Senate blocks Bush's immigration bill

June 28, 2007, 10:48AM
Senate blocks Bush's immigration bill


By MICHELLE MITTELSTADT
Copyright 2007 Washington Bureau

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WASHINGTON — In a stunning setback for President Bush and other advocates of a proposed immigration law overhaul, the Senate voted today to block a final vote on the legislation, almost certainly dooming any further effort at reform in Congress this year.

On a vote of 46-53, the Senate fell 14 votes shy of the 60 needed to cut off an inevitable filibuster and move to a final vote on the bill, which had been cobbled together in recent months by a bipartisan alliance of about a dozen senators working in concert with the Bush administration.

Both Republican senators from Texas — Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, who had battled for weeks to make the bill more conservative — voted, as expected, to bring it down, bucking their president on his chief domestic policy priority.

The vote represented a moment of high drama for the Senate, with neither side entirely sure of where the votes were as senators headed into the showdown.

"I don't know. People are going to vote their conscience, their constituents," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who led the charge to defeat the legislation.

In the end, a bill that was fully embraced by no one and criticized by just about everybody imploded amid entrenched conservative opposition, distrust between both parties amid incredibly high political stakes and the sense that too many compromises had to be made to keep the fragile deal together.

The so-called "grand bargain" knitted together three major concepts: Legalization for most of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, significantly beefed-up enforcement at the Southwest border and within the United States, and a temporary worker program designed to address America's labor needs.

It also proposed a historic reordering of legal immigration, de-emphasizing the decades-old focus on family reunification in favor of bringing in more highly skilled foreigners to enhance U.S. competitiveness in the global economy.

While the business sector, organized labor, immigrant-rights groups, religious institutions and others preached the need for a comprehensive overhaul addressing all aspects of a dysfunctional immigration system, very few of them offered full-throated support for the bill and lobbied to change many of its key underpinnings.

Business interests from Silicon Valley to the hospitality industry complained that the legislation offered too few green cards for foreign workers. Immigrant-rights activists and the Roman Catholic Church worked to block the legal immigration changes even though more than 50 percent of green cards still would have gone to relatives. Organized labor fought the temporary worker program designed to bring in 200,000 workers a year, viewing them as direct competition to Americans.

The conservative grassroots, amplified by a vocal talk radio campaign, rebelled against what they immediately labeled as an amnesty for lawbreakers, rejecting the contentions by Bush and others that illegal immigrants were not getting a free handout and instead would have to pay fines and back taxes, learn English and wait for years before they could consider applying for legal permanent residence.

Conservatives also denounced the bill as weak on enforcement, even though it would have created a mandatory employment verification system, provided an immediate $4.4 billion infusion for enforcement, and added thousands more Border Patrol agents and detention beds.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and other architects of the bill pleaded unsuccessfully with colleagues to recognize that the measure, though flawed, represented the best chance at reform perhaps for years to come.

"This is hard. This is very hard politics," Graham said. "But the day it ends without resolution, you wake up the next day and your country has got a mess on its hands. Not only does it have a broken immigration system, it's got a broken Congress."

While the senators' inaction doesn't necessarily tie the House's hands, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has made clear she'd wait to see what the Senate did before deciding whether to commit to bringing an immigration bill up in the House.

With immigration a volatile topic that could badly split her caucus and expose vulnerable Democrats to tough votes, Pelosi may well decide to shelve any action this year.

michelle.mittelstadtchron.com