Blame the Democrats First, Again

Marc Cooper, the self-loathing progressive, does yet another hit piece on Democrats, this time for not getting the immigration compromise bill through the Senate (all 44 of them).

Marc, have you been living in this country for the last 12 years? Have you seen the conference committee reports on nearly every bill, which drop out any Democratic idea and foreground every Republican one? Remember the conference report on the Partiot Act? Quick reminder: it completely discarded the Senate civil liberties protections and went essentially with the House bill. And just recently Frist and Hastert slipped protections for pharmaceutical companies against big lawsuits into a defense spending bill. Why would this immigration bill be any different, especially if it was larded up with amendments that corresponded to the bill already passed on the House side? My belief is that the entire guest worker/earned legalization program would have been thrown out in committee unless the bill from the Senate was clean.

Compromise bills like this routinely limit amendments, I mean the Republican have done this like 40 times in the past decade. NOW it's heresy to get a clean bill through the Senate? Ask Orrin Hatch about that one:

"The Democrats know the amendments would pass," Hatch said in an interview. "They lost in [the Judiciary] committee, but they would pass on the floor."

That's not the spirit of the compromise, to agree to things and then have them overturned on the floor. Frist couldn't rein in the hard-right Senators in his party, so Reid couldn't keep with the deal like a chump and then get a bill that doesn't resemble the compromise.

And do you really think it's a good compromise to split up earned legalization by how many years illegal immigrants have been in the country? There's a reason they're called undocumented workers: nobody time-stamps their passport when they come across the Rio Grande River. This would be another bill (and that's if the earned legalization compromise even stayed in the bill) that would be completely unenforceable.

This is a difficult and emotional debate and it might require discussion for more than a couple weeks. And it definitely requires less finger-pointing from those who simply have a hard-on for criticizing Democrats.