The following
64 "Democrats" voted to build a
700-mile border fence along the border with Mexico and sold out to the gigantic corporations by creating a permanent underclass of workers who can do nothing but cheap labor for our economy.
This bill, which contains no amnesty provisions whatsoever, puts immigrants between a rock and a hard place -- they can either starve, or they can work for subminimum wages. And not only that, this bill contains no way to pay for it whatsoever. Below are the shameful 64:
Andrews
Baird
Barrow
Bean
Berkley
Berry
Bishop (GA)
Bishop (NY)
Boren
Boswell
Boucher
Boyd
Brown (OH)
Brown, Corrine
Capuano
Cardoza
Chandler
Cooper
Costa
Costello
Cramer
Davis (AL)
Davis (TN)
DeFazio
Delahunt
Edwards
Etheridge
Ford
Frank (MA)
Gordon
Herseth
Holden
Hooley
Israel
Kanjorski
Kildee
Kind
Lipinski.
Lynch
Maloney
Marshall
Matheson
McCarthy
McIntyre
MelanconMiller (NC)
Mollohan
Moore (KS)
Moran (VA)
Pascrell
Peterson (MN)
Pomeroy
Rahall
Ross
Ruppersberger
Ryan (OH)
Skelton
Smith (WA)
Spratt
Stupak
Tanner
Taylor (MS)
Weiner
Wexler
For far too long, too many Democrats have acted like Republicans and voted like them. This has led to stuff like the Iraq War Resolution, the Bankruptcy Bill, the Alito confirmation, and other such bills.
The problem is that whenever voters have a choice between the real Republicans and the people acting like them, they will vote for the real ones every single time. But when you pit a real Democrat against a real Republican, the voters will vote for the Democrat every single time.
When you have Democrats whining about "illegals," they are buying into the right-wing conspiracy theory that Mexican immigrants are somehow invading our country and trying to reverse the Mexican War. But that ignores the reality on the ground.
What they miss is that trying to automatically deport all 11 million undocumented workers is an impossibility -- therefore, laws that make it more difficult for them to come out of the shadows benefit only one group of people -- the corporations. The corporations benefit because they can hire cheap labor and never have to worry about unions. If they complain, they get deported and starve.
We recognize they broke the law in coming here. But no reasonable person would call for the death penalty for simple assault. They are still people. They should be treated fairly and equally, with each individual situation taken into account. A fair system of justice would treat someone who came here at three, who played by the rules, and who was found out at 21, much differently than someone who came here for the purpose of selling meth to our kids.
And the wall would be a gigantic waste of taxpayer dollars. It would cost $19 billion to construct, $60 billion to maintain, and not even cover more than a third of our border. And as the article says, this bill is not funded or paid for. Therefore, it is nothing but a simple piece of partisan grandstanding for the election.
These so-called "Democrats" should have seen it for what it was and called them on it. Instead, they fell into the "me, too" syndrome. A good way to show how different they were than the Republicans would have been to say that this is the very kind of unfunded mandate the Republicans said they were against and that this is nothing but a smokescreen to cover up their ties to Big Oil and Big Money.