June 02, 2013 09:36 AM UTC

Public Pessimism Grows Over Immigration Reform

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• by: Colorado Pols

NBC News reports on a new nationwide poll on immigration reform, an issue considered this year's biggest legislative priority–and possibility for actual success–in Washington:

A new poll from Quinnipiac University shows that seven in ten registered voters think that Republicans and Democrats in Congress will not be able to work together to pass an immigration bill this year.

Hispanics and Democrats are slightly more optimistic, with about a third of each group saying that the bill will get to the president’s desk. But only 24 percent of voters overall said they believe that Congress can pass the legislation…

A bipartisan bill passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month by a 13-5 vote and will be taken up on the Senate floor in June. But the fate of various immigration measures in the Republican-controlled House is still unclear.

Evidence is mounting everywhere of a hardening among House Republicans against the immigration reform effort that only a few weeks ago seemed to have real bipartisan momentum in the Senate. You can see this shift quite clearly in the "evolution" of GOP Rep. Cory Gardner of Colorado, who has switched from a perceived need to reach out to Hispanic voters after the 2012 election to rehashing the same conservative objections to the Senate's immigration reform bill you've been hearing for years from immigration hard-liners. Gardner's hard-line comments came only a few days after House Speaker John Boehner declared the Senate's immigration reform bill "DOA" in his House. Boehner, like Gardner, calls benchmarks for border security, or "triggers," too "weak."

The possibility of a bipartisan immigration reform measure passing this year has been held up as a sign of hope that Republicans are aware of the long-term demographic peril they are in, as their backward and increasingly anachronistic position on this issue is central to the party's unpopularity among the fastest-growing segment of voters in the United States–Hispanics. At the same time, Republican support for immigration reform risks a backlash from the party's right-wing "Tea Party" base, whose fervor is one of the only assets the GOP has left with which to win elections. The "Tea Party" has no interest in compromise on immigration as long as there are "scandals" to jawbone–or failing that, someone named Barack Obama in the White House.

This is how yet another chance–and demographically, really maybe one of the last chances–for Republicans to show they can be participants in a functioning government could slip away.