With regard to the Senate’s immigration bill, Barack Obama said this morning:
If there’s a good reason not to pass this common-sense reform, I haven’t heard it. So anyone still standing in the way of this bipartisan reform should at least have to explain why.
This is classic Obama: it is possible that he is so lazy and so disengaged from reality that he literally has not paid attention to the debate over the Senate Gang of Eight’s immigration bill. But I doubt it. More likely, pretending not to know about the debate is just an excuse for the president’s intellectual laziness: if you haven’t heard the other side’s arguments, then how can you rebut them?
Jeff Sessions, who has been heroic on this issue from the beginning, responded to President Obama:
The President said he has not heard any good reason to oppose the Senate bill. Clearly, he has not listened to the ICE and USCIS officers warning that the bill would permanently undermine enforcement. Here are three more reasons: the Senate bill will lower wages, increase unemployment, and reduce per-capita GNP. All of these statements are confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office. Under current law, we will provide approximately 10 million grants of permanent residency (green cards) over the next decade. Under the Senate bill, that number will triple to more than 30 million. Further, the Senate bill would double the number of guest workers at a time when a record 90 million Americans are outside the work force. We need to get Americans off of unemployment, off of welfare, and back into the labor force—-but the “reforms” proposed by the Senate would put even more Americans out of work. Many of the same CEOs demanding that Congress increase guest workers are laying off thousands of American workers.
This is a defining moment for the House Republicans. They must decide who they represent: certain activist CEOs lobbying Congress, or the national interest and the millions of Americans struggling to get by in this low job, low wage economy.
Is Obama so out of touch that he won’t know about Sessions’ rejoinder? No. But will he try to respond? Of course not. Obama is lazy, by his own description, and not especially bright. He is at best a weak defender of his own positions. So he will do what he always does: rely on the Democratic Party media to cover for him, and prevent his opponents’ fact-based arguments from seeing the light of day.
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