One of the 11 House Republicans La Raza praised for not voting to end President Barack Obama’s temporary amnesty program for illegal immigrants revealed that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has been working “every day” behind the scenes on an amnesty bill.
In a Friday appearance on MSNBC’s Jose Diaz-Balart, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) predicted that Congress is “going to be passing an immigration bill” in the future, “thanks to your brother, Mario Diaz-Balart.”
“Mario and Paul Ryan and good leaders are working every day toward that, and we hope that it will happen,” she said.
Ros-Lehtinen and other members of the GOP earned La Raza’s praise for voting against the border bill that would have denied Obama the right to use federal funds to implement temporary amnesty.
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL), whom Ros-Lehtinen referenced, was reportedly “ready to announce to House leaders that a majority of House Republicans supported his immigration reform bill,” and secured “soft commitments from at least 120 Republicans.” Ryan was reportedly working with Diaz-Balart to get support for his bill, which would have allowed Republicans to bring it to the floor and then vote against it, enabling it to pass with Democrat support.
After House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) was ousted because of his support for amnesty, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told President Obama that he would not bring up an immigration bill in the House this year. Though Boehner said he wanted to get an amnesty bill through in the next Congress, Diaz-Balart asked House leaders to give his bill one more chance this year before being denied.
“I’m seriously disappointed,” Diaz-Balart said then. “We have a historic opportunity to fix a system everyone knows is broken. We’re squandering that opportunity. The bottom line is we have a bill that is ready to go. We had bipartisan support. And yet I’ve been told we’re not going to move forward this year.”
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