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Immigration bill looks like history
Posted by Frank James at 12:16 pm CDT

A story of mine ran in today’s Chicago Tribune about a move by House Republicans that greatly lessens the chance that immigration-reform legislation will be passed this year.

House leaders are planning to hold a number of hearings this summer to examine in detail the immigration legislation the Senate approved in May.

It’s an extraordinary move by House Republicans. A congressional expert I talked with yesterday, Donald Ritchie, associate historian of the Senate, could not recall an instance where hearings occurred on legislation that normally would go to “conference,” as we say in Washington.

A conference is typically when negotiators from the Senate and House meet, to hammer out the differences between the competing versions of legislation passed by both chambers.

Hearings usually occur before either chamber votes on legislation not afterwards. So it is highly unusual for the House to conduct hearings on a bill the Senate has already voted on.

House opponents of the Senate legislation are convinced that when the details of the Senate’s work product get a full public airing, that enough Americans will be horrified at what they learn to justify the House action.
One feature in the Senate bill to which opponents of the legislation often point would allow illegal immigrants, including those who wrongly used the Social Security numbers of U.S. citizens and legal residents, to apply for benefits accrued during the period the illegal immigrants worked without authorization.

This really steams opponents of the Senate bill since numerous instances of identity theft have been traced to illegal immigrants and these crimes often result in a miserable experience for victims who often must go years trying to repair their credit histories.

I recall that when the Senate voted against an amendment by Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) that would have stripped out this controversial provision, I thought that this issue wasn't going away. And so it hasn't.
In any event, my guess is that there’s a lot of legislation that wouldn’t fare very well if submitted to the kind of scrutiny the House is about to give the Senate bill.

For this reason, I’m guessing this tactic of pre-conference hearings won’t be often repeated. But now that it’s been unleashed, who knows how and when it will be used again?