June 16, 2007
Amnesty Now and Then III Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes in mild disagreement with Joshua Zeitz’s post “Amnesty Now and Then.” Mr. Gordon writes, “Joshua Zeitz’s linkage between a pardon for Richard Nixon and a pardon for Scooter Libby, and between some form of what I will call amnesty . . . for draft dodgers then and illegal aliens now, is a bit strained.” While endorsing the analogy between draft evaders and illegal immigrants, Mr. Gordon argues that the pardon of Richard Nixon and the pardon of Scooter Libby have relatively little in common. I don’t think this necessarily gets at the heart of Joshua Zeitz’s point—that Bush, like Ford, might do well to adopt a broadly forgiving approach to policymaking—but it’s a fair point all the same. I can’t say I agree with Mr. Gordon’s description of the Libby trial; Libby’s crime was actually not “practicing politics in Washington, D.C.,” but rather lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as an intellectually honest National Review contributor notes here. But let’s not rehash that debate again so soon. Mr. Gordon’s assessment of the Libby trial is actually less problematic, as far as I’m concerned, than his reading of the current struggle over immigration reform. In articulating his nominal point—agreeing in part, and disagreeing in part, with Mr. Zeitz—Mr. Gordon offers an extended analysis of the barriers to the passage of the Kennedy-McCain bill. This is an undeniably important policy debate, and it concerns one of the few areas of legislation where President Bush might actually be able to accomplish something before the end of his term. As an explanation of why the President has so far failed to achieve anything substantive, Mr. Gordon’s description of recent events falls short. As Mr. Gordon sees it, the main obstacles to immigration reform are not the rightist Republican senators who voted in droves against ending the debate on the bill but rather the Democratic leaders in the Senate. Mr. Gordon asserts that the “villains” of the immigration debate are Harry Reid and “his political Svengali, Senator Chuck Schumer,” who are “both . . . far more interested in political advantage than in solving the nation’s problems. If the country’s immigration problems have to continue to fester so that these two can deny an achievement to President Bush, so be it.” This is a strange account of the Senate’s clash over immigration. If Harry Reid wanted to prevent the passage of S.1348, he could simply have decided not to bring the bill to the floor, or have delayed its consideration while proposing, say, a censure resolution against Alberto Gonzales that would have sucked up all of Congress’s attention. Instead of doing either of these things, though, Reid brought the bill to the floor and withdrew it only when its Republican opponents proved so implacable as to prevent what Mitch McConnell might call “a fair up-or-down-vote.” Chuck Schumer’s record of action on this bill is similarly upstanding: He voted for cloture on S.1348 at each and every opportunity. Schumer is a shrewd and ruthless political operator, to be sure, but these are hardly the actions of a man determined to undermine the President’s immigration agenda. No, anyone who looks at the record of votes on the immigration bill can see where its most serious opposition lies, and that is with the Republican caucus. And what’s more, I don’t think it’s really true that, as Mr. Gordon suggests, President Bush has done all he can to win Republican support for immigration reform. “He was up on Capitol Hill this week lobbying GOP senators,” Mr. Gordon writes, “and is willing to spend his fast-dwindling store of political capital on it. His rhetoric on the bill has been unusually strong as well. I’m not sure what more he can do.” It’s true that the President sympathizes strongly with the aims of the Kennedy-McCain bill, and he has spoken out in its favor. But if the President is serious about winning significant bipartisan support for its passage, he should be willing to take on its Republican opponents more aggressively, rather than just pleading for their cooperation. He could threaten to withhold his services as a fundraiser for Republican candidates who won’t give the immigration bill a fair shake. One such candidate might be Jefferson Sessions, the diminutive senator from Alabama who is one of the bill’s top Senate opponents. He has a fundraising dinner scheduled with President Bush on June 21. I wonder how Sessions would react if Bush suddenly realized he had to wash his hair that night. In the same vein, last Wednesday, June 13, Bush appeared at a fundraiser for Republican congressional candidates that raised $15.4 million. Can you imagine how those congressional candidates would have responded if the White House had postponed the President’s appearance at the dinner indefinitely, due to Bush’s need to focus on passing immigration reform? Of course, these thoughts will remain purely speculative. The President won’t threaten Jeff Sessions, nor will he withhold one ounce of his fundraising capacity from other xenophobic congressional candidates. Mr. Gordon suggests that Harry Reid is “widely perceived as being a partisan first and a senator second.” I’d suggest that the President’s kid-gloves approach to negotiating with Senate Republicans shows that his priorities are at least as partisan as those of his opposition. Blame rests with a lot of different parties for the stalling of S.1348, and some of those parties are Democrats. But Mr. Gordon’s breakdown of that blame is decidedly one-sided, and its factual basis is tenuous at best. If this bill ever passes, it won’t be because Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer break under pressure but because the Republican caucus decides that immigration reform is an idea whose time has come.
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