It was a fiasco -- the worst possible result:
A terribly flawed bill that, of all the GOP's Senate superstars, only
Marco Rubio could support. All the other rising stars -- Ted Cruz, Rand
Paul and John Thune -- voted "no," as did Leader McConnell and Whip
Cornyn.
Worse yet, the jam down created a toxic environment around
immigration reform, greatly complicating if not dooming the effort in
the House for this session.
For reasons I discussed with Bill Kristol (
transcript here) and Mark Steyn (
transcript here)
on the day of the vote, the Speaker needs to find a way to distance the
House from the Senate train wreck.
Perhaps a quick vote down would be
the best way, or a "no" vote on the same day the House passes its own
"first step" border security bill. Who knows?
As Robert Costa notes this morning,
the Speaker plays his own game. But the Senate bill is political
poison, and the Speaker and the Leader have no intention of surrendering
their majority by embracing this fiasco of a bill.
How much of a fiasco? Read
my interview from Wednesday with a very good guy and a serious conservative, Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota. It is pretty clear he got
terrible
advice on how statutes actually work when interpreted by the courts,
and worse advice on what the fence meant to border security
conservatives. We too often assume that legislators actually know how
the laws they think they are drafting will actually work. There wasn't a
member of Congress in the early '70s who knew how the Endangered
Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and Clean Air Acts would turn out to
be twisted engines of anti-growth extremism, and as the Hoeven interview
made clear, one of the authors of the key amendment actually thought he
was mandating a fence that would work when he was doing exactly the
opposite.
The job of immigration reform now falls to
House Judiciary Chair Goodlatte and some key House members, among them
Raul Labrador.
But with proponents of smart, comprehensive immigration reform losing
at half-time, here are ten key things to keep in mind -- the first five
on the substance of the subject, the latter five on the politics.
1. The need for real reform is enormous for all the reasons Senator
Marco Rubio has repeatedly stated, among them the national security
issues of porous borders and millions of illegal immigrants already in
the country, with more headed this way.
2. The humanitarian issue is real and pressing -- Catholics,
evangelicals and other people of faith are pressing for relief for the
millions of honest, hard-working illegal immigrants living in fear of
deportation and separation from their families. We should continue to
press for serious legislation while realizing that many opponents of the
Senate bill share these concerns and wish only to solve these problems.
Without real border security, the humanitarian situation will only
deteriorate further. The solution begins with a strong fence.
3. The connection between Obamacare and the regularization process is
real -- and it needs a true remedy, not a glossing over. If the illegal
immigrant population is regularized, it cannot be eligible for
Obamacare (the cost would be staggering). Neither should this
ineligibility become a reason for employers to prefer the newly
regularized over citizens and legal residents with green cards.
4. The demand for a fence is real, and it must be mandated with
specific language. It must extend across tribal lands where necessary,
it must contain citizen standing to sue for enforcement, it must trump
all contrary laws which contain citizen standing provisions that could
be used to block it, and it must have detailed construction specs and
mapping. The fence is the first line of defense against a recurrence of
this problem, not pie-in-the-sky alleged technology breakthroughs, no
matter their detail. The new technology is very nice, but double-layered
fencing works where it is built, so build it across vast stretches of
the 2,000 mile border. There is nothing sacred about the 700 miles used
in the 2006 law that has been ignored.
There has never been an
explanation for the number; it is a classic Beltway convention without
any substance behind it. Put in writing on a map where and why the
double-layered fencing will be built and the where and why it won't be
built. In no other business in the world would such sloppiness on such a
key issue be tolerated, but the Senate just waived the whole thing off
and then proposed to empower Janet Napolitano to waive even more of it
off. The very worst part of the very bad Senate bill was Section 5(b).
Read it and weep over the fact that either (a) the GOP staff lawyers are
so bad or (b) the Democratic staff lawyers are so good.
5. No bill is better than a terrible bill, or even a badly flawed
bill, or even a decent bill without a fence that will simply recreate
the problem with bigger numbers over a shorter period of time.
6. Senator Marco Rubio remains a GOP superstar who will be in much
demand in 2014 and a very serious contender for the GOP presidential
nomination if he chooses to be. And his candidacy will be greatly
enhanced by this. He has marked out his reformist credentials on a key
issue and can go as conservative as he wants to on every other issue.
Thanks to his immigration efforts, the media won't be able to paint him
as an extremist as it is trying to do with Ted Cruz right now. The
immunization process is painful, but Rubio's a pretty tough character.
In addition, the noise from the extreme wing of the anti-immigration
reform movement is wildly amplified by the media. Here's a test: Ask any
elected official you know if they'd like to have Senator Rubio headline
a fundraiser for them next month. They will all say "Yes!" Almost
everybody in the GOP still loves Rubio, but many disagree with him on
this key issue. Big deal. Recall that W had the same issue with things
like ports and immigration reform but never lost the GOP base.
7. Senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and John Thune all helped their
national ambitions as well, should they decide to pursue them, because
they all participated in a very smart way in the Senate debate. Cruz was
an eloquent, precise lawyer with style and energy. Paul kept up his
campaign to be taken seriously as a legislator known for candor and
responsiveness. Thune offered the sort of simple, clear border fence
amendment that appeals to those of us who long for legislators to do
their jobs with precision and transparency, not with talking points.
Along with Governors Christie, Jindal, Kasich, and Walker, the GOP has a
deep bench of potential nominees for 2016. None have been damaged by
this debate.
8. No House GOP member at all afraid of a primary can support the
Senate bill. Period. That's why it was wildly reckless as a matter of
party politics for GOP senators to push it forward without a real fence.
The border fence remains the physical expression of a national resolve
to stop not just illegal immigration, but also terrorism and
trans-national crime. Refusing to build it -- turning their collective
back on the clearest part of GOP agreement -- was hurtful to the House
GOP in a way that borders on contempt.
9. Read Jonathan Alter's new book
The Center Holds (or at least
my interview
with Alter from Thursday's show) to discover details of the 2012
campaign in Spanish language media. Ignore that
"campaign-within-a-campaign" if you will, but understand this: There are
states in play in 2016 that will be decided based on what happens
between now and the fall of 2015 on immigration reform. The Supreme
Court, which figured so prominently in this week's headlines, will be
fundamentally recast by 2020. If the GOP wants to compete in 2016 --if
it cares about the country's role in the world and the make-up of SCOTUS
-- it must get immigration reform done.
10. But for the politics of the immigration reform to be good,
the substance of immigration reform must be great, not terribly flawed
as it is in the Senate bill.
That's where we are at the close of the first chapter of the
immigration reform debate, one written largely by Chuck Schumer. (Even
most of the paragraphs allegedly written by Republicans were ghosted by
Schumer's troops.) Senator Schumer is very, very smart. Perhaps the
House Republicans will find a way out of this corner into which their
Senate colleagues have sent them, but that will require a great deal
more innovation and energy than they have shown thus far.
