Immigration policy disagreement gets personal

The Hill:

Tensions over immigration reform flared into the open Tuesday as the White House and House Republicans exchanged rhetorical barbs over the GOP’s commitment to an issue central to President Obama’s agenda.

White House press secretary Jay Carney criticized as “laughable” a claim by Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) that nobody had done more than him to fix the nation’s immigration system.

The House Republican chairman of the immigration subcommittee, meanwhile, attacked White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer as a “demagogic, self-serving political hack” for his criticism of an emerging GOP proposal.

The back-and-forth marked a departure from the careful tone that both the White House and Republican leaders had adopted on immigration in recent months, with Democrats growing increasingly impatient with the House’s slow-moving, piecemeal approach to the issue.

It also underscored the perilous path for the legislative push in the GOP-controlled House, which is likely to break for a five-week August recess without considering any immigration bills on the floor.

The House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday held an initial hearing on the legal status of immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents. The panel’s chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) are crafting legislation to grant this limited population a path to citizenship, but Democrats have warned that they would not support proposals that do not address all 11 million illegal immigrants.

At the hearing, Republicans made clear that they view immigrant children as unique and argued they should be treated differently from people who knowingly overstayed their visas or crossed the border illegally.

“I do not believe that parents who made the decision to illegally enter the U.S. while forcing their children to join them should be afforded the same treatment as these kids,” Goodlatte said at the outset.

The chairman of the immigration subcommittee, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), noted that federal law treats children differently in almost every case.

“Simply put, children brought here have not committed a crime, misdemeanor or otherwise,” Gowdy said. “The adults have, but the children have not.”
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Pfeiffer made a mistake that will make it much harder for the White House to get a compromise on the immigration bill.  What they are likely to get instead is the piece meal approach they are critical of.  I get the feeling that the  White House would rather have the issue than a deal, but the House approach complicates the White House spin on the issue and what the House is proposing is much closer to what polls show voters want.  Pfeiffer may be showing his frustration with that polling.