The Legislative Undead

When last we checked in with the Bush-McCain-Kennedy-Grahamnesty-Kyl (notice how that roster keeps getting longer, and all but Uncle Teddy are 'Pubbies?) immigration amnesty bill, it was oscillating back and forth wildly between its proponents' selling points versus what it would actually do and its being on its deathbed versus teetering on the precipice of passage.

The ensuing forty-eight hours have only made it worse. It's fair to say that while this bill may be enraging the bulk of the GOP base, its mostly making me sick.

Stay with me now, as I try to trace this Li'l-Billy-in-the-Family-Circus meandering account. I'll understand if you get lost at some point, but don't expect me to come back for you. Oh, and barf bags are on the house.

THURSDAY, 5:00 AM: The Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector posts another devastating article on NRO asserting that McCain-Kennedy is more than just an "amnesty" bill, because it doesn't just forgive alien felons' crimes, but actively rewards them:

Consider two foreigners who were here on temporary visas that expired in December 2006. One of these individuals lawfully returned home upon expiration of his visa; the other chose to remain in the U.S. unlawfully. Under S. 1348, which of these individuals will be granted the privileges and benefits of citizenship? Answer: the one who broke our laws. Meanwhile the individual who respected our laws and returned home will remain abroad and will have little chance for citizenship. Is this fair? Of all the people in the world who wish to come to America, why should we feel compelled to grant citizenship to a group whose sole qualification is that they broke our laws?

President Bush ceaselessly protests that the Senate bill is not amnesty. In a certain sense, he is right: The bill goes way beyond amnesty. The root of the word “amnesty” is to forget. In a normal amnesty the crime is “forgotten” and penalties are waived. S. 1348 goes far beyond waiving penalties for all those who broke U.S. immigration laws; it rewards them with access to government benefits and citizenship.

THURSDAY, 6:08 AM: Admiral Ed relays an AP report that after sane Republican senators tried in vain to find a bill-killing amendment that would pass, the hoped-for poison pill turned out to be a union-backed Byron Dorgan amendment that had lost by a single vote a week earlier:

A fragile compromise that would legalize millions of unlawful immigrants risks coming unraveled after the Senate voted early Thursday to place a five-year limit on a program meant to provide U.S. employers with 200,000 temporary foreign workers annually.

The 49-48 vote came two weeks after the Senate, also by a one-vote margin, rejected the same amendment by Senator Byron Dorgan. The North Dakota Democrat says immigrants take many jobs Americans could fill.

The reversal dismayed backers of the immigration bill, which is supported by President Bush but loathed by many conservatives. Business interests and their congressional allies were already angry that the temporary worker program had been cut in half from its original 400,000-person-a-year target.

A five-year sunset, they said, could knock the legs from the precarious bipartisan coalition aligned with the White House. The Dorgan amendment "is a tremendous problem, but it's correctable," said Senator Arlen Specter, R-PA. The coalition will try as early as Thursday to persuade at least one senator to help reverse the outcome yet again, he said.

Not only did eleven Republicans, most of them conservatives, vote for the Dorgan amendment, but a number of conservatives who are also part of the "compromise coalition" helped vote down several common sense security-related amendments that you'd think they would wholeheartedly support. Never has the principle of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" been more dizzyingly applied.

THURSDAY, 7:20 AM: NRO's editors weigh in again on the current state of the battle and sound less than sanguine about the chances of stopping it:

The bill’s weaknesses — on the merits, and in public opinion — have not kept the Senate’s compromise coalition from holding together. That coalition has so far fought off amendments from both the Right and the Left. Its principal tactic has been to offer watered-down versions of those amendments to provide cover for nervous senators. So, for example, Senator John Cornyn’s amendment to deny legal status to certain convicted felons, sex offenders, violent gang members, and members of terrorist organizations was defeated 51-46 after senators passed a far weaker alternative to it offered by Ted Kennedy. Liberal amendments that threaten the coalition will probably be dealt with similarly.

An amendment strategy can help to highlight the bill’s glaring flaws, but it is unlikely to derail the bill. To do that, senators are just going to have to be willing to do the right thing — which in this case would also be the popular thing.

