LocoPunk: Immigration Politics: Where's the Dark Matter? (excerpt)

If there's any one attribute that characterizes Republican members of Congress, it's gutlessness... The Republican side of Congress has been meek and almost silent during the prolonged stretches of time when George Bush needed their support on the war, Social Security reform, over-the-top partisan charges of lying and corruption, and other controversies...

Yet... numerous Republicans in both the Senate and the House look almost fearless in their defense of a legislative compromise with Teddy Kennedy (of all people!) for the purpose of ramming a carelessly written time bomb of an immigration bill through the United States Congress... Lindsey Graham blithely tosses around terms like 'bigotry,' John McCain gets in the face of rank-and-file Republicans in New Hampshire with a challenge to propose a better idea or shut up... All this in the context of the fact that the polls do NOT show a universal mandate for passage of some kind of a comprehensive immigration bill, no matter how half-assed and fraudulent its enforcement provisions are...

What lobby or combination of lobbies is so omnipotent as to transform lifelong political cowards into reckless gamblers who sneer right in the faces of the voters who put them in office? Where's the benefit that outweighs the enormity of the risk? What's worth the potential cost of giving the opposition a generation-long veto-proof majority in Congress?

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 22:23:10 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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