Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who helped craft the Senate's comprehensive immigration reform bill, criticized President Barack Obama in an appearance on Fox News on Sunday, telling the network that the way the president handled battles with Republicans over the debt ceiling made members of his party less likely to work with him on immigration reform. Many of his fellow party members in the House, Rubio said, don't trust the president to enforce aspects of any immigration bill intended to make the US-Mexico border impassable to those who would try to cross it illegally. That lack of trust, the Florida senator went on, only grew during battles over the debt ceiling.
"I think immigration reform is harder to achieve today than it was three weeks ago because of what happened here," Rubio said, according to Fox News. He added. "The president has undermined this effort, absolutely, because of the way he has behaved over the last three weeks. This notion that they're going to get in a room and negotiate a deal with the president on immigration is much more difficult to do...because of the way the president has behaved towards his opponents over the last three weeks." Rubio also pointed to the Obama administration's decision to delay parts of the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare" - like a consumer protection law which sets limits on the costs of health care, which administration officials say is necessary to give insurers and employers more time to comply - as evidence that the White House "has consistently decided to ignore the law or how to apply it".
Rubio was one of eight senators from both sides of the aisle who co-authored a comprehensive bill on immigration reform. That bill would extend provisional legal status to over 8 million of the nation's 11.7 million undocumented immigrants. It would also put them on a 13-year path to citizenship, but not before certain "triggers" were reached - including the construction of another 350 miles of US-Mexico border fences, the implementation of a border-security strategy by Homeland Security and an employment-verification system by all of the nation's employers.
The bill passed the Senate in June by a wide margin, but House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has refused to introduce it for consideration in the lower chamber, citing opposition from members of the House's Republican majority. Many of those members voiced suspicions that Homeland Security would fail to put into place what the bill mandated on border-enforcement, while those formerly undocumented immigrants would continue to proceed on the path to citizenship anyway. Rubio appeared to sympathize with those House Republicans' concerns while not entirely siding with them. "The House deserves the time and space to craft their own solution," he said.
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