Posted on 01/07/2007 10:16:24 PM PST by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic and Republican leaders predicted on Sunday the U.S. Congress would pass an immigration law this session after scuttling President George W. Bush's plan last year.
Democratic leaders also said they were looking at ways to provide middle class tax relief, with one hinting of possibly ending some tax breaks for the wealthy.
House of Representatives Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland said on "Fox News Sunday" that immigration was one of the topics discussed when congressional leaders were invited to the White House last week to meet with Bush.
"He (Bush) smiled and he said, 'You know, I think I'm going to have a lot easier time dealing with you on immigration than I had dealing with the House Republican leadership on immigration,"' said Hoyer.
"I think that's the case," said Hoyer, who did not detail the plan.
Bush proposed a major overhaul of the immigration system that included a limited guest worker program and an easier path to citizenship for many already in the country. He coupled that with money for increased border security.
In the end, House Republicans killed the immigration overhaul and Congress limited its action to approving money for 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky agreed that an immigration bill was possible.
Democrats last week took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 12 years and have been outlining their legislative agenda since then.
On taxes, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said her party was looking at ways to provide "tax cuts for the middle class" but did not rule out repealing breaks for the wealthiest taxpayers.
"We're not going to start with repealing tax cuts, but they certainly are not off the table for people making over half a million dollars a year," Pelosi said on CBS' "Face the Nation."
And Hoyer said Democrats were hoping to find a way to adjust the alternative minimum tax so it did not strike the upper middle class. The tax was instituted to make sure the rich did not escape paying some tax, but it has not been changed or indexed so that inflation has brought more people under its provisions, raising their taxes.
But drastically changing it could cost the federal government $1 trillion over 10 years.
Hoyer said he thought the tax could be adjusted and not cost the government anything but he did not say how.
In this image made from video and provided by CBS's Face the Nation, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi , left, speaks with Bob Schieffer in her office at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. during an interview broadcast Sunday, Jan. 7, 2007. Democrats are not ruling out raising taxes for the wealthiest people to help pay for tax cuts for middle-income families, Pelosi said. (AP Photo/CBS, Face the Nation)
Oy Vey!
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, holds the speaker's gavel as she speaks 04 January 2007 during the 110th Congress Opening Day Ceremonies on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Just days after taking control of Congress, Democratic lawmakers warned that US President George W. Bush will not get a blank check to expand the number of US troops in violence-wracked Iraq.(AFP/File/Mandel Ngan)
The dems won't need the wealthy's vote anyway if the immigration package being bantered about is enacted.
They'll have all those grateful new "citizens" on the voter rolls.
And this is something that the powers that be around here remain in denial about.
Let's see. The solution to the immigration problem was to vote out the republican congress.
Smart, very smart.
Bush is such a complete idiot on illegal immigration.
Bush is such a complete idiot on illegal immigration.
It's called politics.
Seems to me that the Dems do not have that big a lead in either house and that the Repubs, if they had the huevos could make life miserable for them, just as the Dems have done for bush the last six years.
Seems to me that the Dems do not have that big a lead in either house and that the Repubs, if they had the huevos could make life miserable for them, just as the Dems have done for bush the last six years.
Eggs???
Nope. It's called treason at worst and blatant disregard for the soveriegnty of the United States at best.
Re: the photograph of Bob Schieffer:
I hate it when men sit with their legs crossed like a woman in a dress... It looks so feminized...
What does that tell you ? I think Bush is not to upset he lost the House ,the Senate Maybe ,but not to diappointed there he is on their wavelength on this amnesty stuff .
The fact is we are going to be sold down the river on amnesty. I wonder what the polls show on that one I am sure the AMERICAN people are for amnesty for 20 million illegal immigrants and for granting them social security benefits after only contributing to it for 18 months.I see that old Steny Hoyer has let ALL OF US AMERICANS know that we have rejected private social security accounts! Im sorry but I dont remember voting on that.
"The solution to the immigration problem was to vote out the republican congress."
That line is getting *very* old. The new Dims in congress promised strong enforcement but, they don't provide any solutions in their *first 100 days* plan. Nor do I expect they will in the future.
Time to stop licking your wounds and playing the blame game over the last election. Get on with your life.
Shaky principles. Those Bushes have their streaks of liberalism. Unfortunately the country pays for it.
Well, tell us then. What's the big picture?
Well, tell us then. What's the big picture?
That's just it, I'm not in a position to see the big picture either.
