June 25, 2007 10:30 AM

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Mj ... g5MDE2MjY=

Senate Math
It’s fuzzy.

By Ernest Istook

The Senate’s latest immigration proposal is another sad sign that Washington needs some remedial math classes. Not only does the amnesty bill defy common sense, but its numbers just don’t add up.

Let’s start with the bill’s pretense that the government can conduct background checks on some 12-million amnesty applicants — within the 24-hour turnaround time guaranteed for each applicant. This is the same federal bureaucracy that can’t meet a three-month deadline for processing passports for its own citizens. The Senate bill would have us believe that the government’s already-overworked immigration processors would be able to review and clear 12 million applications in a year’s time — that’s 48,000 every workday !

The bill’s sponsors also played fast and loose with figures when Senator Ted Kennedy and others called a Capitol Hill press conference to show off 310 boxes that they claimed were filled with letters from “a millionâ€