So the Immigration Bill finally goes down in flames. I didn't cover the absurd events of the past few days - though I vastly enjoyed Malkin's minute-by-minute accounting and speed typing skills (say what you will, the woman has a career as a transcriber should this whole writing a blog thing fail her). But in terms of adding to what was being said, I didn't have much - I thought bringing it back up would fail, and it did.
That's due, at least in part to the fact that the underlying impressions of the bill had not changed - conservatives, already angry, became... well, angrier at the prospect that Bush would continue to pursue a policy they clearly disliked. That's what you get for pandering to your base. Bush and his people seem the least savvy of politicians in missing the notion that the base has always been dictating terms, not the Bushies. Add to the conservative anger the lukewarm support of even the most ardent pro-Mexican immigrationists, and you have the recipe you had before: a strong core group of Republicans enhanced by a swing-y group of Democrats whose constituencies look a lot like the Republicans as well.
Again, I think Reid termed the bill's failure a win, and it certainly looks that way now - the base is now furious with the Republican Party's apparatus, exacting painful monetary revenge in refusing to donate and paralyzing a number of Presidential campaigns (notably Sam Brownback's, who folded like a card table in today's vote; as well as John McCain, who has essentially torched any hope of seriously contending for the nomination). While others - notably Mitt Romney - are now free to run against the current administration, in many ways they can't: not while they feel obligated to defend our continued involvement in Iraq.
Meanwhile, liberal blogs have done what they've done all along - virtually ignoring a failure on Reid's part as spectacular as the Iraq funding vote (apparently, not mustering a majority of the Senate, never mind your own party, never mind the 60 votes needed for cloture, is only a problem when talking about Iraq). Edward Kennedy can fume about close minded Republicans, but he apparently has nothing to say about Jon Tester, Claire McCaskill or Debbie Stabenow, all of whom voted against cloture as well. If you can't strongarm the novice junior Senators in your own party when the chips are supposedly down, what leverage do you have, really?
In truth, this bill remained, to the end, a disastrous hodgepodge; shoehorned into a vote without following the normal process of hearings, discussions, and amendments that would, most likely, have indicated that the whole approach here was all wrong. The best its most ardent (read: mildly less lukewarm than the other) supporters could muster that they expected a completely different bill, with less onerous provisions for undocumented aliens to go through, to pass the House and dominate what would ultimately land on the President's desk. Of all the fictions around this bill, this one may be the most dangerous, if only for being untested; the reality there is that the precarious coalition of Senators required to pass the Senate bill would have completely fallen apart over relaxing the punitive aspects of documenting the undocumented: punishment and suffering is a key element of what's animating the conservative side of this debate.
I reiterate, nothing is going to change on immigration if we maintain a misplaced focus solely on Southern border and mainly undocumented Latin Americans. The breakdown of our immigration process is bigger than that, and the wage and labor issues tied up in the Mexican workforce are issues - again - that immigration changes alone can't really solve. Moreover, conservatives have something right in this whole thing that Democrats ignore at their peril: the failure of the Bush Administration to effectively deport violent criminals, known terrorists and others is a scandal. As much as we don't want immigration officials swooping down on law abiding, if "shadowy" communities around the country, there are thousands of clear-cut, enforceable cases that could be addressed and dealt with that even liberals can acknowledge as requiring deportation.
Still, I suspect the healthy aspects of this failure are he big news here: the fact that large numbers of Americans made it clear that something, just not this something needs to be done about immigration is a message that I think got through. And it's clear that traditional liberal pleas for sympathy for the undocumented "in the shadows" will only go so far; this story needs a fresh take, and less blanket assertions that every illegal border crossing is a wild, romantic quest for freedom and the American way. Even clearer though - and it will be, next year, when Republicans likely face electoral disasters in almost any urban area - is that an active conservative effort to simply demonize "brown people" is a recipe for disaster. The next time we contemplate immigration reform - and despite the doomsayers, we will - everyone will need to come up with better arguments, face up to certain realities and try something different. Or we can do this dance again in 2009. The choice is ours.
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