Posted on Mon, May. 28, 2007

GOP senators will work to mend fences legislation
By MOLLY HENNESSY-FISKE
Los Angeles Times

KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON WASHINGTON -- Leading Republican senators on both sides of the immigration debate said Sunday that they will work together to modify the bipartisan legislation now being considered in the Senate.

Initially, some conservative Republicans had condemned the "grand bargain" that emerged on immigration this month.

The legislation would increase border security and workplace enforcement of immigration laws, long favored by Republicans, in exchange for delivering on the Democrats' promise to offer legal status to an estimated 12 million people now here illegally and to create new guest-worker programs.

The compromise, backed by President Bush, won support from conservative Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., while another GOP conservative from a southern border state, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, condemned it as amnesty.

Last week, Bush met with Hutchison and several other Republican opponents at the White House; Sunday, Hutchison said she considered the legislation "better than the status quo."

After the Senate returns June 4 from its Memorial Day recess, Hutchison plans to propose changes that would allow her to vote for the bill. "We can fix this," she told Fox News Sunday.

Hutchison was joined Sunday by Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, one of the Republicans who brokered the compromise.

"I'm prepared to listen to what Senator Hutchison has to say, if we can find a modification which will get a stronger vote and get this plan through," Specter said.

Hutchison said Senate Republicans are developing an alternate version of the bill that could pass both chambers.

"This bill has to have some elements of change before it will be acceptable to the majority of Republicans in the Senate and the Republicans in the House," she said. "I do think it can be done, but it's not there yet."

Even if the legislation is amended to Hutchison's satisfaction, Republicans are likely to face tough opposition from conservatives in the House.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., denounced the plan Sunday, calling it "an absolute disaster from a national-security standpoint" because it legalizes illegal immigrants and scales back a proposed 700-mile security fence along the southern border, a project he has championed.

"If we sign a second amnesty into place, you will have a wave of people, a stampede of people, from every country in the world coming into the United States illegally, thinking they're going to catch the third amnesty," Hunter said while on CNN's Late Edition.

http://www.star-telegram.com/national_n ... 17152.html