McCain: I want to name America’s new immigration reform law after Ted Kennedy

A bon mot from his speech last night to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, preserved for posterity on Twitter by Benny Johnson of BuzzFeed. It’s a testament to Maverick’s eagerness to pander to his audience that he’d say something like this, knowing that House Republicans are already nervous about how amnesty will be received by conservative voters. In fact, a right-wing friend mine of who works in politics saw Johnson’s tweet and assumed McCain must have been joking. Surely, with immigration reform already imperiled by righty opposition, a GOPer already loathed by tea partiers wouldn’t offer up the effort as a prayer to Teddy’s memory. Would he?

The “Ted Kennedy Immigration Reform Act of 2014″ has a nice, turnout-producing ring to it, don’t you think?

BuzzFeed Benny ✔ @bennyjohnson Follow McCain accepting his award on behalf of Ted Kennedy.

BuzzFeed Benny ✔ @bennyjohnson Follow McCain "I will never ever ever ever as long as I am breathing stop before immigration reform is passed."

BuzzFeed Benny ✔ @bennyjohnson Follow McCain "when immigration reform passes I will make sure it is forever called the Edward M. Kennedy immigration bill"

He was most definitely serious, says Johnson, although I could have told you that even without having been there. After all, for whatever strange reason, McCain has felt compelled to praise Kennedy before when trying to sell the Gang of Eight bill. January 28, 2013:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) hailed the late Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy on Monday as a bipartisan group of senators laid out new principles for comprehensive immigration reform — perhaps handing opponents a weapon.

Kennedy and McCain led the effort for broad-based immigration reform that failed nearly six years ago, and McCain said this new push was nearly the same.

“If we do succeed, and I think we will, it will be a testimonial to Ted Kennedy’s effort years ago that laid the groundwork for this agreement,” McCain said. “You will find that this agreement has very little difference from that of the legislation that was led by Sen. Kennedy some years go.”

He was right about that last part, at least. I guess McCain thought at the time it was his job to reassure the left that the dastardly Republicans who were part of the Gang of Eight wouldn’t try to gut the bill’s legalization provisions, but Chuck Schumer’s membership in the group would have been reassurance enough for them. Besides, from the very beginning it’s been clear that Democrats, not Republicans, would provide most of the support in Congress for the bill. Either McCain totally misjudged which voting bloc needed pandering to or he’s so contemptuous of conservatives that he found it more important to taunt them with a Kennedy reference than to try to win them over by deep-sixing rhetoric like that. Imagine: This is the guy whose political acumen we were trusting to stop the Hopenchange juggernaut in its tracks in 2008.

Well, no harm done. Obama’s going to solve Congress’s problem for them sooner or later. Probably sooner.

For our younger Freepers who may not know why those of us >50 years of age have so much antipathy for Teddy Kennedy and will not let his wicked memory rest ... I also despise Juan McCain for his RINO ways, but when Ted's Chappaquidick "Misadventure" occurred, 7/18/1969, Juan had already spent nearly 2 years in a North Vietnamese POW camp suffering extreme duress.

Photo Gallery of Ted Kennedy's Car at Chappaquidick

This was the infamous 1972 Teddy Kennedy parody ad in The National Lampoon created by Ann Beatts. It was a visually spot-on replica of VW’s ad produced by Doyle Dane Bernbach, claiming the Beetle was so well sealed it could float. VW sued National Lampoon claiming unauthorized use of its trademark. The Lampoon had to recall the magazine and issue an apology. National Lampoon also printed a fake quote from Kennedy, as a "response" to a question on whether he planned to campaign for President in the next election: "I'll drive off that bridge when I come to it."

1965 - The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act, INS, Act of 1965, Pub.L. 89–236) abolished the National Origins Formula that had been in place in the U.S. since the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. It was proposed by U.S. Representative Emanuel Celler (D-NY: His paternal grandparents and maternal grandmother were German Jews. This was the culminating moment in Celler's 41-year fight to overcome restriction on immigration to the U.S. based on national origin.), co-sponsored by U.S. Senator Philip Hart (D-MI) and heavily supported by U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA). The Hart-Celler Act replaced the EQA with a preference system that focused on immigrants' skills and family relationships with citizens or U.S. residents. It marked a radical break from the immigration policies of the past. The law as it stood then excluded Asians and Africans and preferred northern and western Europeans over southern and eastern ones. At the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s the law was seen as an embarrassment by, among others, POTUS #35 JFK, who called the then-quota-system "nearly intolerable". Some historians thought that JFK saw a chance for retaliation in response to the anti-Irish Catholic bigotry by WASPs he encountered as a younger man. After Kennedy's assassination, POTUS #36 LBJ signed the bill at the foot of the Statue of Liberty as a symbolic gesture. In order to convince the American populace - the majority of who were opposed to the act - of the legislation's merits, its liberal proponents assured that passage would not influence America's culture significantly. POTUS #36 LBJ called the bill "not revolutionary", SoS Dean Rusk estimated only a few thousand Indian immigrants over the next 5 years, and other politicians, including Senator Ted Kennedy, hastened to reassure the populace that the demographic mix would not be affected; these assertions would later prove widely inaccurate. In line with earlier immigration law, the bill also prohibited the entry into the country of "sexual deviants", including homosexuals. By doing so it crystallized the policy of the INS that had previously been rejecting homosexual immigrants on the grounds that they were "mentally defective" or had a "constitutional psychopathic inferiority". After ethnic quotas on immigration were removed in 1965, the number of actual 1st generation immigrants living in the U.S. eventually quadrupled from 9.6 million in 1970 to about 38 million in 2007. Over 1 million persons were naturalized as U.S. citizens in 2008. The leading countries of origin of immigrants to the U.S. were Mexico, India, the Philippines, and China. Nearly 14 million immigrants entered the U.S. from 2000 to 2010. Family reunification accounts for approximately two-thirds of legal immigration to the U.S. every year. The number of foreign nationals who became legal permanent residents (LPRs) of the U.S. in 2009 as a result of family reunification (66%) exceeded those who became LPRs on the basis of employment skills (13%) and for humanitarian reasons (17%).

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