Susan Collins rarely splits with her Maine colleague Olympia Snowe, but on immigration she did. She said the bill didn't strike the right balance. "People were troubled by the proposed solution for the 12 million people here illegally," she said. Collins is running for reelection next year. Snowe isn't.
While opposition to the bill may aid individual senators, it clearly undercuts Republican efforts to capture the Hispanic vote. Hispanics paid close attention to the Senate deliberations, and while Democrats--Reid especially--bear some of the responsibility for the bill's downfall, Republicans bear more. After all, the leading Republican foes claimed credit for the bill's demise.
Hispanics are the fastest-growing voting bloc in the country, and they are basically swing voters. According to exit polls, they voted 44 percent for Bush in 2004 but only 29 percent for Republican congressional candidates in 2006. As a result of Republicans' role in killing the immigration bill, "I believe we're reinforcing everything" that brought us to 29 percent, said Graham, one of the bill's architects. He's right about that.
For Democrats, the failure of immigration reform is a twofer. Democrats are likely now to begin to solidify their hold on the Hispanic vote. And their House members in rural and conservative districts have been spared a risky vote in favor of immigration reform.
Of the what-ifs, one is worth considering. That was Reid's rash decision on June 7 to pull the bill off the Senate floor rather than give Republican leaders a day or so to put together a limited number of
amendments and proceed to final passage. At the time, the bill was hurtling toward passage. Opponents were despondent. Both McConnell and Kyl believe it would have passed within a few days had Reid not been so impatient. But we'll never know.
The pause before Reid brought the bill back to the Senate floor last week proved fatal. My guess was that the opposition had peaked. It hadn't. Instead, resistance to the bill became an earsplitting national phenomenon during the interim rather than mere conservative noisemaking.
McConnell had theorized that a divided Washington--Republican White House, Democratic Congress--provided the best chance for bipartisan agreement on big issues like Social Security and immigration. But preliminary talks on reforming Social Security have gone nowhere and the attempt to overhaul America's broken immigration system has failed.
Too bad. The bill was a compromise that, in my view, had far more in it that conservatives should have cheered than booed. And Kyl and Graham and a few other Republican senators were courageous in negotiating the bill and fighting for its passage. They didn't flinch. But in politics you only get credit for success. And that they didn't achieve.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
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