NumbersUSA WHEN YOU GET UP FRIDAY MORNING

From: Roy Beck <ImmigrationInfo@numbersusa.com> Add to Address Book
Date: 2006/04/06 Thu PM 11:48:59 EDT
Subject: Fri AM tasks to beat Hagel amnesty

From: Roy Beck, President, NumbersUSA
Date: Thursday 6APR06 11:15 p.m. EDT

Friday morn tasks to beat Hagel Amnesty and Frist mass immigration increase

WHEN YOU GET UP FRIDAY MORNING, PLEASE DO THESE THINGS TO HELP SAVE THE COUNTRY

No. 1: Send any faxes still posted on your Action Buffet corkboard.

www.NumbersUSA.com/actionbuffet

No. 2: Check our VOTE DAY page for any late developments in the Battle in the Senate.

www.NumbersUSA.com

Be sure to scroll to the bottom of the page to see what votes are coming up next. And you can check how your Senators voted on every amendment and motion thus far.

No. 3: Phone your Senators one last time before the scheduled 9:30 a.m. vote on the Hagel amnesty.

The Senate switchboard is:

202-224-3121

Your key messages are:

The Hagel/Martinez substitute is 95% of the Judiciary Committee's amnesty that was voted down Thursday.


Oppose the Hagel amnesty and vote NO on cloture that would bring the Hagel amnesty to a vote.


This offers an amnesty path to citizenship for nearly all the illegal aliens in this country. If you vote for cloture, your constituents will know that you have supported amnesty.


NumbersUSA has announced that its Immigration Grade Cards will score a vote for cloture on the Hagel Substitute as a vote for a giant amnesty.


WHAT TO EXPECT?



All signs up to a couple of hours ago pointed to the cloture for Hagel getting the required 60 votes, which would then allow a final vote requiring only 51 votes.

But just before the Senate adjourned an hour ago, the grand amnesty coalition of Frist (R-TN), Kennedy (D-MA), Hagel (R-NE) and Reid (D-NV) seemed to fall apart.

Van Esser, our Hill Team Chief of Staff, said this is his impression of what transpired late tonight: Frist indicated there is no agreement between GOP and Dems and that he and his Republican colleagues would vote against cloture on the Hagel-Martinez plan because the Dems won't allow amendments thereafter.

The Democrats were insisting that they would allow only 3 amendments and that the bill had to determine who would be Senate negotiators when they have to compromise with the House and its tough enforcement-only bill. The Republicans tonight were insisting on getting to vote on 20 amendments.

Reid accused the Republicans of filibuster by amendment because they had asked for 20 amendments. Frist said he asked for 20 amendments out of the 396 amendments filed.

This may be a ruse by Frist who has flip-flopped all over the map the last few weeks, but Frist said he planned to vote down cloture and cast the Hagel-Martinez amnesty bill aside. And then he plans tomorrow morning to bring up his own bill, S 2454.

By the time you read this, the Democrats could feel that their bluff has been called and they give in to Frist and allow the 20 amendments, and then they have a chance to move the Hagel amnesty to a final vote.

That is why you need to make those early morning phone calls immediately to get as many NO votes as possible on the Hagel cloture.

But if the Hagel amnesty does not get through cloture, that would be an amazing victory for all of you.

The only reason the Republicans are holding the line on offering amendments as that they are under such seige from their constituents that they know they have to be able to point to some tough amendments they can hide behind to try to justify the overall amnesty.

Your pressure may be just enough to create an impasse that wins the day in avoiding this one Hagel/Martinez disaster.

But if we do, we then are faced with the Frist bill which has no amnesty, lots of good enforcement BUT doubles legal immigration from 1 million to 2 million a year.

This would be more disastrous to the American quality of life and to American workers' wages than the amnesty over a 15-20 year period, although not as harmful in the short-run.

We oppose all immigration disasters of whatever size.

