Unless there's another 09/11 level terrorist attack, or further depredations by enemy invaders or narcotrafficantes from Mexico.
A lot can happen in the next 582 days. A lot.
Posted on 03/30/2007 9:09:25 AM PDT by John Jorsett
WASHINGTON (AP) - Colorado Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo, an outspoken opponent of illegal immigration, will announce his bid for president on Monday.
Tancredo will kick off campaign with an announcement in Iowa, where political caucuses start whose the presidential nominating season, an official close to the congressman said.
Tancredo has flirted with a presidential bid for more than a year and began raising money for the effort in January. After taking in more than $1 million in two months, he has decided to make his run official, said the official, who asked not to be named ahead of Tancredo's official announcement.
Tancredo's office on Friday morning said that he will make a "major announcement" Monday on a Des Moines, Iowa, radio station.
Tancredo spokesman Carlos Espinosa would say only that Tancredo will announce his intentions and that his decision whether to run for president won't affect whether he will run again for his House seat.
Tancredo, a five-term House member who represents the Denver suburbs, is a leading supporter of securing the nation's Southern border with Mexico and cracking down on illegal immigration. He has used the issue to take on President Bush and Arizona Sen. John McCain, a leading contender for the GOP nomination.
Tancredo acknowledges that he is a long shot for president, but he has made no secret that he hopes to rattle McCain's campaign in Iowa by appealing to conservatives on immigration, abortion and other issues.
McCain last year co-sponsored a bill creating a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country now, though he has played a smaller role in the issue this year.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
"Somehow the powers that be are supposed to bless a particular candidate and we are all supposed to fall lockstep into line.
That is the EXACT same thing Alan Keyes supporters said about him when he was running for President. Mr Keyes got his ass handed to him just like Tancredo will.
What candidate for president are you supporting?
Fred Thompson
I understand that H.R.4437 and S.6211 are bills from the last Congress. I, therefore, have asked you whether you "supported" their passage, rather than whether you "support" their passage.
Why are you afraid to say whether you supported passage of H.R.4437?
Why are you afraid to say whether you supported passage of S.6211?
Why are you afraid to say whether you support giving illegal aliens legal status and a path to citizenship?
Why are you afraid to say which of the Republican candidates for president you believe would make a good president?
I agree with you..Tancredo is toast before he ever
walks out of the Rockies...If we can't get a win
with these yoyo's ..why waste time, money, effort...
Only candidates who can muster some serious..$$$$
are: Thompson, Guliani, McCain and maybe Newt??
So, if we can get the charisma, conservative principles,
and tenacity of the nominee on same page...we will
have a fighting chance.....JK
I know you don't understand this but HR 4437 and S 6211 are/were the same bill. Simply different versions, that were to be merged in conference committee.
Obviously, had the House gone to conference, and negotiated, a final bill would have emerged. But they didn't, so we will never know what that final bill might have been.
Whatever details might have been in that bill, we can say, broadly, that it would have contained enforcement and immigration policy reform.
Now it is 2007 and a new bill will emerge. It will also contain enforcement and reform.
Based on what happened in 2005/2006, we can generally predict what the new bill will be.
In 2005/2006, because the GOP was split/fractured, the dems were able to get more of what they wanted and the GOP got less of what they wanted.
Because the GOP is still split, the same thing will happen in 2007.
You've not answered the questions.
Do you support giving legal status and a path to citizenship to millions of illegal aliens?
Would you have voted for or against passage of H.R.4437 in December 2005 when the bill was presented for a vote in the United States House of Representatives if you had been a member of House
Would you have voted for or against passage of S.2611 in 2006 when the bill was presented for a voted in the United States States Senate if you had been a member of the Senate?
I understand the complete history of H.R.4437 and S.2611. The House passed a good bill and a minority of Republican senators were determined to collaborate with nearly every Democrat in the Senate and pass an amnesty bill. Thirty-two (32) Republicans voted against the Senate amnesty bill. Twenty-three (23) Republicans joined with forty-one (41) Democrats to pass the amnesty bill. What you refer to as "reform" is amnesty.
