Leaders of the House of Representatives stood pat yesterday on their earlier stance not to support Gov. Benigno R. Fitial\u2019s lawsuit against federalization of local immigration.<\/p>\n
In his State of the Commonwealth Address yesterday, Fitial said he is disappointed that many members of the Legislature did not get behind his efforts to oppose federalization, \u201cgiven the significant economic harm it presents the Commonwealth. <\/p>\n
House Speaker Arnold Palacios said Fitial certainly has the prerogative to express his disappointment but \u201che\u2019s got to remember that all these individuals are also elected officials. <\/p>\n
\u201cAnd so they can also express their position and everyone certainly has the right to their perspective on the federalization issue,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The Speaker said he has not changed his previous position on the issue.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am against the litigation from the very beginning primarily because I felt that a good faith effort could have been done to negotiate some of the regulations to implement. We didn\u2019t do that. The administration opted to immediately file the lawsuit,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Palacios believes the filing of the lawsuit hampered policies, rules and regulations that could have been worked out to address the challenges the Commonwealth would have on this issue.<\/p>\n
Rep. Diego Benavente said he still feels the same way about the lawsuit.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no question, we agree with the impact and how it [federalization] affects us. But even from the very beginning we felt that working with the Obama administration in drafting the temporary regulations was a way in which we can work to reduce the hardships, the negative impact that it has. There is no question that it\u2019s going to affect us,\u201d said Benavente, who is chairman of the House Committee on Federal and Foreign Relations.<\/p>\n
However, given that the CNMI has yet to see the regulations, Benavente said he would agree with the idea to further delay the implementation of the law.<\/p>\n
A further delay, he added, might buy the CNMI the time necessary for the Department of Homeland Security to implement measures that would allow the Commonwealth continued access to the China and Russia markets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Leaders of the House of Representatives stood pat yesterday on their earlier stance not to support Gov. Benigno R. Fitial\u2019s lawsuit against federalization of local immigration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133325\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}