President Obama may have exhausted his capacity to nudge immigration reform toward enactment this year.
“They either are for immigration reform or they’re not,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday, speaking of the House GOP majority. “That’ll be a choice they make.”
Although Obama is determined to “keep at it,” the fate of a statutory pathway to citizenship for an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants will not ride solely on Obama’s shoulders, according to the White House.
That sort of talk — distancing a president from a potential legislative defeat — is a sure sign that defeat is being contemplated in the West Wing, despite public expressions of confidence.
“He’s an important part of it, but it’s bigger than he is,” his spokesman said.
Carney’s effort to broaden the rationale for immigration reform beyond the president’s second-term ambitions was a tacit admission that Obama has little pull when it comes to House Republicans.
The White House has cast Obama as just one of many advocates working the issue from outside Congress, including employers who want changes; Senate Republicans who voted for an earned pathway to citizenship; and the Republican Party leadership, which believes it must increase support from Latino voters in 2016 and beyond.
But House Republicans may prove immune to those advocates’ political, economic, policy and moral arguments.
“In the end, you know, we can’t prevent lawmakers from making bad choices,” Carney added. “We can simply be part of a broad, comprehensive effort of persuasion.”
The president met Wednesday with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus at the White House, assuring lawmakers that he wants to leverage the Senate’s recent bipartisan passage of an immigration measure into a similar victory this year in the House.
When those lawmakers asked Obama during the nearly 90-minute meeting if he would take his advocacy back out on the road, the president said he is considering it.
“The president has an extraordinary ability unique to him to put sunlight … where there are clouds,” Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., told RCP after the meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
The lawmaker — who during Obama’s first term publicly challenged the president to make good on his pledges to enact reforms — clarified that the request Wednesday was not for campaign-style GOP-bashing.
“I didn’t say, ‘Use the bully pulpit and beat anybody up.’ There’s a difference,” Gutierrez explained.
The meeting with Hispanic lawmakers came a day after a similar White House session with the Congressional Black Caucus. And it followed the White House release of a report summarizing federal and academic studies that cited benefits to the economy should Congress help undocumented immigrants gain legal status.
While encouraging the Senate to pass a reform measure, Obama assumed a decidedly backseat role at the request of Democrats in the upper chamber, who feared his overt involvement on Capitol Hill might harm prospects for GOP votes. Senate reform advocates gingerly referred to the president as “the outside cheerleader.”
(With that bill now passed, however, the president will meet Thursday with Sens. John McCain and Chuck Schumer to discuss the reform, the White House said. Vice President Biden will also attend.)
Obama’s leverage appears spent with House conservatives, however, who have grown more hostile to reform as the 2014 midterm elections draw closer. Echoing the analysis of many conservatives that the GOP’s viability may hinge on its outreach to Latinos hasn’t done the trick. Nor has private stroking or public cajoling.
Many House Republicans, who say they do not trust the Obama administration to enforce tough border provisions of any reform law, declare they will not be influenced by the White House or public opinion polling; or be steered by a weakened Speaker John Boehner; or persuaded by some of the most popular elected leaders in their party or by VIPs in the business and religious communities.
“Of course there are limits to the powers of the bully pulpit on every issue,” Carney said when asked if immigration was testing Obama’s second-term clout.
“This is a methodical effort, using all the tools available to us and to him, using all the tools available to advocates and lawmakers who support immigration reform, to get this done,” he said.
RCP congressional correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns contributed to this report.
WH: Obama Alone Can"t Sway House on Reform
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