WASHINGTON — Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush told a conservative radio host he would undo President Barack Obama’s executive actions to let some five million people temporarily stay in the country if he’s elected president.
The following exchange occurred Tuesday when Bush appeared on the Michael Medved show:
Medved: Would you undo his executive orders on immigration?
Bush: The DACA and DAPA? Yes, I would.
DACA is shorthand for Obama’s 2012 program to let young people brought to the U.S. illegally as children apply for temporary deportation relief and work permits. DAPA is a reference to his 2014 program — currently halted by a federal judge and being appealed by the administration — which could grow that number by more than four million, mostly parents of U.S. citizens. The next president can end the programs in an instant.
“He’s had millions of people, basically by the stroke of a pen, be given temporary status,” Bush said.
Bush called for immigration reform through Congress but didn’t condition his support for undoing Obama’s immigration actions on passage of legislation. Scrapping the programs without legislative action would place the beneficiaries at risk for deportation. That could pose a political problem for Bush in a general election, were he to be the nominee, because Latino voters overwhelmingly support Obama’s moves by margins ranging from 64 percent in a December Gallup poll to 89 percent in a November Presente survey.
Bush has positioned himself as the most pro-immigration candidate in the emerging Republican field, openly stressing the need to provide legal status to the estimated 12 million people living in the country illegally. His remarks Tuesday reflect the extent to which Obama’s executive actions on immigration — abhorred by the conservative base — have become an early litmus test in the GOP primary.
There is no Republican in the field who supports Obama’s immigration actions. Two of Bush’s chief rivals — including Scott Walker and Ted Cruz — have come out against any legal status for unlawful immigrants. Marco Rubio’s position is more complicated: he supports a path to legal status but only after piecemeal reforms have been established to beef up border security and overhaul the legal immigration system.
Meanwhile, Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton has championed Obama’s immigration actions, setting up a clear contrast with the eventual GOP nominee.
Asked at CPAC in February about the top five priorities in his first 100 days as president, Bush seemed to refer to Obama’s immigration initiatives when he said, “undoing the — by executive order, undoing what the president has done, you know, using authority he doesn’t have.”
Just saying it doesn’t make it so, Jebster: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120334/obama-immigration-order-legal-bush-and-reagans-were
Pardon me, but could you say that in Spanish?
Sweet. He just lost the general.
I am beginning to wonder if Jebya will even run. He is so lack luster, so boring and predictable. Even his pandering lacks any passion. Jebya is just going through the motions. He should have listened to his mom and stayed out. Now no matter what path he chooses, he loses.
What do we read into this late middle-aged face angled toward his future? A kind of studied plainness with privilege surrounding its ruddy hue? Sleight shadows cast from framing lenses that meld into brows above them? An angularity leaning from his center to right expanding in the tilt toward grey, thin forelocks and the average advantages of age? He is framed above the ears and across the central elements of his brain function by the white-wash of family power and wealth giving a life to his political renaissance. That’s the whiteness framed over his shoulders. Who believes this figure leads a lot of decisions? His father betrayed the class that lives upon the collection of rents. His brother fucked the country. Here is the sober one. The clear thinker. The Mensch. Only he is not Jewish. He is just the ambitious son of profits furnished by ideology that shapes a huge portfolio of the family’s economic interests and investments. Meanwhile, the New Yuck Times monitors the loss of blubber on his morning scale while it searches in the weeds for Hilary Clinton’s compromised entanglements in the international uranium market. Methinks the appeal is too bland and presumptive. Yet the superficiality of our published interpreters of these faces of modern politics attempt to measure one against the other upon these totally unrelated factors.