Grover Norquist Keeps Standing With Michael Bloomberg’s Amnesty Lobby Group

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) successfully forced former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s amnesty lobby, the “Partnership for a New American Economy,” to remove references to and photos of him from its website. But Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) president Grover Norquist continues to stand with the organization on immigration.

“Along with several other conservative leaders Grover wrote an op-ed for the Washington Times which published on Tuesday Nov. 18 — you can access it here,” ATR spokesman John Kartch wrote in an email to Breitbart News on Monday morning, providing a link to his Washington Times op-ed calling for comprehensive immigration reform. Norquist wrote:

It is time to reform our immigration laws step by step or in one comprehensive package. Mr. Obama and Democrats in Congress have a problem. They spent 2009 and 2010 with supermajorities in the House and Senate and did nothing to reform immigration. The union bosses stopped them as they did in 2007 when Robert Novak reported that Sen. Obama was their messenger, telling the Senate that President Bush’s immigration reform was dead.

Kartch also provided a link to video of Norquist arguing with Jorge Ramos of Fusion TV over the president’s executive amnesty order. In the video, Norquist argued that Obama didn’t go far enough with amnesty for illegal aliens:

Let’s remember, back in 2007 when Obama was a senator and President Bush, a Republican, said let’s do a full immigration reform, Obama killed it four times. Four votes, Senator Obama killed that reform. Let’s not whitewash the past. Organized labor has attacked every effort to do immigration reform in this country for the last hundred years. It is the backbone of the Democratic Party. So that’s our problem, that’s what we’re trying to fix. So what should we do? Should we respond to the president’s temporary half measure which ignores six years of nothing, six years of ignoring this problem? Six years of nothing? Six years of golf, not immigration reform, by being mad at the president and impeaching him? No.

Kartch hasn’t answered whether Norquist approves of Bloomberg’s amnesty lobbying group the Partnership for a New American Economy using his photograph on its website–the question Breitbart News posed to him after Sen. Paul got his picture removed. Kartch hasn’t responded to a followup email seeking comment again.

Norquist has lobbied for amnesty for much of his career, and just last year spent several hours testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in favor of the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill. That bill is something the president has said he wants the House to pass in response to his executive amnesty order, and some–like Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ)–want to do just that.

“We did much of what the president did, and, in fact, went even further in the Senate bill,” Flake said in response to the president’s announcement, a response in which he calls for Congress to pass another big amnesty bill like the Gang of Eight bill. “The problem is, the way he did it is going to make it very difficult to move the other parts of immigration reform that we really need. So it’s not that he did something that we wouldn’t have done otherwise; it’s the way he went about it.”

Others however, including incoming Senate Budget Committee chairman Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), want to use the power of the purse that Congress has to stop the president–and then focus on crafting an immigration policy for the U.S. that benefits American workers over illegal immigrants.

“The House should send the Senate a government funding bill which ensures no funds can be spent for this unlawful purpose,” Sessions said in a statement responding to Obama’s announcement. “If Reid’s Senate Democrats vote to surrender their own institution to an imperial dictate and block the measure, then the House should send a short-term funding measure so the new GOP majority can be sworn in and pass a funding bill with the needed language.”

The reason Congress needs to fight this so hard, Sessions said, is because the foundation of American government–and future economic prospects for struggling Americans–depends on it.

“Congress has no higher duty than to protect the American people and our Constitution,” Sessions said. “The President’s action is a threat to every working person in this country–their jobs, wages, dreams, hopes, and futures. For years, the American people have begged and pleaded for a lawful system of immigration that serves the nation and makes us proud–but the politicians have refused, refused, refused.”