We will come to you immediately with instructions on what to do if we are facing a vote on the Frist mass immigration increase bill.

What is the best that could happen tomorrow? The Senate fails to pass anything and leaves town for two weeks of Easter break!

Just stay tuned. Look for our Alerts and keep reading the Vote Day page.


SOME OF YOU ARE DISCOURAGED AND THINKING ABOUT GIVING UP


We've gotten quite a lot of emails from faxer/phoners who say they are very discouraged that the Senate is still considering an amnesty after all the phone calls they have made and faxes they have sent.

Some say that it is clear that the nation is lost and that they might as well just give up.

Others have jumped all over me for saying this morning that we won a victory in defeating the Judiciary Committee bill, saying that there is NO good news and that disastrous immigration policies are inevitable no matter what any of us do.

Most of you, of course, have a fighter's heart and are continuing to do wonderful work with no plans for retiring.

But to all of you, let me say that all of us here in D.C. at NumbersUSA understand discouragement. We fight it as much as we fight the open-borders Senators.

We know that it is not the open-border Senators who can beat us in the long run, but discouragement. And, oh, do we get discouraged.

I'll be just a little dramatic here and say to those of you who are worn out fighting for sensible immigration that will protect the American quality of life:

When things get a little tough around here, I think about places like Valley Forge, General Washington's wintering grounds during the darkest days of the Revolutionary War. I think about what it took to keep soldiers in a fight that seemed impossible to win. They were short on food, short on clothing, walking around on bleeding bare feet in the snow. What are we weary from? Writing faxes? Sending faxes? Making phone calls? Maybe actually visiting a Senator's local office? Being called some names? Losing some sleep?

The soldiers of Valley Forge were fighting to have their own country in which the citizens of that country could govern themselves for themselves.

We are in no less of a battle today to see if the American people will retain control of our own destinies in our own country or whether the greediest of multi-national and local outlaw corporations will run our country for their interests and fill it with as many foreign workers as meets their preferences while essentially taking away any real ability of the citizens of this country to have a say in what kind of country we will be.

Think about what the Senators pushing the Hagel/Martinez amnesty are doing: They are showing the world that millions of people from around the world who broke numerous laws to get here, to work here and to live here can go into the streets and demand to be called and treated as Americans and the U.S. Senate will give it to them. There will be no end of mass rallies in the future of lawbreakers from around the world trying to intimidate the Senate for their share of the rewards.

At such a point, there will be nothing here that will resemble a country in the way that the Valley Forge patriots had imagined. The right of self-determination for the citizens of America will have been bargained away.

Listening to most of the Senators speak this week in favor of an amnesty, it was glaring how much more they were concerned about treating "undocumented workers" well than about treating any problems of any American. Sen. Martinez (R-FL) seemed practically in tears tonight when it appeared the amnesty was unraveling, as spoke of the lost opportunity to help all these poor illegal aliens who have worked so long and so hard to earn their American dream.

If you can walk away and let these kinds of politicians have the field to themselves, then that is your choice and you will be sitting on the sidelines with a long history of "summer soldiers and sunshine patriots" who weren't there to be counted at Valley Forge or any other time that the rest of Americans were working to create, preserve and expand their rights of self-determination.

I trust that most of the 172,000 of you will still be in the fight next week, no matter how the votes go on Friday.

I've seen this tenacity in you time and time again. For six straight years, we have beaten back repeated all-out efforts by Sen. Reid, President Clinton, President Bush, former Sen. Daschle, Rep. Pelosi and Sen. McCain to pass amnesties.

Politicians of their ilk passed six amnesties in the 1990s before American citizens had the internet to inform them instantly, to organize them and to mobilize them for action. Since Americans have amassed as a citizen army on the internet, not a single amnesty has passed this decade.

LET'S DO THE IMPOSSIBLE AGAIN ON FRIDAY ...

... AND IF NOT FRIDAY, THEN ANOTHER FRIDAY,

-- ROY


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