immigration reform. reform that provides a path to citizenship for more than 11 million undocumented immigrants. the conventional wisdom is that it s a fight that the president can t win because of opposition to a deal in the house driven by the tea party. but the contours of the immigration fight are strikingly similar to the contours of the shutdown fight that the president just won decisively. indeed, perhaps the best way to think about immigration reform is as an opportunity to end a nightmarish shutdown of the basic legal rights of millions of people. it turns out john boehner could potentially end that shutdown tomorrow, if he would simply let the democratic process play out. back in june, with mitt romney s 44-point loss among latinos, still fresh in their mind, republicans helped pass a bipartisan, immigration overhaul in the senate that included a pathway to citizenship. boehner has refused to allow that bill to come to a vote in the house, saying republicans prefer a piecemea
government doing. this is something new. that s what s so fascinating and worrying about this moment, we re on the frontier of something new. clay shirky of new york university, thank you very much. thank you. coming up no one spent more time trying to fix a broken immigration system than i am. i talked about it the day after the election and i ve talked about it 100 times since. and yet today, while members of the house were talking about monkey courts and amorphous clouds, the president was putting immigration reform front and center. when we come back, i ll explain why the boehner strategy on immigration spells doom for the republican party. [ male announcer ] if you can clear a crowd but not your nasal congestion,
yeah, congresswoman degette showed the kind of public official she is in colorado, that she didn t like the bill, i didn t like the bill. i still think it could have been done so differently and so much better, instead of the giveaway to drug and insurance interests, as the bush administration wrote it. but i also knew that my constituents could benefit from a law that could have been better, but was adequate for the needs of some of them and we keep improving it. and you know the affordable care act, as you know, chris, in my state, and in most states, on the average, it saved a senior that stands that enrolls in this medicare program, medicare drug program, it saved them about $800 additionally, because of what we did in the affordable care act. that s another benefit that s come from this, as you know. and finally, senator, what is your reaction to the members of the house, the house of representatives, who are suing to block the medicaid expansion that republican governor joh
i still think immigration reform is an important subject that needs to be addressed and i m hopeful. the easiest way to address immigration reform, of course, would simply let the house vote on the senate bill. and that isn t a pointless exercise. earlier this month, 184 house democrats signed on to an immigration reform bill, similar to the senate bill. meanwhile, the group, america s voice, is counting 28 house republicans who have offered support for a path to citizenship. that almost gets you to a majority. and it suggests the senate bill has a very real chance of getting enough votes to pass if only boehner would bring it to the floor. so why won t he do it? boehner has long insisted that he will not bring to the floor any bill that does not have the support of the majority of the majority, a concept known as the hastert rule. boehner has now broken the hastert rule so many times, he cannot hide behind that rationale anymore. just last week, he did it once again, with the bill
pre-existing conditions. i just spoke to the head of the biggest medicare company in the state, medicaid company in the state today. they are going to sign up at least 100,000 people, come january in the first few months of next year, that didn t have insurance before. this is going to work, we re going to look back on this five years from now and wonder what the fight was about. it s just like medicare. there was opposition in the beginning and people become very satisfied with it over time. what did you think of congresswoman beget s comparison to medicare part d. i remember interviewing you right after the medicare part d vote passed. you were in the house and i was profiling you at the time. and i believe you were opposed to that. and i imagine you turned around and worked with your constituents to make sure it worked. yeah, congresswoman degette showed the kind of public official she is in colorado, that she didn t like the bill, i didn t like the bill. i still think it co