GOP road to WH linked to citizenship pathway: Menendez.
By American Bazaar Staff
WASHINGTON, DC: A key Republican senator issued a dire warning to his party colleagues that if the GOP wants to recapture the White House, first and foremost, it needs to support the immigration reform bill.
“[If] we don’t pass immigration reform, if we don’t get it off the table in a reasonable, practical way, it doesn’t matter who you run in 2016,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said on Sunday’s Meet The Press.
“We’re in a demographic death spiral as a party and the only way we can get back in good graces with the Hispanic community in my view is pass comprehensive immigration reform. If you don’t do that, it really doesn’t matter who we run in my view.”
Graham, one of the four Republican Senators that are part of the so-called Gang of Eight pushing the immigration reform, was answering a question from moderator David Gregory that who among potential GOP 2016 candidates has the most momentum.
The South Carolina Republican was not the only senator to remind the Republican Party about its demographic problem.
New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez, Graham’s Senate colleague, in fact, went one step further. Speaking on another Sunday show, he warned that without a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented immigrants the Republican Party had no chance to recapture the White House in future.
“I would tell my Republican colleagues, both in the House and the senate, that the road to the White House comes through a road with a pathway to legalization,” Menendez told CNN’s State of The Union. “Without it, there’ll never be a road to the White House for the Republican Party.”
On Meet The Press, Graham, however, sounded very optimistic about the passage of the immigration reform bill, which is being debated by the Senate. He predicted that there will be “a political breakthrough” and “Congress is going to pass immigration reform.” The senator added: “I think we’re going to get plus 70 votes. I’ve never been more optimistic about it.”