Graham a month ago: ‘Immigration Will Be First Casualty of Health Bill’

Whatever's convenient.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2010/03/19/sen-graham-immigration-will-be-casualty-of-health-bill/


Sen. Graham: ‘Immigration Will Be First Casualty of Health Bill’

By Jonathan Weisman

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who is currently trying to help President Barack Obama out of the thickets of immigration, Guantanamo Bay and climate change, showed his claws Friday, declaring he’ll drop out of negotiations on a comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws if health care passes.

“The first casualty of the Democratic health care bill will be immigration reform. If the health care bill goes through this weekend, that will, in my view, pretty much kill any chance of immigration reform passing the Senate this year,” Graham said in a statement blast-emailed to the Washington press corps. Just this morning, Graham and Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) had an op-ed in the Washington Post touting a bipartisan immigration overhaul. “The American people deserve more than empty rhetoric and impractical calls for mass deportation,” the two lawmakers wrote. “We urge the public and our colleagues to join our bipartisan efforts in enacting these reforms.”

An immigration bill was a long shot anyway, and even long-shot status is probably too generous. The negotiations on closing Guantanamo in exchange for Democratic concessions on detaining and trying terrorism suspects are far closer to fruition. Still, in a deeply polarized Washington, Graham understands he holds most of the cards in the talks.

Immigrants and immigrant-rights groups are planning to mass on Sunday in hope that their issue will be the next on the docket once health care is disposed of, one way or another.

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aka "Republican" :eyes:

working with Kerry on climate change and Schumer on immigration?

Here he is being burned two ways. The immigration bill is not written and he and Schumer have not done the work needed to gather support. Now, to him, it looks like this is being done mostly for politics - without caring whether it succeeds. Where does it leave him given that he sincerely had joined the effort to do it right.

The second way, is that he, Kerry, and Lieberman have done an enormous amount of work reaching out to groups of Senators, making tough compromises for all of them, reaching out to affect industries and to environmentalists and even to the military. He is right to not want their careful work destroyed by this action.

Frankly, his anger is justified - and the appropriate statement is not the angry statement of a month ago - he has then worked on both bills, but the one of today.

sarcasm not needed. :)

Graham is furious because in a cynical political ploy Reid and Schumer have pushed climate change off the agenda for immigration, in spite of the fact that Graham, Kerry and Lieberman have worked for months and have a compromise bill that they were to roll out on Monday. There is no immigration bill.

I know that there is pressure for an immigration bill and I though Kennedy/McCain should have passed. My daughter was one of the 200,000 protesters in DC at the time the House passed the Senate Healthcare bill. But, in the hyper political time before an election, do you really think this can be passed? Do you remember what happened on Kennedy/McCain? Even though it had the support of a Republican President, it was filibustered by the Republicans. Talk radio whipped up a huge number of calls for Senators to do that.

Now, we have a Democratic President and McCain has actually supported the atrocious Arizona bill. In addition, there is 9.5% unemployment. While Reid clearly hopes this will gain him support among the Hispanics in Nevada, there is the other side as well. How many states might have poor whites and blacks moved to join RW Republicans speaking as populists? If this bill does not get 60 votes and fails, we will have handed the Republicans the legislative victory they have not had since Obama took office - and on an issue where they can easily demagogue.

It would be better to at least wait to see if the Justice Department determines whether it will challenge the Arizona law.

But it was Reid and Schumer who thought it was not wise to filibuster Alito and thought it was better to not have a Democratic plan to end the Iraq war in 2006 - and who trashed Kerry behind his back for pushing Kerry/Feingold. I hope I am wrong, but I don't see how doing this now - in a rushed, not careful way will be anything other than a failure. It really does not seem to be the best way to get a sensible, thoughtful bill - and we risk losing a Republican, who has withstood a huge amount of vilification from his own party for working with us.

Graham is without his own agenda.

He has, however, stood against the lunatic fringe in his party to work with Democrats. Even back last summer, you had this SC town hall - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP7nCyqMTsE and it has only gotten worse.

I assume his agenda on CC was that he believes the science and he wants something done and he wants nuclear plants for SC which will provide them with energy in the future. Do I think he is the environmentalist Kerry is? - NO, but there is enough agreement that climate change is real and something needs to be done that they can work together.

On immigration, Graham supported McCain's effort to do the same thing. It is McCain who changed.

But I am not looking at him with rose colored glasses. He a Republican who joined every Republican filibuster. I think on these two issues, where he saw possibility for agreement, he was working with the Democrats. He may now think it was not worth the grief he took.

unlike yourself, I don't have much faith in Graham. It almost seems like he wants to be 'bipartisan' without actually doing so. I recognize he has a lot of pressure from all sides on him, but he's reminding me more and more of McCain.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=433x277913

and he stuck his neck out to do it, then Reid decides he wants to tackle Immigration Reform instead, in nothing more than a political move. Graham has a right to be angry. And, we don't even have a workable Immigration bill. Unless Schumer is going to work on it all by himself, because Graham I doubt will go along now.
You know what the real shame of this is, we had a bipartisan bill ready to go that would of shown unity in Congress and Reid and I think Schumer decided to undo all the good will and pursue their own agendas.

Why don't we apply the same standard to Senator Graham. The man is not stupid. Senator Graham had two choices, continue his support for climate change and work with Senator Kerry and Senator Reid to find a way to move forward while the immigration reform work was done (Congress is fully capable of doing more than one thing at a time despite evidence to the contrary)or throw a temper tantrum.

Senator Graham threatened this during the health care debate and if you want to ascribe purity to his motives, be my guest. However, I subscribe somthing else.

His political gain here is that he now has the talking point about how hard he worked to heed the President's call for bi-partisanship and progress and those nasty Democratic leaders in the Senate stopped him. The poor thing...

Someone needs to slap him.