Obama’s Secret 9 month Amnesty Project
(Politico) - Nine months ago, the new Homeland Security
secretary, Jeh Johnson, received a request from the White House. President
Obama wanted him to personally take on perhaps the administration’s toughest
political assignment: looking for creative ways to fix America’s immigration
system without congressional action—or executive overreach.
Just four months into the job, Johnson had been prepared to
take on tough security issues: Bombs on planes. Deadly diseases. Radical
Islamists carrying U.S. passports. As the Pentagon’s chief counsel, Johnson had
routinely dealt with contentious national security matters, finding himself in
the midst of sensitive political fights like whether and how to close
Guantanamo Bay, allowing gays in the military, and the rapid expansion of
America’s killer drone program.
He wasn’t prepared for a crisis of purely political making.
Just days earlier Obama had been labeled the “deporter in
chief” by a top Hispanic leader and ally, furious over the inaction by a
president who seemed trapped between the demands of his supporters to allow
millions of long-time residents who lacked documentation to stay in the
country, and the seemingly endless foot-dragging of Republicans.
That request to Johnson would prove critical: a moment when
the president set on the path of a much more ambitious change than the narrow
changes in civil enforcement policy he and his aides had initially explored. In
the remaining months of 2014, Obama would come to support a sweeping executive
action to allow millions of undocumented immigrants to stay in the country, as
Congress lurched from willingness to consider changes to strained immigration
laws to refusing to tackle the issue at all. Meanwhile, interest groups from
the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to the Business Roundtable, from K Street’s
shrewdest lobbyists to the most hard-nosed union bosses, intervened to try to
shape the direction of the order.
At several key points, Obama wavered under pressure from
members of his own party, worried about an electoral collapse that happened
anyway when the votes were counted in the midterm elections earlier this month.
Throughout, Johnson worked, largely in secret on the grand plan that finally
became public this week, convening a small group of former Capitol Hill aides
with expertise on immigration to work with Homeland Security officials to draft
a policy that all expected would provoke not only fierce opposition from
conservatives but from liberals who thought Obama should go further. It was a
consuming task: in all, sources said, the immigration issue ate up fully half
of the Homeland Security secretary’s time in recent months, with Johnson —a
high-powered corporate attorney in his previous life — writing the final
presidential memorandum himself.
By the time Obama went before the American people to unveil
his plan in an Oval Office speech to the nation Thursday night, the White House
and DHS had exchanged dozens of drafts and endured months of starts and stops,
punctuated by a sharp electoral defeat for their fellow Democrats. Still, they
went forward, with the president finally telling aides of his decision in the
Roosevelt Room of the White House on Monday night.
Johnson, for his part, seemed anxious to be done with a
journey he portrayed as a political lesson.
“I was new to immigration law and policy…when I came into
this job,” Johnson said this week. “Before that it was law of armed conflict,
national security fiscal law. I’ve been disheartened and disappointed with how
volatile the issue has become in American politics. I hope that people will
look at immigration reform from a common sense point of view, what makes common
sense, what’s practical, what’s pragmatic.”
Summer of miscalculations
Three months after Obama’s first overture to Jeh Johnson,
Republicans had not given up on the idea of an immigration plan of their own.
At least, some argued, there was a political opening to forestall any
independent action by the president. June 12 was the day that Rep. Mario
Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) planned to unveil to House leaders an immigration bill
that, he was convinced, many Republicans could get behind.
For more than a year since Obama’s re-election, in which
Hispanic voters had turned out in unprecedented numbers to vote against a
Republican nominee who came out hard against undocumented immigrants (Mitt
Romney even memorably called on them to “self-deport”), Republicans had flirted
with — and invariably backed away from — proposals for comprehensive
immigration reform. Any bill that could be seen as granting legal status to
people who entered or stayed in the country illegally was a non-starter for
many conservatives. Senate Republicans like John McCain and Marco Rubio had
eventually, carefully, stuck out their necks just far enough to get a
comprehensive reform bill through the Democratic-controlled Senate. But the
Republican-controlled House was another matter. GOP leaders saw the need for
some sort of action, but rank-and-file conservatives were deeply skeptical or
outright opposed.
