It’s easy to say that after the fact. You wonder: What planet are they on? President Bush and leading Republicans should never try to run a controversial bill past the Republican base in the dead of night. A proper immigration compromise requires leadership. It requires that the bill sponsors go out and move the country.
That’s what President Bush told the New York Times back in 2000 when its editorial board told him that the American people didn’t support tax cuts. Then I’ll have to move the country, he responded.
In retrospect it is clear that the negotiators on the Senate immigration bill knew this. They knew they didn’t have the country, and they knew that they didn’t have time to build support and move it. So they tried the bum’s rush.
Conservative commentators are talking this morning about the fact that people don’t trust the federal government. They don’t trust it to be serious about border security and they don’t trust it to be serious about employment enforcement. And we know that at the local level the liberal counties and cities turn a blind eye to illegal immigrants in their faces.
The truth is that ordinary Americans don’t like that. They don’t like it because they think that the law is the law, and the government ought to enforce the law.
It is probably true that the welfare state today is finding itself ministering to hordes of illegal immigrants and that one of the main drivers of the immigration bill is the desire of the welfare state administrators and line workers to have recognized in law what they are already doing in fact.
But that is the government’s problem, not the people’s problem.
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