president obama and house majority leader eric cantor. a happy passover phone call turned into an immigration smackdown. they can t even agree on how that phone call went down. it doesn t bode well for cooperation between the president and republican-led house on immigration or any other issue. let s bring in our strategist victoria difrancesco soto at the lbj school of public policy. alex stewart is former press secretary for rick santorum. good to see both of you. good morning. good morning. let me lay this out chronologically on how this came to be. the president put out a statement putting out the anniversary of the gang of eight bill. unfortunately, republicans in the house of representatives have repeatedly failed to take action seemingly preferring the status quo of a broken immigration system over meaningful reform instead of
difficult time trying to enforce the law. at the same time, trying to push congress to give us a vote. if congress would give us a vote, we wouldn t have to wait another year, another month. we could do this tomorrow. your reaction to deporter in chief is that s not the president obama that you know. well, if congress didn t give the president the money to go out there and aggressively apprehend people and deport, people would say that the president wasn t doing his responsibility. the president has a role. he has to enforce the laws. what the president s trying to do is enforce the laws in a smart way, going after the criminals, folks trying to hurt us, instead of trying to separate families, picking up a woman who s shopping at the grocery store for her family or picking up her child from school. we do this smartly, we can do this well so we can finally get a vote, fix the broken system, and not have to deal withdrawal this again in the future. congressman becerra, thank you ve
peterson is director of african studies at lehigh university and victoria soto is at the lbj school of public policy at the university of texas as well as being an msnbc contributor. gang, it is great to have you here. we are going to get into this duck and cover situation. i do want to remind all of our viewers that this is a situation from wednesday where a & e executives indefinitely suspended their duck dynasty dad, phil robertson, for remarks he made about gays and african-americans in an interview with gq magazine. those that are coming out to his defense, we have sarah palin, newt gingrich, governor bobby jindal who called robertson a friend. take a listen. he s a good man. i know he s got love in his heart and he wants everybody to be treated with equality and respect. here s where i think that it s so hypocritical of a & e and hollywood and the left. they all say that they re for
satisfying corporate demands and trying to ram amnesty down the throats of its own voters. joining us now is professor at the lbj school of public policy at the university of texas, victoria s victoria soto. thank you, as always. i m reminded of the old adage, once burned, twice shy. i think it is great that speaker boehner is bringing in someone who knows a thing or two about immigration reform. should we be optimistic? you know, alex, i have been a debbie downer about the whole comprehensive immigration reform for a while now. the truth is, i m not much more optimistic about comprehensive immigration reform. i think that the talent hire maybe signals there s going to be a move to do something about immigration. again, i m very nervous about this. the house says, we want to do a piecemeal approach, but the hidden message behind that is, we have to do border enforcement before we do anything else. so let s say that there s a border enforcement bill that s
with the senate period. laura, i was invited to the white house yesterday, and i refused to meet with the president because i saw it as a political trap. joining us from austin, texas, professor at the lbj school of public policy at the university of texas, victoria desoto. thank you so much for joining us. i m rather shocked about mike mccall s statement that meeting with the president of the united states is a political trap. seems like we ve made 180 on the subject of immigration reform. where are you on this? are you optimistic anything can get done? alex, i m actually pessimistic. i knew early on if we get into october, november, we weren t going to see immigration reform come through. first of all we ve seen it fall apart in terms of the house not wanting to move forward on comprehensive immigration reform. comprehensive reform is key. you can t have a piecemeal