RNC chairman: Obama ‘lying’ to Hispanics

President Obama is not trustworthy on the issue of immigration reform and has been “lying” to Hispanic voters, Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Reince Priebus said late Wednesday.

{mosads}During an interview with CNN, Priebus was asked to respond to the president’s challenge in a Wednesday afternoon press conference for the new Republican congressional leadership to take up the issue. Obama said he would forge ahead with executive action, despite his party’s losses in the midterm elections, although he said Republicans were welcome to supersede his unilateral moves with legislation of their own.

“I don’t believe a thing he says,” Priebus shot back. “So I mean — he’s been talking about immigration reform for seven years. You’re using his words as if they actually mean something and asking me to respond to it. He’s been talking about this when he had 60 votes in the Senate and Nancy Pelosi in the House and didn’t do a darn thing.”

Obama, Priebus continued, spent the past year “lying to Hispanic voters.”

“Saying I’m going to sign an executive amnesty before the end of summer, and then people went crazy, then he said, ‘Well I’m not going to do it,’ because he didn’t want to upset the midterms,” Priebus said.

Earlier this year, Obama vowed to take executive action by the end of the summer after Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) informed him the House did not plan to move on the Senate’s bipartisan immigration reform bill. The White House subsequently postponed that move until after the midterms, saying that, if the president took action on immigration earlier, it would risk injecting the issue into the highly politicized campaign and polarizing voters against the idea of long-term reform. But the move was also seen as a concession to vulnerable Senate Democrats who were worried it would rock the boat.

“It’s ridiculous,” Priebus continued. “He’s not trustworthy on this issue. The only thing he has done is he’s unified the country against his immigration policies.”