During a town hall meeting in Racine, WI, House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) revealed the House Republican Leadership plans to pass multiple immigration bills and then combine them with the Senate legislation in the conference process to create a comprehensive bill.
Ryan said the goal is to make what he and the House GOP leadership considers improvements to the Senate bill.
“A lot of people are saying, just pass the Senate bill,” Ryan explained. “That’s not what the House is going to do. I think we can make it better.”
According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, “Ryan said in the House, where the Republicans are in the majority, the intent ‘is to bring five or six bills… to fix these problems one step at a time in a comprehensive way.'”
Ryan said negotiations are ongoing in the House for when certain bills will get to the floor. “Tentatively, in October, we’re going to vote on a border security bill, an interior enforcement bill, a bill for legal immigration,” he said.
The Journal-Sentinel noted that Ryan also said the House will vote on a bill that would grant illegal aliens amnesty. “We’re going to vote on a bill for people who are undocumented,” Ryan said.
Conservatives fear a strategy like Ryan’s will not end in any serious improvement of the Senate bill, a piece of legislation even most in House GOP leadership admit is fundamentally flawed. As Breitbart News has detailed, many conservatives believe such a plan is a backdoor to amnesty provisions similar to those found in the Gang of Eight bill.
In response to Ryan’s announcement this week, one congressional GOP aide said it is the wrong way to go forward because the resulting bill could end up even more convoluted and problematic than what was already passed by the Senate.
“There is no doubt: the plan is to send bills to conference and use the senate bill to make a mega-comprehensive proposal,” the source said in an email Friday afternoon. “It could end up even longer than 1200 pages and have even more big industry giveaways.”
“And once that’s done there’s no turning back,” the aide explained. “If the people don’t speak up during August it may be too late.”
Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) also commented on the development, saying, “Instead of trying to save the Schumer bill with a ‘comprehensive’ accord, Republicans need to focus on helping out-of-work Americans find good-paying jobs that can support a family.”
“The comprehensive effort underway in Congress not only provides amnesty before security measures are achieved but calls for an unprecedented increase in low-skill immigration,” he said. “Our immigration system is of course broken, but the efforts we are seeing now would make things much worse-particularly for struggling workers of all backgrounds.”
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