Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Elect-a-New-People (DREAM) Act Fails -- for Now

Fox has it here.

Oddly, the amnesty angle is running third in the press coverage behind the repeal of the bans on homosexual behavior in the Armed Forces and abortions on military installations.

I hadn't realized until this morning the Dems had rolled three poison-pill provisions in this legislation at once, yet I found the news oddly comforting. Surely the Left were putting on a big show for the base, knowing in advance that they couldn't get that much done at once.

Right?

1 comment:

knightblaster said...

The immigration part actually never made it into the bill -- they didn't have the 60 votes to amend the bill to include it. Reid said that they wanted to put it into the bill, but that's DOA for now.

The DADT was a part of the bill, meaning that you'd need 60 votes to remove it, which probably isn't happening. So what the Republicans did, instead, was block the debate, because Reid didn't have 60 votes on that, since all Republicans voted to block (including Collins, who is in favor of repealing DADT) and the two democratic senators from Arkansas also voted to block.

This is going to come up again in the lame-duck, and if the GOP wins quite a few seats in the election, we're going to see all kinds of shenanigans in the lame-duck session to desperately pass this or that liberal priority legislation. The defense appropriations bill, with DADT, will be passed in the lame-duck, I think, after the Pentagon report on DADT is released in December (giving the Republicans political cover to some extent). As for the Dream Act, that will be tough. I doubt they'll get 60 votes to fold it into defense appropriations.