More On Immigration Deal That Wasn't

Via Time:

Talk about cold feet. Less than 24 hours after the leaders of the Senate's Democratic and Republican families had announced a marriage of convenience on immigration reform, Minority Leader Harry Reid ditched his Republican counterpart Bill Frist at the altar Friday, blocking the bi-partisan bill he had backed the day before. Stunned Senators headed to their home states for a two-week Easter recess, furious over the break-up. "It's a war," said Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter. Even members of Reid's own party, most notably Senator Ted Kennedy, who had worked for five years on an effective amnesty for the country's millions of illegal immigrants, was said to be furious.

Disappointed members of both parties say it was Reid's election-year ambitions that ultimately doomed the immigration bill. The Democrats have a legitimate chance to take back control of the Senate in November, and for a life-long politician like Reid, few things are more important than the opportunity to lead the world's greatest deliberative body, his critics say. A victory for Bill Frist on an issue as nationally charged as immigration would not help the Democrats come election day. "It's not gone forward because there's a political advantage for the Democrats not to have an immigration bill," Specter said.

Personally, I would not put all of the blame for the failure on Sen. Reid. The fact that these Senators were willing to declare victory without accounting for conservatiamendmentsnts that were sure to come is ridiculous. Furthermore, pushing through a bill that grants virtual amnesty to most illegal immigrants may not be seen as a victory for Frist by many conservatives, despite the support of the president.

While I've been critical of Harry Reid as minority leader (the Dems managed to pick one of the only people more dull than Tom Daschle to lead them), this may not end up being a bad move for him and the Dems. Consider this analysis from the same TIME article:

In retrospect, however, [the Immigration compromise] may have been too perfect. After initially signing on, Reid decided he might be walking into a trap. Some Republicans wanted to vote on amendments that Reid believed would have essentially picked apart the compromise plan; under one of them, for instance, the Department of Homeland Security would have had to certify that the border was secure before any illegal immigrants could be made legal.

What's more, even if he could defeat the amendments, any bill the Senate passed would have to go into a conference committee with the House which wants to build a wall along much of the U.S.-Mexico border, criminalize all illegal immigrants in the U.S., and dramatically increase the penalties against those who help them, from businesses to churches. Looking several moves ahead in a game of legislative chess, Reid feared that the conference would produce something that looked more like the House bill, which currently has no amnesty provisions for making current illegals citizens, than the Senate version.

Granted, when such a watered down bill came back to the Senate, Reid could still block it by filibustering. But in a election year, Reid knew that could be political suicide, forcing fellow Democrats to vote against a bill Republicans would portray as securing America's broken borders. Those Democrats who were around in the last mid-term election are still smarting from the votes they cast against the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, an issue Republicans cashed in handily at the polls. Giving Frist another National Security vote to beat the Democrats with, they feared, was a sure fire way to let Republicans maintain control of the Senate this fall.

This is a rare example of political foresight on the part of the Democratic leadership. While it will still be difficult for the Dems to take the Senate, there's no need to hand them an issue that's getting as much press as this one.