The SAVE Act - The Hundred Monkey Theory Proves Accurate

About the time you believe you have the entire Democratic Party pegged as a colossal write-off somebody steps in and throws you a real curveball and you’re caught standing there with your mouth open, a dazed look across your face, and a generally confused question pinging back and forth in your benumbed head. Where did that come from?

Heath Shuler, North Carolina’s Democratic representative to the U.S. House of Representatives, is one of those somebodys. A 35 year old kid, a Blue Dog Democrat representing North Carolina’s 11th congressional district and a former National Football League (NFL) quarterback and real-estate investor who appeared on the Washington political scene when he knocked eight-term incumbent Republican Charles H. Taylor out of his chair and took the oath of office as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives on January 4, 2007. An upstart, a newbie, and a fish to everyone he encounters, Heath Shuler is now carrying a completely different sort of ball, and to say it is one that I didn’t expect to see a Democrat carrying is the understatement of the year.

Congressman Shuler is preparing to launch an immigration related bill in congress, and the preliminary assessment seems to indicate that it is entirely rational. It contains no path to citizenship for the estimated 20 million illegal aliens in our country, there are no provisions in it that would provide any sort of preferential treatment to the invading hordes, and it doesn’t require us to “think of the children.â€