Recall a post here about Issa proposing two house bills:
1) Pure enforcement
2) Visas for immigrants with high tech skills
Nothing looking like amnesty.
There is not much that Dems can do with those.
Boehner (or Ryan) taking just those two to conference and coming back with completely different bills (amnesty for illegals) and putting them up for Dem votes strikes me as near zero Chance, but I know its a popular conspiracy theory here.
You are right about Dems see it as a wedge issue, but few in house GOP want to give Obama anything now.
Are you joking? Any immigration bill coming out of the House will be sent to the Senate for amendment and a vote. They will then send it to conference, where it will resemble the Gang of 8 bill. This is the strategy developed by the GOPe to create a Trojan Horse for the Senate.
CONGRESSWOMAN BACHMANN: ...Everyone is going to help Obama achieve his number one political agenda item, which is to bring in tens of millions of new voters to support his agenda. Why in the world any self respecting Republican would want to get behind this effort is beyond me, but it seems like this is what they want to do. Their first worry is not border security. The Senate bill was a fake border security bill. We were betrayed and lied to by the Republicans in the Senate. So we don’t have a border security bill. And the way that you pass a bill is you’ve got to get a bill through the Senate, a bill through the House and on the president’s desk. Well, two out of the three are effectively done. We know that the president will sign a bill that has amnesty in it. The Senate already passed it. Now it’s up to the House. So what is about to happen to the House is that we’re going to get what I call a Trojan horse. It will be a bill that will sound great, it will be all about border security, and who couldn’t get behind that? But if that bill passes with the help of conservatives out of the House, it goes to what’s called a conference committee. Because the bill won’t be the same as the bill that came out of the Senate. That’s where the politicians get together behind closed doors and they figure out one compromised bill that goes back to the chamber. Well, the one must have for President Obama is legalization, and legalization equals amnesty, which equals citizenship, which equals tens of millions of new voters that will vote to forever cement in place his progressive agenda. This is where the whole thing breaks down. So we have not had one minute of discussion for the whole Republican conference in the House.
As one who lobbies on the Hill on immigration issues, I can tell you that conservative Congressmen like Steve King, Lou Barletta, Michelle Bachmann, et. al. don't want any immigration bill out of the House for the reasons indicated above.
Boehner (or Ryan) taking just those two to conference and coming back with completely different bills (amnesty for illegals) and putting them up for Dem votes strikes me as near zero Chance, but I know its a popular conspiracy theory here.
It depends on how you define amnesty. Any legislation that allows the lawbreakers to stay and work here legally, the object of their crime, is amnesty. Citizenship is just the cherry on top. I can see the Dems agreeing to a blanket legalization with citizenship being discussed later. Boehner, Ryan, Cantor, Goodlatte, and Pete Sessions among others will say that this is not amnesty. Obama will say he is willing to compromise, but citizenship will have to be discussed as some point down the road. It is a scam.
You are right about Dems see it as a wedge issue, but few in house GOP want to give Obama anything now.
I think you are greatly underestimating the tremendous pressure being put on the Reps by their corporate donors. There is a reason why about 100 of them flew into DC several weeks ago to put pressure on the GOP leadership. They would not have wasted their time if they did not think that something will come of it.
The big prize for the GOP is the doubling of the guest worker program. They will use amnesty (legalization of status) as a bargaining chip to satisfy their corporate paymasters, especially with midterms looming in less than a year.
FYI: The Gang of 8 bill was never submitted to the House. If it had been, it would have been blue-slipped and sent back to the Senate for revision because it contains appropriation and revenue language that must originate in the House.