What is Kyl up to?

Four hours away from President Bush’s luncheon meeting with Republican senators at the Capitol, a luncheon at which they may be the meal, I find at VDare a disturbing statement by Sen. Jon Kyl on all it would take to get the immigration bill moving again:

All we have to do on the Republican side is sit down with those who have amendments, get those amendments in a reasonable package, not too many, but enough so all of the members can say they had their chance.

Gosh, after the events of the last month, Kyl still wants this bill? I don’t get it. Kyl’s excuse for having participated in the drafting of the disastrous S.1348 was that the Democrats had the votes to pass amnesty in any case, so he might as well be a part of the process to get as much enforcement into the bill as possible.

But that situation no longer obtains. Amnesty has been stopped. The country rose up in rebellion and stopped it. So there’s no need for Kyl to go along with a terrible bill to make it a little less terrible. It sounds as if Kyl positively, instead of reluctantly, supports S. 1348.

Also, here, at USA Today, is the answer to my question: how can it be the Republicans who bring back the bill, since it was the Democratic Leader who withdrew it?

Democrats accused Republicans of threatening the bill with death by amendment. “We need a breakthrough on the Republican side,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Reid’s deputy, said on Fox News Sunday. “We’re not going to waste more time on procedural slowdowns.”

Thus the idea is, if the Republicans commit to limiting the number of their proposed amendments, so that the amendment process will not drag on indefinitely, then the Democrats will return bill to the floor.

So it’s possible that this week we may lose the victory we thought we had won last week.

On the other hand, Republican senators know that the army of grassroots phone callers is ready to descend on them again if they try to pass this bill again. And they must know that passage of this bill would spell the death of the Republican party. So why would they work to pass it?

Well, they would do it, for the same reason that John McCain has done it, even at the cost of his presidential hopes: Principled liberalism. True devotion to the higher calling of America, which is the dissolution of the United States as a distinctive sovereign nation.

And if that is what ultimately motivates them, then only continued, increased, and irresistible popular pressure can suffice to stop this bill.

Also USA Today quotes President Bush telling reporters he had discussed immigration with Pope Benedict:

“I told him I was a person who strongly supports comprehensive immigration reform,” Bush said. “On the one hand, we’ll enforce our law; on the other hand, we need to treat people with dignity.”

For Busheron, the only way to “treat people with dignity” is to reward 20 million illegal alien lawbreakers with permanent legal residency in the United States, while simultaneously busting our borders so wide open they can never be closed again. In short, “treating people with dignity” requires national and civilizational suicide. It sounds like Busheron the sentimental low-church evangelical and Benedict the intellectual Catholic Pope are right on the same page.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 12, 2007 08:11 AM | Send