Down In Flames By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, June 28, 2007 4:20 PM PT
Immigration: The Senate's 53-46 defeat of the immigration bill Thursday was more than a victory for rule of law over alien amnesty. It was a triumph of citizens' will over politicians' disdain. Real reform must follow.
Related Topics: Immigration
The Bush-Kennedy immigration reform bill is dead and unlikely to be served up again before a new administration takes office. No wonder. It was a pork-laden spending bill that offered de facto amnesty to illegal immigrants, federal contracts to the usual contractors, spoils for businesses that habitually hire illegals, and new layers of bureaucracy, supposedly to speed immigration entries.
The only people it didn't reward were those not looking for cash largesse, citizens who ask only that the federal government show the will to enforce existing laws.
Over two decades, border and labor laws have been so neglected that some 20 million illegal immigrants have entered the country with impunity. No lawmaker blames himself for this state of affairs. He just insists it's a question of more money.
That's why grass-roots Americans took legislators aback with letters, demonstrations and phone calls, the latter in such overwhelming volume that they crashed the Senate switchboard on Thursday, sending a message that words couldn't quite match.
Entrenched politicians not only tried to shove this bill down voters' throats. They repeatedly implied that voters weren't smart or reasonable enough to understand why they were doing it. They blamed talk radio, as if their constituents were sheep. They also made the bill long and secretive.
All that did was fuel voter anger. In turn, lawmakers declared war on their constituents, calling any who questioned the bill "yahoos," "bigots" and "simpletons." President Bush, who had a key role in crafting this bill, fell into some of this, warning against letting details "frighten people."
The bill's co-sponsor, Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, took a lower road, calling the bill's opponents Nazis. What opponents really sought, he bellowed on the Senate floor Thursday, were "gestapos" to remove illegals, contemptuously confusing anyone seeking rule of law with a proponent of a lawless police state.
Majority Leader Harry Reid called talk-show critics of the bill "generators of simplicity" and vowed they'd eat their peas sometime. "We will come back," he said. "It's only a question of when."
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham pandered to La Raza activists by way of the Southern-guilt card, saying illegal-immigration opponents were "hatin' on people who aren't from around here."
All of these efforts to distort the government's failure to enforce the law and blame voters are signs of a Senatethat's out of touch. Rather than having a civil debate — taking the issue piece by piece, starting with border enforcement law, moving to a guest worker program and then resolving how to deal with the millions of illegal aliens, as most Americans favor — senators insisted that pork be doled out first and that the same failures that began with the 1986 amnesty be repeated.
With this kind of "reform" off the front burner, maybe the Senate can spend the time remaining until next election listening to what voters really want and build from there. Arrogance always fails in a representative democracy. Defeat of this bill was a wake-up call to politicians to remember those who elected them.