“GOP Retreat: Rep. Jeff Denham Says Party’s Quietly Crafting Broad Immigration Bill”:

The GOP’s most outspoken proponent of comprehensive immigration reform let loose in an interview with reporters here, detailing quiet efforts to draft far-reaching legislation, saying House leadership is “committed” to bringing the hot-button topics on the floor and criticizing President Obama for carrying out too many deportations.

“We’re the party of deportation? Look at this president’s numbers!” Rep. Jeff Denham said.

The California Republican says he is part of a working group laying the ground work to bring forward comprehensive immigration reform, and that top-ranking Republicans are supportive of addressing the full gamut of immigration topics in legislation in 2015.

“I think leadership’s commitment is not only to bring up immigration reform, but to bring it up in multiple different bills. The question is the timing of that and the sequence of those bills,” Denham said.

“We’ve gotta be able to discuss the DREAMers, the 11.5 million that are here today, as well as a Guest Worker program, in the overall discussion of border security,” Denham said, later adding, “We’ve had a working group for quite some time on the various pieces of immigration on doing everything from a comprehensive bill to a step-by-step approach, but finding out who in our conference is actually open to debate and discussion.”

The revelation is important because shortly after the election, Speaker John Boehner warned Obama that moving ahead on executive actions called unconstitutional by Republicans, including Denham, would kill all chance of immigration reform.

[…]

“Most of the grown ups around here realize you can’t just do nothing, but how do you bring up reform when part of your conference refuses to support anything?” the aide asked.

Denham, who in 2013 became the first Republican to cosponsor a Democratic immigration bill that would give millions of illegal aliens a chance at citizenship, criticized a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill passed in the House this week that would reverse Obama’s recent executive action as well as a 2012 order to grant amnesty to individuals brought illegally to the U.S. as children.

“By adding deferred action amendment in here it goes back to a situation where you’ve got kids that came here through no fault of their own that we need to have a full discussion and debate on that now are going to be put at the top of the list for ICE to deport,” Deham said, adding that he would gladly support a “clean” funding bill without the measures and warning Republicans against “playing politics” with the underlying measure.

Although a large majority of the GOP conference voted for even the strictest language in the DHS bill, Denham said many of them could support legislation to legalize illegal immigrants.

“There were a number of members yesterday that understood this was a political drill and because this was politics they were going to support it. I think as we move a real bill forward not only will we be able to win those votes within our conference but I think the ultimate bill that will get to the president will be a true bipartisan bill that will fix reform altogether. It’s going to take several months to get there,” he said.

Denham said Senate Republicans have confided their concerns with the House-passed DHS bill in him, especially given that there is no discussion of a comprehensive immigration bill at the moment.

Let me simplify this:  bend over, GOP voters.  You fucked up, you trusted us!  And Denham is hoping too many people in his party are so disengaged that they won’t notice.  He’s a Gruberer.  Making any GOP establishment outrage over the actual Gruber’s dismissal of the rubes nothing more than rank hypocrisy. A show.  Theater.

Mitch McConnell warned (right before the 2010 GOP TEA Party landslide) that the era of Reagan was over and that the GOP risked becoming a regional party if it continued to stick to principle rather than embrace mushy centrism.  He was absolutely right:  the GOP does risk becoming a regional (mostly northeastern) party precisely because they’ve decided to cast-out the Reaganism that captured blue-collar Democrats as well as the GOP-base, resulting in a pair of electoral landslides and 25 years of unprecedented growth.

But hey, what can be more prudent these days than, you know, casting the bulk of the American electorate as racist nativist xenophobes who are “anti-immigration” because they advocate for controls on immigration and the need for assimilation (or the “naturalization” process that the left — and the libertarian right, along with GOP hacks beholden to crony capitalists who fund their campaigns — have all but abandoned)?

That’s what passes for “grown up” thinking. Realism, if you will.   Pragmatism.

Spit.