Seeing the Light or Shuffling the Deck?
Looks like Lindsey has proposed an amendment to the Homeland Security funding bill that would increase border security. Has the message gotten through or is this just the first step in creating a trojan horse to get pieces of amnesty legislation through? Looks like the Democrats are already talking about adding some provisions for foreign workers (Reid is offering a side-by-side amendment that would pair the Graham bill up with the AgJobs and DREAM Act bills that would help those who entered illegally as children as well as certain agricultural workers who are "out of status").
At this point, I trust nothing from this group (McConnell, Kyl, McCain, Martinez, and Specter are some of the co-sponsors) until I see the full text of the amendment in front of me. It may be a moot point since the Whitehouse has already threatened to veto the bill because of budget issues.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out and learning what the strategery behind this is.
Update: That was quick. The amendment was dropped for consideration (as was Reid’s side-by-side amendment) by a vote of 52-44. But, there are continuing plans by the Democrats to introduce the AgJobs amendment in future bills or as a standalone bill. This is going to be an ongoing fight.
Hot Air gives a great perspective on Graham’s introduction of the amendment:
Suddenly he’s for incremental, enforcement-first change, and all it took was two months, two highest-of-high profile cloture defeats, and a ton of venomous press and opinion polls to convince him. “The [amnesty] bill was super super tough on border security,” he notes, politely neglecting to mention that most of the security measures were only added at the eleventh hour to woo conservatives after they killed the first measure of the bill and that among the “super super tough” measures he had in mind were exactly four drones for 2,000+ miles of border. That package was $4.4 billion; the current proposal is only two-thirds that amount. Why scale it back? Hey, why not? They’re keeping the four drones. Isn’t that enough?
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