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Fragile immigration compromise shatters loudly |
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By Byron York
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Posted: 06/29/07 06:40 PM [ET] |
Wow, that was a squeaker.
We heard for several days that the big immigration cloture vote was going to be really, really close. “Razor-thin,” as the highly trained professional pundits like to say.
I thought so, too. I had breakfast yesterday morning, a couple of hours before the vote, with a Republican senator who was a “no” on the issue. He was keeping up with things pretty closely, and he thought the margin, one way or the other, was going to be, well, razor-thin.
Since 64 senators had voted to move the immigration bill forward on Tuesday, we discussed whether there might be five who would change their minds and vote against allowing the bill to proceed. If that happened, the bill would die by a single vote.
It seemed clear that a few senators were going to switch to “no.” But there was no guarantee there would be five. And no expectation of more than five.
And even if there were five, there were worries that Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had something up his sleeve and might persuade a few Democrats who had voted against the bill on Tuesday to vote differently this time, keeping it alive.
Either way, it was going to be close, close, close.
And then it turned out to be a rout, with the bill’s supporters falling 14 senators short of a vote to move forward.
Why? Chalk it up to the old “profiles in courage” effect.
For a while, when it appeared that the bill had a chance of staying alive, its most timid supporters stayed on board — but only on the condition that everybody else stayed on board, too.
Then, yesterday morning, word went ’round that the required five senators had changed their minds. The immigration bill appeared headed for defeat. That’s when a squeaker became a stampede.
What were the senators thinking? Well, everybody knew that if the bill died, it would stay dead, probably for a long time. That would mean their vote on cloture would stand, certainly up until next year’s elections, as their final position on the “amnesty” bill.
“It was one of those things where people were prepared to vote for it — if it was going to pass,” says a plugged-in Senate source. “But they didn’t want to fall on their swords for a failed bill, and on the last vote on this issue for a long time.”
So the coalition that everyone described as “fragile” fell completely apart. But that only became clear in the last few minutes before the vote.
One hint came when Harry Reid walked into the Senate chamber. My notes from yesterday morning say, “Reid walks in — looks tired — not like a guy who knows he’s going to win.”
By that point, it was all just talk. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), one of the last speakers for the Democrats, worked himself up into one of his classic leather-lunged orations, even though at the time I counted just eight senators in the chamber.
It really was all over but the shoutin’. And if you had to pick just one senator to do the shoutin’, Teddy would be the one.
So he went on and on, suggesting, among other things, that the bill’s opponents might be planning to create a “Gestapo” to root out illegal immigrants.
Now, even the shoutin’ is over. In recent weeks, many of us failed to understand just how weak support for the bill was. Now there’s no denying it.
York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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