Thread: Detroit News: Immigration reform won't rise from dead

Immigration reform won't rise from dead

Nancy Kruh

Now that the Senate's immigration-reform compromise has been Code Blued, few pundits see any hope the bill can be resuscitated.

Washington Post columnist David Broder places a sizeable portion of the blame on Harry Reid . Broder suspects the Senate majority leader yanked the bill off the floor prematurely after growing impatient with Republicans who were attempting a de facto filibuster with a raft of amendments.

"In his pique, Reid was quick to label the rejected legislation as 'the president's bill,' even though the White House had had less to do with writing it than a bipartisan group of senators," Broder writes. "Reid also put the onus on Bush to deliver more Republican votes to end debate, making that a condition for possibly reviving the measure."

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Robert Novak expresses astonishment at the lengths four conservative Republicans went to stymie the legislation. "So hell-bent on blocking a bill on principle," Novak writes, the four switched votes on a union-friendly amendment they'd helped to defeat two weeks earlier. The columnist characterizes the amendment as a "poison pill" that would have eventually unraveled the entire legislation.

Two other columnists doubt President Bush's additional pressure on rebellious Republicans will make much difference.

" none of the constitutional powers of the presidency are useful to Bush in trying to sway Republican votes on immigration," Fred Barnes writes in The Weekly Standard. "Even the bully pulpit doesn't help much in the seventh year in office of an unpopular president."

In Newsweek, Howard Fineman offers a similar assessment: "Here he is, an unpopular leader fighting an unpopular war. And so he decides to do what? Climb into the ring for an ultimate fighting bout with the base of the very Republicans who got him to the White House."

Nancy Kruh writes a roundup of opinion for the Dallas Morning News that is published Saturday in The Detroit News.

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ar ... 60304/1008

What?


I'm not letting up. No way!

Novak and Barnes are low-lifes as far as I'm concerned. Novak was a surprise.