GOP committing political suicide
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GOP committing political suicide
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Posted: April 7, 2006
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com
In the rush to get an immigration bill out of the Senate, the Bush administration appears willing to cave into the Democrats on the issue of amnesty.
The latest burst of bipartisan enthusiasm came when a strange marriage of Republican Sens. John McCain and Bill Frist joined with Democratic Sens. Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid in proclaiming that only those illegal aliens who are in the United States five years or more will be allowed to stay.
Suddenly, every "undocumented migrant" you ask will claim to have been in the United States five years or more. How is anyone going to prove different? In the thriving market in forged documents, we find in major cities such as Los Angeles and New York, any reasonably enterprising illegal alien should be able to get a Social Security number and produce a driving license for any name it takes to prove they have been in the United States five years or more.
We are witnessing remarkable statements from the likes of Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who said of the recent compromise, "While it admittedly is not perfect, the choice we have to make is whether it is better than no bill, and the choice is decisive." This sounds uncomfortably familiar.
What we are likely to get out of the compromise is new language promising to secure the border, but without building a fence. We're probably going to be sold that electronic sensors are just as good. So why don't we just build an electronic surveillance force? All this is nonsense. We already have good immigration laws on the books that we don't enforce. How long will it take to put the electronic surveillance force in place? How many illegal immigrants will the electronic fence actually prevent from getting into the United States anyway? Will we add enough Border Patrol agents to make sure the electronic fence is working?
Why won't the Senate and President Bush just come clean on what is really going on? Senate Republicans do not have enough votes for a tough enforcement law and the president is not going to push for tough enforcement. Besides, President Bush is basically in favor of amnesty, as long as we can find the right euphemism, such as "guest worker." Certainly, no Republican wants to be accused of offering a "guest illegal" program, even if that's what the "get out of jail free" card after five years here actually means.
Maybe no bill at all would be better. Why is President Bush so determined in his second term to commit political suicide? Conservative Republicans want "guest worker" amnesty and "electronic surveillance" fences no more than they wanted Harriet Miers to be on the Supreme Court.
Probably, what it will take to wake the White House up is the massive defeat in the 2006 congressional elections that is brewing right now. Maybe if enough Republican senators and congressmen bite the dust in November, Karl Rove will realize that courting future "illegal immigrant" voters to expand the Hispanic base of the Republican Party is probably a very costly strategy, especially if in the process the growing conservative majority turns hard against the president.
The immigration bill that is being hammered together will certainly be proclaimed as a "great solution," a "comprehensive bill." In the end, this new immigration bill is not really intended to stop illegal immigration. The bill is just intended to sound like we are going to stop illegal immigration.
In another few years, we will have not 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States, as the administration claims we have now, but maybe 25 million. But, of course, in five years from now, all we have to do is wave the magic wand again, permitting Congress to declare once more that everybody is legal, as long as they have been here five years or more. Why don't we just do this every five years? That should make the problem go away altogether.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/artic ... E_ID=49632
