Why Reid Was Right to Doom Immigration Compromise
Time Magazine has a cogent explanation for why Harry Reid scuttled the immigration compromise bill yesterday. He figured out he had walked into a trap, like the one I described here. From Time:
After initially signing on, Reid decided he might be walking into a trap. Some Republicans wanted to vote on amendments that Reid believed would have essentially picked apart the compromise plan; under one of them, for instance, the Department of Homeland Security would have had to certify that the border was secure before any illegal immigrants could be made legal.
What's more, even if he could defeat the amendments, any bill the Senate passed would have to go into a conference committee with the House -- which wants to build a wall along much of the U.S.-Mexico border, criminalize all illegal immigrants in the U.S., and dramatically increase the penalties against those who help them, from businesses to churches. Looking several moves ahead in a game of legislative chess, Reid feared that the conference would produce something that looked more like the House bill, which currently has no amnesty provisions for making current illegals citizens, than the Senate version.
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