The House Democratic Leader’s press office (that’s Nancy Pelosi, don’t think of her too much lest you cry for the days when she was in charge and got things done) is hammering new Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) for his pathetic game of already blaming President Obama for his own upcoming failures.
Just in case you missed it in his Sunday show appearances or first presser, Ryan penned an Op-Ed for USA Today in which he again blamed President Obama for Republicans refusing to take up immigration reform for the next several years, writing, ”The House of Representatives will not vote on comprehensive immigration legislation as long as President Obama is in office.” That will show Obama! Neener-neener.
The Democratic Leader’s office hammered Paul Ryan with a round up of editorials blasting him for being so pathetic this morning (their bold):
USA TODAY Editorial Board: Paul Ryan walls off immigration reform
…Congress could take a giant step toward resolving this mess. But, as new speaker of the House Paul Ryan made clear in his first round of Sunday talk show interviews, that’s not going to happen, certainly not during Barack Obama’s presidency.
Ryan said the House has no intention of considering immigration overhaul as long as Obama is in office. His flimsy excuse for inaction? That Republicans can’t trust a president who used executive orders to make broad changes to immigration policy, instead of working through the legislative process.
… Obama acted only because the GOP-controlled House refused to even take up immigration reform after the Senate passed a bipartisan measure, 68-32, that would combine tighter border enforcement with an arduous pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers…
Ryan apparently felt he couldn’t get elected speaker unless he made a pact with the House’s rejectionist wing. And when one of your party’s leading presidential candidates offers impractical fixes and calls Mexican immigrants “rapists,” it would take unusual courage to stand up for a better way.
No matter what excuse Ryan gives, though, this is the view that he enables by putting immigration reform off-limits. It is unworthy of someone who claims to want to lead one of the government’s most dysfunctional institutions in a new and better direction.
That sentiment - that Speaker Ryan has sold out millions to appease a few dozen radical Republicans - is being echoed by editorials across the country:
Miami Herald: Reform still stuck in GOP House
It’s no surprise that U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, the new speaker of the House, declared that immigration reform is dead during the current Congress. The tea-party faction of his Republican caucus would tear him apart politically if he dared to bring a genuine reform measure to the floor.
But it’s important to set the record straight because the issue is far too important to the future of the country, and it’s not going away just because one party can’t deal with it: Blaming President Obama for the problem, as Mr. Ryan did this week, is a gross distortion of the record…
▪The Senate actually passed a bipartisan immigration reform bill after Mr. Obama’s 2012 re-election with 14 Republican votes.
▪ When that bill moved to the House, Mr. Obama generally stayed quiet in order to give then-Speaker John Boehner room for political maneuver. Yet even with that, House Republicans refused to go along…
Now the Republicans are stuck with the line that Mr. Obama can’t be trusted. But that doesn’t make it true. It doesn’t square with the record…The speaker’s story that the president can’t be trusted may play well in his caucus, but it won’t play at all with the voters…
Sacramento Bee: Paul Ryan caves on immigration as he becomes House speaker
House Speaker Paul Ryan’s weekend pronouncement that a much-needed immigration overhaul won’t happen provides a sad commentary on the start of his speakership.
In other words, one of his first acts of leadership was to cede immigration policy to the likes of Rep. Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican and member of the so-called Freedom Caucus. Brooks, who has held elective office off and on since 1982, won his congressional seat in the Republican wave of 2010, and makes illegal immigration one of his signature issues.
In 2011, he declared he would “do anything short of shooting” illegal immigrants to make them stop “taking jobs from American citizens.” In 2014, he accused Democrats of launching a “war on whites.”
…Brooks exacted the pledge from Ryan, writing in a letter he submitted to the congressional record that the Wisconsin Republican agreed to “not allow any immigration bill to reach the House floor” unless a majority of House Republicans support it…
Now, there will be no immigration bill, not in an election year, not when the president is a lame duck, and definitely not when all an ambitious politician needs to become speaker is to let some of his supposed convictions go.
Minneapolis Star Tribune: Speaker Ryan plays politics with immigration reform
Making his first rounds of Sunday talk shows over the weekend, newly anointed U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan dropped this little bombshell: There will be no movement on immigration in the coming year because he finds President Obama “untrustworthy” on the issue.
This stands in stark contrast to Ryan’s statements just five days ago, when he said, upon assuming his new role, that Republicans and Democrats should “pray for a deeper understanding” of one another and work together as representatives of the American people rather than as partisans…
Little mention has been made of the fact that President Ronald Reagan used his executive powers to protect minor children from deportation in 1987…Similarly, President George H.W. Bush in 1990 granted deportation protection to 1.5 million spouses and children of those legalized under amnesty. His executive order covered about 40 percent of the then-undocumented population. Obama’s executive order covers about the same percentage, which today is just under 5 million. No Republicans accused Reagan or Bush of overstepping their authority or declared either untrustworthy.
A cynical person might believe that Ryan’s ultimate goal is to preserve immigration as a galvanizing election issue while neatly sidestepping any messy negotiations that might bring his side in line for rebukes from the right.
House Speaker Paul Ryan has done what was expected of him: He blamed President Barack Obama for Republicans’ inability to pass immigration legislation.
Actually, House Republicans have proved eminently capable of passing legislation; they already passed an immigration plan this year. They voted in January to strip undocumented immigrants, including the “Dreamers” who were brought to the U.S. as children, of the protection from deportation that Obama had extended to them in a 2012 executive action.
That vote represented the will of the Republican conference, which opposes legalizing the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. But chasing guiltless Dreamers out of the country sends the wrong message in a national election. So Ryan is required to repeat the cover story that his predecessor designed.
…The Senate subsequently passed bipartisan immigration legislation with 14 Republican votes….When action moved to the House, Obama kept mostly quiet on the issue to give Boehner maximum room to maneuver. But restrictionists in the House Republican conference shut down the process. And once it was clear that House Republicans would blow up any effort that provided relief to undocumented immigrants, Boehner shifted rhetorical gears.
Speaker Ryan should really have waited at least a week before blaming President Obama for his failures. The media could have swallowed that like they swallowed Boehner’s “jobs bill” — the empty papers he waved around during his pressers, in front of a press wall screaming “JOBS!”, in spite of his failure on jobs bills.
Instead, Ryan came out of the gate full of smug hubris, playing the “blame Obama” card handed down from Boehner, but with much less finesse than the former Speaker. Ryan only knows how to appeal to the beltway media and the Tea Party, both of whom seem to love a good story so much that they’ll look past the empty vessel telling it.
Speaker Ryan probably still thinks this is working, but the nation hears nothing but a huge whine and sees nothing but a shaking finger pointed desperately at the President because Ryan hasn’t the guts to face down the extremists running his party.
Ryan came into this knowing he would have to sell out totally and lie to the public daily — and he signed up willingly, eagerly even. He demanded concessions and then when he didn’t get them, he caved and grabbed the gavel looking for glory — which makes him exactly like the extremist members of his party. And so very different from John Boehner.
You know things are bad when Democrats can use the media to beat up a Republican. Poorly played, Speaker Ryan.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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