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“I told the people at Fox, I wanted to talk about this today three or four times,” Limbaugh said. “And they wouldn’t do it. They were not interested in bringing this subject up.”
Read more from this story HERE.
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Instead, it hit after she talked to her attorney, and found out that the court’s decision will allow her Polish wife, Kasia Kurzatkowska, to apply for a green card, putting an end to a heart-wrenching seven years in which the two have been periodically separated by immigration laws.
“When we sat with our attorney, it became real,” said Kirkbride, 40, of Walnut Creek, Calif. “Waiting for this decision was like waiting to find out if you are pregnant – your whole life can change if you are. Now, we can have a future and buy a house, and have a child.”
Kirkbride and Kurzatkowska are among an estimated 26,000 same-sex couples in the U.S. with one partner who is not a U.S. citizen. Under the law, a subset of these couples – those who are married or considering marriage – had been prevented from applying for green cards for their spouses or fiances.
In the last decade, some of those non-citizens have been deported, even though they were legally married. Many others have been in a legal limbo, with one partner living undocumented in the United States. Some couples have left the country entirely to be somewhere they can both work and live legally.
Read more from this story HERE.
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Traian “Tray” Popov and Julian Marsh found out Friday that their petition for a green card for Popov had been approved, just two days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that section 3 of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional, The Miami Herald reported.
Section 3 has been used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to deny green cards for foreign-born spouses in same-sex marriages with U.S. citizens.
Read more from this story HERE.
House Republicans insisted Sunday that they plan to change key elements of the Senate-passed immigration bill, signaling a protracted and rocky battle ahead despite one Democrat’s pronouncement that in the end the House will cave and pass the Senate bill anyway.
Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee who is playing a major role in the chamber’s consideration of immigration policy, on Sunday addressed what is perhaps at the heart of the impasse.
He said the House, which is drafting its own plan, cannot agree to a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Rather, he wants a “pathway to legalization” — in other words, allow some illegal immigrants a shot at a green card, but not full-fledged citizenship.
The pathway to citizenship, though, is a cornerstone of the Senate-passed bill, and any Democrat-backed plan. Increased border security, better enforcement of businesses and an expansion of the legal immigration system make up the rest of the bill.
Putting the issue in stark terms, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told “Fox News Sunday” that if Republicans strip the pathway to citizenship, “no Democrat” would support it.
Read more from this story HERE.
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Now the Gang bill has passed the Senate and immigration is the work of the House, where former vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan is a leading reform advocate. Ryan favors the same legalization-first sequence for immigration reform that Rubio and the Gang did. The difference is that now, more conservatives are aware of the basics of reform proposals. And that means Ryan might be in for a rougher ride with the conservative base than Rubio experienced.
That, at least, is one conclusion to take from Ryan’s appearance last Wednesday on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program. Hannity interviewed Rubio several times during the Gang of Eight deliberations. In later interviews, Hannity became more skeptical and questioning, and in the last such interview expressed surprise that Rubio had declared legalization would come before border security. With Ryan in the interview chair, the first thing Hannity wanted to know was when securing the border would come in the sequence of immigration reform.
“I’m sure you are aware, a lot of conservatives including myself are angry,” Hannity told Ryan. “No border security first. How do you feel about it?”
Ryan stressed that the House would not take up the Senate Gang of Eight bill. “We want to have real triggers on the border, real triggers on what we call the E-Verify,” Ryan said. But Hannity wanted to know if that meant border security would come first: “Is securing the border first a top priority for you?” he asked.
Read more from this story HERE.
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“We need a solution that strengthens families. We need a solution that expands economic opportunity. And one of the reasons we need improved border security — that is not mentioned enough — is to further prevent violence and drug trafficking… and the brutal human trafficking and exploitation of women and girls,” he said at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials conference.
Priebus added that it’s “important that Republicans are taking a lead in this policy discussion.”
The Senate on Wednesday passed an immigration reform bill, 68-32, with every Democrat and 14 Republicans voting in favor.
In its current form, however, the bill has little chance of passing the House, as Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has said he won’t bring a package to the floor that doesn’t have the support of a majority of Republicans in the lower chamber.
Read more from this story HERE.
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In a Thursday tweet, she wrote: “@GovChristie’s dead to me.”
The tweet came on the heels of Republican Sen. Jeffrey Chiesa’s vote to end debate on the immigration reform bill. Mr. Chiesa was appointed to the seat by Mr. Christie after Sen. Frank Lautenberg died.
