The two Houses of Congress are set to
clash.
WASHINGTON, May 25 -- A compromise Senate bill that would toughen border security and put most illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship emerged intact Wednesday from more than a week of impassioned debate. Its advance set up a showdown with the House over the most substantial overhaul of immigration law in 20 years.
. . . But even before the final vote, the focus began to shift to the coming negotiations between the Senate and the House, which has passed legislation that focuses on bolstering border security and offers no provision for citizenship. The gulf between the two versions is so vast, and the politics of immigration so heated in this election year, that the prospects for a deal remain murky at best.
Many House Republicans vehemently oppose the provisions in the Senate bill that would legalize most illegal immigrants and create a guest worker program that would bring 200,000 foreign workers into the country each year. They have vowed to fight to prevent the legislation from becoming law, and they have the support of many grass-roots conservatives around the country.
But supporters of the bill hailed the coalition of Republicans and Democrats that fended off conservatives' repeated efforts to kill it. Enactment of the measure would also be a victory for President Bush, who has thrown his support behind it.
I think Yglesias is right on this one. While the Senate compromise is certainly better than the House Bill, we could potentially do a lot better with the next Congress.
If something does pass this year, a lot of the pressure for immigration reform will fade away and it'll be hard to revisit the issue. Maybe the next congress would only let us get a slightly better bill or maybe it will let us get a much better bill. It's hard -- impossible, really -- to know for sure. But it's very unlikely that we'd get a worse bill. Under the circumstances, Democrats seem to have a lot of leverage and every reason to take a hard line in negotiations.
Or, they sit back and watch the House and Senate leadership duke it out. But the bottom line is, Democrats on the conference committee have every reason to insist on a good final immigration bill, not a Republican pander to its bigoted base.