Original Story at Politico
By: REID J. EPSTEIN and JONATHAN ALLEN

The White House is getting ready to launch a major fall blitz for immigration reform — this time, one that appears to be more about partisanship than partnership with Republicans.

While Washington may be consumed in the latest continuing resolution crisis and debt ceiling drama, it’s also just days away from massive new push on an issue many had written off months ago.

But if the president’s low profile on immigration in the past had been a bow to the reality that Republicans wouldn’t want to join hands with him publicly, the nature of the renewed push suggests the West Wing brain trust isn’t betting much on the prospect that the issue will be resolved in this Congress.

The political imperatives driving the latest immigration effort are clear: Obama can’t just abandon an issue that he promised to deliver on during his last campaign without suffering a major backlash from activists who helped elect him, and congressional Democrats are anxious to make sure Latino voters are motivated to punish Republicans at the polls in the 2014 mid-term election if there’s no law on the books by then.

Still, the effort remains a delicate balancing act for the White House.

Obama needs to keep frustrated activists angry at Republicans, not the White House and its Democratic allies in Congress.

Yet there is still hope in some corners of the White House that using outside interest groups to pressure Republican lawmakers could force the House to act on some form of immigration legislation and begin a conference with the Senate, which passed its version of the bill in June — to sway GOP lawmakers, rather than simply score points with voters.

“The White House and everyone who works here believes that immigration reform can and should get done in this Congress,” said White House spokesman Josh Earnest. “In fact, as the president has said, immigration reform would pass with bipartisan support tomorrow, if only the speaker of the House brought it to the floor for a vote.”

And White House Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri suggested there’s urgency in the West Wing.
“There are no off ramps here,” Palmieri said. “Congress needs to act on the legislation and it is in everyone’s interest that happen as soon as possible.”

The president’s top immigration adviser, Felicia Escobar, has told immigration advocates that the White House will turn to their issue after the battles on government funding and raising the nation’s debt limit, creating what senior administration officials say is a window of opportunity to make progress on the issue. That’s just in time to harmonize with a series of Oct. 5 events across the country organized under the heading of a day of “dignity and respect” and a Washington lobbying effort by an array of pro-reform activists at the end of the month.

The new push comes as the president faces tremendous pressure from the Latino community, a pivotal voting bloc in his re-election, to spend more of his time and energy prodding the House to act on immigration reform.

“He knows it’s important to keep the fight going,” said former Obama Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, who noted that the president ran on enacting an immigration overhaul. “It is still very much a part of his mission and his legacy.”

It’s clear that if Democrats don’t soon show that they’re serious about moving forward on immigration, they risk alienating Latino voters — or, worse for the White House, shifting the ire of activists from House Republicans to the president, who has not used his executive authority to order blanket immunity from deportation for immigrants who came to this country illegally.

But White House officials also say there’s something tangible that could be gained from the push — even if the bill doesn’t ultimately make it to Obama’s desk.

Moving immigration to the front burner could result in enough heat on House Republicans to force action on a small piece of the comprehensive overhaul the Senate passed in June, said one White House official. That official is hopeful that a conference committee could produce an immigration law in this Congress that would include a path to citizenship for the millions of illegal immigrants currently in the country.

And so, whether or not they really think they can win, the White House and Capitol Hill Democrats are preparing to elevate immigration over the next two months, after the big fall fiscal deadlines have passed.

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