The American Spectator

Streetcar Line

(Page 2 of 2)

It is hard to see this as anything other than a deliberate attempt by the bill's drafters to provide an end-run around everything else in the bill, in effect to make everything else into window dressing. What other reason could there be for cutting the background check time period from 90 days to a single day? (!!!!!!!)

Collectively, all the other loopholes identified by Sessions are at least equally scary. For instance, the trigger does not require full implementation of the U.S. VISIT system, which is the biometric border check-in/check-out program that already is two years overdue. The trigger's requirements for detention capabilities for scofflaws is off by about 50 percent, or more than 30 thousand beds, from what a later part of the bill acknowledges is the desirable amount.

Also, "Aliens who broke into the country illegally a mere 5 months ago are treated better than foreign nationals who legally applied to come to the U.S. more than two years ago."

There are loopholes that fail to protect against certain child molesters, fail to protect against certain people with terrorist connections, fail against known gang members (who must merely "renounce" their gang membership on their application), and fail against absconders (people who already have been given deportation orders but ignored them and remain in our country).

p>On and on goes Sessions' list, with the senator also identifying a number of provisions that would make the bill financially costly to American taxpayers. One of these provisions is so bad that it, too, merits quoting Sessions' description in full: br> /p>

Free legal counsel and the fees and expense of arbitrators will be provided to aliens that have been working illegally in agriculture. The U.S. taxpayer will fund the attorneys that help these individuals fill out their amnesty applications. Additionally, if these individuals have a dispute with their employer over whether they were fired for "just cause," DHS will "pay the fee and expenses of the arbitrator." [See p. 339:37-41, & p. 332: 37-38.]

In all, if passed in its current form, this might be one of the single worst bills in the history of the United States, ranking right up there with the Smoot-Hawley tariff that helped usher in the Great Depression. It makes a mockery of law and order and public safety, and it makes a mockery of the entire notion of American citizenship. It is outrageously irresponsible.

Not only that, but by concocting it via the alchemy of back-room deal-making, without benefit of a single committee hearing, its drafters contemptuously insult the American people by refusing to trust the people with the ability to analyze and comment on the legislation the drafters would impose upon them. Such shenanigans are utterly destructive to all efforts to maintain within our populace what the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson called "some sense of duty, something of a faith, some reverence for the laws ourselves have made."

There is no way, none whatsoever, that this bill can inculcate a reverence for this nation's laws. Instead, it breeds only further contempt: the contempt for our laws it will instill in the minds of illegal immigrants, and the contempt for our system with which a clear majority of Americans will greet such legislation if passed into law.

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