THURSDAY, 10:08 AM: Allahpundit reports that Lindsey "Tell The Bigots To Shut Up" Grahamnesty - who got booed at the recent South Carolina GOP convention - has thrown a tantrum over an amendment offered by Barackalackadingdong Obamamama (well, that's how Uncle Teddy pronounces the Illinois junior senator's name after his third martini).

Notice in particular the magic pump-fist action meant to ad histrionic emphasis to Grahamnesty's martyrous portrayal of his own heroic "bipartisan" virtue. It's of a demogogic piece with this slur of his as brought to us by that bathroom tissue known as the New York Times:

Supporters of the legislation have also accused their foes of being callous in their push to deny residency to illegal immigrants. “If you want to be the person who keeps families apart, bring this bill down,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and another of its architects, said Wednesday on the floor.

Opponents of the measure say that while such criticism, particularly coming from fellow Republicans, can sting, it will not deter them.

“It is not helpful, and I don’t think it reflects where a lot of people are,” said Mr. Thune, who noted his grandfather came to the United States from Scandinavia. “We have an appreciation that we are a welcoming country, but coupled with the fact that we are a nation of laws and have to respect those laws.”

Not any more. We have something better than laws. We have the uncharted compassion of Lindsey Grahamnesty, which we knuckle-draggers are too dimwitted to appreciate.

THURSDAY, 10:35 AM: Hugh Hewitt relays an AP report that....:

The immigration "compromise" is coming apart at the seams as the McCain-Kennedy coalition opts for a jam down rather than the serious legislative surgery necessary to repair a badly structured bill.

THURSDAY, 2:29 PM: Double-H relays a Washington Post story illustrating yet again why Trent Lott lost his Majority Leader's post four and a half years ago:

Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott (R-MS) said he has told the most virulent Republican opponents that he will not tolerate a raft of amendment votes designed simply to filibuster the measure, and he castigated his own party's senators for their vote switches.

"We're going to do this damned thing, and if we don't, I think we should dissolve the Congress and just go home," Lott fumed.

Hey, now there's an idea. Dissolving Congress and going home, that is. Much more from T.L. Worthless later.

THURSDAY, 4:45 PM: NRO's editors try again to convey the facts of life to bewitched GOP senators who seem impervious to simple logic:

Some Republican supporters of this deal seem to believe that they have already sustained all the political damage from it that can be sustained, so that the thing to do now is to pass the bill and get it over with. This is a delusion. Conservatives will be far angrier if the bill passes, especially once they see millions of illegal immigrants lining up to get their “probationary” legal status while the bureaucracy drags its feet on enforcement.

THURSDAY, 5:20 PM: Senate Majority Chisler "Dirty Harry" Reid begs President Bush to intervene to save Republicans from saving themselves:

"There's lots of support for this program on the outside,'' Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said after pulling the bill from the Senate floor in Washington. ``The problem was on the inside of this Senate chamber.''

"I want to finish this bill, but I can't do it alone,'' Reid said. "Let's have President Bush work with us.'' ...

Reid had appealed to Bush to help persuade forty-seven Republicans who opposed limiting debate on the bill in an earlier vote today. The legislation's demise would produce headlines that "the President fails again,'' the majority leader warned.

Well, Senator Pencil-Neck was right about the headline in this very same Bloomberg piece. I'd think he was aware that Bush is currently over in Europe at the G-8 summit gazing into Vlad Putin's navel again. I'd also think he'd figure that if Bush is as politically radioactive as people like Reid are endlessly claiming, a presidential appeal to commit political suicide would be likely to produce the precise opposite result, but given what I've seen in this immigration fracas over the past few weeks, he may know his 'Pubbies better than we thought.

THURSDAY, 7:10 PM: Brother Hugh chimes in again with audio of an appalling Trent Lott tirade against the Republican base and some of his own colleagues tied off with a gag-inducing smooch to Uncle Teddy that would make me ill if all this arrogant, cynical, treacherous, transparantly dishonest bobbing, weaving, ducking, and dodging wasn't already doing it.

I'll play the clips on Hard Starboard Radio tomorrow (10 AM PDT) and (hopefully) get the responses of my RepublicanForum colleagues. Click here to read those of Mark Steyn. I'll read them tomorrow morning if I end up flying solo.

