DREAM Act Portal Forum - As conservatives celebrate scandal-mania, immigration reform marches forward

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The celebratory tone among Republicans and conservatives caught up in Beltway scandal-mania continues this morning. But the real story is that behind all the hoopla, immigration reform continues to march forward, with conservatives suffering one defeat after another in their efforts to derail it. And that means the day is fast approaching when House Republicans will have to decide whether they are going to pass reform and suffer the consequences from their base, or take the blame for killing it.

Late yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Senate Gang of Eight compromise, which would create a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants, on a 13 to 5 vote. This is a big, big deal. It means the most ambitious effort at immigration reform in years is heading to the full Senate.

This caps a period in which far right Republican Senators introduced amendment after amendment designed to undermine the core of reform, efforts that were slapped down by a bipartisan group of Senators, demonstrating that the coalition behind real reform seems to be holding.

Senator Orrin Hatch voted with the majority to advance reform, and the importance of that should not be understated. Hatch is from Utah, where the Tea Party claimed one of its earliest scalps in the person of former longtime Senator Bob Bennett, partly over his support for immigration reform. Hatch is exactly the sort of Senator reformers need if they are going to get very broad bipartisan support for the final Senate vote.

If that happens, and it’s looking increasingly likely that it will, that will very much intensify the pressure on the House to act. The prospects for passing the bill out of the House are uncertain, to put it mildly. But some Dems think all the scandal mania actually improves the prospects for immigration reform. As one Dem remarked to me, by sucking up all the right’s energy and attention, it could distract conservatives just enough to sneak immigration reform past them.

I don’t know if that will prove true or not, but that dynamic does seem to be one that pro-reform GOP Senators are trying to use to their advantage. Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, for instance, go before the cameras and rail about Obama’s scandalous, Nixonian conduct, then turn around and do the hard work — along with
Mr. Amnesty himself, Chuck Schumer — of moving immigration reform past one conservative hurdle after another.

As Jonathan Bernstein noted yesterday in a good piece, if reform passes the Senate, many mainstream conservatives in the House are going to have to decide whether to allow it to advance, or to bow to the far right and kill it. That’s the choice looming behind all the scandal triumphalism that is commanding the attention of conservatives right now.

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