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By Lynn Sweet
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Posted: 06/07/07 06:26 PM [ET] |
MANCHESTER, N.H. — As I write this on Wednesday morning, the fate of the comprehensive immigration bill in the Senate is not clear. But unlike most Senate matters, for which 60 votes are needed to keep a measure alive, this time the magic number is just two.
Whether the legislative process on immigration continues depends at this point solely on the outcome of a meeting between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). While that meeting — to take place Wednesday afternoon — at first glance does not seem remarkable, no matter the outcome, it does mark a coming-of-age event between the two leaders, who have only been working together since January.
On other major bills, most recently the Iraq supplemental measure, when McConnell walked into a negotiating session, the White House has been with him. On immigration, McConnell is playing a different role, since a legacy issue for President
Bush is to leave office with a plan in place to legalize the status of the nation’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants and there is a bipartisan coalition working in the Senate for it to pass.
McConnell presides over a divided caucus. An author of the Senate bill is GOP White House candidate Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who in the Tuesday night GOP presidential debate found himself surrounded by rivals who gave a hostile reception to the bill.
At issue is whether Reid and McConnell can work time agreements on amendments. As I write this, there are 14 pending amendments. McConnell wants more, maybe 20 more. What’s important is not the number of amendments — and Democrats will want more if the GOP gets some — but for how long they will be debated.
Since the long-term prospects for coming up with a bill that will pass the House and Senate are so long-shot in any case, the leaders face a strategic decision of whether to end the latest chapter on the long-running immigration debate now or later.
“This is a bill that will never, ever make a majority of the Republicans happy. It doesn’t matter what we do,” Reid told reporters on Tuesday. He faces problems with his members because Democrats are resisting creation of guest-worker programs.
“Whatever we bring out of the Senate will be an imperfect piece of legislation, of course,” Reid said. “But remember, there are other steps before we finish this. The House has to do a bill. The president will have his input there, I’m sure. It has to go to conference. There will be input there.’
The hardliner foes of the immigration bill — the anti-immigrant round-’em-up-and-ship-’em-back crowd — oppose it on the grounds that it grants amnesty to the people here without papers. The word amnesty has become hot-button. McCain is trying to cool it off. For the past few days, McCain has been using the phrase “silent amnesty” to try to reframe the argument. At the debate, McCain said that “for us to do nothing is silent and de facto amnesty.’’ While he did not coin the phrase, it might gain traction now that he is using it to stick it to foes of the bill by pointing out that their obstruction to change means the status quo.
Sweet is the Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times. E-mail:
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