Allahpundit examines the House Republicans’ claim, articulated by Paul Ryan in the interview seen above, that maybe they won’t pass immigration reform because Obama can’t be trusted to enforce new border security laws:
The thing is, though, if you’ve concluded as a caucus that Obama’s gone rogue and can’t be trusted to dutifully carry out federal law, the answer isn’t to boycott immigration reform, it’s to boycott new legislation of all kinds. … Blaming Obama’s executive power grabs is a convenient way for Boehner, Ryan, Rubio et al. to dodge the real problem within the caucus, which is that conservatives don’t trust their own leadership to demand real, measurable border security improvements as an absolute prerequisite to legalizing illegals.
Weigel yawns:
The Obama-won’t-obey-the-law theory has always been a sort of chimera when it comes to talk of immigration reform.
Say the Senate bill was passed in the House tomorrow, conferenced, and signed by the president. He’s got three years left in office. The legalization component of the Senate bill depends on a border security standard that’s going to be determined by a panel of state governors. They have five years to sign off. If you think about the timing of the Affordable Care Act—passed in 2010, implemented at the end of 2013—there’s no real danger of Obama using a new immigration law to grant more amnesty. He could do that right now.
So, file these talking points under “Republicans Looking Busy.”
Sargent thinks Ryan’s comments are a distraction from the real debate:
The important thing to understand about Ryan’s quotes is their strategic vagueness. When Ryan says security and enforcement — the meeting of border metrics, E-Verify, etc. — must be “verified before the rest of the law can occur,” he’s deliberately fudging the dilemma Republicans face. Will the 11 million get some sort of temporary or provisional legal/work status before all these conditions are met? Or is even that automatically “amnesty” and therefore a nonstarter?
The Dish 