From an email I received recently from a guy that reads and watches these bills going through Congress. I thought his comments, and insights were interesting.


It's discourageing that so many folks out there are so unfirmilar of the operation of Congress, and of the details of the issue that gets them so upset. The parliamentary maneuverings required to get a bill passed through Congress have little to do with democracy. A minority, especially a sizeable minority, can bottle things up forever, especially in the Senate, but also to a lesser extent in the House.

The GOP majority in the House managed to produce a bill that is intended primarily to secure the borders. But before they could vote it out, the Dems inserted what they hoped would be a poison pill for the whole thing. They insisted that illegal status be changed from a misdemeanor to a felony. Now a misdemeanor requires a hearing before deportation, if that's desired. A felony takes a trial, by jury, if desired--read the Constitution. As we don't have thousands of judges, prosecutors and public defenders waiting around to handle millions of trials of illegals for years and stick them in prison cells we don't have, the Dems hoped this would sufficiently motivate their people to parade in the street and kill the whole thing. So far, so good.

Frist and the GOP leaders wanted a similar bill in the Senate, but McCain (as in McCain-Feingold) and his good buddy Kennedy decided to throw in the Amnesty-by-another-name provision to motivate the conservatives to kill it. This time it worked and the bill couldn't make it out of the Senate.

Sensenbrenner (read GOP leadership) had promised to take out the felony provision in conference and wind up with basically a border-security bill, but the MSM trumpeted this as "GOP wants to decriminalize (read legalize) illegals" thus upsetting good conservatives like those below.

The difference between parties is still stark. The Dems are salivating over the potential votes from the Hispanic minority as soon as they can be registered. (Remember the rush to get hundreds of thousands of new citizens sworn in before Nov, 2000? We wound up with over 60,000 felons as new citizens.) The GOP is at least united in wanting secure borders, even if we can't decide what can be done with illegals already here.

Leaving the illegal immigration law a misdemeanor, would mean faster removal form the the country, once they're caught.