House Passes the DREAM Act
Senate Cloture Vote Postponed Until Thursday or Later
By Micheal E. Hill
Wednesday, December 8, 2010 -- 9:07 pm EST
--Updated on Wednesday, December 8, 2010 at 10:30 pm EST--
After more than ten years since its first introduction, the House of Representatives has passed the DREAM Act, doing so by vote of 216-198. House action occurred late in the evening on Wednesday, December 8, 2010, after an hour of emotional debate on the measure. As a technical matter, the House passed a House amendment to the Senate amendments to H.R. 5281, an unrelated bill that the House had passed back in July. In amending the bill to include the text of the DREAM Act, the House has now tossed the DREAM Act ball into the court of the Senate, which must pass the measure in identical form before it can be sent to the President for his consideration.
Advocates on both sides of the DREAM Act spent much of the day on Wednesday unsure of whether there were enough votes in the House to pass the measure. Indeed, all day long on Wednesday, legislators and advocates, alike, were unsure about whether the House or the Senate would first take up the bill. The stakes on how that question was to be answered were high. The Senate was widely expected to defeat the attempt to bring the measure to the Senate floor, and DREAM Act advocates feared that a defeat in the Senate would doom the bill in the House. After a tug-of-war that went on throughout much of the day, the decision was made to postpone a vote in the Senate in order to permit the House to vote on the bill. first That decision paid off, with the House first narrowly voting to approve the rule providing for the consideration of the DREAM Act and then subequently voting narrowly to pass it. To illustrate how close the two votes were, a switch of two votes from AYE to NAY on the rule would have defeated the rule. A switch of nine votes from AYE to NAY would have defeated the bill, itself.
Now that the House of Representatives has passed the DREAM Act, the Senate must pass it in identical form before the 111th Congress adjourns, or the bill will die when the 112th Congress convenes on January 5, 2011. The Senate was scheduled yesterday to vote on a motion to invoke cloture on a motion to proceed to S. 3992, the Senate version of the DREAM Act that was introduced in the on Tuesday, November 30, by Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL). As previously indicated, the Senate Democratic Leadership agreed to postpone that vote in order to permit the House to vote first on the DREAM Act. At the time of this writing, it was unclear whether the Senate will proceed to vote on invoking cloture on S. 3992 or whether it will maneuver to bring up the amended version of H.R. 5281 sometime over the next week.
The DREAM Act was first introduced a decade ago by Representative Howard L. Berman (D-CA), who has reintroduced it in every Congress since. The bill has changed over the years, changing dramatically over the last month.
As passed by the House, the DREAM Act would cancel the removal of, and adjust to conditional permanent resident status, an alien who: (1) entered the United States before his or her 16th birthday and has been present in the United States for at least five years immediately preceding enactment of the Act; (2) is a person of good moral character; (3) is not inadmissible or deportable under specified grounds of the Immigration and Nationality Act; and (4) at the time of application, has been admitted to an institution of higher education or has earned a high school or equivalent diploma. The measure provides for a ten year-long period of conditional residency for beneficiaries, followed by a period of three years before they could apply for United States citizenship.
Applicants for relief under the House-passed version of the DREAM Act would have to apply for that relief before reaching their 30th birthday and would have to pay $2,525 in "surcharges" in addition to the fee that the DHS sets for the cost of adjudicating their application. Under the House-passed bill, DREAM Act applicants would be ineligible for a host of federal educational assistance programs.
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