Washington – Legislation to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws cleared a key hurdle Tuesday when the Senate voted 64-35 to take up the measure again after a nearly three-week break. But opponents of the proposal insisted they would scuttle it by week’s end.
The procedural vote squeezed past the 60-vote threshold needed to bring the bill back for debate, but even advocates said that was the easy part.
The immigration bill now must run a gantlet of 26 politically charged amendments and clear another 60-vote hurdle Thursday to cut off a filibuster before a final vote Friday.
The bill’s most ardent opponents forced the Senate clerk Tuesday night to read all 26 of those amendments in their entirety as a delaying tactic.
“This is going to begin some very heavy trench warfare,” said Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa. “It’s going to be like World War I.”
Colorado Republican Sen. Wayne Allard was one of those who voted against reviving the bill.
“I could not, in good conscience, support this flawed process. I will now do all that I can to support amendments that will address the serious flaws within this legislation,” Allard said. “We can do better than the current bill before us.”
Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado is one of a bipartisan group of senators that crafted the legislation. He voted to keep it going.
“This is a national security problem that is not going to go away until the members of the U.S. Senate have the courage to stand up and deal with this issue,” Salazar said on the Senate floor before the vote.
Presidential optimism
Bush administration officials who have championed the proposal insisted that the bill once left for dead was now on its way toward passage.
“We are confident in Senate passage because we look at the alternative, and the alternative is nothing,” said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
“In the end, logic, common sense and wisdom will prevail,” Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez added in a shot against detractors, who continue to say the immigration bill’s border-security provisions are unworkable and its path to citizenship for 12 million illegal immigrants amounts to “amnesty” for lawbreakers.
Privately, White House officials were less boastful.
Big hurdles ahead
Even if it clears the Senate, the bill faces a wall of GOP opposition in the House. House Republicans took the unusual step in a closed-door conference meeting Tuesday of debating a resolution opposing the Senate bill, even before the Senate completes action on it. The GOP did not take a final vote on the resolution, but lawmakers trounced an effort to call off the debate, 83-28.
Those 28 votes are significant, suggested Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., one of the few outspoken Republicans to support a comprehensive immigration overhaul.
It is well short of the 70 Republicans that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has said she needs to pass a bill.
Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., called the gathering an obvious and unseemly attempt to influence the Senate vote a few hours later.
“I think it demeans us in the House to comment on a Senate bill that’s still under consideration,” he said.
House GOP leaders denied that.
House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he informed the White House of the effort Tuesday night.
“I won’t say they were happy about it,” he said, but added, “You can’t throttle back debate in the House, or debate in the conference.”
The Senate’s vote a few hours later struck a few ominous notes.
Among the 35 senators opposing even taking up the bill for debate again were nine Democrats and a Democratic-leaning independent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who are likely to oppose final passage. That number could grow as the bipartisan coalition that drafted the compromise bill tilts it toward conservative positions on some issues in an effort to garner more Republican votes.
Getting tough
The senators in the so-called grand bargain spent much of the afternoon finalizing a get-tough amendment that would put up $4.4 billion for border security, establish a tracking system to watch participants in the bill’s new guest worker programs, and, perhaps most significantly, force illegal immigrants to leave the country temporarily to get the “Z visas” that would allow them to live and work legally in the United States.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, one of three Democratic authors of the bill, expressed some misgivings over that last provision Tuesday, but Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., its author and another key architect of the bill, said he would not vote for final passage without it.
“There will be some who think this is too tough,” he conceded. “But there are many who believe we won’t ever do anything to change the problem. I’m trying to talk to those who don’t believe that this bill corrects the mistakes of the past; and to those who think we’re too tough, it’s all perspective and application.”
Key provisions and proposed amendments
Some major amendments to be considered before a final vote
