Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill Stalls Out

Friday, June 8, 2007
Contributed by: Charles A. Mallard

Announced last month as a "Grand Bargain" with bipartisan support, the 2007 Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill failed to capture the required Cloture votes needed to move the bill out of debate and onto the floor for a vote. In reality, the vote was not even close. Needing 60 votes to end debate and schedule a final vote on the bill itself, the original bipartisan group of Senators and the White House were only able to muster 45.

Under the Cloture procedure, had the motion had passed, the Senate would have had 30 hours to complete debate and consider final amendments before voting on passage. While the failure of the Cloture vote brings a close to this round of debate and consideration on the bill "until further notice," both Senate Majority Leader Reid and Minority Leader McConnell have suggested that they hope to bring the bill back for consideration sometime in the future House leaders have, however, indicated that they do not intended to address immigration legislation until a Senate bill is completed.

Based on the debates, amendments and voting, it appears that most Senate Democrats backed the bill despite concerns that it would have tightened and limited family based immigration preferences. Divisions with in the Republican Party were surprisingly more substantial, particularly considering that immigration reform has been touted as President Bush's number one domestic agenda and the original bipartisan proposal had the backing and stamp of approval of the Oval Office. At the end of the day, Republican Senators disagreed amongst themselves as much as they did the Democrats. Only seven Republican Senators voted in favor of Cloture, prompting Majority Leader Reid to point the finger at the President for having done too little to obtain Republican support. Noting that "this is the president's bill," Reid rhetorically questioned "Where are the president's people helping us with these votes?"

While the bill still has the backing of the President and several Senators have expressed interest in continuing the debate, a busy Senate schedule suggests that it is unlikely that immigration reform will remain high on the Senate's agenda. Complicating this further is the fact that there does not appear to be a clear consensus from which to draw conclusions about the desires of the American public. Bruce Josten, a lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was quoted this week by the The Associated Press as stating, the immigration issue is "divisive in the Republican base, it's divisive in the Democratic base, it's divisive in the business community. It splits organized labor, it splits the immigration community."

Muddying the waters further are the poll numbers published by The Associated Press, from a survey conducted May 30-June 3 by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press which found that two-thirds of the public are in favor of giving illegal immigrants citizenship if they have jobs, pass background checks and pay fines. When asked about the current Senate bill, however, most people were ill-informed (less than one-third said they had heard a lot about the bill) and of those who had heard at least a little about it there numbers were split on the bill, with 33 percent favor the bill, 41 percent oppose and 26 percent who gave no response or said they didn't know. Republicans opposed it by 43 percent to 36 percent, Democrats by 37 percent to 33 percent, and independents by 46 percent to 31 percent.

With numbers and confusion of this magnitude, it seems unlikely that presidential election cycle politics will be eager to embrace the issue in any meaningful way and that another opportunity to tackle this important issue has again been lost.

This column is published for informational purposes only. It should not be construed as legal advice and is not intended to create an attorney client relationship. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author's law firm or its individual partners.