Senator Sessions and Senatopr Vitter both correctly called S.2611 an amnesty bill. Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Patrick Leahy, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd all supported the Senate amnesty bill.
Republicans in the House are not split on giving amnesty to millions of illegal aliens. A solid majority of Republican senators opposed the Senate amnesty bill.
The twenty-three (23) Republican seantors that insisted on rewarding millions of illegal aliens are to blame for a bill not being passed.
Why are you afraid to say whether you support rewarding millions of illegal aliens with legal status and a path to citizenship?
Why are you afraid to say what member of the Senate or House best represents your views on immigration?
The third paragraph of post number 168 shoudl have read "Would you have voted for or against passage of H.R.4437 in December 2005 when the bill was presented for a vote in the United States House of Representatives if you had been a member of the House?".
A paragraph contained in post number 168 should have read "The twenty-three (23) Republican senators that insisted on rewarding millions of illegal aliens with amnesty are to blame for a bill not being passed."
Could not help but notice that open border Grover Norquist has been thrown out as an 'expert' on Tom Tancredo.
Norquist has always opposed any enforcement of immigration laws.
This is old, but relavant, quite a read. Also mentioned is Stephen Moore, who founded Club for Growth. Norquist/Club two peas in the mass invasion pod.
llegal-immigration bill weakened by unlikely alliance - Deja Vu!
The 1998 Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration was awarded to Marcus Stern for this series of Articles.
It's nearly 8 years since the sad story below took place. The names of the players, those that would end our national sovereignty are the same. This is a must read! Know thy enemy.
Stern is the reporter to recently break the news of corruption troubles of Cong. Duke Cunningham.
http://www.cis.org/articles/Katz/katz1998.html
(Part III of Series)
Illegal-immigration bill weakened by unlikely alliance
By Marcus Stern
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE
04-Nov-1997
WASHINGTON - After years of bitter losses, Sen. Alan K. Simpson thought the political tides finally favored his quest to create a way to keep illegal immigrants from getting jobs.
The issue had emerged as a hot-button during the 1996 campaign. This time, he would surely defeat the powerful and savvy pro-immigration lobby.
"As I look out on this sea of faces, there are some who have been cutting my bicycle tire for 17 years," the now-retired Wyoming Republican said last year as the Judiciary Committee prepared to debate his proposals. "They're sitting back there, hollow-eyed, twitching like dogs eating peach seeds and wondering if they can do it again. ... Well, I think that game is over."
Simpson was wrong.
Once again, he had sorely underestimated the tenacity and cleverness of special-interest groups determined to preserve the flow of undocumented workers into the United States.
Yes, Congress eventually passed a new immigration law. But it was so weak it would do little to hasten the creation of a system to help employers quickly and reliably verify that the people working for them are in fact eligible to hold jobs in the United States. Such a system is a key to curbing illegal immigration, according to many experts.
The "twitching dogs" who dragged down Simpson's initiative last year are Capitol heavyweights whose coalition on immigration falls into the unlikely bedfellows category. Among them: the National Federation of Independent Business, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Rifle Association, the Catholic church, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Bar Association and even some labor unions.
As these special interests swarmed all over Capitol Hill, however, no lobbyist represented millions of legal immigrants and other poor people, who, because of welfare reform, soon might need the low-skill jobs now being held by the rising number of undocumented workers.
"There's no National Association of Working Poor," said Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary during President Clinton's first term. "There's no special-interest lobbying group working on behalf of very poor people trying desperately to find and keep jobs.
"If a politician has to decide between the interests of small businesses seeking inexpensive help and the interests of poor Americans either seeking a job or afraid of losing a job or declining earnings, the chances are very good that the small business has far more clout."
Special-interest clout
The clout displayed last year when the immigration lobby defeated Simpson's plan is a textbook demonstration of how special interests have long dominated immigration policy in Washington.
Simpson wasn't asking for anything remotely like a national ID card or national database of workers. He merely wanted the Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 to authorize pilot projects to test methods for verifying employment eligibility.
One pilot would have required participating employers to check their new employees' Social Security numbers. Because it would apply to all of their new workers, discrimination against "foreign-looking" job applicants would have been minimized.
