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Amnesty, shamnesty. Maybe it'll die in the Senate
See previous: An amnesty by any other name still stinks
Friends and neighbors, the best we can hope for under the current administration is no action of any sort on immigration. I realize that's a gamble. The bill currently under consideration is a wonderful bill compared to what we can expect under an Clinton or Obama administration, but if either of them ends up in the White House immigration is going to be a minor issue compared to the other problems we'll have anyway. As long as we keep the 12 or 20 or 30 million people who are in this country illegally illegal there's at least hope that under a Thompson administration an actual reasonable compromise can be worked out and actually implemented. Stall for time, people, stall for time.
Below the fold:
- Amnesty bill deathwatch
- Few senators support the illegals bill
- The Immigration Deal
- Discord on the Immigration Accord
- After Aiding Bill on Immigration, Employers Balk
- Dissecting the Bush/Kennedy shamnesty bill (Updated)
- Chertoff: Some people think anything less than capital punishment is amnesty
- Immigration 9/11
- Everybody Hates The Compromise
- The cruelty of treating lawbreakers like criminals
See also: N.Z. Bear Makes Monkeys of the MSM
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I linked Beldar's post here yesterday but he's updated it big time since then. Go read it.
Too short for a good excerpt, too good not to mention: Curses
Don't miss InstaGlenn's post here while you're at it. Amnesty bill deathwatch
Don Surber
Michelle Malkin called it the shamnesty bill and if it passes, I’m declaring myself an illegal alien so I can stop paying taxes, too.
But is the amnesty bill viable? Forget the House battle. Stephen Dinan and S.A. Miller of the Washington Times counted noses and found at least 40 senators have doubts and all you need are 41 to sustain a filibuster.
Its Fishwrap blog named the names of those publicly in opposition: Democrats who said they oppose the Senate bill are: West Virginia Sen. Robert C. Byrd, North Dakota Sens. Kent Conrad and Byron L. Dorgan, Illinois Sens. Richard J. Durbin and Barack Obama, New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, and Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson.
Republicans who said they oppose the Senate bill are: Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning, Oklahoma Sens. Tom Coburn and James M. Inhofe, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, North Carolina Sen. Elizabeth Dole, Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions and Wyoming Sen. Craig Thomas.
That’s 15. And the Times blog also found “another 32 senators who said they cannot even take a position yet.”
36 years ago, when Byrd was elected whip over Kennedy, Ted sent him a note thanking Byrd for teaching him how to count votes.
Looks like Ted forgot that lesson.
Or could it be that Mitt Romney killed this deal on Tuesday night when he said the McCain-Kennedy bill would do to immigration what the McCain-Feingold bill did to campaign financing.
Ouch. ...
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As promised above: Few senators support the illegals bill
By Stephen Dinan and S.A. Miller
Fewer than 20 senators are publicly committed to supporting the immigration deal that hits the Senate floor today while nearly 40 are already opposed or have serious concerns, underscoring how difficult it will be for President Bush and his allies to craft a coalition that can pass the bill.
A Washington Times survey of Senate offices and public comments after the deal was announced Thursday found an additional 32 senators who said they cannot even take a position yet -- a result of the fact that the deal was written in secret by a dozen senators and the Bush administration, wasn't even finalized until yesterday and still hasn't reached many Senate offices.
"I did not agree to any immigration deal and was not part of the negotiations," said Sen. Jim Bunning, Kentucky Republican and a likely opponent. "From what I have heard about the bill, it gives amnesty to the estimated 12.5 million illegal immigrants in this country."
Fewer than 20 senators are publicly committed to supporting the immigration deal that hits the Senate floor today while nearly 40 are already opposed or have serious concerns, underscoring how difficult it will be for President Bush and his allies to craft a coalition that can pass the bill.
A Washington Times survey of Senate offices and public comments after the deal was announced Thursday found an additional 32 senators who said they cannot even take a position yet -- a result of the fact that the deal was written in secret by a dozen senators and the Bush administration, wasn't even finalized until yesterday and still hasn't reached many Senate offices.
"I did not agree to any immigration deal and was not part of the negotiations," said Sen. Jim Bunning, Kentucky Republican and a likely opponent. "From what I have heard about the bill, it gives amnesty to the estimated 12.5 million illegal immigrants in this country." ...
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I almost didn't mention this one -- it strongly reflects the NYT's standard leftward slant -- then decided that the fact the NYT is against the bill in it's present form in good news even if their reasons are wrong. The Immigration Deal
(5/20/07 NYT Editorial)
The immigration deal announced in the Senate last week poses an excruciating choice. It is a good plan wedded to a repugnant one. Its architects seized a once-in-a-generation opportunity to overhaul a broken system and emerged with a deeply flawed compromise. They tried to bridge the chasm between brittle hard-liners who want the country to stop absorbing so many outsiders, and those who want to give immigrants — illegal ones, too — a fair and realistic shot at the American dream.
But the compromise was stretched so taut to contain these conflicting impulses that basic American values were uprooted, and sensible principles ignored. Many advocates for immigrants have accepted the deal anyway, thinking it can be improved this week in Senate debate, or later in conference with the House of Representatives. We both share those hopes and think they are unrealistic. The deal should be improved. If it is not, it should be rejected as worse than a bad status quo. ...
*** Discord on the Immigration Accord
By Darryl Fears, Washington Post Staff Writer
There is little doubt about how grass-roots organizations feel about a bipartisan immigration compromise reached in the Senate: They don't like it.
The New York Immigration Coalition issued a statement that called the proposal unacceptable, saying, "We say no to this deal." In California, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund vowed to oppose numerous provisions in the plan. In Massachusetts, an immigrant and refugee advocacy coalition said the deal was "immoral, unworkable and unacceptable."
