Rachel Weiner of the Washington Post reports that Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl is backing away from his earlier story meeting with President Barack Obama on immigration:
Earlier this week, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) caused a stir when he was quoted saying that President Obama personally told him the administration will not support stricter border enforcement until Republicans back broad immigration reform. The White House denied the claim. Now Kyl is saying that’s not what he meant.
Kyl was quoted: “The president said the problem is if we secure the border, then you all won’t have any reason to support comprehensive immigration reform. In other words, they’re holding it hostage.”
In an interview with National Review, Kyl explained:
Kyl tells us that the comments were “taken a bit out of context,” and that the “they” he was referring to was the Left, “the president’s base,” and not the administration. “I did not try to start a fight. This meeting happened a month ago and we were talking in the context of his political problems. He was talking about how they think that if we secure the border, you guys [Republicans] won’t have the incentive to work on comprehensive immigration reform.”
Is this a sign that Republicans want to tamp down the immigration fire that they’ve been stirring up?
This article appears in Jun 24-30, 2010.
“If we secure the border…”
What a riot. Nobody in office right now can secure the border even if they wanted to. Even if we had bi partisan cooperation, it wouldn’t be possible. Fence? Minefield? Virtual Fence? Military? They haven’t come up with something that works, not even on paper.
When I saw those 5 words, I knew right away there was something wrong with that comment.
The Republicans know that they have a demographic problem because they’ve pretty much done everything they can to make Hispanic voters not feel welcome. (Yes, I’ll pre-acknowledge the existence of Hispanics who support Republicans on some issues, including immigration.) Backing up is a wise thing to do for Kyl, since he has little incentive to further undermine that support. Especially since he’ll be going up to the voters two years from now and will probably face a harder time than McCain since Hayworth and others will see Kyl as the easier target for an anti-incumbent election tempered by the fact that it will be a Presidential election as well (meaning: higher than normal turnout which in Arizona means a lot of Hispanic voters.)
The shame of it all is you can’t believe a word that comes out of a Republicans mouth. I can’t believe that they even think they can win back the house and senate in November and if they do this country will get just what the hell it deserves. You thought the last time they were in control was a disaster, just see what they’ll do if they get a chance in November. They ( the GOP) can’t be trusted under any circumstance, haven’t they shown us that over and over again and continue till this day to show us that?