There is an op-ed in the Washington Post directly related to the last post about immigration reform. Written by Ruben Navarrette Jr., it calls the balk by House Republicans a "stunt" and offers a harsh, quite partisan, attack on Republican lawmakers.
First House Speaker Dennis Hastert announced his intent to hold, in August, what is sure to be a series of heated public hearings on the Senate immigration bill. Obviously the idea is to poke holes in the legislation and make it easier to defeat.
House Republicans have their own bill, which bears little resemblance to what their colleagues in the upper chamber have in mind. The Senate bill offers a concrete plan for what to do with 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants already in the country. The House bill offers little more than chest-thumping and tough enforcement measures, such as making unauthorized presence in the United States a felony, from which the Republican leadership has already started to back away.
This certainly constitutes a new way of doing business. It's unusual, to say the least, for one chamber to hold public hearings on the work of another. Besides, if you want to hold town hall-style meetings, why not hold them before bills are passed in the first place? Maybe because August is close enough to November so that hearings could affect the midterm elections.
The stunt gives Republicans a mallet that they can use to beat Democrats over the head. The House leaders have already dubbed the Senate legislation "the Kennedy bill" — in reference to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), a co-sponsor. Never mind that the bill's other co-sponsor is a Republican — Sen. John McCain of Arizona — or that nearly two dozen Republicans voted for the bill. Never mind that the Senate bill was passed by, well, the Senate, and so it seems silly for House leaders to try to use it to gain an election-year advantage over Democrats in the House.
As a bonus, the hearings also provide political cover for House Republicans eager to kill the Senate bill. They can come back to Washington and claim that they were all set to do something about the problem of illegal immigration but then they heard from constituents who have cultural concerns — that they shouldn't have to "press 1 for English" or that taco trucks are invading their neighborhoods, etc. — and they're sure that legalizing the undocumented will only make it all worse. And so now, reluctantly, they have to take a pass and do nothing at all.
The whole tone of the piece is that the Senate comprehensive bill good; House enforcement focus bad. Despite Mr. Navarrette's assessment, calling these actions by the House "stunts" is a bit silly. Unlike Mr. Navarrette, the House members face reelection in November and have to answer to voters. I think they are reading the poll numbers and realizing they could be in trouble if they don't stand fast on supporting enforcement.
