DEAR FRIENDS,
Just a quick note in between all the dashing around DC today.
At the moment the news around Capitol Hill is filled with cautious optimism that the Amnesty Senators can't seem to get the 60 votes it will take to pass the Specter Judiciary Committe bill or any other blanket amnesty that is being considered.
Obviously, we could lose at any minute, so the burden of responsiblity weighs heavy on all of us not to let up in our phoning, visiting Senators' local offices and in faxing.
But ....
The inability of the Amnesty Senators to get 60 votes right now is an incredible victory. I was talking with Rosemary Jenks (our Director of Government Relations) awhile ago just as she was leaving another interview at CNN. She says there is only one explanation for why this vote is deadlocked right now ....
.... The relentless pounding that you American citizens have given these 40-plus Senators who are holding out against all the money and power of the national corporate lobbies, the national religious lobbies and most of the national media. THAT must be the explanation.
Now, some of you may think me a naive optimist to be glad about a situation in which it appears that more than 50 (half) of our Senators are willing to give away our country so easily in supporting these amnesty bills.
But what I am is a realist who knows how just how terrible our situation has been for years in the Senate. We are all pinching ourselves to see if we are in a dream because all practical signs three weeks ago suggested that a blanket amnesty would easily pass the Senate.
As we nearly always do in the face of the impossible, we rallied ourselves and all of you to try to beat the amnesty that looked inevitable.
Now, it looks like we just might have a chance!
I want you to take a moment to understand the context of all of this so you can appreciate how effective all of your actions have been. I know that many of you have been writing me that despite all your phoning and faxing your Senators still make terrible choices and that you should just give up on them and work on somebody else.
But we will never win unless a lot of people who were once -- or are now -- thought hopeless come around to our side, at least on some things.
We can't stop working on any of these people. You never know when you will be the straw that breaks the camel's back and causes your Senator to pull back even slightly from his/her pursuit of flooding our communities with wage-depressing foreign workers. And that slight pulling back, combined with incremental changes in other Senators may just make the difference.
In a battle, no army can afford to have individual soldiers to stop firing because he doubts that his participation is not making any difference, or that his target is hopeless.
The fact is that most of our allies in the House and the Senate the last five years have resisted bringing major immigration reform legislation to the floor because they said that once anything got to the Senate it would be turned into the most ugly open-borders legislation you could imagine.
Well, they were right. We never could have imagined any legislation as bad as the one the Judiciary Committee passed last week:
- doubling the level of mandatory immigration to 2 million a year
- granting blanket amnesty for 12-20 million illegal aliens
- more than doubling the level of foreign guestworkers and opening up all occupations from low-skill to high-tech and science to competition from the world's laborforce
When we met with top staffers of key Senate allies just a couple of weeks ago, they were preparing to stage a floor battle on principles and parliamentary maneuvers to slow down the disaster and hoping that as many as 15 Senators would stand up against these gigantic immigration increases as they lost.
Apparently at this minute, as many as 45 Senators may be balking!
There is no way that would have happened if you and the members of many other grassroots groups had not been relentless in turning their heads from the siren song (and big bucks) of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
SENATORS HAGEL & MARTINEZ WORKING
ON A COMPROMISE TO GET A HALF-DOZEN MORE REPUBLICANS
Hagel (R-Nebraska) and Martinez (R-Florida) are from the radical fringe of the Republican Party that believes America will fall apart if it has to rely on Americans to do its work.
They are reported to be working fervishly night and day to come up with a compromise that would win a few more Republicans over to support an amnesty. They claim they have a dozen Republicans committed to the Specter Judiciary Amnesty.
All but three of the Democrats are thought to be solid for the amnesty (although I would hope that none of you with Democratic Senators will accept that as set in stone).
That would suggest 55 votes for the amnesty right now.
Hagel and Martinez are talking about a compromise that would give permanent residency to all illegal aliens who can prove they were here more than 5 years.
They say that would leave out the approximately 40% of illegal aliens who have come in the last 5 years (presumably enticed by Pres. Bush's constant speeches extolling the virtues of illegal workers and promising some kind of amnesty).
Asked what would happen to the 40% who would not get amnesty, Hagel and Martinez say that the country would adopt really tough standards that would make it virtually impossible for most illegal aliens to get jobs and that they would start going home as they find life to be so hard here.
(pause) Yes, you heard right.
Hagel and Martinez seem to be making our argument that attrition will work if we enforce the laws and mandate workplace verification for all employees.
The logical question from us is: If you can enforce the laws for future illegal aliens and for those who came in the last 5 years, why can't you do it for everybody and forego any amnesty?
The biggest argument Senators are making for amnesty (Sen. Feinstein, D-CA is doing this all the time) is that the illegal aliens will never go home under any circumstance so we might as well make them Americans.
Hagel and Martinez in their compromise have conceded our main point, and we should use that to hold on to our 45 Senators and try to win over some additional ones.
Another problem of the Hagel/Martinez compromise is that for every Republican they hope to pick up by not offering a blanket amnesty to all illegal aliens, they may lose some Democrats who won't be willing to cut 40% of the illegal aliens out of the jackpot reward.
That such backdoor maneuvering is going on is a clear sign that citizen pressure is having an effect.
Many of those 45 Senators who are holding out may really prefer to take the big corporation lobbying money and to receive their blessings from the open-border religious leaders, but they are looking fearfully over their shoulders at what might become an angry mob of voters next fall and beyond.
Only you can make those Senators keep looking over their shoulders.
Frankly, we only feel like a half-dozen Republican Senators and one Democratic Senator are safe on our side. All the rest could be flipped to support an amnesty, based on their past behavior, what their staffers are saying about them and the incredible enticements that the open-borders lobbyists are giving them.
Get everything you need for phoning and visiting by going to:
www.NumbersUSA.com
DON'T STOP FIGHTING,
-- ROY
|
