Open comment to Ted Kennedy… Fuck you! You fucking drunken wife beating charlatan. How dare you compare opponents of an Amnesty bill to Nazi’s. Go crawl back into to your bottle!
Lawmakers killed the Senate immigration reform bill yesterday, voting 46-53 to move to a final vote on the controversial measure, 14 short of the 60 required.
The defeat is a setback for the bipartisan team of lawmakers who worked for months to craft a bill they hoped would draw enough support from both parties to pass. It represents a blow to President Bush, who threw his full support behind broad immigration reform and whose Cabinet played a key role in shaping the legislation.
And it represented a victory for grassroots conservatives who, spurred by right-wing radio talk show hosts, overwhelmed Congress with phone calls and e-mails assailing the legislation.
The legislation’s demise makes the fate of immigration reform in the near term uncertain. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, made it clear to Senate leaders and the White House that she would not bring up immigration legislation unless the Senate passed it first.
Yesterday, the senators behind the bill took to the floor to make impassioned pleas urging their fellow lawmakers to support the measure, even as several Senate phone systems crashed from the volume of calls from people for and against it.
“Even if you disagree with this bill, don’t end this debate,” said Sen. Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, who urged his colleagues to reject “these voices of exclusion” opposing the measure and not “say we are surrendering to these negative voices across America.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, a key member of the team that worked to produce the bill, said that in the aftermath of its failure, more illegal immigrants would continue to cross the border, and she rapped conservative critics for their focus on the provision that would allow illegal immigrants to gain legal status.
“To those people who opposed this as an amnesty bill, I don’t know how you can say more strongly, this is not,” Feinstein said.
Calling up images of Nazi Germany, Sen. Ted Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, chastised opponents for clinging to the idea that America could simply track down and deport more than 12 million illegal immigrants. “America deserves better,” he said.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama, a staunch opponent of the bill, cited a study by the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, which said the bill would reduce illegal immigration by only 13 percent. “Let’s stop here now, let’s go back to the drawing board and come up with a bill that will work,” he said.
Though critics have argued that the Bush administration could deal with illegal immigration by enforcing existing law, the bill’s backers and administration officials such as Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff have pointed out that there is no existing mandatory system to ensure that illegal immigrants are not hired at work sites. The bill would create one.
“At the end of the day, it’s the most important measure that we could have,” said Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida.
After the vote, Bush called it a “disappointment” that Congress had failed to act on the bill.
“Congress really needs to prove to the American people that it can come together on hard issues,” he said.
Sponsors vowed to return to the issue at some point.
“We will be back,” Kennedy said. “This issue isn’t going to go away, and we will succeed.”
Sen. Jon Kyl, a Republican from Arizona and a supporter of the bill said he came under enormous pressure from conservative constituents who railed against the measure’s path toward citizenship for illegal immigrants.
“I’ve learned one main lesson,” he said. “A lot of Americans have lost faith in their government – they don’t think we can control our borders, win a war, issue passports.”
But the bill also drew Democratic opposition from lawmakers worried about the potential impact on low-wage U.S. workers and concerned about border security, particularly from freshman Sens. Claire McCaskill of Misourri, Jon Tester of Montana and Jim Webb of Virginia, who won their seats from Republicans.
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