Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) said the clock on comprehensive immigration reform will end if Congress does not pass a bill next year.
“I don’t see the Senate, in 2015, taking this issue back up,” he said on Wednesday. “The clock ends on Jan. 2 of next year.”
After the Senate passed its immigration reform bill that the Congressional Budget Office determined would lower the wages of working class Americans, the House said they would not take up the Senate bill, which led some opponents of immigration reform to believe the bill was dead.
Soon after, though, House Republicans indicated they were working with Democrats like Gutierrez to go to conference with the Senate on various piecemeal bills where the pathway to citizenship provision would be a “fundamental principle” of any agreement. When there was stiff opposition to that strategy after relentless reporting by Breitbart News, House leaders said they would not go to conference on the Senate bill, though they have not ruled out going to conference on separate piecemeal bills.
Though President Barack Obama and Democrats indicated they had the votes to pass comprehensive immigration reform by the end of 2013, the legislative calendar this year ran out.
After Tuesday’s announcement of a budget deal between Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), amnesty advocates feel they will now get a vote on comprehensive immigration reform in the House during the first months of 2014.
As Breitbart News has reported, Gutierrez has said his “Republican friends” have told him they want comprehensive immigration reform in everything but name only. He has called Ryan an “ally” in his quest for amnesty. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has also said advocates of comprehensive immigration reform would make a final attempt to pass the bill sometime in the spring of 2014, after the primary season. Since 2014 is a midterm election year, there will be a very limited number of legislative days in which comprehensive immigration reform can be debated and passed.
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