Thread: Congressional Immigration Stunts

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Congressional Immigration Stunts

By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
Sunday, June 25, 2006; Page B07

After we reform immigration policy, let's do something really useful. Like reform Congress. Apparently, the august institution is more broken than the U.S.-Mexican border.

Just how broken became evident last week after two really strange occurrences, each showing that members of Congress will duck their responsibility to solve tough problems if so doing gives them a weapon with which to bludgeon opponents or even members of their own party with whom they disagree.

First House Speaker Dennis Hastert announced his intent to hold, in August, what is sure to be a series of heated public hearings on the Senate immigration bill. Obviously the idea is to poke holes in the legislation and make it easier to defeat.

House Republicans have their own bill, which bears little resemblance to what their colleagues in the upper chamber have in mind. The Senate bill offers a concrete plan for what to do with 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants already in the country. The House bill offers little more than chest-thumping and tough enforcement measures, such as making unauthorized presence in the United States a felony, from which the Republican leadership has already started to back away.

This certainly constitutes a new way of doing business. It's unusual, to say the least, for one chamber to hold public hearings on the work of another. Besides, if you want to hold town hall-style meetings, why not hold them before bills are passed in the first place? Maybe because August is close enough to November so that hearings could affect the midterm elections.

The stunt gives Republicans a mallet that they can use to beat Democrats over the head. The House leaders have already dubbed the Senate legislation "the Kennedy bill" -- in reference to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), a co-sponsor. Never mind that the bill's other co-sponsor is a Republican -- Sen. John McCain of Arizona -- or that nearly two dozen Republicans voted for the bill. Never mind that the Senate bill was passed by, well, the Senate, and so it seems silly for House leaders to try to use it to gain an election-year advantage over Democrats in the House.

As a bonus, the hearings also provide political cover for House Republicans eager to kill the Senate bill. They can come back to Washington and claim that they were all set to do something about the problem of illegal immigration but then they heard from constituents who have cultural concerns -- that they shouldn't have to "press 1 for English" or that taco trucks are invading their neighborhoods, etc. -- and they're sure that legalizing the undocumented will only make it all worse. And so now, reluctantly, they have to take a pass and do nothing at all.

Meanwhile, Bush has said that an enforcement-only approach won't work and that he supports the comprehensive immigration reform that the Senate bill would deliver. And so he's sure to be furious over this act of betrayal by members of his own party. Which may explain why House leaders waited until Bush left for Europe before making the announcement.

What cowards. If House Republican leaders want to oppose the Senate bill because it offers some illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, then let them say so now. Why play games? They don't have the guts to pass comprehensive reform, nor do they have the guts to kill it. And they don't have the guts to stand with President Bush in trying to fix a broken system.

All that happened in Act One. Act Two was when Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter apparently took offense at House leaders' back-door assault on a bill that he was instrumental in putting together and that he helped get through the Senate. So now Specter is threatening public hearings of his own -- on the House bill -- and to do so in July, before the House leaders get their show on the road.

Think about that for a second. What does it mean when legislators use transparency and public forums as a weapon against one another? And why is it thought to be such an effective weapon? "Tick me off, and I'll hold hearings into the bill you passed." It makes you wonder what they're hiding and what they're doing in Washington when we're not looking. And it makes you shudder.

Had enough? This may have started out being about road shows. But now it's a sideshow.

ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com

The Senate bill offers a concrete plan for what to do with 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants already in the country.

Love this line. The only problem is it's "our feets" that are in this concrete.