President Obama and a bipartisan group of senators are pushing comprehensive immigration reform based on more secure borders and a pathway to citizenship for illegals, but Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, told WND history clearly reveals which part would happen and which part would not.
"The trouble is the president thinks that perhaps since he doesn't remember history or whoever puts his words in his teleprompter doesn't recall even recent history," said Gohmert, a former Texas judge and current member of the House Judiciary Committee.
"In 1986, the Democrats promised, 'Look, if you'll just agree to give amnesty to everybody here, then we'll some along and secure the borders,'" he said. "It's like like saying if you'll just agree to increase taxes, eventually we'll slow down our spending and the second part never comes. Some of us have learned from past mistakes of others."
President Obama says the issue has already been debated for years, so lawmakers just need to get busy and pass comprehensive reform. Gohmert said a bill could be passed very quickly if Obama would simply demonstrate he is serious about border security.
"He could get it next week if this week he would actually use our resources to secure the border so that we know people coming in are legal," Gohmert said. "If this president can hunt down an American citizen in Yemen and blow him up with a drone, surely he could use drones along our border. Not to blow anybody up, but to make sure those coming in legally and not coming in to destroy our country and not coming in from al-Qaida camps that have set up or the drug cartels that are set up across the border.
"Once the president commits to that, today, tomorrow or the next day, once he gets that done, we could have an immigration reform package done within a week," Gohmert said.
The congressman added that a tangible commitment to border security would also be necessary before entertaining the Senate bill.
President Obama listed continued upgrades in border security as his No. 1 priority in immigration reform, but Gohmert isn't buying that rhetoric.
"It's a little better than it was, but I take issue with the president saying we've got to stay focused," Gohmert said. "He has so badly lost his focus that he would have his own Justice Department complicit in getting guns sold to criminals and used in Mexico to kill Mexican people and even used in this county to kill.
"To stay focused, you have to get focused in the first place," said Gohmert, who added that Obama approved Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano's decision to scrap a virtual fence on the border and offered nothing as an alternative.
But that doesn't mean Gohmert is opposed to any immigration reforms.
"We desperately do need an immigration reform bill. We need to reform immigration," he said. "We've got one of the worst immigration processes and agencies in the world. It takes too long to get immigration papers done, and we're not carefully going through them well enough."
In his Tuesday speech, Obama also warned against letting the immigration debate become one of us versus them, noting that virtually all of us came to the United States at one time or another. Gohmert said Obama's claim to know our history is once again proven false.
"So he doesn't know our history, although I have to admit I haven't been to all 57 states like he said he has," said Gohmert, referring to a an Obama blunder during the 2008 campaign.
Gohmert also ripped an Obama comment saying he has more personnel on the border than at any time in U.S. history. Gohmert said that's patently false, given the crackdown imposed by President Woodrow Wilson following the Pancho Villa raids nearly a century ago.
"If he wants to follow in Woodrow Wilson's footsteps and become the president that actually does as well as Woodrow Wilson did, then he needs to do that and quit making up history as he goes along that never occurred," said Gohmert.