Last week’s showdown over the Senate’s immigration bill pitted the lawmakers who wanted to talk the measure to death against the ones who wanted their colleagues to shut up and vote. Nobody won.
In an ill-advised game of chicken, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had warned members that unless they voted to limit debate to 30 more hours, he’d pull the bill from the floor. They didn’t and he did. That was good news only for the handful of hard-liners who’d rather live with the current dysfunctional immigration system than compromise on a solution. We like to think most senators — like most Americans — want this problem solved. And in fact, now both parties are working to revive the bill, with Reid agreeing to resume debate if Republican leaders can bring their recalcitrant members to heel.
Maybe they got word of the new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll, which showed just 27 percent of the public approve of how Congress is doing its job, the lowest approval rating in more than a decade.
The immigration bill is a fragile bargain struck during two months of closed-door negotiations between the White House and leaders from both parties. Everyone at the table found parts of it bitterly distasteful, but they emerged with a bill that would genuinely accomplish things. It offers more border security, more workplace enforcement, more legal workers to address the nation’s labor shortage and a realistic plan to legalize the 12 million undocumented workers who already live here.
When it hit the Senate floor two weeks ago, its sponsors pledged to stand firmly together against any amendments designed to torpedo the bill. That meant some of them had to vote against measures they’d supported or even authored during last year’s immigration debate. Compromise, they agreed, was the greater good.
Others were not so flexible. When it became clear they didn’t have the votes to remove the hated legalization plan, some Republicans tried to erode support for the bill by weakening popular provisions such as a guest worker program or by piling on measures some Democrats found harshly punitive.
Reid and others accused Republicans of trying to debate the bill to death or kill it outright by adding poisonous amendments. Some Republicans cheerfully copped to the charges. “I’ve been trying to kill it since the beginning,” said Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.).
But others said they just needed more time and were incensed that Reid wanted to shut down the debate. So they called him on it. Insisting that “more amendments are legitimately pending,” Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) voted against ending debate but chided his Republican colleagues for trying to sabotage the bill with endless talk. “Are we going to slither away from this issue and hope for some epiphany to happen?” he said. “No. Let’s legislate. Let’s vote.” That’s more like it.
