Back to Internecine Strife

The serious situation in the Middle East has brought the freedom lovers of ThreeSources together. Allow me to fire a rhetorical Katyusha somewhere into the comity.

Virginia University professor Larry Sabato is a pretty serious guy in reading and interpreting polls. While he is not expressly partisan, he is obviously sympathetic to conservatives and Republicans.

Friday night on Larry Kudlow's show, Sabato said if the election were held today, Republicans would lose the house by a wide margin and would lose five Senate seats, keeping the Dick Cheney majority unless the Democrats found a lucky sixth. Rep. Harold Ford was on the same show. He's not one of the five, and he is a very impressive candidate whom the party will back to the hilt.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn was on as well. She is convinced the answer is border security. Her constituents in Tennessee are swamped (really?)

I like Rep Blackburn, but I have to go with the Wall Street Journal Ed page. Today they wonder if Rep. Pence and Sen. Hutchinson will be able to "talk the party down from the ledge."

GOP Representative Mike Pence of Indiana has been pushing an immigration compromise that he hopes will end the stand-off between the House, which has passed a bill focusing entirely on enforcement, and the Senate, whose bill combines more security with a guest-worker program.

This is compromise sausage, the editorial and I find much to dislike about it Yet Rep Ford presaged the campaigns to come, accusing his GOP colleague of "getting nothing done on Immigration, even though you control both houses of Congress and the White House.”

The Tancredo wing is still convinced that obstructionism is a winner.

These objections aside, we'd consider it progress if the House and Senate ever reached the point of discussing these details. And thanks to Representative Pence and Senator Hutchison, there's still a chance that might happen. First, however, they must convince their GOP colleagues that voters would prefer a solution to divisive rhetoric. That will be a tough sell, especially without the help of Democrats who are only too happy to use the stalemate as a campaign issue in November.

Meanwhile, Republican House leaders have announced that they'll spend the rest of the summer holding more immigration "hearings" like the one last month titled, "Should We Embrace the Senate's Grant of Amnesty to Millions of Illegal Aliens and Repeat the Mistakes of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986?" That sounds more like a Lou Dobbs ratings ploy than a GOP interested in compromise.

Sounds like "Speaker Pelosi" and "Majority Leader Reid" to me...

Immigration Posted by jk at August 7, 2006 11:33 AM