On The Edge Or Over It?

Thanks to the profane, over-the-top arrogance of Senate Supreme Chancellor John McCain, and the appallingly awful PR legerdemain of hatching McCain-Kennedy II in the proverbial back room (not "smoke-filled" anymore, alas) and trying to bludgeon it through the Senate like an Indy car through a Wendy's drive-thru against the overwhelming opposition of the American public at large, the hope on the center-right is growing, weed-like, that the latest grand "comprehensive immigration compromise" is dead for a ducat, dead.

For Double-H, that hope was nailed down into certainty by New Jersey Donk Senator Bob Menendez:

Senator Menendez drove a nail into the compromise's coffin today when he blasted the "hateful rhetoric" in the country directed at McCain-Kennedy 2.0. I have spent a week interviewed guests and talking to experts and the callers, and there hasn't been any hateful rhetoric, nor have I heard it on other shows. What I do hear is profound suspicion of the Congress and perfectly reasonable objections to the obvious problems in the bill.

Blasting away at opponents - especially those who might have been won over by responsive amendments - is a sign of desperation, as is the increasingly cement-handed massaging of the bill.

Hugh left out the adjective "frantic," as each successive amendment has been voted down by increasingly narrow margins. Norm Coleman's "sanctuary city" amendment is the latest, and despite the Admiral's optimism, I'm betting the "compromise's" stubborn defenders find a way to shoot down John Cornyn's amendment closing a gaping loophole in the bill that will ensure that members of terrorist-related organizations, known gang members, sex offenders, alien smugglers who use firearms and felony drunk drivers are either permanently barred from the United States or prohibited from getting any immigration benefit, and call it "addressing opponents' national security concerns."

You'd think I'd be more confident of the tide turning against this turkey. Perhaps that's my natural cynicism take center stage again. I mean, look what border erasure foes have going for them now: the President is "Harriet Miers-ing" the bill:

[Bush] continues to misrepresent the immigration debate, and thus lose any chance to attract fence-sitters to his side. Again today, he suggested that the opponents of his immigration plan want us instead to do a massive manhunt and forcibly and quickly deport all twelve million illegals - and then says that, well, of course that's an impossible task, which is why his opponents are wrong. But not even the anti-immigration hardliners at National Review have ever suggested doing that. Again and again and again, the mainstream anti-illegal immigration folks have said their preferred option is to get tough on border enforcement and get tougher on employers who hire illegals, and let the rest of the problem work itself over time by mere attrition. That is NOT a massive deportation scheme. For Bush to continue to insist that mass, forced deportation is his opponents' only alternative is like sticking a hot fork in their eyes. And, since a large percentage of them are people who otherwise are among the last holdouts SUPPORTING Bush on other matters, his insult to their motives and their intelligence is particularly ill-advised. At the very least, the way to win skeptics is not to mischaracterize the other side's position.

You will probably recall that when the President put up his laughably unqualified White House counsel and de facto groupie for the SCOTUS seat of the retiring Sandra Day O'Connor, which was most definitely a collective "hot fork in our eyes," as well as being a sucker-kick a ways south of that bodily location, he and his surrogates first tried to buffalo conservatives to "trust him," then tried to snow conservatives that Miers was "one of them" on the grounds that because she goes to church that meant she'd vote to overturn Roe v. Wade (i.e. a "fundie" seat on Olympus), and finally dropped all pretense of persuasion and launched a verbal war against his own base, suggesting that Miers opponents were "sexist" and "elitist." Dubya only relented when then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist told him the facts of life in the baldest Barry Goldwateresque fashion: that the White House's disastrous PR bumbling had so incensed the center-right and denuded any possible cover for his caucus to go along with the Miers nomination that there was no chance she'd be confirmed.

If the President is now doing the same thing vis-a-vie the amnesty bill by erecting nativist strawmen in lieu of actually addressing opponents' eminently reasonable and sensible (and, on the national security holes plugged by the Cornyn amendment, day-glo obvious) objections, echoing Democrats in the process, there should be every reason to believe that McCain-Kennedy II is as doomed as every cheeseburger that comes across my plate.

And yet there are reports like this one suggesting that not only will the amnesty pass the Senate, but by a filibuster-proof margin. Which would do for the aforementioned Senator Coleman, Maine's Susan Collins (okay, no big loss there), New Hampshire's John Sununu, and every other underdog 'Pubbie up for re-election in '08 what the McCain Mutiny did for George Allen, Jim Talent, Conrad Burns, Mike DeWine, and Rick Santorum last November.

Will three weeks - now two and a half - be enough for their base's high-rolling boil to scald the Republican remnant back to some semblance of sanity? Well, it took four weeks to flush the Miers fiasco. I hope that isn't a hard & fast template, or, to re-coin a phrase, "We" - both America and its erstwhile majority party ' "are [bleep]ed".