Weird Wild Wacky Stuff Happening With the Shamnesty Bill

Ace and Allah and Drudge are saying the bill is teetering on the brink because of something Byron Dorgan did to it, something that threatens to upset the Senate's delicate left-right feng shui. Something about putting a sunset provision on the guest workers made Republicans afraid to vote for it.* Most Republicans are afraid of the sunset provision because after sunset is when the Mexican goat-sucking vampire chupacabras come out, and if one of their constituents or his goat is killed by a chupacabra (as opposed to an illegal MS-13 gang member) they will have a lot of explaining to do about why they supported this bill. On the other hand, if the bill's co-authors can sacrifice a lion on a stone table, it moves the bill out of the penalty box and into double jeopardy, where the scores can really change.

Stay tuned to the JYB News Bureau for more hard-hitting, ineffable coverage that will make almost as much sense as the real stuff.

Meanwhile, in other vague amnesty bill news, Daniel Henninger from the WSJ (last heard here insisting that opposition to this bill is really all about culture, and amnesty opponents only want immigrants from western Europe) sorta kinda admits that his many many critics have a point about how important citizenship is:

The problem for many people with the illegal workers, no matter how hard they work, is that they exist entirely outside the complications of civic life for an American citizen. And they appear to do so more or less permanently. For many, this makes the illegal-worker status quo a rebuke to the idea of dutiful citizenship.

That is an understandable and even defensible point of view. What remains is what to do about it. The American "community" taking matters into its own hands, the vigilantism of the Minuteman Project, went out of fashion in the U.S. about 50 years ago. Nor is there any chance, as some Republicans desire, that a Congress in our time is going to enact an employer hiring ban whose implicit goal is to force many millions of people to leave the country.

I'm actually less worried about forcing many millions to leave than I am about keeping many more millions from coming in. After we get a fence and some animatronic General Pershing statues to scare people away, I think we need to winnow through the aliens already here and deal with the ones whose occupation consists mainly of smoking yerba, selling yerba, and/ or plotting to blow up our airports. The rest, who want to work, we can make guest workers or something out of them, though not citizens. The U.S. citizenship track ought to be something you get on by obeying our laws instead of breaking them.

Anyway, Mr. Henninger's change in tone is much appreciated, and one hopes the White House and Linda Chavez follow suit.

*I don't see why Dorgan can't just say, oh, never mind, that was a silly little frolic, I'm such a bad boy, I withdraw the amendment so let's go ahead and pass the bill without it.