Our generous Mandarins
The Senate voted yesterday to grant amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who have already been caught and ordered deported but are defying a court order, preserving their path to citizenship as part of the immigration bill.
We marvel at our wonderful elites in Washington, our Mandarins, so much better than the people, so exalted in their judgment. They are Democrat and Republican, in the Senate, the White House and Congress. They care so very deeply, do they not?
UPDATE
Senator Trent Lott, the subject of many of the first pieces in this space in 2002, is discovered to have a good idea: “we ought to vote to dissolve the Congress and go home and wait for the next election..” Now that’s a notion we can get behind.
UPDATE II
Rasmussen on the real mystery in the immigration bill debate:
The last Rasmussen Reports national telephone poll found that just 23% of Americans supported the legislation. When a bill has less popular support than the War in Iraq, it deserves to be defeated. There is no mystery to why the public opposed the bill. In the minds of most Americans, immigration means reducing illegal immigration and enforcing the border. Only 16% believed the Senate bill would accomplish that goal.
It wasn’t amnesty or guest-worker programs or paths to citizenship that doomed the bill. Each of those provisions made it more difficult for some segments of the population to accept. However, most voters were willing to accept them as part of a true compromise that accomplished the primary goal of reducing illegal immigration. The key to winning voter support was to accomplish that primary goal.
The Senators missed that point and that’s where the mystery resides in analyzing why this bill failed. It’s not unusual for political leaders to be out of touch with their constituents, but rarely this out of touch. How could something this unpopular with voters get so close to passage in a legislative body that is supposed to represent them?
Incredibly, or perhaps not, many of our fellow citizens are so poorly informed that fully 58% said that that they “didn’t know enough to say” if the Senate bill was bad or good.