Is it possible that the House and Senate will agree on an immigration bill? For most of June, the answer seemed to be no.
The House Republican leadership announced it would not appoint members of a conference committee to reconcile the border-security-only bill the House passed in December with the comprehensive (border-security-plus-guest-worker-plus-legalization) bill passed by the Senate in May. Instead, House Republicans would hold hearings around the country in August -- hearings expected to be forums for complaints about illegal immigration and demands that border control be strengthened before any legalization or guest-worker program is passed.
Meanwhile, the Senate seemed likely to stick with the approach taken by a bipartisan, mostly Democratic majority that rejected limiting the bill to border security. Deadlock seemed likely.
But three developments last week may be reviving the chance immigration will be passed. The first was the renomination of Utah Rep. Chris Cannon in the Republican primary on June 27. Cannon has supported guest-worker legislation and measures to allow children of illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition to state colleges and universities. His opponent, John Jacob, spent thousands of his own dollars to attack Cannon for supporting "amnesty" and actually led Cannon in the Republican convention, where incumbents are usually renominated routinely. Polls showed the race close. But Cannon won 56% to 44%, down just slightly from his 58% to 42% margin over an immigration opponent who spent much less money two years ago.
If Cannon had lost, House Republicans surely would have panicked and stonewalled any approach but border-security-only. But his victory -- and the fact that he ran ads with endorsements from George W. Bush, who supports a comprehensive bill -- indicates that his positions are not political death, even in a district that went 77% to 20% Republican in the 2004 presidential election.
The second development was an interview of Sen. Arlen Specter in The Washington Times on June 27. Specter is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and supported the Senate bill. He would be the lead Senate voice in any conference committee. Specter still insists that the Senate will only accept a comprehensive bill. But he did concede that he might accept a version that made guest-worker and legalization programs contingent on concrete achievements in border security.
"It may be down the line that we will come to some terms on a timetable, with border security first and employment verification first," he told the Times. Enforcement has "got to be in place firmly. But I don't think the Senate will pass a bill that's limited to that," adding that decisions on a timetable would "come in very hard-fisted negotiations at the end of the rainbow."
The third development was the meeting in the White House of Rep. Mike Pence with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney on June 28. Pence, chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, has advanced a guest-worker plan based on that of Colorado rancher Helen Krieble, which would allow workers to apply in their home countries to "Ellis Island centers" run by private firms, which would match them with jobs from employers in the United States. It's an attempt to get around the current cumbersome green card bureaucracy. Guest-worker slots would not lead to citizenship, but would legalize workers who comply. The Pence program could be phased in after a period in which border security is strengthened.
The Cannon victory, the Specter concession and the Pence plan point toward a possible compromise that could conceivably be adopted by a conference committee and win majorities in both houses. In the process, they direct the attention of those on all sides of this issue to the practical, concrete realities of American life. If advocates of border-security-and-employer-sanctions get their way, and there are high-tech steps to close the sieve on the border and create a forgery-proof identification card system, then what happens to the 7 million or so illegal immigrants who are currently working in the United States? Presumably they go away -- but in the process, we lose a labor force that our economy needs to maximize production. If advocates of a comprehensive bill get their way, and we don't have high-tech ID, then presumably we'll still have millions of illegals in our midst. It is surely not beyond our technological capabilities to secure the border and to provide legal worker identification, at least if we subcontract these tasks to the private sector, which is so much better at these things than government. Neither the House nor the Senate bill seems likely to achieve those goals. So it's good to note that there's a chance, maybe only a small chance, that a conference committee can come up with a bill that does.
Cannon's Victory Means Little in Immigration Debate
by Chuck Muth
In a race with national implications, and dominated by the sole issue of illegal immigration, Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) scratched out another all-but-certain 2-year term by winning his Republican primary race against millionaire developer John Jacob on Tuesday, 56% to 44%. But those hoping this race would serve as a bellwether for congressional action on immigration reform or the November elections won’t be able to take much from this contest.