But the anti-verification coalition painted the proposal as a sinister plot. It portrayed it as a retina-scan ID card, police-state power, the second coming of the Holocaust and even the fulfillment of a dark prophecy in the Bible's Book of Revelation that people would be stamped with the "mark of the beast."
At one meeting of the Judiciary Committee, an irritated and clearly frustrated Simpson indignantly waved a make-believe tattoo that looked like a grocery store bar code. He called it a ploy to kill his verification proposal. He was right.
Grover Norquist, a social conservative and anti-tax Republican lobbyist, reveled unapologetically in the tactics he used to undermine the verification initiative and to mock Simpson personally.
The peel-off bar-code tattoos were supposed to remind people of the way Nazis tattooed Jews during World War II.
"It was great," recalled Norquist, who is close to House Speaker Newt Gingrich. "We had our guys walking around with tattoos on their arms. It drove Simpson nuts because the implication was he's a Nazi."
The truth, however, is that both the House and the Senate bills specifically barred the implementation of any kind of national ID card. Politicians view such a card as a political kiss of death; nobody expects Congress to seriously consider one.
Toward the end of the debate, Simpson decried the pranks and slurs.
"We have dealt with tattoos and Adolf Hitler," he said. "It is the most offensive thing that I have ever heard. It's disgusting and I'm sick of it."
'Mark of the beast'
Although voters tend to see Republicans as tougher than Democrats on illegal immigration, the weakening of the verification provisions was largely the handiwork of conservative Republicans and their behind-the-scenes strategists like Norquist.
Their success underscores how tough it is for Congress to do the one thing experts have said for decades is central to curbing illegal immigration: Establish a reliable, non-discriminatory employment verification system.
Norquist has strong ties to the business community. Mainstream firms like Microsoft paid him to lobby against other provisions of the bill, such as tighter restrictions on the immigration of computer programmers.
But his forte is mobilizing support among social or moral conservatives, including gun owners (Note: Norquist now on board of NRA), the religious right, home-schooling adherents and others he described as "anti-welfare and anti-police state."
"A government powerful enough to find an illegal immigrant is also powerful enough to find your bank accounts," he said.
Conveniently, he ignores the fact that the government long has been able to find bank accounts with ease while it still can't reliably identify undocumented workers.
"Nobody really minds people sneaking across the border and working at 7-Eleven," he added.
At one point during the debate, congressional offices received calls from fundamentalist ministers around the country asking about rumors that the verification provision would fulfill a prophecy in the Book of Revelation. Was it true, they asked congressional staffers, that people would be stamped with the "mark of the beast" under the new law?
"Six-six-six," Norquist explained matter-of-factly during an interview. "That's always been one of the arguments against the ID card. There's something in Revelations about numbering people. The 'beast' could be a big computer."
The National Rifle Association was told the bill would lead to a federal computer registry that the government could use to hunt down its members and seize their guns.
"Gun owners quite correctly understand that it would take Bill Clinton all of two weeks to add the question, 'Got any guns? Could we have a list of them? Where do you keep them?' " said Norquist.
Verification opponents also circulated mock national identification cards bearing Simpson's likeness. On the back of the cards was a retina scan diagram suggesting that the legislation called for everyone to carry such a card.
"That was a good one," Norquist chuckled.
Anti-verification coalition Conservatives didn't fight verification alone last year. They were part of a coalition of strange bedfellows involved in civil rights, ethnic and religious advocacy, anti-government politics and free-market ideology. They were also bolstered by powerful business groups.
The coalition was a juggernaut that fought virtually any verification initiative. Because Republicans control Congress, conservative lobbyists were especially influential. The fact that some limited, voluntary verification projects stayed in the bill at all outraged some conservatives.
"I view it as the camel's nose under the tent for a national ID card," said Stephen Moore, an economist with the Cato Institute who lobbied against the bill. "The theme we played to Republicans was that if you're trying to roll back big government, you shouldn't be instituting this new police-state power."
Social conservatives like Norquist and libertarians like Moore don't see illegal immigration as a major problem.
