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“Because there is so much room for agreement here, there is a lot that we can do; especially, if we will undertake this a step at a time. We have learned as a country over the last few years that it’s not always ideal to have to swallow the entire elephant as a whole. Sometimes its better if you take it a bite at a time or a step at a time. We had a bill that came through a couple of years ago that was a couple of thousand pages long that some people were told that you had to vote for it and pass it before you find out what is in it…that has become infamous now.

“But I think that serves a warning for us for not biting off too much. My old line on this is that Washington D.C. is one of those towns that you’re going into the grocery store and you want to buy bread, milk, and eggs and you are told that you can’t buy bread, milk, and eggs unless you buy a bucket of nails, a half ton of iron, and a book about cowboy poetry, and a Barry Manilow album. You ought to be able to do that step at a time. 

“That is what I have been urging my colleagues on the Judiciary [Committee] to do, is to take this one step at a time. The most important thing that we can do right away, I think, is to protect the border and, perhaps more importantly, fix the legal immigration system. We have made it so difficult for so many people to immigrate legally and we’ve made it relatively easy for a lot of them to immigrate illegally, and we need to turn that around. And if we turn it around we could start making a serious dent in the problem. I think if we start there, rather than jumping head first into the pathway to citizenship, I think we’re going to see more progress faster.”