Paul Ryan: Obama “Playing Politics” Over Refugees Is “Remarkably”

After the exhaustive amendment process for the transportation bill, Ryan began this week by taking up the 45th “closed rule” of the year, setting a record for the number of bills on the House floor without the possibility of amendment. He distanced himself from a few Republican presidential candidates who have urged that the US refuse asylum for Muslim refugees.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) yesterday moved to head off what could be an early major hurdle to his leadership by separating omnibus negotiations to prevent a government shutdown from GOP opposition to the president’s welcoming of Syrian refugees.

“This is a moment where it is better to be safe than to be sorry, so we think the prudent, the responsible thing is to take a pause in this particular aspect of this refugee program in order to verify that terrorists are not trying to infiltrate the refugee population”, Ryan said in a press conference Tuesday.

Szubin’s nomination got a hearing before the Senate Banking Committee on September 17, and Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) praised his past work in countering terrorist financing during his time with both Republican and Democratic administrations….

On the other side of Capitol Hill, the picture is equally discouraging.

“I haven’t called for a halt or a moratorium”.

“It’s not me making this up”, McCaul said.

Senate Republican leaders do not expect to vote on the issue before the Thanksgiving recess.

Asked during an interview with Scott Pelley of CBS’s 60 Minutes program how long he imagines being speaker, Ryan replied: “Fourteen months for now is what I know – for the rest of this term”.

Ryan said the president’s foreign policy is “lacking” and does not “have a strategy to defeat ISIS”. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, “Let’s say France has had 2,000 people leave to go and fight”. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said they would introduce a bill restricting visas for any individuals who had been in Iraq or Syria in the past five years.

Democrats said they would oppose GOP efforts to use the legislation to demand ideological policy changes. So I think over the course of a couple weeks, Ryan worked hard to kind of quell a few of the concerns of the far right, and he’s a fairly conservative member as well.

Not later than 120 days after the date of the enactment of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State shall jointly submit to the appropriate congressional committees an assessment of the extent to which the Government of Iraq is increasing political inclusiveness, addressing the grievances of ethnic and sectarian minorities, and enhancing minority integration in the political and military structures in Iraq.

“We’ll crucify them”, said a senior House GOP aide. Yeah, it doesn’t help.

“As we see it, this would virtually kill the opportunity for Syrian or Iraqi people seeking asylum to come to the United States”, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security panel told reporters on Wednesday.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi met with Ryan on Wednesday and pushed for Democrats to be able to offer an alternative bill, but her request was denied, according to a senior House Democratic leadership aide.

So here, once again, we have our legislators – legislators who refuse to do their jobs by dealing with actual problems faced by actual Americans – legislating that President Obama do something about a problem he is already doing something about.

Obama vetoed the last NDAA that came to his desk, citing that funds were directed to a war-fighting account not subject to sequester level spending cuts, rather to the base budget.

“This is not a partisan issue”.

Ryan’s office did not respond to the letter from Babin, but noted it is focused on moving a bill they believe is reasonable and strikes an important balance to pause the program, but not cancel it outright. But what we also saw was with stress with the Republican coalition, with the House Freedom Caucus.

The president has called the Guantanamo Bay facility a national-security threat and a recruitment tool for terrorists. “It’s pretty clear to me that the intelligence to vet just isn’t there”. Ryan didn’t even seem to get a lot of coverage for much of the race, even going so far as to say he wasn’t interested. He just said he was going to veto our bill putting pause to the refugee program, I can’t imagine why he would do that…