"Illegal immigration is part of the price we pay for being both a prosperous and a free country, and I'm not willing to sacrifice some of our freedoms to try to keep out immigrants, especially when I don't think it's going to work very well," said Moore.
He added that spending $3 billion-plus a year to fund the Immigration and Naturalization Service "probably is a waste of money. But this is a political issue. And the way you deal with illegal immigration is you increase the INS budget. It doesn't do a lot, but at least politicians on both sides can go home and say, `Well, how can you say I'm not doing anything about immigration? I increased the INS budget.' "
What you don't do, he said, is involve employers in enforcement.
"Sometimes in politics you pass feel-good measures," Moore said. "And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Passing a bill that's mostly window dressing is a way of defusing public alarm about something. And in states like California, illegal immigration is perceived as a big problem."
http://towncriernews.blogspot.com/2006/01/llegal-immigration-bill-weakened-by.html
You don't consider yourself part of the militia?!?
Undoubtedly on Jan Michelson's show on WHO.
He went nationwide on Gordon Liddy's show.
Excerpts From Congressman Tancredo's President Campaign Announcement Statement:
While we fight around the world to defend our nation, we are entrenched now in a struggle here at home to define it. The crisis of illegal immigration threatens not only our economy and our security, but our very identity...The great tradition of American assimilation has broken down. The melting pot has cracked, and our Founding ideals are leaking through....
For too long Americans have been force-fed candidates who ignore or mock their valid concerns about the security of our borders, the enforcement of our immigration laws, and the survival of our national heritage. That ends today.
Tancredo's a good man and pretty conservative on everything.
He's not technically a one trick pony, but he has that image, and it's his own fault, because he talks about nothing else besides immigration. So regardless how well-rounded he is, he hasn't presented himself that way.
Unless there's another 09/11 level terrorist attack, or further depredations by enemy invaders or narcotrafficantes from Mexico.
A lot can happen in the next 582 days. A lot.
Thanks for posting this information AuntB.
turnabout is fair play
Let's back up and look at it.
The first thing was to frame the issue as republican against republican. Good republicans against bad republicans. Bad Ben. Bad Bush. Bad any/everybody who didn't agree with you. They're not "true conservatives" or real Americans. "They" are trying to destroy America.
To go along with this, try to define the language. This is amnesty, that is amnesty, everything is amnesty.
Once again, after three years it hasn't worked. Your support today is no wider than it was in 04, and it is probably less.
That is because it has always been and will always be republicans against democrats. And when they are discussing the issues, they now exactly what amnesty means.
Let's look at those evil republicans who joined with the dems. We can look at why and when it happened.
There is one and only one reason why. They knew that the GOP would never unify to pass an immigration bill. That the borderbots would never return. And the only way to pass an immigration bill was to join with the dems. At all it took was for the dems to compromise enough to switch. We know when and why the Ag state senators switched in 2003. Later, when the dems agreed to the further compromises in Martinez-Hagel, more switched.
Now lets llok at the particular numbers you use in your last reply.
You accurately state that there were 23 Senate republicans supporting the bill. Then you make the leap that this means that the 32 remaining Senate republicans supported enforcement only. Not true. Most of those voting against the Martinez-Hagel Reform were backing the Bush Comprehensive Immigration Reform Plan or the Kyl-Cornyn reform plan. Then if you deduct those GOP senators who were not voting for anything, there were only a handful who were supportung enforcement.
Now let's look at your numbers in the House.
You say that there was a "solid majority" of House republicans supporting enforcement only. Not true. Many republicans voted for it as part of comprehensive reform. If there has been a solid majority, the House would have gone to conference committee. Hastert knew there was more than enough votes in the House to pass S2611. That is why he bailed out and refused to go to conference.
The bottom line is, then or now, and after 3 plus years, you have no way of coming close to implementing what you want.
As a stong supporter of Tancredo for president, there is something you need to know. You shouldn't be hyping Sessions and others. While they are willing to be allies with Tancredo on immigration, they are emphatically against him for president. You see, Tancredo is of southern European descent and these ol' boys in the south don't like southern europeans any more than they like mexicans and blacks.
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