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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2007-06-28

Big Day Thursday

Stephen Dinan is reporting overnight that the Immigration Bill is on life support going into the 1030-ish a.m. cloture vote Thursday morning.

Just two days ago, 64 senators voted to revive the bill, with many saying they wanted to give the Senate a chance to improve the bill through amendments. But after a messy day in the chamber yesterday, with dozens of objections, arguments on the floor and five amendments defeated, at least a half-dozen senators said publicly or privately that their patience has run out.

"The way this has been handled, I'm not going to take a leap of faith," said Sen. Richard M. Burr, North Carolina Republican, who voted to advance the bill on Tuesday but said the way Democratic leaders ran the floor yesterday left no room to "take a bad bill and make it better." . . .

This could make things VERY interesting later this morning. And, in what has to be the most hilarious justification for passing this bill, the always-intellectual Arlen Specter weighed in with this:

Sen. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Republican, urged senators to overlook the problems he acknowledged might be in the bill and instead vote for it as a signal they are trying to do something. He said opponents should forget about waiting for a bill that will make illegal aliens go home.

"Amnesty, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder," he said. "One thing is plain, and that is the 12 million undocumented immigrants are going to stay in the United States one way or another."

Thanks, Arlen. And we're supposed to just trust you on the issues of security and enforcement then? As a signal that you're DOING SOMETHING?

Seriously? As one wit said many years ago, "There is no problem so intractable, no solution so elusive, that the Congress can not make it worse by trying to solve it." Sen. Specter, stop trying to convince people that you're worth your $140+k salary by "doing something," and actually start working to SOLVE THE PROBLEM.

Just doing something . . . I wonder if surgeons approach patients the same way: walk in the E.R., notice that the patient is dying, and grab a knife to start indiscriminately cutting.

And, really, how much of all this arm-twisting is an effort by Senators of both parties to just get this stupid issue off the table heading into 2008?

But that's not all, folks! SCOTUS is going to hand down its final rulings for the term tomorrow morning, including the all-important ruling in the Kentucky schools' raced-based enrollment program.

Gosh, it should all be a great deal of fun.

OH, and, don't forget, the Fed Committee is going to come out with it's policy statement and announcement of interest rates sometime shortly after noon.

Talk about a denoument.
Posted by: Michael / 6/28/2007 01:17:00 AM

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