Bush already gave us his "big picture". His "picture" of his "new America".
.....<
| We are now one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the world. We're a major source of Latin music, journalism and culture. Just go to Miami, or San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago or West New York, New Jersey ... and close your eyes and listen. You could just as easily be in Santo Domingo or Santiago, or San Miguel de Allende. For years our nation has debated this change -- some have praised it and others have resented it. By nominating me, my party has made a choice to welcome the new America. As I speak, we are celebrating the success of democracy in Mexico. George Bush from a campaign speech in Miami, August 2000. |
Here is an excerpt of a good critique of that speech:
In equating our intimate historic bonds to our mother country and to Canada with our ties to Mexico, W. shows a staggering ignorance of the civilizational facts of life. The reason we are so close to Britain and Canada is that we share with them a common historical culture, language, literature, and legal system, as well as similar standards of behavior, expectations of public officials, and so on. My Bush Epiphany By Lawrence Auster
The Path to National Suicide by Lawrence Auster (1990)
An essay on multi-culturalism and immigration.
How can we account for this remarkable silence? The answer, as I will try to show, is that when the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 was being considered in Congress, the demographic impact of the bill was misunderstood and downplayed by its sponsors. As a result, the subject of population change was never seriously examined. The lawmakers’ stated intention was that the Act should not radically transform America’s ethnic character; indeed, it was taken for granted by liberals such as Robert Kennedy that it was in the nation’s interest to avoid such a change. But the dramatic ethnic transformation that has actually occurred as a result of the 1965 Act has insensibly led to acceptance of that transformation in the form of a new, multicultural vision of American society. Dominating the media and the schools, ritualistically echoed by every politician, enforced in every public institution, this orthodoxy now forbids public criticism of the new path the country has taken. “We are a nation of immigrants,” we tell ourselves— and the subject is closed. The consequences of this code of silence are bizarre. One can listen to statesmen and philosophers agonize over the multitudinous causes of our decline, and not hear a single word about the massive immigration from the Third World and the resulting social divisions. Opponents of population growth, whose crusade began in the 1960s out of a concern about the growth rate among resident Americans and its effects on the environment and the quality of life, now studiously ignore the question of immigration, which accounts for fully half of our population growth.
This curious inhibition stems, of course, from a paralyzing fear of the charge of “racism.” The very manner in which the issue is framed—as a matter of equal rights and the blessings of diversity on one side, versus “racism” on the other—tends to cut off all rational discourse on the subject. One can only wonder what would happen if the proponents of open immigration allowed the issue to be discussed, not as a moralistic dichotomy, but in terms of its real consequences. Instead of saying: “We believe in the equal and unlimited right of all people to immigrate to the U.S. and enrich our land with their diversity,” what if they said: “We believe in an immigration policy which must result in a staggering increase in our population, a revolution in our culture and way of life, and the gradual submergence of our current population by Hispanic and Caribbean and Asian peoples.” Such frankness would open up an honest debate between those who favor a radical change in America’s ethnic and cultural identity and those who think this nation should preserve its way of life and its predominant, European-American character. That is the actual choice—as distinct from the theoretical choice between “equality” and “racism”—that our nation faces. But the tyranny of silence has prevented the American people from freely making that choice.
So, you think that this all happened on his watch? I don't think so, it's been coming on for a long long time, way before his watch.
This is more like it.
In point of fact, history bestows the wreaths of honor and presidential greatness on those who followed exactly the spirit of Bobby Kennedy's borrowed quote from Shaw. Looking back from Reagan to Truman, the Roosevelts, Wilson, Lincoln, and Jackson, the formula for historical success is clear. And to say the least, a president who "dreams things that never were" and says "why not?" -- then spends a presidency midwifing that vision into reality -- is destined to spend his time in the White House as a lightning rod of division.
The premiere example of this, of course, is Lincoln. Seeing disunion and slavery as what it was, he not only said "why not?" to their opposites, but grimly went about the task of making those imagined opposites reality. As with the Bush-haters of today, those who despised Lincoln for actually daring to make his dream of union and freedom for blacks a reality were relentless in their attacks. With the death toll of American soldiers in Iraq hovering north of 3,000, it is worth recalling the absolute furor whirling around the sixteenth president as he devoted himself to making his vision a reality of American life, a vision that finally cost over 600,000 dead in four years.
