Posted on 07/23/2014 8:00:29 AM PDT by cotton1706
On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of Congress’ few and most vocal Republican advocates of comprehensive immigration reform, shared the line that he’s apparently decided to lean on through the rest of the 2014 election cycle: “There’ll be no immigration reform because of the crisis on the border. I blame Obama for this moment.”
Graham has a long history of seizing on an issue of possible bipartisan compromise, watching hard-liners in his party kill that possibility, and then abandoning hope of the compromise because Obama didn’t manage the “optics” or the schedule or something insignificant. He knows perfectly well that climate change legislation didn’t move forward in Obama’s first term because the Republican Party conveniently stopped believing in its existence, that nascent immigration reform hopes stalled in Obama’s first term because Mitch McConnell’s Senate minority staked out a path of total, filibuster-happy obstructionism, and that comprehensive immigration reform legislation died in Obama’s second term because the Republican House of Representatives refused to act on it.
He knows these things because they are facts. But hey, he’s being a team player ahead of the elections, so sure, it’s Obama’s fault that House Republicans long ago decided it wasn’t in their political interest to pass a CIR bill and conference it with the Senate version and are vaguely using the border crisis as cover.
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
Lindsey Graham is not a phony. He is genuinely the person he has shown himself to be.
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