David Broder Likens Immigration Bill’s Defeat To A “Mob-Rule Moment”
 
The Washington Post’s David Broder laments the defeat of the Senate Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Here is how he characterizes the death of the bill:
With all its shortcomings, the defeated legislation offered some prospect of improving at least some aspects of that broken system. But it was buried by an avalanche of phone calls to the Capitol from good citizens decrying what they had been told on many talk radio stations and by some conservative politicians: that it was an amnesty bill.
Broder seems to belong to the Trent Lott School of representative democracy: elected officials should feel free to blithely ignore the will of their constituents. Does Broder similarly feel, as does Lott, that talk radio is running America and something should be done about it?
The Senate Immigration legislation was stillborn because it was conceived in secret by a small elitist group of Senators who imperiously decided to ram down the throats of the citizenry one of the worst bills in recent memory, without committee hearings, without debate and without amendments. The unsavory and stealthy Senate procedures that produced the bill, in and of themselves, were sufficient to raise more than a few red flags among the American people. Nobody needed talk radio hosts shouting “Amnesty!” to realize the bill was a stinker from the get go.
When Broder writes that,
The point is pretty basic. Politicians are wise to heed what people want. But they also have an obligation to weigh for themselves what the country needs. In today's Washington, the "wants" of people count far more heavily than the nation's needs.
he has it exactly backwards. The Senate Immigration bill was a perfect example of the “wants” of elitist politicians counting far more heavily than the needs of the country.
The majority of people in this country want to stop illegal immigration period. The fact that the existing illegals will be forced to “ live in the shadows” is of no concern to your average American — regardless of political affiliation.
 
 
Thursday, July 5, 2007
By Johnny K