So I read an article this morning on the Washington Monthly in which the author blasted the Obama speech as a sorry set of excuses to make up for empy rhetoric.
The President's math doesn't add up.
BUT...what really caught my eye, and what many of us here have been noting for a while, is that a big, "comprehensive" bill will be voted on ALL of its parts INDIVIDUALLY. Just like healthcare. So when and if, it reaches the floor, lawmakers will have to vote on every measure proposed invidually. When Dream Act is called out, it will either pass or fail (most likely pass). When additional enforcement funding comes up, it will either pass or fail, etc.
A reply post by user Americanist illustrates it as best as anyone could, please read AND as always, pass it along to as many people as possible:
Do the math, willya?
Take the House as a paradigm: you need 218 votes. There are 255 Democrats and 178 Republicans. On immigration reform, if you have 180 Democrats who will vote for legalization, you might have as many as 10 Republicans who might, just possibly sorta kinda, entertain the possibility of voting yes as well.
So that's not enough. Capisce?
When you get to 200 Democrats, you go down to no more than 5 Republicans. When you get to 210 Democrats, you get NO Republicans.
But when you get to 220 Democrats who will vote for an immigration reform bill, you could get as many as 25 Republicans.
So the effective strategy is obvious: get a majority of the House from WITHIN the Democratic Caucus, first. Do NOT try to get your decisive votes from the Republicans, because they won't give 'em to you.
The same essential dynamic exists in the Senate, only you need 60 votes on several issues (rather than a simple majority as you do in the House - and there, you really only need it twice: on the Rule, and on final passage, although you also need to be able to beat back motions to reconsider.)
If you really have 56 Democrats plus two Independents to move a Senate bill, you can get three or four Republicans.
But if you have only 52 Democrats plus one Independent, you don't get any Republicans.
The key isn't to get Republicans to give Blue Dogs cover. It's to get Blue Dogs directly.
Why doesn't anybody ever do the math? Cuz it interferes with delusions about the substance, e.g., 'we need a comprehensive solution...'
Um: why?
Legalization is the tough vote. The rest is negotiation. So when somebody says there is no way I can vote for legalization: stop bargaining with him (or her). You can't get their vote for the bill you want -- so long as it includes legalization.
So (when you do the math) you realize that there are several different majorities in the House and Senate for immigration reform -- it's just that the majorities for legalization, and the majorities for other parts of the "comprehensive" bill, aren't the SAME majorities. You pick up a vote or ten here, and lose 'em there.
What the 2007 debacle (as well as the ones in '06 and '05, in fact ALL of the past decade or more) shows is that the 'comprehensive' theory is an Epic Failure: you don't make a bill more likely to pass by bundling legalization into a 'comprehensive' bill. That doesn't gain votes, it loses 'em.
And worse, as a simple and WRONG framing, it sets up a simpler and effective response, which the GOP is using: no comprehensive reform UNTIL the border is secure... which neatly sidesteps the truth that the border doesn't cause illegal immigration.
The worksite does.
Posted by: theAmericanist on July 3, 2010 at 10:44 AM
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/arc..._07/024565.php