Don’t just say no, say NO!

According to a snotty article in the Washington Post (discussed at Powerline), 75 percent of the House Troglodytes, I mean Republicans, are standing firm against any compromise with the Senate’s “comprehensive” immigration bill. The Post reports: “Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) will not allow a vote on a House-Senate compromise that does not have the support of most GOP lawmakers or one that would undermine the reelection chances of his at-risk members, aides said.”

That’s a great relief to hear. But it’s not good enough. The House Republicans should have nothing to do with some doomed compromise bill. They should refuse to talk about any possible compromise with the worst bill to pass a house of Congress in the history of the United States. Such a refusal is what the country needs, and it’s what the House GOP needs to win in November, which in turn will assure that amnesty and “guest worker” will not be passed by the next Congress as well. The point is not to let some miserable House-Senate compromise die through a failure of enough GOP support to get it to the floor for a vote (where’s the line in the sand, where’s the drama, in such an off-stage demise?), but to refuse, as a matter of ringing principle, even to discuss the Senate bill.

Call Speaker Hastert and other key GOP representatives. Tell them: Don’t go into a House-Senate conference on CIRA. Don’t walk into the same room with CIRA. Because once you arrive at some watered down compromise version of CIRA, you—the House Republicans—will come under monstrous pressure to pass it, so as to have passed something. And then you will become the target, you will be cast as the Troglodytes guiltily and sneakily resisting the good and the true. But if you take the moral initiative, if you say to the world: “This bill is a monstrosity; no compromise with it is remotely acceptable, we will not go into a conference on this,” then the traitors in the Senate who passed the bill will become the target, and you will become the heroes.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 29, 2006 12:05 AM | Send