USEFUL HYSTERIA
BORDER-BILL CRITICS HAVE A POINT


Sessions: Blocked the bid to ram bill through. May 22, 2007 --

THE American Right is up in arms. The new immigration-reform bill announced with great fanfare last week is, say my fellow conservatives, a disaster of Biblical proportions. Virtual spittle is being expectorated all over the senators who negotiated the terms of the bill and the White House, which supports it.

Anti-immigration conservatives are the most vocal people in the country when it comes to saying that our immigration system is broken. But now they have been presented with an "immigration reform" bill that attempts to address some of their concerns, and they're screaming bloody murder about it.

They're right to scream bloody murder. These comprehensive legislative solutions - the sorts of bills that run hundreds of pages in length and are written in impenetrable gobbledygook - are almost always disastrous.

They are jerry-rigged, rickety affairs whose language is inexact and imprecise by design. They often do the opposite of what they are intended to do. The best (or worst) example is the big 1996 bill that was intended to slice away regulation from the telecom industry - and merely ended up handing out gifts to big companies.

Critics of the immigration bill have already gone through it with a fine-tooth comb and found dozens of instances in which tough-sounding provisions are revised and undercut pages later.

Here's a doozy, uncovered by talk-radio host Hugh Hewitt. While the bill starts off with language that suggests no goodies will flow to illegals until the border is strengthened by fencing and more patrol agents, other language - 260 pages later - seems to remove the trigger from the trigger mechanism.

That contradiction is surely intentional - the act of a clever liberal congressional staffer who was surreptitiously trying to remove a provision that was added to satisfy the complaints of conservative senators.

That's pernicious and disturbing - and par for the course with one of these comprehensive bills. It violates the central principle of representative government - which is not only that the people should govern themselves, but that the governing law written by their representatives should mean what it says.

The conservative revolt over the weekend, conducted on the Web and talk radio, will almost has resulted in an entirely proper and appropriate slowdown of the bill's progress. Following the threat of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to filibuster the bill if his colleagues tried to ram it through before week's end, the Democratic leader of the Senate has postponed debate until June.

There was never any good reason for a rush. The illegal-immigration morass is decades old and didn't need to be fixed before Memorial Day.

Yes, the senators who made the deal wanted to speed it through because they know that what they came up with is a very delicate balance that will lose support if any of its provisions is removed.

But in this case, debating the terms of the bill can only improve it, since the most questionable provisions - like a new visa status for newer illegals that seems to grant its holders almost-permanent residency and rights with no requirements from them - won't survive a serious Senate debate.

All the same, there is reason for astonishment at the hysteria - there is no other word for it - that attaches to this issue on the Right. This country, I am informed on an hourly basis by e-mailers enraged by my refusal to join in the apocalyptic frenzy, is being destroyed by illegal immigration.

This is a conviction so deep and basic that it seems inarguable to those who hold it. It has almost reached the status of received religious wisdom, such that disagreement with any of its particulars brands you a heretic.

Still, I will be grateful to those people who take such relish in calling me a "traitor" (five e-mails today alone) if their witch-burning frenzy keeps a bad bill from becoming law.

jpodhoretz@gmail.com

http://www.nypost.com/seven/05222007/po ... htm?page=0