The immigration overhaul bill collapsed on the Senate floor Thursday night, the victim of partisan bickering over procedure that reflected a broader national divide over how to deal with millions of illegal immigrants.Jim DeMint certainly gets my vote for quote of the day!!!!!!
The failure to limit debate and move the bill toward final passage was a stunning defeat for President Bush, as well as Democratic and Republican senators, who have invested significant time and political capital into fixing the immigration system.
“This is a victory for sanity in this country,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), one of the bill’s top critics.
I will keep repeating this until they finally do it. Stop with the "new" laws and START enforcing the ones already on the books!!!!
Hot Air covered it while they were voting and Michelle Malkin has the roll call votes.
Good.
We do not need new bills, we need to be enforcing the existing laws.
Come here legally or get out. Simple.
I do not know why it is so hard to understand, people come here to make a better life for themselves, to have opportunities and they are welcome, but those that come illegally, those that break the very first law we have by sneaking in and trying to bypass all legal routes should be made to leave.
Deport them.
Do I sound too harsh? Why? Because I am insisting our laws be upheld? Because I am saying that we have plenty of legal routes for immigrants to come and live in our country and I am opposed to allowing illegal immigrants to break our laws and be rewarded for it?
Fine. Then I am harsh.
According to John Hawkins' at Right Wing News we can thank DeMint for "gumming" up the works and seeing this bill fail.
After the 2nd cloture vote failure at noon on Thursday, Harry Reid could not get unanimous consent to call up amendments to the bill because Jim DeMint refused to give his consent. This was extremely problematic for Reid because he wanted to get in votes on 6 more amendments before the last try at a cloture vote.
At that point, all the senators who were participants in the "Grand Compromise" AKA the "Masters of the Universe" by the opponents of the bill, leaned on DeMint to try to get him to give consent for the bill to move forward. Unfortunately for them, DeMint wouldn't budge. This essentially killed the entire afternoon that the pro-amnesty side hoped to use to shore up support for the bill.
While DeMint was gumming up the works, the opponents of the bill, including most prominently Jim DeMint, Jeff Sessions, and Tom Coburn, huddled and came up with a list of conservative amendments they wanted considered.
The "Grand Compromise" crowd didn't want a lot of these amendments to be voted on because either some of the amendments would have been accepted and it would have killed the bill or alternately, they would have had to vote against common sense enforcement measures and made themselves look bad.
Eventually, after the process was tied up all afternoon and failed a third cloture vote, Harry Reid yanked the bill even though the opponents of the bill said they were willing to stop gumming up the process as long as all the amendments they wanted were voted on today.
My source told me that he thinks this will kill the bill because the Senate has now voted against cloture 3 times and that means that if they want to bring it back up, they'll probably have to start from scratch and go through the regular committee process.
When I was packing and left for my trip, Baghdad Reid was threatening to shelve the bill if he didn't get his way and if cloture wasn't voted for, well once again, Reid lied because from what I am reading they voted 3 times before it was pulled.
Dan Balz, in a Wapo piece seems to be whining that both sides of the aisle did not come together to pass this idiocy, well I disagree strongly, 11 democrats crossed the aisle to oppose cloture, I think they DID work in a bipartisan manner to defeat a bill that never should have been brought up for a vote to begin with.
The partisan blame game was already at fever pitch as the bill was going down yesterday. But to those far removed from the backrooms of Capitol Hill, what happened will fuel cynicism toward a political system that appears incapable of finding ways to resolve the nation's big challenges.
If Washington cannot produce a solution to the glaring problem of immigration, they will ask, what hope is there for progress on health care, energy independence, or the financial challenges facing Medicare and Social Security? Iraq is another matter entirely.
So, only getting a piece of garbage that does not enforce the laws already on the books, to PASS, is working in a bipartisan manner? What about killing a bill that IS a piece of trash because it would harm America? Isn't THAT working together?
ENFORCE THE LAW and quit trying to bend the rules for those that are here illegally!!!!!
Wapo again:
"The reality is most people are just desperate to see a solution. If this goes down, the opposition is not offering an alternative, and that means the problem is still an issue," said Pete Brodnitz, a Democratic pollster. "We're in a period where people are looking to see leadership and progress."
Yes, we are offering an alternative you lying weasel...ENFORCE THE LAWS...deport those here illegally and tell them to come through the front door next time because the back door will be locked, and make sure not to forget to actually LOCK THE DAMN BACK DOOR!!!!!!
Those that have been reading this blog for any length of time over the last months will already know, I like Bush, I am not scared to say I like Bush. I like that he does not bow to "polls" but continues to do what he feels is right, I like that he understands that a nation as powerful as ours should not be breaking our promises and we should be willing to fight, even when the fight gets hard to help those that wish to be free, I like quite a bit about Bush.
I simply do not agree with him on this issue. I respect that for some reason he backs this immigration bill, but I do not, and will not agree with it just because I like Bush. We are not robots that vote as our "party" says to vote. We do not "think" what our party tells us to think. We do not band together on something we do not believe in because it shows unity.
We have minds, we use them and it is what makes us different from the far left liberal democrats.
So, once again, with the chorus..... no new bills, ENFORCE THE LAW AS IT STANDS.
How freaking difficult is this and why do we even have the laws if no one is going to bother enforcing them?
[Update] The NRO nails it on the head with why this travesty failed and will continue to fail.
And yet the motion Thursday night to end debate and move to a final vote on the bill was soundly rejected, failing to garner even a majority, let alone the necessary 60 votes.
The reason was simple — public outrage.
Immigration is one of those areas where public and elite views differ widely (for instance, see here and here). But most of the time that doesn’t really matter, because immigration seldom ranks high enough in voter concerns for politicians to take much notice. This gives lawmakers and bureaucrats a relatively free hand to cater to the preferences of businesses and racial-identity groups and anti-borders activists in promoting ever-higher immigration levels and ever-looser enforcement.
But that only works when you’re pushing bills or administrative measures that are relatively narrow and targeted. Most people have no idea what H1b visas are, let alone whether they should be increased or decreased. The attorney general’s decision to extend Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Central American illegal aliens is something most reporters — let alone ordinary readers — don’t understand, and thus receives little scrutiny in the media.
The accumulation of such small measures has a large effect, but it’s hard for non-specialists to see, and so it continues, like the proverbial frog sitting still in a pot of water while the temperature approaches boiling.
But when you assemble a huge “comprehensive” Frankenstein’s monster of a bill, stitching together body parts from all different aspects of the issue, it’s a different story. Then the media, and thus the public, start taking notice. And people don’t like what they see.
The result has been an intense outpouring of sentiment against the bill. Senators Chambliss and Graham were actually booed at their own state Republican conventions. Protesters gathered at the district offices of Senators Lott and Kyl . Sen. Alexander made the mistake of holding a town meeting — at which he got an earful about the bill. Republicans in Arizona were tearing up their registration cards and the Republican National Committee saw a 40 percent drop in small-donor contributions.
And every Senate office was inundated by phone calls and faxes — hundreds-to-one against the bill.
The role of blogs and columnists and think tanks in fueling and directing this outrage was essential, with National Review Online and the Heritage Foundation deserving special honors. But senators can still write them off as part of the Washington game rather than real people and real voters. One of the key groups focusing actual grassroots outrage was Numbers USA, which soared past a third of a million members because of public anger over the bill — and these are real citizen activists busily phoning and faxing, not a tally of passive small donors.
AMEN!!!!!
Part Two is here, it seems some places ARE enforcing our laws.
ABOUT DAMN TIME.
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