The GOP leadership seems bound and determined to spend the next twenty years or so wandering in the wilderness. The shenanigans surrounding this travesty of an immigration bill are bad enough on their own, but how bloody stupid is it to give Harry Reid an opportunity to put all of his rotten eggs in Jon Kyl and Mitch McConnell’s baskets?
Five GOP Senators write to Reid:
(click to embiggen)
Reid responds:
Washington, D.C. 20510
Dear Senators Cornyn, Vitter, Dole, Sessions and DeMint:
Thank you for writing to me earlier today about my efforts to bring the comprehensive immigration reform bill back to the Senate floor.
As you know, the Senate was unable to complete action on the immigration bill earlier this month because a handful of Senators, including several of you, objected to my repeated efforts to call up further amendments to the bill. Following the unsuccessful cloture vote on June 7, a group of Senators including Minority Leader McConnell, Republican Conference Chairman Kyl and Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Specter, came to see me with a request that I bring the immigration bill back before the Senate under a procedure under which a large number of additional amendments could become pending to the bill.
The so-called “clay pigeon” procedure is unusual, and I would not have considered employing it in this instance without the full support of Senator McConnell. It seems to me appropriate for the two leaders to work together to overcome the tactics of a small number of Senators in order to allow the full Senate to debate an important national issue like immigration. The White House made clear that it also favors such a procedure, since the immigration bill is one of President Bush’s top priorities.
I respectfully disagree with your assertion that I intend to “shut off the debate” and that the procedure in question will “silence amendments instead of facilitate their debate.” On the contrary, I am working to facilitate debate on more than twenty additional amendments to the bill. In contrast, several of you objected when I tried to call up as few as five amendments during the earlier debate. The American people can see clearly who wants to debate immigration reform and who wants to shut off that debate.
Moreover, your claim that the Senate will only debate amendments which I “hand select” is plainly untrue. The dozen or so Republican amendments that will become pending to the bill have been selected by the Republican leadership, not by me.
In sum, I appreciate the concerns expressed in your letter but consider them misplaced. Senator McConnell and I have worked together in good faith to ensure a full, open and productive debate on a bill of overriding national importance that is supported by many Republicans and endorsed by President Bush.
How easy of a serve was that one to return? Is there any remaining doubt about which Senators are elbows deep in this capitulation to big business, and to carving out a legacy for George W. Bush to which he’s not entitled? Here’s a hint, yet again, President Bush: Iraq, and the War on Terror are your legacies. The fact that you are becoming squeamish about how they’ll reflect on you doesn’t give you license to seek any others.
By the way, I wonder how Hugh Hewitt feels about his fawning over Senator Kyl the other day, given Reid’s response here? How many of those sandwiches are you going to fix yourself, Hugh?
Here’s the dealio: If Kyl and McConnell don’t have a very, very strong response to Reid’s exposing their hypocrisy tomorrow, they are finished. Specter is already an outcast, Lott is a clown, Chambliss and Isakson have done the Potomac two-step on their positions, indicating just how shallow their convictions are, Lyndsey Graham is a laughingstock, McCain has ruined his chances at the presidency, and probably at reelection, and George W. Bush has just taken a payday loan on the last remaining credit he has in “political capital”. If these creatures of the Beltway consider their current dearth of credibility to be harmless, I’m all for not disabusing them of that notion…I can’t wait to see their faces upon their respective defeats when they are next up for elections, if not primary challenges.
h/t Michelle Malkin
Filed under: Election 2008, Government, Harry Reid, Home Alone, Illegal Immigration, Iraq, News, Politics, Republicans, Terrorism
totally concur; this is an op-ed that is to run (with a few edits pending) in Philadelphia’s “Family Newspaper” … The Bulletin”; it focuses on Specter:
06/18/2006
ARLEN SPECTER, ESQ., IMMIGRATION…
AND THE 2010 SENATORIAL PRIMARY
By Robert R. Guzzardi, Esquire and Robert B. Sklaroff, M.D
SPECIAL to The Bulletin
“This matter is on life support, but it is not dead.”
This may be how Senator Arlen Specter characterized the stalled immigration-amnesty bill, but it also describes his relationship with Reform Republicans. Former Congressman Pat Toomey is now the President of the Club for Growth, but his supporters clamor for the opportunity to reverse his narrow defeat in the 2004 Primary. At a meeting on May 5th, conservatives warned him we were going to monitor his voting, and his posture regarding the pending immigration bill looms as the deal-breaker.
Constitutional Mandates
Our limited government—of the people, by the people and for the people—requires a civil society whose members accept and acquiesce (voluntarily and non-coercively) to the Rule of Law. It is not only, conceptually, a core value, an abstract ideal. The Rule of Law is an operational necessity for the behavior of a free, peaceful, prosperous, cooperative, independent civil society.