At the tail of her tweet, Ms. Coulter also added: “Jeffrey S. Chiesa R NJ votes ‘Aye’ on Amnesty bill.”
The denouncement is a major turn for Ms. Coulter, who pushed hard for Mr. Christie to run for president against Barack Obama in 2011. In February of 2011, she told Fox News: “I don’t care if [Chris Christie] wants to run, his country needs him, it appears.”
Read more from this story HERE.
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Fortunately, claims like this are overblown. As Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics has noted, the Republican party’s defeat in 2012 had more to do with shifts in turnout, especially among whites and blacks, than it did with the party’s weak appeal among Hispanics. These shifts pose problems the GOP must address, but immigration reform won’t do it. A recent Pew poll found that whites and blacks tend to be the groups most suspicious of the immigration reforms put forward in recent weeks. As for the long-term future of the party, the losses the GOP has suffered to date among Hispanics have been more than offset by its gains among white voters, who have been trending the party’s way since 1968.
This doesn’t mean the Republican party should ignore Hispanic voters. It shouldn’t ignore any voters, and besides, Hispanics determine the outcome in several Mountain West states and are very important in Florida. But Graham wants Republicans specifically to adopt the Gang of Eight immigration bill that he, Chuck Schumer, Marco Rubio, and others put forward and which just passed the Senate. They think it’s a cure for what ails Republicans.
Many Republican senators have apparently bought this notion. The bill passed with the support of about a third of the Senate GOP caucus. Nevertheless, the proposition is just not true. The Gang of Eight bill would be a step backward in the party’s quest for political rehabilitation.
To see this, it is necessary to ask: What, after all, is the voters’ problem with the GOP? Their demographic characteristics like religion, skin color, and ethnic background don’t reveal the underlying attitudes that drive their discomfort with the party. Beneath these factors, we find a skepticism of the Republican party that unites many different types of voters, including many who supported the GOP as recently as 2004. Read more from this story HERE.
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By Stephen Dinan. Rep. Steve Stockman, a Texas Republican, said Friday that the Senate immigration bill is a revenue measure, which makes it unconstitutional because all revenue bills must start in the House.
“Not only is the Senate amnesty bill an abuse of taxpayers and immigrants, it’s utterly unconstitutional,” Mr. Stockman said. “The Senate cannot invent its own amnesty taxes.”
He called on House Speaker John A. Boehner to officially reject the Senate bill as unconstitutional using what’s known in Congress as the “blue slip” process, which is when the House informs the Senate that one of its bills contains taxes or spending and therefore must come from the House. Read more from this story HERE.
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By Stephen Dinan. The National Border Patrol Council, the union for the agents charged with guarding the U.S.-Mexico border, says it has “serious concerns” about the way the new Senate bill handles security in the southwest — adding a major new critical voice to the immigration debate.
NBPC had held its fire in recent weeks as it worked behind the scenes to try to get the bill amended, but the agents are now speaking out and saying they aren’t sure the Border Patrol can even handle the surge of 20,000 additional agents that was the crux of the deal that helped win over wavering Republicans.
“We chose to work behind the scenes, and it doesn’t seem that the problems were corrected,” Shawn Moran, an at-large vice president for the NBPC, told The Washington Times on Thursday, after the Senate vote. “It seems that political goals took precedence over actual reforms. Unless we’re going to form a human chain from Brownsville to Imperial Beach, I’m not sure this is going to be the cure that everybody thinks it will be at the border.”
With the NBPC expressing concerns, it means that all three unions for the employees at the immigration services — Border Patrol, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — have said the Senate bill doesn’t measure up.
Senators passed their bill Thursday afternoon on a 68-32 vote, with 14 Republicans joining all of the chamber’s Democrats in support. Read more from this story HERE.
A caller from Lubbock, Texas, on Friday told conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh that some illegal immigrants in his area don’t want amnesty because it means federal income tax and fiercer competition for cheap labor.
“Today I went out and was doing some ag’ work on some of the farms out here and got to talking to some of these guys, asking them about what they think about this. And they’re very, very concerned,” the caller said. “A lot of them were telling me, ‘Well, we really don’t want to become United States citizens.’”
He went on: “There’s two things that they brought up that really scared me. They do not want to become United States citizens. I said, ‘Why not?’ They’re afraid that the United States government is going to take so much taxes out of their paychecks once they have to pay into the federal income tax.”
“Are you kidding me on this?” Limbaugh replied.
“I am dead serious. They do not want to become American citizens,” the caller said.
Read more from this story HERE.