Hoyer Discusses Immigration Reform on MSNBC's "NewsNation with Tamron Hall"

WASHINGTON, DC - House Democratic Whip Steny H. Hoyer (MD) appeared on MSNBC's "NewsNation with Tamron Hall" this afternoon to discuss the need to move forward on immigration reform in a bipartisan way. Below are excerpts from the interview and a link to the video.

Click here for the video.

On Immigration Reform

“I don't think we ought to ignore Republicans at all…. What I’ve urged is, the President said he was going to take action. The Senate passed a bipartisan comprehensive immigration bill. Everybody in the Congress and most people in the country understand the immigration system is broken and needs to be fixed. My own view, Tamron, is if the President acts, that will give incentive, frankly, to  the House of Representatives to either take up the Senate bill [or] put its own bill on the Floor and take action to establish immigration reform by law, not by executive order, but executive orders are not unusual. Ronald Reagan, George [H.W. Bush], George [W. Bush], [and] Bill Clinton passed executive orders, many of them dealing with questions of immigration, so this is not unusual, but hopefully that will be temporary, and we will then consider a statute, agree on it in a bipartisan way, have it pass the House and Senate, and have it in a fashion in which the President can sign. That's what the American people want us to do, work together to solve problems.”

“I think that each party is going to do things that the other party doesn't like. What I’ve urged Speaker Boehner and I would urge my own colleagues to do is not to allow the things on which we don't agree to undermine those items on which we can agree. In this instance I understand what the Speaker and Senator McConnell said, that it would be better not to create what they perceive as some sort of confrontation, but the President has said for, frankly, over six months [that] this is what he was going to do. This does not come as surprise to anybody. And in any event, whatever he does can be a temporary stop gap to try to solve some of the problems that exist while the Republican majority in the House and Senate, participating with Democrats, comes up with a bipartisan agreement as the Senate has already done some 18 months ago. So Tamron, I think that I hear that rhetoric, but on neither side should we allow disagreement on one issue to undermine our ability to come to agreement on other issues.”