The White House admonished newly appointed Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, Republican from Wisconsin, for refusing to cooperate with the Obama administration on comprehensive immigration reform, only days into his tenure. Speaker Ryan announced on Sunday that President Obama cannot be trusted on the issue of immigration, a skepticism born out of his 2014 executive actions which shielded millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation.
“The president has proven himself untrustworthy on this issue, because he tried to unilaterally rewrite the law himself. Presidents don’t write laws. Congress does,” Speaker Ryan said in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press.
The White House has responded with equal force, chiding the Wisconsin lawmaker for backtracking his stance on immigration reform which led him to coauthor a bipartisan immigration bill in 2013, only later deciding to side with fellow Republicans in refusing to bring the bill to a vote. There is a distinct “irony” in his recent comments, the White House says, that make the Speaker’s comments ring with a palpable partisan tinge.
“I understand he has some complicated politics to take care of in the House when it comes to significant fractures inside of his own conference. He knows best how to handle that,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said. “But pandering to the extreme right wing of the Republican conference, including preposterous comments like that, has not served the party or the country very well.”
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