Enter Diaz-Balart, the Floridian whose Hispanic background
and solid relationships with conservative members of the House GOP conference
made him well-positioned to broker a compromise. In May and early June,
Diaz-Balart spent his evenings quietly shopping a PowerPoint presentation of a
border enforcement and legalization bill to his colleagues. He poll-tested the
proposal. He recruited a whip team of roughly eight lawmakers and they secured
soft commitments from at least 120 Republicans, enough to pass Democratic
support, according to multiple sources familiar with the process.
He had planned to sit down with House leaders on June 12,
ask for a week to firm up the numbers and secure their commitment to bring the
bill to the floor — from which he hoped it would pass with a bipartisan
majority. Behind the scenes, he kept the White House informed of his actions.
Obama held out hope that Diaz-Balart might succeed where so many others had
failed, agreeing to delay the release of a narrow batch of executive actions on
immigration to avoid antagonizing conservatives at a delicate moment in
Diaz-Balart’s negotiations.
But then, just two days before the meeting, Eric Cantor, the
House majority leader who had gingerly supported certain immigration reforms,
lost the Republican primary for his Virginia House seat to an insurgent
candidate who hammered him for his supposed softness on immigration. “Eric
Cantor saying he opposes amnesty is like Barack Obama saying he opposes
Obamacare,” thundered Dave Brat, an obscure college professor who challenged
the powerful majority leader. Beating Cantor, Brat claimed, “is the last chance”
to prevent undocumented immigrants from pouring into the country.
“We were so close,” Diaz-Balart says now. “We were closer
than the House has ever been.”
Democratic misgivings
Obama was back at square one. He had no bill to sign. And he
was coming under pressure from his liberal allies. Hispanic advocates remained
furious with him for waiting so long to do something— anything. Frustrated
Senate Democratic leaders prodded him to take unilateral action by the end of
the summer — just before the midterm elections — a timeline that White House
officials tried unsuccessfully to get the senators to reconsider.
Then, in a face-to-face meeting outside the Oval Office in
late June, House Speaker John Boehner informed Obama that not only would his
Republican members decline to address immigration, they planned to sue the
president, as well, for exceeding his authority in a variety of administrative
actions taken in the absence of congressional approval.
A week later, Obama had settled on his course: He would go
it alone, and take much broader executive action than the rest of Washington
expected. And he would act soon, setting an end-of-summer deadline. Speaking in
the White House Rose Garden, the president turned combative as he repeatedly
veered from his prepared remarks.
“The failure of House Republicans to pass a darn bill is bad
for our security, bad for our economy, and it’s bad for our future,” he
thundered. “Drop the excuses.”
But Obama had bigger problems than Republican intransigence.
A shocking influx of tens of thousands of unaccompanied
children, sent by their parents from violence-torn villages in Central America,
were crossing the southwestern border of the United States, where overwhelmed
federal border guards struggled to find ways to handle them. Some news reports
mistakenly suggested that the parents were responding to Obama’s promises of
leniency; and as the numbers of children grew, even some previously supportive
Democrats began getting cold feet about Obama’s plans to loosen immigration
rules at a time when they feared it could send still more migrants flooding to
the border. The first signs of the impending border crisis had been visible
when Obama made his June announcement, but Democrats did not anticipate how it
would alter the political landscape.
National Republicans soon launched a campaign to make the
border influx a defining issue in the midterm elections. But Obama, at first,
was unmoved.
In July, one White House aide dismissed the notion that
Obama would pay much heed to the potential damage to Democratic candidates in
conservative areas of the country. “My guess is it is pretty minimal,” the
official said when asked what effect the fate of his party in the midterms
would have on Obama’s decision. “We are going to do what we think is the right
thing to do.”
Testing the legal boundaries
As the politics got worse for endangered Democrats, outraged
liberal activists were besieging the White House with demands for what should
go into his executive orders.
Senior White House officials including counsel Neil
Eggleston and domestic policy adviser Cecilia Munoz hosted more than 20
sessions in July and August with business, labor, Hispanic activists and
lawyers. There was no shortage of special pleadings.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus wanted Obama to protect
all 8 million undocumented immigrants who would have been eligible for legal
status under the Senate bill. Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft and other high-tech
players pressed officials to include some of their longstanding requests, such
as recapturing unused green cards to bring in more skilled workers from abroad.
So-called “dreamers,” the young undocumented immigrants for whom Obama extended
administrative relief in 2012, pleaded for similar leniency for their parents.
Undocumented farm workers sought a special carve out, too.
