It's a Bloodbath!

Now the head man in the House in charge of their punitive immigration bill is pinning it on the President:

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, who has pushed a tough border security bill through the House, accused President Bush on Wednesday of abandoning the legislation after asking for many of its provisions.

"He basically turned his back on provisions of the House-passed bill, a lot of which we were requested to put in the bill by the White House," Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., angrily told reporters in a conference call. "That was last fall when we were drafting the bill, and now the president appears not to be interested in it at all."

Sensenbrenner chairs the House Judiciary Committee and would be the House's chief negotiator on any final immigration package for Bush's signature. He said it was the White House that had requested two controversial felony provisions in the bill the House passed last winter.

"We worked very closely with White House in the fall in putting together the border security bill that the House passed," he said. "... What we heard in November and December, he seems to be going in the opposite direction in May. That is really at the crux of this irritation," he said of Bush.

Now that turns the whole "compassionate conservative" thing on its head, don't it?

If the President were still on board with the anti-immigrant plank of his base, maybe these little secrets wouldn't come out. But Sensenbrenner added:

"I was very disappointed in the president's speech," Sensenbrenner said. "I think he doesn't get it."

Asked if Bush mollified conservatives in the speech by calling for sending National Guard troops to states along the Mexican border, Sensenbrenner said, "He failed in that completely."

And despite Bush's insistence that he was not calling for amnesty, Sensenbrenner said, "Well it is an amnesty, because it allows people who have broken the law to stay in the country."

The President is being hung out to dry by the House Republicans because they feel they've been treated the same way. So we have parallel scapegoating here. And neither side looks good to the public. The Democrats must let the public know that nothing gets done in the House without the support of the White House. They must let the public know that the President wanted to imprison a priest if he gave food or communion to an undocumented immigrant. And more to the point of the midterms, they must let the public know that these House Republicans up for election still support that extreme measure. And once that happens, the stampede you'll hear is of the entire Hispanic population running to grab their voter registration cards.

UPDATE: TPM Muckraker makes exactly the right point: it was not even a couple weeks ago that the Republicans were saying it was the DEMOCRATS' idea to make illegal immigration a felony. Now Sensenbrenner's blaming the White House. Who's next, Scalia?