Some Shadows

By Mark Krikorian on June 27, 2013

Illegal aliens are living so deep in the shadows that they were on hand in the Senate galleries for this afternoon's 68-32 vote for the Schumer-Rubio amnesty bill, and they yelled out Obama's campaign chant when the vote was announced.

Lots of bloviation beforehand about how "historic" the vote was. No one mentioned that the Senate passed an amnesty in 2006 that wasn't approved by the House. Was that "historic", too?

I'm listening to America's Great Debate, about the Compromise of 1850, and I'm struck by how pedestrian and foolish the Senate has become — not in the substance of the policies debated, which are not comparable between the periods, but in the debate itself. The closing comments on the Schumer-Rubio bill were mostly treacly clichés about the speaker's parents or grandparents or in-laws, and how their experience is an argument for the Crabhusker Kickback Bill of 2013.

And the invocation of the DREAMers was particularly tendentious — what does the experience of someone brought here at the age of 6 months have to do with this monster bill? You want to amnesty people like that? Well, so do I, as part of a wider bill to tighten enforcement. But their constant use as props for those arguing for a mass amnesty is morally dubious, the kind of emotional blackmail we've come to expect from the open-borders side (both left and right).

In any case, it's now the House's job to allow this bloated, dangerous measure to die on the vine. Unfortunately, the decision about what happens next rests almost entirely on the shoulders of John Boehner.