That only added to the pressure on Johnson and his small
working group back at the Department of Homeland Security, who were struggling
to come up with a plan that was legally defensible and yet sufficient to
address the political demand. Some advocates, including California’s liberal
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, an immigration attorney, drafted extensive memos for the
administration laying out their own legal rationales for expanded executive
action.
At DHS, however, Johnson and his team were hungry for
information to back up their decisions. As time went on, they leaned more
heavily on the work of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington
think tank that churned out data that caught the department’s attention. One
report offered detailed projections of how each of the different categories of
undocumented populations might benefit from executive action — possibilities
based mostly on educated guesses from the Institute’s experts.
DHS aides were impressed enough to seek two personal
briefings for Johnson from the Institute’s staff.
The process appeared to be humming along.
A debate on Air Force One
On Labor Day, Obama was traveling to Milwaukee, a
battleground in recent years with Republicans as they’ve sought to curb union
benefits. The president invited a small group of top labor leaders to fly with
him to the event. The conversation aboard Air Force One turned to a heated
political debate: whether Obama should take executive action on immigration
before the November election.
Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees
International Union, urged the president to stick with his plans to act by the
official end of summer, less than three weeks away. But Leo Gerard, president
of the United Steelworkers, argued that Obama should delay the announcement
until after the election, out of concern for Democratic Senate candidates who
might be caught in the backlash. The conflicting advice, some advocates
contend, undermined the unified front that activists were desperate to maintain,
particularly as Senate Democrats grew nervous. (Gerard and Henry declined to
comment.)
Over the next few days, more and more Democrats began siding
with Gerard.
What really worried the White House was that opposition
wasn’t limited to vulnerable moderates up for reelection in Republican-leaning
states. Sen. Al Franken, a liberal from Minnesota, expressed concerns. Sen.
Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who wasn’t on the ballot, pointedly asked Obama to wait
until after the election. And Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who caucuses with
Democrats, declared openly that it would be a “mistake” for the president to do
anything alone, ever.
When King personally delivered that message to White House
chief of staff Denis McDonough, the Obama team knew it had a problem. If an independent
from Maine, a state Obama won by 15 points, couldn’t support the president’s
actions on immigration, they really were in trouble. David Simas, the White
House political director, asked Guy Cecil, the executive director of the
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, for polling on the immigration issue.
Cecil gave him polls commissioned by the Iowa and Arkansas Senate campaigns,
showing vast numbers of voters who didn’t want Obama to ease pressure on
undocumented immigrants without the agreement of Congress.
The White House realized it couldn’t put out an executive
order that would get attacked by candidates of the president’s own party. By
that Friday night, as Obama flew home from a NATO Summit in Wales, he began
calling allies to inform them of his decision to delay action — dealing yet
another setback to the immigration reform advocates and the president’s
relationship with Hispanic voters.
The anger was palpable as the Congressional Hispanic Caucus
squared off with top White House officials in a meeting room steps away from
the House floor in September, days after the announcement. The lawmakers viewed
the president’s decision to delay action as the latest in a long line of broken
promises.
As they sat around a long table in a meeting room of House
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office, more than a half-dozen lawmakers spoke
as the caucusgrew impatient with McDonough, Munoz, and other Obama aides.
Democratic Reps. Tony Cardenas and Rep. Lucille
Roybal-Allard spoke about the pressures they were under from impatient and
disappointed constituents in Los Angeles. Cardenas, in particular, pressed the
White House to maximize the number of undocumented immigrants who could be
protected under the president’s authority — telling officials that if the number
of immigrants covered under Obama’s order turned out to be smaller than
expected — say, 3.5 million — he would feel that Obama hadn’t gone far enough.
Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), for his part, was adamant that
the Obama administration follow through on executive action by Thanksgiving.
Roybal-Allard wanted to know: Would the formal
recommendations from the caucus, which lawmakers had sent months earlier, be
included?
They had the memos, the aides responded.
The lawmakers, White House aides promised reassuringly,
would be pleasantly surprised by the outcome.
Closed doors at DHS
The drafting process going on in the bowels of the DHS
headquarters was a mystery to those on the outside. And that’s the way Johnson
— and the White House — wanted it.
Disciplined and direct, Johnson approached his work for the
White House like an attorney going to the mat for his clients. Unlike some
political figures, he wasn’t interested in buffing up his own image. As an
early supporter of Obama’s 2008 campaign, Johnson had credibility in the
president’s insular world. No matter what, he wasn’t going to leak details of
the president’s plan.