While the senators and Bush administration officials exchanged congratulations on Capitol Hill for reaching the compromise, supporters and opponents of illegal immigrants eyed the politicians warily and prepared for a legislative showdown as the proposal heads to the Senate floor this week. ...
But condemnations from supporters and opponents of illegal immigration were a sign that the bipartisan compromise, like the illegal immigrants it addresses, faces a rocky future. ...
*** After Aiding Bill on Immigration, Employers Balk
By Robert Pear
WASHINGTON, May 20 — Employers, who helped shape a major immigration bill over the last three months, said on Sunday that they were unhappy with the result because it would not cure the severe labor shortages they foresee in the coming decade.
In addition, employers expressed alarm as they learned that the Senate bill would require them to check a government database to verify that all current and former employees — aliens and citizens alike — were eligible to work in the United States. ...
Read the whole thing, but do keep a tissue handy.
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I'll probably pull some excerpts from Dafydd's Regularization: the Immigration Sideshow post after I get some sleep, but in the mean time just go read it. There are also a couple of worthy posts farther down on his site that I'd have linked when they were fresh if I'd been paying attention. ... (Much later) Had trouble sleeping (maybe I need to increase my happy pill dosage till this blows over), getting a late, slow start. I'm going to skip the excerpt and move on to newer things.
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Michelle Malkin's Dissecting the Bush/Kennedy shamnesty bill post has been updated several times since I linked it before.
*** Chertoff: Some people think anything
less than capital punishment is amnesty
Allahpundit (H/T: Michelle)
I missed this on Thursday in the aftermath of the deal being announced, but NRO didn’t. Here’s Bush’s own secretary of homeland security displaying raw contempt for the wishes of his party’s base by floating a derisive laugh line that would have fallen flat even on dKos.
Go read Barnett, especially numbers 7 and 9. “The Republican base at this moment has absolutely no faith in its leaders.”
[video link]
*** Immigration 9/11
Bruce Kesler
The latest Immigration Bill proposal bears an uncomfortable similarity to 9/11. It hits most’s consciousness and public attention as if from out of the blue, despite many years of visible causes and effects, and this remedy is even more hastily pushed, despite some’s warning and most’s realization that the strategy and costs were inadequately understood.
Like 9/11, the proposed Immigration Bill exposes many underlying fissures in our society, in our modes of public information, and between our legislators and the governed. It could represent an opportunity for reforms in these, as well as for more careful consideration of the immigration issues raised.
That’s as far as necessary to take the analogy to stop and consider whether the Immigration Bill and the speedy adoption process as proposed are reasonable. I believe not, not only because of improvements that can and should be made in the bill itself, but also because of the missed opportunities as to process. ...
*** Everybody Hates The Compromise
Ed Morrissey
Proverbially, a compromise succeeds best when it leaves all sides unsatisfied. However, the compromise which everyone hates usually fails, and that appears to be the case with the new immigration reform package -- and that spells trouble for any hopes of reaching a compromise at all. While immigration hardliners have found enough devils in the details to populate an entire plane of Dante's Inferno, immigration advocates apparently dislike the bill at least as much: ...
[T]he tenor of the debate raises grave concerns about our ability to fix immigration. Everyone agrees that the system is broken; in fact, that's about the only agreement to be found. The partisans have become so passionate and vociferous that any compromise will likely fail. Advocates will hold border security hostage, because they can do that much in Congress; opponents will block anything else. Both will consider anyone who tries to broker a compromise as either traitors or racists, and the end result will be more paralysis.
This particular compromise has plenty to oppose on both sides, and appears unworkable. If we're going to solve this huge, expensive problem, we're eventually going to have to find somewhere in the middle to meet. Right now, the visceral immediate reaction to this effort demonstrates that paralysis sells.
*** The cruelty of treating lawbreakers like criminals
By: Jay Tea
When your opponent resorts to emotion in an argument, you can be fairly certain that you're winning.
Case in point: this sad tale from this morning's Boston Herald.
It's a tragic tale, of families torn asunder, children forcibly separated from parents, relatives forced to try to make up for the absence of others.
The only element missing is the root cause here, the "original sin:" just why did the government come in and take away all those mommies?
Because those mommies chose to break the law.
They chose to break the immigration and labor laws of this country they so loudly proclaim their love for.
Choices have consequences. And when you choose to break the law, you face the possibility of being arrested, detained, tried, incarcerated, and in their case deported back from whence they came. ...
*** Takeaways From the Barfight
D J Drummond
Yesterday was a mess. Once again, the problem of millions of illegal nationals in the United States gets tempers high and patience thin. Many claims were made by readers, some of which were considered and thoughtful, but others were repeats of bald-faced lies and hysteria. This is the way of things along the fringes of both sides, where only extreme action is considered tolerable. Other readers suggested what they wanted to see done, but the devil is in the details, and details in the plans were few and lonely. Now that a day has passed, I have examined the comment logs and would like to note these points from the fracas:
• No one likes the bill currently before us in the Congress. But stopping the thing is going to require a lot of pressure from everyone. Knightbrigade hit that nail on the head;
• Assuming the present bill is shot down, the problem will still need attention. To my mind, the status quo is unacceptable, but will be the default position of the politicians. And attacking everything which comes down the road just because it's not 100% of what you demand, plays into that position. If you're not backing a specific proposal, you're part of the problem, wounded ego or not;
• The media, old or new, cannot be trusted to do its job on this issue; ...
Continue reading: Amnesty, shamnesty. Maybe it'll die in the Senate -- Part 2
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