President Bush yesterday moved aggressively to resurrect his plan to relax rules against illegal immigration, a move bound to anger conservatives just days after they helped re-elect him. The president met privately in the Oval Office with Sen. John McCain to discuss jump-starting a stalled White House initiative that would grant legal status to millions of immigrants who broke the law to enter the United States….“We are formulating plans for the legislative agenda for next year,” said White House political strategist Karl Rove. “And immigration will be on that agenda.” He added: “The president had a meeting this morning to discuss with a significant member of the Senate the prospect of immigration reform. And he’s going to make it an important item.”
While the president was huddling with Mr. McCain, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was pushing the plan during a visit to Mexico City. “The president remains committed to comprehensive immigration reform as a high priority in his second term,” he told a meeting of the U.S.-Mexico Binational Commission. “We will work closely with our Congress to achieve this goal.”
But key opponents in Congress said Mr. Bush’s proposal isn’t going anywhere. “An amnesty by any other name is still an amnesty, regardless of what the White House wants to call it,” said Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican and chairman of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus. “Their amnesty plan was dead on arrival when they sent it to the Congress in January, and if they send the same pig with lipstick back to Congress next January, it will suffer the same fate,” he said.
And here I hadn’t even gotten around to posting the contest about when George Bush was going to outrage his conservative supporters and what the issue would be. I guess we’re a little late for that now. Eight days after the election must be some kind of record.
Perhaps for an encore he can force the Marines to break off the Fallujah assault and start negotiating with the surviving enemy fighters. The disgusting thing is that the president won’t do anything about abortion because the country is split on it, but he’ll fight for the rights of illegal aliens even though the vast majority of the country is hugely against it. You can’t say that he’s a coward, but he sure does seem to have courage in all the wrong places.