Papers, please.
I see the House Republicans have decided to abandon all pretense on the whole "no seriously, we can be compassionate not-monsters on this whole immigration thing"
thing.
At least on paper, the legislation, which passed 233 to 181, wasn’t explicitly about immigration. Rather, this was yet another election-year “message bill,” in which House Republicans pretended to be outraged about President Obama’s entirely routine executive orders. GOP leaders put together a bill – subtlely called the ENFORCE Act – intended to make it easier for members of Congress to sue the White House, forcing the administration to prioritize law enforcement in line with lawmakers’ wishes. [...]
But immigration stood at the center of the debate because Republicans put it there: to prove Obama’s tyrannical tendencies, GOP lawmakers used the administration’s deferred action on Dream Act kids as Exhibit A.
In practical terms, then, the Republican bill was part of an effort to force Obama to deport immigrant children who came to the United States with their families.
So the main purpose of the bill is to allow House Republicans to sue the administration in order to force it to deport the school-age children of undocumented immigrants more efficiently.
Because, apparently, that's what's important right now.
The bill is going nowhere, mind you. It's a device for Republicans to use in speeches to the base, and not much more. You have to wonder about the priorities involved, however, in explicitly singling out children as the ones most in need of deportation.