The Daily Background
| The immigration bill appears dead. Let’s poke it with a stick.
by Arlen Parsa
Tom Tancredo loves his lettuce. So much so that he’s sending it to Administration officials:
It’s not every day a presidential hopeful sends Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff a head of lettuce, but that’s what Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colorado, did Wednesday to show his disagreement with Chertoff’s recent comments on how failure of passing immigration reform might affect the agricultural industry.
Tancredo says he disagrees with recent comments Chertoff made that suggested if the immigration bill fails, the agricultural industry will suffer. To prove his point he sent Chertoff a head of lettuce, a fruit basket, and a card saying, “much, much more where this comes from.â€
I understand that Chertoff has been behind the scenes pushing extremely hard on the President’s behalf for the immigration bill, which now seems all but dead, since it failed a cloture vote 46-53 today in the Senate. This has got to be the weirdest symbolic political stunt since the ad that showed Mike Gravel staring into the camera for two minutes and 50 seconds before throwing a rock into a pond and walking away.
I suspect like a lot of people, I had mixed feelings about the bill. On the one hand, the current immigration situation is obviously problematic, so it’s good that undocumented workers would have been afforded legal status under the bill, but on the other hand, there are some questions about whether or not it would have created some sort of indentured “guest worker class” of migrants who wouldn’t be given the same labor protections and minimum wage requirements, not to mention the whole issue of splitting up families.
Meh. As with some issues like this, there were certainly people I respect that were for the bill, as well as some Senators that I respect who were against the bill (and of course there were some lousy folks on both sides as well). Perhaps we can take some solace in the fact that what Bush wanted to have been seen as a major achievement of his time in office has fallen apart.
