Pelosi: If Amnesty Passes, 'It Will Happen Before June'

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said that if comprehensive immigration reform is going to pass in this Congress, it will happen before June of 2014. 

“Well, I think if it’s going to happen, it will happen before June,” she said in a Sunday interview with Spanish-language station Telemundo. “And I think that, you know, this is one of those things. We’re not going away.”

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) has said amnesty would be dead if not passed by January 2, 2015, because he predicted the next Congress would not take up the legislation. Pelosi had previously said that House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), who declared that amnesty is “absolutely not” dead this Congress, had told her to “wait until next year” for comprehensive immigration reform. 

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who, with Senators like Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) helped write the Senate immigration bill that passed, indicated that Republicans would try to pass comprehensive immigration reform in the spring of next year, after the GOP primaries. Amnesty advocates are hoping a potential resolution on the budget deal brokered by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) will clear the way for a vote in the House in the early part of 2014. The Congressional Budget Office determined that comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway-to-citizenship provision would lower the wages of working class Americans. The timetable for comprehensive immigration reform will be tricky in 2014 because that is an election year, which is why amnesty advocates wanted the budget deal to make more room in the legislative calendar for amnesty. 

Though House Republican leaders have said they would not go to conference on the exact Senate bill, they have not ruled out going to conference on piecemeal bills. In fact, Democrats and President Barack Obama have said they did not mind comprehensive immigration reform being broken up into pieces so long as all the pieces pass. Gutierrez has also indicated that his “Republican friends” have told him behind the scenes that they want comprehensive immigration reform in everything but name only.