This enhances individuality through a minimally-invasive government. This is how values and rights are balanced, as success is built upon success. Required, however, is recognition that disingenuous rhetoric both distorts debate and demeans the very public that politicians have been elected to serve.
The proposed immigration legislation assaults this Rule of Law, a core value of our Constitutional Republic. A fundamental definition of national security is a country’s defense of its borders, but internationalists invite the world to flood America with those who are not rooted in its values. These are the same people, the “One World” idealogues, who support Supreme Court decisions predicated on United Nations precedents. They serve only to endanger the potential of the United States to survive culturally as the greatest nation in history.
Congressional Mandates
This Rule of Law, however, is under mortal assault in Congress. Legislators are expected to honor, respect, support, accept and obey the independent citizens who have authorized them to represent their interests. Indeed, they derive their power from Rousseau’s Social Contract, through which people give up some rights to a government in order to receive social order. Social contract theory provides the rationale behind the historically important notion that legitimate state authority must be derived from the consent of the governed.
Legislative activity is of critical behavioral importance, for it is required to uphold, enforce the Rule of Law…consistently…over time…in word and deed…so as to maintain the respect of the citizens who accept being bound by that Rule of Law.
This core-value is compromised when elected officials ignore failure to enforce the law, by probing the ineptitude of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. It is no accident that it functions within the Homeland Security Department, for the ultimate charge of officials who enforce laws is to protect our liberties.
This core-value is undermined the Rule of Law when they fail to secure the country’s borders by mandating prompt construction of the legally-mandated and fully-funded fence. Rome fell after illegal immigrants infiltrated from the north. America can fall after illegal immigrants infiltrate from the south. The frontier-spirit of Individualism and the gut-searing risk of Extinction are at-stake.
Administrative Mandates
On the very day that the government announced it is delaying implementation of a directive that all foreign travelers carry a passport—even to Canada and to Mexico—because of the backlog of unprocessed applications, the Senate recognized that its jerry-built “compromise” had been compromised by reality.
That’s why this is a phony bill. There is no intent to enforce this bill, for why would anyone confront an undocumented alien who has just been documented to be further-documented to enter a pathway to citizenship…even if there is no “Oz” at the end of that Yellow Brick Road?
In fact, long-term incumbents such as Senator Specter know that they failed to ensure that the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli law was enforced, and they escape from condemnation by claiming “the country is broken.” As Laura Ingraham notes, all 535 Congressmen should be issued lapel-buttons reading “E.T.L.” for they need only work to “Enforce The Law” instead of conjuring additional absurd mandates. This would constitute a clarion call to pass no legislation until the Federal Government finally implements what already has been demanded by Congress.
Fiscal Mandates
The sleeper-issue is the inherent costs associated with the Amnesty Bill. Here, the rosy estimates of the Congressional Budget Office pointedly failed to address obvious parameters—such as a burgeoning Social Security burden—that are encompassed by a Heritage Foundation analysis. And Ann Coulter has rightly complained that she would deprived of what Illegal Aliens would be entitled to claim, the ability to pay a small fine in lieu of unknown amounts of back-taxes.
The internal strife of the Republican Party constitutes a confrontation of its ethicists with its businesspeople. The former simply want cheap labor, for whom taxpayers are to finance burgeoning health, education and welfare “rights.” Are we to sell-out our national identity for those who wield power to accrue money?
But the GOP’s fiscal-constituency clamors for labor, noting inability to outsource jobs in the service-sector as it has in manufacturing. It tolerates expressions of angst by those who prioritize security-concerns…but only so long as it doesn’t affect its quarterly-reports.
Should incumbents be permitted to pander to a large voting base to enhance their power? They must be forced to hear from those who prioritize the interests of the county, the rest-of-us who fear big Government and all those who yearn for it to enlarge further.
Meanwhile, Geraldo Rivera claims—when debating Michelle Malkin on Fox’s O’Reilly Show—that “Americans” have a responsibility to accept all “Americans,” even those who would remain here despite having committed felonies. Again, rather than admit this would create a financial black-hole, he relies on bromides; we are NOT a “nation of immigrants”; we are a “nation of LEGAL immigrants”!
Credibility Mandates
The “art of compromise” starts with identifying the legitimate interests of all involved parties. It is for that reason, alone, that this bill falters, for it rewards the most venal desires of the key-players in this sociological drama. It matters not if fashioning a bill is akin to making sausage; for both “means” and “end” nauseate.
If a camel is the result of a committee-constructed horse, then this multiply-amended bill sports humps on its humps…dooming it to death during any journey across the desert or the Rio Grande. This assumes, of course, that people forget that sweeteners added to buy short-term votes can be removed subsequently. Only the amnesty would be irreversible, and this is the core of the grand design of those who would sacrifice our border-security on the political-economic petard of what they claim to be humanitarian compassion.
