an immigration bill had really been a “top priority,” he could have had it. It wasn’t. Earlier this year, President Obama threatened the same executive order on immigration he’s now going to take. But what does it say that he put it off until after the midterm election — once again elevating political convenience over a supposed core principle? Even now, his promised executive order won’t give America real reform: one that provides a clear and lawful path for talented and hardworking people to come here, a guest-worker program that meets the needs of our economy, and a resolution that doesn’t leave in limbo the final status of the millions here illegally. All his order does is shield them from deportation and allow some to work. Here’s the shorthand: Like every other action this president has taken on immigration, this new one will, in fact, make genuine immigration reform less rather than more likely. Still, he’s given a complete pass.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 05:29:07 +0000
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