As the federal government gets back to full operation (for the next 90 days, at least), President Obama laid out his policy priorities for the remainder of the year at a White House news conference.
At the top of the president’s list is passing a budget. Okay, that’s a good one. We haven’t done that for a while, and it’s right in sync with what the American people think he and Congress ought to be doing.
From there, President Obama skips over a few matters that the American people would like to see him and Congress work on. You know, like strengthening the economy, improving the jobs situation, defending the nation against terrorism, and that sort of thing.
Instead, second on the president’s to-do list is addressing “immigration reform,” – a Washington euphemism for mass amnesty and flooding U.S. labor markets with lots of new foreign workers. It is reasonably certain that for a large percentage of Americans, this is not their idea of what a reformed immigration policy should do. However Americans think we should be “dealing with illegal immigration,” a recent Pew Research survey found it ranks 14th on the public’s list of policy priorities (out of 18 that were offered on the survey).
In case Congress hasn’t figured it out yet, that means the American people are in no mood for them to be taking up legislation to reward illegal aliens with amnesty. Nor, with a 5 percent public approval rating, does the public have any confidence that Congress would handle immigration reform any better than they have handled the issues that got us into this mess.
Oh, and the president’s third priority for this year: Passing an agriculture subsidy bill? That ranks so low that it does not even show up on any list of public policy priorities.