Meanwhile, Senator Specter still touts a measure with components—such as a multilingual mandate—that he had previously opposed. America’s ability to serve as a melting pot would be doomed to fail, as the Tower of Babel was destined to fall, if its citizenry couldn’t speak the same language. Yet, a half-century after the Supreme Court lambasted “two countries, separate and unequal,” he would hope that, after the rhetoric has cooled, his multicultural views to predominate.
But Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell sees no need to burden the taxpayer with funding the spoils of conditional-amnesty. He would create a Guest Worker program, but recognizes that this concept need not be addressed until after border security has been achieved. Reform Republicans want a fillet (as in the choicest meat) and a filleted bill (as in a deboned fish); we don’t want sausage.
Will the ranking-Republican on the Judiciary Committee prove to be the “irresistible force” that budges the Minority Leader, functioning as an “immovable object”? This is the internal tug-of-war that animates the domestic war-games raging in the Senate.
Moral Mandates
Indeed, religious scholars cite Abraham’s having welcomed the three strangers, but they forget that he also bid them farewell, for the size of his tent was limited. And medical ethicists who would provide unlimited resources to illegals forget that their actions are justly limited to provision of emergency levels of care. Thus, we want no sanctuary city or church to house illegals.
Perhaps the most heinous argument directed at opponents of this bill, is claiming we support mass-deportation. To the contrary, we feel that making America less hospitable to illegals would undermine the drive of those overwhelm already-stretched governmental services. Were the “Hazleton Approach” adopted as the norm, illegals wouldn’t easily find an income-source or a roof over their heads.
And if it took two decades for 20 million illegals to arrive, then this constitutes a useful time-frame for the reverse phenomenon to transpire…as LEGAL immigrants arrive to supplant them.
This isn’t xenophobia. This is a constitutional, humane, feasible, practical, rational, affordable response to a threat to the shared-values that have made America the world’s beacon.
Political Mandates
In America, polling consistently shows that discontent with the Administrative and Legislative branches of federal government festers, and worsens. There is a rolling revolution among the electorate, of disenchantment, cynicism toward elected Incumbents of both parties, and the hybrid moderates as well.
There is a sense that elected leaders are not protecting us—as the immigration-debacle and sham-bill tragically demonstrate—and that they are self-interested instead of focusing on America. But we are empowered to combat this travesty.
Throughout the ages, the few have ruled the many; America is, in concept and in practice, the exception. Self-government is not error-free; it frequently does not work, even more frequently, it does not work well. The wonder is that it works at all. American Exceptionalism requires self-criticism and self-correction. In the political and government sphere, this self-correction is called Elections.
Those who fear the entire party-agenda could become hostage to this RINO (“Republican In Name Only”) are willing to risk the loss of any one seat, so as to save the tradition courageously sculpted by Abraham Lincoln during the (first) Civil War era. We feel Senator Specter needs an attitudinal readjustment. He must not forget his roots—as a crusading G.O.P. District Attorney—or they will rapidly grow to entangle him.
He has countenanced the failure of government to enforce the Rule of Law. Some claim the Bush Administration has “the slows” with regard to building the fence, simply to pressure fellow-Republicans to abide by its pressure-tactics. That is why some fear that ignoring the law for lo these many years has been an intentional crime perpetrated against patriotic citizens. As a result, threatened has been national security (the twenty 9-11 killers) and national identity. If we have no borders; we have no definable country.
The immigration bill should be gently euthanized in a Hospice program, and the processing of legal visa applications should be redoubled (while the wall is built). The problem has grown to critical proportions challenging not only national security but also national cohesion. All that is needed is enforcement, and all that Congress need do is supply the resources to “do what is doable” before forcing Americans unnecessarily to embark on uncharted territory.
For some of those elected, the self-correction will come in the primaries and general elections of 2008; for Senator Specter, it is “Republican Primary 2010.” Immigration has engaged the electorate. It has enraged and focused the voters across the spectrum. We are not happy.
Three more concerns animate the Reform Republicans, who are carefully watching Senator Specter. Will he vote for the pro-union “card-check” bill that is being promoted heavily by the Democrats? If so, he will be endorsing the ability to unionize a business without respecting the right in a democracy to a secret ballot. [See http://www.Fundforgrowth.org.
And will he continue conducting a private foreign policy, such as when he goes to Syria? If so, he will be cozying-up to a terrorist state and undermining the president. [See http://www.doctor-bob.biz/AA-Political%20Essays/Specter.htm.
Also, will he run-interference for the Democrats who are attacking Attorney General Alberto Gonzales? If so, he will be helping them dismember the leadership of the Bush Administration.
Senator Specter may be “DOA” as the re-election campaign starts in 2010….
Mr. Guzzardi is a businessman and philanthropist. Dr. Sklaroff is an oncologist, hematologist and internist.
Recall is a major answer- Arizona is proceeding with such an effort against Kyl/McCain. What are other states doing to remove the arrogant, elitist traitors?