The recent trials and tribulations of the suddenly-famous Miss USA, Tara Conner, remind that centuries of bad human experience with alcohol and the fast life cannot save an individual human in modern times from making the same mistakes with alcohol and the fast life all over again. There is a similar version of Ms. Conner's experience in the world of politics and government, with smart people who are supposed to have some understanding of history nonetheless falling into precisely the same traps that history warns those smart people repeatedly against. Presidents daring to ask "why not?" are besieged by those who will insist that the President in question has mismanaged the vision -- blundered, listened to fools and otherwise shown himself to be one of the worst presidents in history.
And the critics are always right, to a point. Being human, it is simply impossible for any president to implement a war policy (or any other policy) without mismanaging, blundering, or listening to fools somewhere along the line. Flyspeck the historical records of the great presidents and these moments are glaringly obvious.
But so is something else. That something else is the utterly dependable voice of critics who simply do not have the will to carry through with the hard work of making a vision reality, critics who will abandon constructive thought altogether and head for the figurative sidelines to carp, moan, whine, and quiver. The recent interview with complaining neoconservatives in the January issue of the virulently Bush-hating Vanity Fair magazine, now combined with the defeatism of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is perhaps best answered not by one of Bush's aides but Lincoln's.
"I am utterly amazed to find so little real faith and courage under difficulties among public leaders and men of intelligence. The average public mind is becoming alarmingly sensational," wrote Lincoln's secretary, John Nicolay, as torrents of bitter criticism rained down on his boss. Bad news of any kind "is enough to throw them all into the horrors of despair. I am getting thoroughly disgusted with average human nature." And John Nicolay never met Nancy Pelosi!
One of the ironies of the success of a presidential vision is that later generations -- and sometimes even the same generation -- can simply not imagine that there was any other outcome possible. This is not only never true, the now-accepted view of a presidentially created reality usually hung in the balance as it was being birthed.
The new book Copperheads by University of Kansas history professor Jennifer Weber is a wonderful case in point. The book brims with the details of the virulent anti-war opposition to Lincoln from Northern critics. They were dubbed "Copperheads" because, like the copperhead snake, they were said to strike without warning. The war to save the Union and eventually the struggle to emancipate the slaves were dubbed "wicked," and Lincoln was bitterly castigated as a purveyor of "fanaticism and hypocrisy." Moral relativism? There were Northerners aplenty who fervently believed the Union side of the conflict represented nothing more than "barbarism and sin."
Yet Lincoln stood fast by his vision even as his critics lacerated him as a bumbling incompetent when he wasn't busy being a tyrant, precisely the portrait painted by Bush's legion of noisy critics.
The other week, Fox News and National Public Radio commentator Juan Williams summed up his view of Iraq and America's commitment to Bush's vision of democracy in the Middle East: "Unless there's some real change, we're not in this forever." But Williams seems to forget that Lincoln's vision did not, in fact, take a mere four years to accomplish. It took America another one hundred years after that death toll of 600,000 -- until the Civil Rights successes of the 1960s -- for Lincoln's vision to begin to be realized. That one hundred year period, surely not foreseen by Lincoln, was rife with lynching, segregation and the rawest, ugliest racism this side of slavery itself. Should Americans have simply walked away from Lincoln's vision because it seemed to be taking "forever"?
The hard truth is that there are important goals in life that take time. Freedom for African Americans was one of them. Freedom and democracy in the Middle East is clearly another. And America's security from the terror rampant in the current world is still another.
So with the new year upon us and already filled with the chorus of modern day Copperheads doing their best to undermine America's will in the midst of a life and death struggle not only for Iraqis but the rest of us, it is decidedly to George W. Bush's credit that he has the courage that Bobby Kennedy spoke of so often as RFK quoted Shaw.
George Bush has the courage to dream of a good and decent something that never was -- a free and democratic Middle East -- and to stake his presidency on the hard and yes, imperfect work, of saying "why not?"
Thank you for that, Mr. President.
As with Lincoln, there is a word for your behavior. The word is leadership.
Nor did he do anything to stop it. He encouraged it.
Ah, but how much in funding will those new voters provide or will they all be part of a union and the funds will come from them? Amen.
Nor did he do anything to stop it. He encouraged it.
He may not have done anything to stop it like the three or four pres befor him but he has not encouraged it.
Get real! EVery time he offered amnesty he encouraged it. Every time an American citizen is killed by an illegal and he does nothing it encourages them. Every time he says "do the jobs Americans won't" he encourages them.
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