Immigration Reform 2013: House Speaker John Boehner Says He’s ‘Hopeful’ On Bringing Reform Bills To Vote This Year

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has hemmed close to the wishes of his party's majority in the lower chamber in refusing to introduce a comprehensive bill passed by the Senate in June. But Boehner told reporters at a news conference on Wednesday morning following a closed party meeting at the Capitol Hill Club that the issue was "an important subject that needs to be addressed" and added that he was "hopeful" that before the end of the year, he could bring a bill to the House floor.

House lawmakers will have to move quickly if that's to be the case. Five weeks remain on the House's legislative calendar, and the odds that the lower chamber's Tea Party and other conservative members would be willing to act on immigration reform are expected to get steeper come 2014, an election year. Battles between the two parties over the debt ceiling haven't helped, either - a week ago, Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) said it would be "crazy for the House Republican leadership to enter into negotiations with [President Obama] on immigration" after the White House and the Senate's Democratic leadership refused to budge on the question of defunding the new health care law.

The House Judiciary Committee has been at work on a series of small, single-issue bills on immigration reform, including one which would extend a path to citizenship to about 1 million DREAMers (or undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US illegally as children) but which would provide nothing for their parents. Support for legislation which would offer citizenship to a greater number of the estimated 11.7 million undocumented immigrants living in the US - the central, indispensable tenet of Democrats' efforts on reform - is questionable among the House's Republican members. And many Democrats in that chamber are distrustful that the GOP's stated "piecemeal" approach on immigration will lead to benefits for the undocumented. "There is a problem with comprehensive immigration reform, and we know what it is," Rep. Joe Garcia (D-Fla.) said at a press conference on Wednesday in reference to the GOP. "The idea that that same party who cannot pass anything ... is now piecemeal going to do this is a fallacy."

The Associated Press writes that David Valadao (R-Calif.), who along with Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), has helped spearhead efforts on the Republican bill which would grant citizenship to DREAMers, noted that Speaker Boehner has told him that a vote on that bill - dubbed the "Kids Act" - was possible by the end of the year. Valadao also said that Cantor sets the House calendar. "If anybody has the power to bring it to a vote it's him," Valadao said. "It's his bill."

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