Who Scuttled The Immigration Reform Compromise?

The Associated Press reports the Democrats are blaming President Bush and the Republicans on Saturday for blocking immigration reform legislation.

A little over a week ago the Senate appeared to have reached a great compromise on immigration reform. Just a day later the great compromise proved to be stillborn. According to the Associated Press, the compromise failed because of an inability to agree on procedures for voting on amendments to the proposed legislation.

In last Saturday's weekly radio address, President Bush said the deal fell apart when Minority Leader Harry Reid refused to permit votes on more than three Republican-backed amendments. Reid was quick to deny he was at fault.

In a web-exclusive commentary, Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, a commentator generally regarded as being politically liberal, laid the blame on the Democrats:

A compromise fashioned by Republicans Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Mel Martinez of Florida had toughened the earned citizenship portion of the Kennedy-McCain bill and made it more palatable to Republicans yet still acceptable to Kennedy.

But according to the recollections of those close to the principal figures, a battle ensued over how many amendments the Republicans would entertain, and Democrats feared that the GOP would use the amendments to strip away the progressive elements of the bill. Kennedy argued that he and McCain had the votes to defeat any troublesome amendments.

This is the U.S. Senate, Kennedy reportedly argued. The leadership has to allow for amendments. But the Democrats were dubious. They’d been burned before. And it didn’t take much persuading when New York Senator Charles (Chuck) Schumer reportedly made the case that the failure to get a bill would be good for the Democrats. As the head of the Democratic campaign committee, Schumer is focused on getting his party back into power in November.

Despite Reid's and Representative Solis' strident attempt to rewrite the history, of the Senate's great immigration reform compromise was killed at the behest of the Democratic campaign committee chair Schumer. Schumer and the Democrats turned their backs on the proposed compromise to resolve festering problem of how to stem the ever-rising tide of illegal aliens flowing across the border and deal with the 12 million illegals already here in a crass attempt to gain a political advantage.

Comments

[Terry Ott]

Shining example of what is wrong about Washington DC these days. Ordinarily, I favor gridlock on the premise that most legislation is bad legislation --- law of unintended consequences, primarly, invoked by politicians whose time horizon for evaluating what's good and right is about 1/5 of what it should be. In this case, though, it is a shame --- and the shame does rest with both parties, but most obviously with the Democrats.

It looks as if I will once again be searching in vain for a POTUS candidate whose primary focus and vision is serving the long term interests of the population in general. Whomever my choice is will go down in flames in the primary battles, and live out his/her life on the periphery of power politics. Damned shame.