True North

The law abiding citizens of America dodge a real bullet today. Senators Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Norm Coleman, and Amy Klobuchar tried to force amnesty for illegal aliens upon the American people today. Despite overwhelming opposition from the American public, these senators and other like minded “individuals” decided to impose their idea of immigration on us. That idea being namely that our national borders don’t really matter.

Despite their rush to get this to a vote, the American public once again rose up to declare “NO! For the last time NO! For God’s sake NO!”. This resulted in the measure failing to gain the 60 votes necessary for cloture, with the final vote being 52-44. Despite eight Democrats seeing the light and voting again this horrendous forfeiture of our national sovereignty, twelve Republicans, include “our” Senator Norm Coleman, voted against our own national interests by voting for this bill.

Now granted Amy Klobuchar also voted for this bill, but she’s a Democrat, she doesn’t know any better. She has a natural deficiency of moral fiber and a severe brain disease called Liberalitis. However, Norm, who reportedly is still a Republican, should know better. His own party leadership opposed this bill. His own President, in a surprise move, opposed this bill. His own base opposed this bill. His constituency opposed this bill. But he was in support of it, for reasons only he appears to be aware of.

If you would like to know why he did, I suggest you call into his campaign office and demand to now why. And depending on their response, perhaps ask them to explain why exactly you should vote for him if he’s going to vote against our interests on key issues. The number for his campaign office is (651) 645-0766.

Now while one could speculate endlessly on what may or may not be happening inside Coleman’s head, there were other issues happening as well. I've also put the final vote positions in the rest of this post.

First of all it is a bit disconcerting that while this failed cloture, it did so by a far smaller margin than the comprehensive immigration bill did (46-53). Quite a few Senators who had previously voted against cloture on this bill, now voted for cloture. Part of that can be attributed to the fact that there was alot less publicity about this bill, so party loyalty (although certainly not from Republican) might have trumped public criticism. In fact, five Republicans (Brownback, Coleman, Collins, Hatch and Hutchinson) voted against the June amnesty but voted FOR this amnesty. Although it’s already been well publicized that Brownback switched his vote after it because clear how it was going, and Coleman delayed his until after it was already decided.

A big surprise prior to the bill is that Senator Hutchinson stood up to declare that not only was she in support of the bill, but that she had been working with Durbin on a compromise version. She declared that this issue was not finished and she would try to move forward with another version. It falls to us to remain vigilant and let our Senators know that we’re not interested in ANY version of amnesty, regardless of how much lipstick they put on that pig.

A big bonus for supporters of legal immigration, is that Durbin has declared that if they can’t get the DREAM Act passed, then AgJobs and a guest worker program is hopeless. And indeed this one had the most weapons to use to get it passed. The sob stories of poor innocent children almost wrote themselves, and Democratic Senators, in their usual habit, hid behind these children and their stories, rather than address the facts of the issue.

The money quote from around the blogosphere on analysis of this bill has to be from John Hawkins

And they say that you can’t teach old Republican senators new tricks =D. I think we’ve actually thumped them on the noses with rolled up newspapers and yelled, “That’s a bad senator! No amnesty” at them so many times, that it has finally gotten through.

Sure, it may have been frustrating, but the effort turned out to be worth it because now the Republican senators seem to realize that the voters are the Alpha Males and they are the followers on this issue. Helping them to realize their proper place in the American political system will give them structure and make them happier senators!

An amusing quote, even if I’m not sure I completely agree. It’s not that they’ve gotten the message. We still had to make alot of calls, and twelve Republicans still jumped ship. And since this issue keeps coming up, it’s clear that the voters are not the Alpha Males. But I hope he’s right and nonetheless, it’s an amusing quote.

[For continuous coverage of more about immigration than you really care to read, read my other posts at EckerNet.Com. And you can leave comments/feedback here.]

And now for the final vote