Immigration problem is Harry Reid's fault

[proud2BlibKansan]

el pretzeldente said basically this in his radio address today.

I can't remember any other president who continually blamed his own and his party's failures on the opposition party.

Damn it. They have control of all 3 branches of govt. Will he ever take responsibility for ANYTHING???

[BrklynLiberal]

1. He will NEVER take responsiblity for anything.

Never has.
Never will.
It is his life story.

[bullimiami]

2. the MINORITY opposition party.

[proud2BlibKansan]

4. good point

It is not the Dems fault. They are basically powerless.

[madame defarge]

3. Read this from Time...

In retrospect, however, it may have been too perfect. After initially signing on, Reid decided he might be walking into a trap. Some Republicans wanted to vote on amendments that Reid believed would have essentially picked apart the compromise plan; under one of them, for instance, the Department of Homeland Security would have had to certify that the border was secure before any illegal immigrants could be made legal.

What's more, even if he could defeat the amendments, any bill the Senate passed would have to go into a conference committee with the House — which wants to build a wall along much of the U.S.-Mexico border, criminalize all illegal immigrants in the U.S., and dramatically increase the penalties against those who help them, from businesses to churches. Looking several moves ahead in a game of legislative chess, Reid feared that the conference would produce something that looked more like the House bill, which currently has no amnesty provisions for making current illegals citizens, than the Senate version.

Granted, when such a watered down bill came back to the Senate, Reid could still block it by filibustering. But in a election year, Reid knew that could be political suicide, forcing fellow Democrats to vote against a bill Republicans would portray as securing America's broken borders. Those Democrats who were around in the last mid-term election are still smarting from the votes they cast against the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, an issue Republicans cashed in handily at the polls. Giving Frist another National Security vote to beat the Democrats with, they feared, was a sure fire way to let Republicans maintain control of the Senate this fall.

Reid had tried to get some kind of guarantee from Frist that Republican Senators would support only the Senate version in conference, and over the last 24 hours, Sen. John McCain worked to sign colleagues on for just such an assurance. Frist's chief of staff, Eric Ueland, tried to be reassuring. “The Senate will defend the Senate position,” he said. But Reid wanted more than that. “We have no safety net here,” says a top Reid aide, “The Republicans have the President, the Senate and the House.” In negotiations that lasted all night, Reid's staff insisted on a say in the make-up of the conference committee, but Frist wouldn't budge. “No majority leader is going to sign away the power of the office or turn a weaker majority leader's gavel over to his successors,” Ueland said Friday.

In the end, Reid chose the only other way to avoid the potential trap, which was to walk away from the deal.Yet that deal is not completely dead. Specter vowed Friday that he would take the compromise up in committee first thing on his return to Washington and would send it to the Senate floor a week later.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1181547,00.html?cnn=yes

[EVDebs]

6. ...but Frist wouldn't budge = the key

""In negotiations that lasted all night, Reid's staff insisted on a say in the make-up of the conference committee, but Frist wouldn't budge.""

[EVDebs]

5. WTF? R's control executive, judicial AND legislative branches and blame

THE DEMS ? This is audacity at its zenith.

[LiviaOlivia]

7. Why Reid Was Right to Doom Immigration Compromise

Saturday :: April 08, 2006
Why Reid Was Right to Doom Immigration Compromise
http://talkleft.com/new_archives/014497.html

~snip~

...He(Reid)figured out he had walked into a trap.... From Time:

After initially signing on, Reid decided he might be walking into a trap. Some Republicans wanted to vote on amendments that Reid believed would have essentially picked apart the compromise plan; under one of them, for instance, the Department of Homeland Security would have had to certify that the border was secure before any illegal immigrants could be made legal.

What's more, even if he could defeat the amendments, any bill the Senate passed would have to go into a conference committee with the House -- which wants to build a wall along much of the U.S.-Mexico border, criminalize all illegal immigrants in the U.S., and dramatically increase the penalties against those who help them, from businesses to churches. Looking several moves ahead in a game of legislative chess, Reid feared that the conference would produce something that looked more like the House bill, which currently has no amnesty provisions for making current illegals citizens, than the Senate version.

In other words, H.R. 4437 loomed at the other side of the conference table. Reid tried to get Frist to agree Democrats would have a say in the picking of the conferees, and that members of the Judiciary Committee would be chosen, but it was no dice.

Remember the Patriot Act? How the Senate had one bill, the House another, and the conferees went almost totally with the Republican version? The Senate rejected the conferees version, there was a recess, and then when the Senate returned, despite Democrats like Feingold fighting it up until the end, the final version that passed was not what we wanted.

That's what would have happened here. We would have ended up with weakened protections for the undocumented and most of Sensenbrenner's wishlist of punitive measures.

Better no bill than a bad bill. Sen. Reid did the right thing.

~snip~

Sociopath Bush and his Congressional minions wanted this failure all along.

[BrklynLiberal]

8. Your post makes a lot of sense and makes Reid look very smart.

[proud2BlibKansan]

9. Okay - dumb question

If the Senate does nothing, we have no immigration reform bill, right? The House bill means nothing unless the Senate votes on it. Is that right?

[RagingInMiami]

10. Well it does keep the issue alive for the November elections

Which I believe was the intent all along.

[Jane Austin]

11. I'm glad it was defeated, because of the Bill Gates provision.

That's the part where the number of H1B visas would double, with an automatic, no discussion, 20% increase over that each year.

H1B workers are foreigners, usually engineers, who are hired by companies like Microsoft to replace American workers in the US, because they work for an average of $13,000 per year less than the Americans.

Bet you didn't know this provision was in the immigration bill, did you?

I am seriously wondering how any Democrats could have endorsed such a change that can only suppress middle-class wages in this country. Bill Gates went to Washington and personally asked for this provision. I guess Microsoft isn't making enough money, or being the richest person in the world just isn't enough for Gates any more.

It's called "in-sourcing" and I am aware of it because I am the mother of two software engineers, one who wonders how long he'll have a job, and the other who is not yet employed.

[proud2BlibKansan]

12. I think the Senate bill was just less evil than the House one