White House Offers Stealth Campaign to Support
Immigration Bill
WASHINGTON — The hide-out has no sign on the door, but inside Dirksen
201 is a spare suite of offices the White House has transformed into its covert
immigration war room on Capitol Hill.
Strategically located
down the hall from the Senate Judiciary Committee in one of the city’s massive
Congressional office buildings, the work space normally reserved for the vice
president is now the hub of a stealthy legislative operation run by President Obama’s staff. Their goal is to quietly secure passage of the
first immigration overhaul in a quarter century.
“We are trying hard not to be heavy handed about what we are doing,” said
Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council and the
president’s point person on immigration.
Six years ago President George W. Bush publicly sent cabinet secretaries
to roam the Capitol building daily to try to woo Republican senators for a
similar immigration bill. But this time, high-profile help from the White House
is anathema to many Republicans who do not want to be seen by constituents as
carrying out the will of Mr. Obama.
So while lawmakers from both parties are privately relying on the White
House and its agencies to provide technical information to draft scores of
amendments to the immigration bill, few Republicans are willing to admit it.
Some are so eager to prove that the White House is not pulling the strings that
their aides say the administration is not playing any role at all.
“President Obama’s concept of engaging Congress is giving a speech that
nobody up here listens to,” said Alex Conant, a spokesman for Senator Marco
Rubio, Republican of Florida, who is an important supporter of the immigration
legislation. “If passing legislation is like making sausage, then this White
House is like a bunch of vegetarians.”
As senators near a final tally on the 867-page bill before the July 4
holiday, immigration supporters acknowledge serious risks in Mr. Obama’s
approach: leaving the public advocacy for a major piece of his legacy in the
hands of others. If the bill fails to become law, Mr. Obama will be open to
criticism from Hispanics that he did not put the weight of his office behind
the legislation.
But Mr. Obama has made some careful public efforts, including a speech
last week at the White House in which he strongly endorsed the legislation. On
Tuesday while on Air Force One in Europe,
he called a Democratic negotiator, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, to
reinforce his opposition to part of a Republican amendment that would have what
the administration views as unrealistically tough requirements for border
security.
Inside Room 201, the administration has gathered a collection of its own
Congressional lobbyists, policy specialists and experts from an alphabet soup
of the agencies that will have to put the immigration legislation into effect
if it passes. They all moved into the vice president’s offices on June 10,
setting up laptop computers and thick binders filled with proposed amendments
on an oval conference table.
“We have folks who know the Senate really well, who know the players, who
have been through this before so they know exactly what Senate staff needs,”
Ms. Muñoz said. “We are deeply, deeply engaged.”
The group is led by Ed Pagano, Mr. Obama’s chief liaison to the Senate
and a former chief of staff to Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat
who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He is joined by Felicia Escobar and
Tyler Moran, senior advisers at the Domestic Policy Council, and Esther
Olavarria, director for immigration reform for the National Security Council
staff. Some days, Ms. Muñoz and Miguel Rodriguez, the president’s chief
Congressional liaison, are there too.
On one day this week, those at the table included two representatives
from the Justice Department, a homeland security official, a State Department
official and someone from the Department of Labor. Throughout the day they
pored through proposed amendments, offering suggestions to the staff of the
senators who offered them and flagging problems that might arise.
At one point, Mr. Pagano, Ms. Escobar and the other White House advisers
huddled for 45 minutes in the smaller of the two rooms with Mr. Leahy’s top
aides. Working from spreadsheets, they discussed each of the 10 amendments that
Mr. Leahy was likely to bring to the floor for a vote that day.
“When Republican amendments are filed and we are trying to decide, ‘Can
we accept this? Can we accept this without some modifications?’ they are the
ones who tell us, ‘This is quite doable,’ ” said one Democratic Senate
leadership aide, who requested anonymity to talk about legislative strategy.
Passage of immigration legislation is critical to Mr. Obama’s legacy but
could also help Republicans repair their image with Hispanics — a rare
confluence of political interests that has stoked optimism among supporters
that it will pass the Senate in the next several weeks.
Mr. Obama’s political advisers say they are confident he will get the
credit he deserves if the bill passes later this summer, even as those on Mr.
Bush’s old team say an in-your-face approach worked best for them. (Although
that immigration bill ultimately failed.)
“There’s nothing like having the White House represented in the
negotiations,” Carlos Gutierrez, Mr. Bush’s second commerce secretary and a top
immigration adviser, said in an interview. “It saves time. It saves effort. It
just makes things more agile, more transparent.”
Mr. Gutierrez and others on Mr. Bush’s team concede that the current
situation is very different. In 2007 the Republican White House believed that
loudly demonstrating Mr. Bush’s support for the immigration overhaul would be
helpful to Republican senators who needed to explain their support back home.
This year, Republicans would recoil at such a display from the Democratic
president.
“The big thing is getting a primary challenger from the right,” Mr.
Gutierrez said. “That’s what really worries Republicans.”
In the meantime, two Republican aides said emphatically that White House
officials had not participated at all in the drafting of the bill by the
bipartisan group of senators.
But White House and administration officials have been in frequent touch
with Republican senators as the lawmakers have to come up with dozens of amendments
on tighter border security and other parts of the bill they deem insufficient.
White House officials declined to name them.
Mr. Pagano’s team is planning to remain in Dirksen 201 for as long as the
immigration bill remains on the Senate floor — clandestine, but not completely
invisible.
“People know
where to find them,” a Democratic aide said. “It’s like going to the nurse’s
office. They know where it is.”
PAT BUCHANAN ON OBAMA’S
HISPANDERING FOR THE ILLEGALS’ VOTES:
more at this link – post on your Facebook and email broadcast
OBAMA: LA RAZA’S GREAT HISPANDERER!
What is the response of
Barack Obama, who took an oath to see to it that federal laws are faithfully
executed?
He is siding with the
law-breakers. He is pandering to the ethnic lobbies. He is not berating a
Mexican regime that aids and abets this invasion of the country of which he is
commander in chief. Instead, he attacks the government of Arizona for trying to
fill a gaping hole in law enforcement left by his own dereliction of duty.
THE AMNESTY HOAX – EVERY DAY OBAMA SABOTAGES OUR
BORDERS MORE TO BUILD THE LA RAZA DEM PARTY BASE of ILLEGALS. SUCH IS TO
DESTROY THE GOP AND PROVIDE MILLIONS OF MEXICANS OUR JOBS, WELFARE AND ANCHOR
BABY BREEDING FACTORIES.
WIKILEAKS EXPOSES
OBAMA’S AGENDA OF ASSAULTING OUR BORDERS, AMERICANS IN JOBS HE WANTS TO FILL
WITH ILLEGALS
more at this link – post on your Facebook and email broadcast
“While the Obama
Administration downplays violence along the U.S.-Mexico border, authorities in
Texas reveal that Mexican drug cartels have transformed parts of the state into
a war zone where shootings, beheadings, kidnappings and murders are common.
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