Posted on 06/14/2007 7:53:06 AM PDT by Jacksonville Patriot
The Inside Story On What's Happening With The Senate Immigration Bill
Yesterday, a GOP aide, who is one of my sources in the Senate, gave me the rundown on what's happening with the Senate immigration bill (this is the same person who I talked to last week about the bill).
First off, it does look like the Senate immigration bill is coming back. The conventional wisdom seems to be that it's going to be brought up right before the July 4th break, so that the Senate Republican leadership can try to use that as leverage to get votes (in other words, "vote for the bill or we'll have to waste your vacation time until you do").
This is despite the fact that the conservative leaders of the anti-amnesty movement are refusing to cooperate, and won't give Mitch McConnell a list of amendments that they want considered. My source tells me that the reason for this is that the game has now been rigged. McConnell is essentially promising to bring the amendments up in exchange for cloture votes, but he's publicly saying that they will strip any problematic amendments out in committee.
In other words, if the bill gets through the Senate and the House, the Democrats and the open borders Republicans will work together when the bills have to be reconciled in committee to strip out any amendments that the "grand bargainers" don't like. Therefore, at this point, it doesn't matter what amendments pass, because any tough enforcement provisions that slip through will be rendered toothless when the bills are reconciled.
My source also noted that the cloture vote to end debate will be the "real" vote on the bill because if debate is closed off, the bill is sure to pass. Then, what will happen is that the votes for the bill will be counted, and a few Senators who are afraid that their election prospects will be jeopardized by a "yes" vote, will be allowed to vote against the bill. This enables those Senators to tell their constituents that they voted against the bill, but it will still allow them to collect campaign contributions from lobbyists who have a better understanding of how things work, and know that the bill couldn't have been passed without their support. Put another way, they get to reap the rewards of supporting amnesty while telling the voters in their home states that they opposed the bill.
My source also let me know that the White House and the Senate leadership, and Trent Lott in particular, are pushing very hard for this bill.
I asked my source to speculate on why Lott was pushing so hard, and he said that Lott may be naive enough to think that this bill might help John McCain's presidential campaign. He told me that despite McCain's dip in the polls since the bill hit the news, it was hard to miss the fact that the biggest supporters of this bill in the Senate, Jon Kyl, Trent Lott, and Lindsey Graham, are all solidly behind McCain in '08.
Before we finished up, I asked my source what he thought the prospects of passage were. He stated that it was a toss up, but that the pro-amnesty side had the momentum. I asked how that could possibly be given the outpouring of anger against this bill, and he told me that a lot of moderates were afraid of being called racists by people like Michael Chertoff, Luis Gutierrez, and Fred Barnes. He also noted that the Senate has a very insulated, clubhouse like atmosphere, and that a lot of these pro-amnesty Senators seem to be more worried about getting the President or Trent Lott mad at them than enraging the voters in their states. In addition, he told me that he thinks a lot of these Senators have "drunk the DC Kool-Aid", and believe that they're better off passing a bad bill, even one that won't ultimately become law if, as expected, the House kills it, so that they can at least tell the voters in 2008 that they did something about immigration.
PS #1: I asked my source what his boss thought the fallout from this bill would be. He advised me that his boss, and some of his boss's conservative colleagues in the Senate, believe that this bill could gin up so much outrage on the right that it could lead to the GOP having an even worse year in 2008 than they did in 2006. As is, conservatives are disillusioned and unmotivated, and he thinks this bill will make things much worse if it passes the Senate.
PS #2: Another question I had for my source was whether he thought Harry Reid wanted this bill to pass. He replied that he thought Rush Limbaugh was right, and that Harry Reid would prefer to see this bill go away. As evidence for that, he pointed to Reid bringing Byron Dorgan's killer Amendment back three times. He also said that if Reid had really wanted the bill to pass, he would have kept it on the floor for another 2-3 days. At this point though, he said that Reid is probably content to let it come back because after the President's high profile lobbying, he can pin the blame for the bill on Republicans.
John Hawkins | 06:30 AM
1. Don't know who to fax? Here is a list of GOP Senators being targeted by the pro-amnesty crowd to flip.
2. Need a fax number? Go to http://www.grassfire.org/19042/targets.htm (Ignore the prices, you are just after the fax numbers).
3. Fax for free from the Web. Put your message in the text box. Go to http://faxzero.com/
That's it. You're done.
I faxed Mitch McConnell the following:
Security first, Senator! Please do not betray your country! We do not want this bill.
You can also email them from a webform here. This site also has their office phone numbers.
Round 2 is beginning.
This is dead-on right. Read this excerpt from yesterday's Washington Times article entitled "Bush Lobbies Senate on Immigration", available at:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20070613-120635-9285r.htm
One key question is how to go forward even though several amendments have already cut at the grand bargain -- including limiting the guest-worker program and making it easier to deport those who don't qualify for legalization -- and several other difficult amendments could pass before the bill is final.
Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott, Mississippi Republican, said those amendments will simply disappear when the House and Senate go to conference.
"No big deal -- you pitch those before you get to the Rotunda," he said.
and write or call your senators, Rush, Shawn, Laura, EVERYBODY to show them what a scam this bill is and Lott just admitted it.
Senator Sessions——chewing gum, taking names.
He’s almost out of gum—look out Republicrats!
This week, we will vote on cloture and final passage of a comprehensive bill that will strengthen border security, bring the 12 million undocumented Americans out of the shadows, and keep our economy strong. In the days ahead, we will work to improve the bill to protect and strengthen family ties while improving the structure of the temporary-worker program.
Free fax works, folks, I just used it to fax the Senile Senator from Virginia, John “Statesman” Warner.
Or, tell the Senators you call that a vote for cloture is a vote for amnesty, aand that you know a vote against the final bill is nothing but a CYA maneuver.
(Mods, I posted this exact same article. Feel free to delete my thread if you want.)
This whole thing stinks. There are too many people supporting it for unexplained reasons.
I found this article at Michelle Malkin’s website and searched Freep using keyword “John Hawkins”. I didn’t mean to step on your toes, and I apologize if I did.
Totally my fault. I was so incensed at the content of the article - especially the notion that the final vote is a ruse - that I posted without checking for previous posts. My apologies.
Once our social engineers manage to push this cultural experiment past the point of no return, they will vacate to safe havens. I told my son to watch where they are moving to, and do the same. There is a wall in our future, but it will be here to keep us in once all the poor, uneducated, unskilled and uncultured citizens of this hemisphere have flooded into the US. I’m not sure why our politicians want this crisis, but they do, and they are going to cause it, one way or the other.
Now that this scam has been made public there’s no Senator that can honestly say later on they didn’t know, or were fooled or deceived when enforcement amendments are removed or the bill made even more liberal. If any one of them votes for cloture they are traitors, period.
Drugs and their use are good for the justice system and the prison industry, lots of jobs there you know. That's something else the government could stop or dramatically slow if they truly wanted to.
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