Most importantly, Cannon didn’t win this race so much as Jacob lost it. More on that later. And anyone who thinks Cannon’s re-election means the immigration issue isn’t resonating at the ballot box and won’t be a decisive factor in other close races in November is deluding himself. As are the White House and the U.S. Senate if they think Cannon’s victory is a sign that they can safely move forward with a guest worker program. No such mandate can be taken from the Utah 3rd congressional district race.
One of the main reasons is that Cannon successfully re-invented himself over the past few months. While once an outspoken advocate of lax immigration policies -- telling a Hispanic audience at one point that he didn’t make much of a distinction between legal and illegal immigration -- Cannon all but became a born-again Tom Tancredo, the outspoken anti-illegal immigration congressman from Colorado, in his campaign rhetoric the days and weeks leading up to the election. Had Cannon not all but renounced his own past policy proposals and votes, the result on Tuesday could have been very different.
Also, it’s important to note that the White House brought out its big gun to pull Cannon’s fat from the fire. No, not the President. The First Lady. As the White House’s point man on immigration for the past few years, the Bush team recognized that Cannon’s defeat would mean the end of any hope for the president’s guest worker program. So Laura Bush, whose popularity is unmatched inside the Beltway, recorded a very strong phone message which was piped into the district just days before the ballots were cast. The last-minute endorsement by Mrs. Bush surely had a positive impact on the outcome of this race.
And then there was the challenger...
On paper, John Jacob certainly appeared to be a formidable opponent. In Utah, candidates can avoid a primary election if they obtain 60 percent or more of the delegate votes at the party’s spring convention. Not only did Cannon fail to obtain the convention endorsement, but he actually lost the balloting to Jacob, 52-48 percent. In addition, unlike the primary challenger from two years ago, Jacob was understood to be a very wealthy individual who was willing and able to fully self-fund his campaign. So on the surface it looked like a perfect storm scenario for a major upset: a weak incumbent, a red-hot contrasting issue and a credible challenger who could write his own checks to deliver his campaign message.
However, just days before the election, stories appeared which set off alarm bells for seasoned political professionals. The first was when Jacob announced he couldn’t afford to go up on TV the full two weeks leading up to Game Day. The second was that the Jacob campaign hadn’t devoted any serious time or attention to wooing early and absentee ballot voters -- voters which can, and often do, make or break a close election. And it went downhill from there.
It’s difficult enough to take out an incumbent as is. You have to run an almost flawless campaign no matter how much money you have, even with the illegal immigration issue on your side. But John Jacob’s performance over the final two weeks of the campaign was anything but flawless.
First came the reports that Jacob may have unlawfully funneled money to an immigrant family. It was an involved and detailed story, but in our sound-bite age all the public heard was that Jacob was a personal hypocrite on the immigration issue. Right or wrong, that’s how the story was perceived by the electorate.
Then Jacob was forced to admit, in no particular order, that he: 1) had a gambling “problem,” 2) had his figures all wrong regarding the number of illegal aliens being housed in a Utah jail, 3) had not one, but two bankruptcies and other business failures, and 4) had a “path to citizenship” proposal of his own based on a practice at Disneyland called FastPass which allows certain people to jump to the front of the line. In other words, “amnesty” by another name.
However, the final nail in the coffin came just five days before the election, at a time when Jacob was, despite all his other problems, still in a statistical dead heat with the incumbent.
First at a campaign event, and then in front of editors from the state’s largest newspaper, Jacob blamed his struggles in challenging Cannon on...the devil. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Jacob said that “since he decided to run for Congress, Satan (had) disrupted his business deals, preventing him from putting as much money into the race as he had hoped.” Overnight, the comments made their way from Utah all across the country and even as far away as London. Jacob tried to recover, saying his “devil” remarks were taken out of context, but the damage was done.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Considering the support Cannon received from the White House which other candidates aren’t likely to receive in November, and considering how spectacularly the challenger in this race blew up his campaign in the end, incumbents who the public perceive are on the wrong side of the enforcement-first brigades of the illegal immigration war are susceptible to ballot box defeat. It’s not a matter of “if” the immigration issue will decide a close race sometime in the near future; it’s when. Cannon dodged the bullet. Others won’t be so lucky.
And that’s the bottom line lesson from Tuesday’s shoot-out in Utah