It is just three months before the midterm elections will decide which party controls the Senate, and the 2016 presidential campaigns will begin in earnest soon after; however, the Republican party continues to demonstrate that it does not have a clue what to do about the issue of immigration reform.
The issue has vexed those in the Republican party almost as much as the party’s crushing defeat at the 2012 presidential election, but it is an issue that the party has already admitted it needs to come to a conclusion about. Last week the party was again bedeviled by the issue, with Republicans in the House of Representatives splintering and stumbling just a day before the party tried to save face by passing a bill late on Friday.
The fiasco again demonstrated that a small number of conservatives refusing to compromise are able to hamper any attempts by Republican party leaders to craft a coherent position on a number of issues, including the one that around two-thirds of American voters have told an American Press-GfK poll last week is important to them.
“It would be very bad for Republicans in the House not to offer their vision of how they would fix the problem,” Senator Lindsey Graham noted after the collapse of the initial House bill, adding that rejecting Democrat proposals while having no vision of their own is not enough. The one area that both parties seem to be in agreement on is that immigration is set to play an even larger role in the 2016 presidential election.