The Washington Times reported last evening:
The Senate voted today to resurrect its immigration bill, overcoming opposition from conservative Republicans and delivering a victory to President Bush and both Republican and Democratic leaders in the Senate.
In a 64-35 vote, the Senate revived the bill, but it still has a long and bumpy road to final passage, much less to reaching the president’s desk. “We have an immigration system that’s broken and needs to be fixed,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat.
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Now the Senate takes up a series of about two dozen amendments, many of which could break apart the “grand bargain” underlying the bill. But some senators who voted to revive the bill have said if their amendments don’t pass they will switch and vote to block the measure next time.The House may be an even bigger challenge. An hour earlier before the vote, House Republican leaders announced they had just had a test vote among their members and about three-fourths of House Republicans who voted in it indicated they were opposed to the Senate’s immigration bill.
The Washington Times’ editors called the vote Border betrayal:
Yesterday, the Senate began debate on a series of amendments to the legislation. Some come from Democrats intent on making the bill more generous, which is not surprising. Other amendments, however, are designed as fig leafs to enable Republicans to pass a bill that is palatable to Big Business, Big Labor and the National Council of La Raza. As to the rest us, the spin is that they improved the bill, or that they really tried to make it better but just couldn’t muster enough votes. In the latter category is an amendment crafted by Republican Sens. Jon Kyl of Arizona, Mel Martinez of Florida and Lindsay Graham of South Carolina. The amendment puts together $4.4 billion for border enforcement, creates a tracking system for guest workers and permanently bars workers who overstay their visas from returning. On Monday, the three senators added a provision that required illegals to return to their home countries to apply for their “provisional” Z visas.
In many ways, this amendment epitomizes why the American public trusts neither Congress nor the Bush administration to broker a serious deal on border security. As Sen. Jim DeMint points out, nearly all the security provisions in the immigration bill mirror existing laws that aren’t enforced (except when Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff turns on his public relations machine.) And if anyone seriously believes that illegal aliens in any numbers will be forced to return to their home countries to apply for visas, we’ll sell them the Brooklyn Bridge. Sen. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Republican, let the cat out of the bag the other day, when he dismissed the idea as “putting people through punitive steps” for “no good reason.” And such fig-leaf amendments do nothing to change the crux of the problem with this bill that we have repeatedly documented on this page: The provisions are like a magnet for undesirables in general, and terrorists and criminals in particular.
The final Senate cloture is tomorrow. Call 1-202-224-3121 and (politely yet firmly), ask for the Senator of your choice, and tell them to secure our borders first and to vote NO on cloture. The test vote by the Republican caucas in the House is a hopefull sign yet it signals nothing as to how a final vote there would go.