Despite his scant knowledge of the complex web of
immigration laws when Obama first handed him the assignment, he took personal
ownership of preparing the president’s policy. He held dozens of meetings with
outside legal experts, lawmakers and interest groups, including NumbersUSA and
Center for Immigration Studies, fierce opponents of legalizing undocumented
immigrants.
But rarely did they walk away with any sense of Johnson’s
thinking.
“He’d be a terrible person to play poker [with]. He could
have a cheap-ass hand and you’d think he’d have four aces,” Gutierrez said. “He
almost stops breathing when you ask him a question. I feel he gets like,
catatonic, like ‘I ain’t telling you nothing. I’m not going to give you any
verbal, non-verbal indications of affirmation. I’m not going to let you read
me.’”
Johnson’s circle of aides included Capitol Hill veterans
like Esther Olavarria, who worked for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), a
leading champion on immigration reform for decades; David Shahoulian, a former
Lofgren aide; and Serena Hoy, who worked on immigration issues for Sen. Harry
Reid (D-Nev.). Their former colleagues on the Hill struggled to get anything
out of them, too.
“These are people that are not going to overstep,” said a
prominent immigration attorney who has known the key players for years.
Obama and Johnson, as well as their staffs, traded draft
memos and ideas for months. By one count, they produced more than 60 iterations
of the proposals. Johnson’s aides would draft something, then shoot it over to
Eggleston and Munoz to examine and return with revisions.
The deliberations had gone on for almost eight months without
any major leaks on the policy proposals — a feat that impressed White House
aides.
But once Johnson’s tight circle expanded last week, the
broad outlines of the plan began to seep out, starting the clock on the White
House’s rush to unveil the most sweeping executive action on immigration in
history.
“He ran an airtight process,” a senior White House official
said of Johnson. “It was an impressive thing.”
Shifting into sales mode
As soon as Republicans realized the president was preparing
to act, in the days after the GOP’s big victory in the midterm elections, they
took to the airwaves to decry his abuse of authority. He was a king, an
emperor, a heavy-handed executive abusing his power. Democrats, for their part,
didn’t know enough about the president’s plans to offer any defense.
By this week, a belated White House response team kicked
into high gear. Munoz and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, the president’s
closest aide and confidante, quickly ramped up their outreach. They put out
calls to high-tech companies, detailing several changes that would make it
easier for them to retain foreign workers. They summoned civil rights leaders
in an effort to get buy in and work the grassroots. They dropped hints to
Hispanic activists that they would be happy with the result.
But even in the lead-up to Thursday’s prime-time address,
not all the president’s allies were happy.
The White House realized it couldn’t put out an executive
order that would get attacked by candidates of the president’s own party. | AP
Photo
The AFL-CIO, for one, was continuing to voice its
displeasure over what it was hearing, including a sweetener for the tech
industry that was reportedly included. Top union officials reached out to the
Congressional Black Caucus to press their case that a provision to allow tech
companies to recapture unused visas would harm American workers.
By Wednesday night, the months of political acrimony, second
guessing, and behind-the-scenes furor appeared to subside as Obama sat down for
dinner with 18 congressional Democrats. Placed next to the menu of crisp fennel
cucumber and tomatoes salad, thyme-roasted rib eye and artichoke puree, was a
card with talking points on immigration.
If critics raise the amnesty charge, the response should be:
“Taxes and background checks aren’t amnesty. That’s accountability. Doing
nothing — that’s amnesty.”
If the president’s legal authority is questioned, say:
“Every president for 70 years, both Democrats and Republicans, has taken
executive action on immigration.”
When Republicans argue for a government shutdown over it,
supporters should respond: “Republicans are blocking funding to conduct
millions of background checks.”
As the group sipped on a Cabernet Sauvignon from Washington
state and a California Chardonnay in a White House dining room, Obama gave his
pitch. His legal rationale was sound, his politics solid. House Republicans had
plenty of time to take up immigration reform. More than 500 days had passed
since the Senate approved its own comprehensive reform bill, Obama noted.
“This is bold,” Gutierrez told the president. “This is
courageous, and generous.”
This one critic at least had finally been converted.
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/how-obama-got-here-113077.html#ixzz3KNev7iZ1
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