AP - Washington 7:57 PM Eastern Hopes for a quick compromise on immigration were dealt a blow Tuesday after House Speaker Dennis Hastert said he wanted to take a "long look" at a Senate bill offering possible citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants.
Hastert said hearings on the Senate bill should be held before appointing anyone to a House-Senate committee to negotiate a compromise immigration bill. Later, he said he was unsure what the House's next move would be.
"We're going to take a long look at it," Hastert said late Tuesday.
House Majority Leader John Boehner agreed. "I think we should know clearly what's in the Senate bill," Boehner said. But he added there are lots of ways to understand its contents.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, also scheduled a hearing for Monday to review provisions in the bill requiring employers to verify that their workers are legal.
Cornyn said he opposes a provision allowing workers to use up to 20 documents to verify they are legal workers. Also, the Department of Homeland Security has raised concerns about how quickly it must have in place an electronic system that employers will use to verify their workers legal status, Cornyn's spokesman Don Stewart said.
"This will give us a chance to look at it in more detail," Cornyn said.
Sending a bill that has already passed the Senate to hearings would be a highly unusual move and make completing a final bill before Congress goes on its summer recess in August far less likely. Disagreement on procedural issue has kept negotiations from starting, but there were hopes that could be resolved this week.
"It's an obvious retreat from where we are," said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
The Senate passed a sweeping immigration bill nearly three weeks ago. The bill offers most illegal immigrants in the country and future guest workers a path to citizenship.
Last December, the House passed a bill focused on enforcement. It doesn't offer eventual citizenship to illegal immigrants or create a guest worker program. There are many other significant differences in the bills.
The day the Senate bill was approved, Majority Leader Bill Frist, R- Tenn. said waiting to negotiate a final bill would be "irresponsible." Rep. James Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, echoed his comments a day later, saying voters should be able to assess when they go to the ballot box in November how their lawmakers did on the issue.
Rep. Lamar Smith, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said holding hearings on the Senate bill makes "great sense."
The recent election victory of Republican Brian Bilbray, who made tough anti-immigration measures a centerpiece of his campaign, "changed a lot of people's thinking on the issue," he said. "It shows how politically advantageous it is to talk about the issue and what you would do and what the federal government should do."
Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., urged Hastert to drop any plans for hearings.
"Hearings might be beneficial if there was a lack of attention or knowledge on this issue in the House, but that's certainly not the case," Flake said in a statement.
Flake sponsored an early version of the Senate bill with Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., who also called for the bill to move forward.
"Only a small, vocal faction wants to stop a sensible guest-worker program and ignore the reality of the 11 million undocumented living in the country now," Kolbe said in a statement. "We must not let any delays impede our progress toward solving this problem."