Hugh joins the borderline plaintive effort to talk sanity to the Senate GOP remnant:

The backdrop to the current debate is not only the immigration bill, but also six years of Democratic obstruction and the loss of a 55-45 seat majority, a loss that is at least in part - I believe in large part - owed to the non-confrontational approach of Senate Republicans to that obstruction, and to the pervasive air of indifference to key conservative goals from judicial nominations, to John Bolton, earmarks and absurd spending, and of course the war. What Senator Lott is voicing in a strong echo of those years is a belief in an institution that many conservatives have lost faith in because Democratic ruthlessness in the use of the filibuster. Now that the GOP has only the filibuster with which to work, the leadership is not replicating the tactics of the Democrats when the Denmocrats werte in opposition, but is in fact seen to be caving on a major issue. Having been hamstrung for most of the past four years, it is simply galling to hear the Republican Whip promise Harry Reid a vote in the spirit of getting something done....

I expect the cloture vote that looms to pass given Senator Lott's remarks, and when it does, the Senate GOP is going to see blowback that it will not recover from in time for '08. Political insanity of the first order, orchestrated by leadership that seems not to have grasped that it is just as easy to go from 49 to 39 as it was from 55 to 49.

THURSDAY, 7:35 PM: Admiral Ed casually live-blogs what Dirty Harry called the "final" cloture vote. The effort to shut off debate fails, 55-45, with none other than T.L. Worthless himself voting "nay". Reid spends his floor time whining hilariously:

Harry Reid's blaming the collapse on Republican objections on votes for amendments. "Small groups shouldn't dictate what goes on around here."

You mean like your Democrats when you spent the past four years filibustering President Bush's appellate court nominations? Or the nomination of John Bolton as Ambassador to the UN?

Harry Reid talked about how he gave the bill lots and lots of time, but the Republicans wanted too many amendments and too much time from the busy legislative schedule.

Hmm. Funny about that. Isn't this the same Democratic leadership that took 108 days just to pass a spending bill for our troops in Iraq?

It is, indeed, Ed. But you miss the point - that rule, like the other one, only applies to Republicans, not Democrats.

Whew. We can sleep well and peacefully tonight.

FRIDAY, 6:27 AM: Hope we all got a good night's slumber, because this morning, despite a couple of post-mortems, we won't need any caffeine to wake up:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), citing "the disastrous status quo that we have on immigration in America today," insisted that Democrats could have gotten the bill passed had they allowed Republicans to vote on more amendments. The effort may have collapsed, in part, because of a dispute over as few as two GOP amendments. Reid said that he offered Republicans up to eight more amendments, but Republicans apparently wanted ten or twelve.

Although McConnell acknowledged that some Republicans would never vote for the bill, he rebuked Reid for not trying harder to win over more moderate Republicans. "The key is the rest of us," McConnell said. "We could have finished this bill in a couple of more days."

McConnell added that he hoped Reid would bring the bill up again soon. "I wouldn't wait a whole long time to do it," he warned. [emphasis added]

Huh? McConnell's shrunken caucus inflicts grievous wounds upon itself but somehow manages to dodge the killing blow, and now he's encouraging Dirty Harry to cultivate the RINOs and try again "soon"? WTF? Is this monstrosity dead for this Congress or isn't it?

On Hugh Hewitt's radio show, John Kyl, the man who had been one of the few credible conservatives left in the upper chamber, echoed McConnell's dismaying sentiments, leading Double H to warn:

Here's the political danger: To bring back a bill with only cosmetic changes will enrage the GOP base far beyond where they already were when their complaints were perceived as being ignored. Republican activists will feel as though they are being conned if the bill that was thought to be dead is raised up in the same form and quickly passed.

Judging from the comments to that very post, even suggesting that the bill be brought back - in ANY form - is ALREADY "enraging the GOP base far beyond where they" were already. Combine just this attempted imperious, contemptuous, perfidous "jam-down" with the context Hugh provided above, and this bill could stay dead and the GOP might still lose another ten senate seats next November. And if it is resurrected and shoved-down our throats successfully? Senate 'Pubbies might lose EVERY SINGLE CONTESTED race.

Hey, the Commodore himself called it "political insanity of the first order". That may turn out to be a grievous understatement.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Hugh for the link and acknowledgement. And to all who followed it here, Qapla! The gagh is fresh and wiggly today....