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Your Activism Is Pushing House to Block Senate’s Bill
Conference Committee still poses grave danger
What just happened:
Shortly before 1 p.m., 68 Senators voted for S. 744 in the all-important final cloture vote. It needed 60 votes. This assures its final passage by the Senate (only 50 votes needed) later today. ( See who voted for cloture below.) The bad news:
If eventually signed into law, this bill would threaten to knock millions of Americans out of the middle class by flooding their occupations with 33 million foreign citizens who are offered lifetime work permits over the next decade. Can you believe 68 U.S. Senators voted for that?
The willingness of every single Democratic Senator and almost a third of Republicans to accept the corporate lobbyists’ insistence that our country faces devastating labor shortages is disheartening to all of us who have fought so hard to protect the 20 million Americans who can’t find a full-time job, and the millions more who have seen their real wages declining for decades during a worker surplus.
What’s next, and the good news about your efforts thus far:
Now, we must turn our full efforts to the U.S. House of Representatives and another huge grassroots effort in July. But this will be only a three-week fight before the month-long August recess.
There is no question that the five-month opposition that all of you have waged is having good results in the House, where the Senate bill is facing an increasingly hostile reception.
If the House refuses to move a giant overall amnesty, it doesn’t matter what the Senate has done.
For all of you who have spent so much of your time recently in this fight, you need a respite. I urge you to take a bit of a breather from activism this next week, celebrate our nation’s Independence Day, enjoy your families and friends. You’ve earned it.
As for today, it sure would be great if you took a moment to make an on-line donation to re-build the C-4 activism political battle fund for our big July House Battle!
When the U.S. Representatives return to work on July 8, we will need to greet them with overwhelming grassroots opposition to keep the Senate’s amnesty from gaining any hold in the House.
Your efforts have been phenomenal:
Over the last few months, you have been faxing your Representatives and going to their offices, even as you focused primary attention on Senators. Republican Representatives have watched the incredible grassroots opposition to the 14 Republican Senators who broke with the rest of their Party and supported Pres. Obama’s top priority for the year.
Just today, Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Illinois), a member of the House Republican leadership, told reporters,
“It is a pipe dream to think that that (Senate) bill is going to go to the (House) floor and be voted on. The House is going to move through in a more deliberative process.”
For months, the open-borders lobby and their supporters in the news media have proclaimed that citizens were not speaking against this amnesty anything close to the way they did in 2007.
Your efforts back in 2007 to mobilize against that amnesty effort has become the stuff of legend around Washington. But I’m so proud to tell you that you smashed the old records for activism! You’ve sent millions of faxes and made hundreds of thousands of phone calls into congressional offices.
For example, Republican Bob Corker, the Senator who rescued the S. 744 amnesty from defeat last week with a fig-leaf border control amendment, admitted on the floor this morning that the bill is extremely unpopular back in his state of Tennessee.
All of us at NumbersUSA thank you for everything you have done thus far. And we thank you for all Americans who will benefit if the House blocks the incredibly harmful provisions of S. 744.
Fighting the bad stuff in narrow House bill:
You will not be surprised to learn that Rosemary Jenks, our director of government relations, and her Hill Team have been working with our House allies for months to keep the Republican Majority from caving to the fat-cat corporate lobbyists the way the Democratic Majority did in the Senate.
About five weeks ago, I was at a private dinner of a number of Representatives who lamented that they feared the majority of Republican House Members were going to be willing to let Speaker Boehner bring the Senate amnesty bill or other amnesty bills to the floor for a vote.
Since then, however, the grassroots uprising against the Senate has truly caught hold among House Republicans who have persuaded their Leadership to go along with House Judiciary Chairman Goodlatte (R-Virginia) to refuse to do a giant comprehensive bill, instead passing small bills that deal with one immigration issue at a time.
The problem is that the special-interest lobbyists are succeeding in getting a number of provisions into those small bills that would harm American wage-earners and taxpayers.
We will be coming to you for assistance in taming those Fat Cat Welfare provisions.
Dealing with the Conference Committee danger:
Even if the House passes an absolutely wonderful immigration bill — such as the enforcement legislation recently passed overwhelmingly by the Judiciary Committee — that would give Senate leaders the opportunity to ask for a joint Senate/House “Conference Committee” which would split the difference between that very good bill and the Senate monstrosity.
If a Conference compromise bill were to include an amnesty, both the Senate and House would need to vote for it, without opportunity for amendment. The general thinking here in Washington is that most House Democrats would vote for the Conference “report” bill and very likely the needed couple dozen or so House Republicans would, too..
But . . .
Even if the Senate leadership were to ask for a Conference Committee, Speaker Boehner would not have to agree and appoint House conferees.
And even if there were a Conference Committee that reported out a bill with an amnesty, Speaker Boehner would not have to bring it to the House floor for a vote.
We have precedence for this in 2005 and 2006.
Many of you were part of those battles in which the House passed an excellent enforcement bill in late 2005. Despite our best efforts, the Republican-Majority Senate passed an amnesty in the spring of 2006. Then-Speaker Hastert refused to conference over those two bills, and the Senate amnesty died. (It was the next spring in 2007 when the new Democrat-Majority Senate failed to pass an amnesty when the new Democrat-Majority House was sure to have approved it.)
Until recently, Speaker Boehner has kept open the option of bringing an amnesty bill to the House floor that might pass with a minority of Republican votes — as he has done with some fiscal bills in the past. But over the last week, he has assured an increasingly aggressive Republican Conference in the House that he would not bring an immigration bill to the floor without at least a bare majority of Republicans supporting it.
Nonetheless, until today, he has refused to say what he would do about a Conference report that reconciled House and Senate bills.
This morning, once again, we saw the results of the powerful grassroots opposition to what the Senate has been doing. Politico just reported that Boehner told reporters :
“For any legislation including the conference report to pass the House it’s going to have to be a bill that has the support of the majority of our members.”
As you know, our Board of Directors, our staff and our members are Independents, Republicans and Democrats. But our July House Battle will be all about making sure that the majority of Republicans are against any overall amnesty. And we want the majority to be at least the two-thirds majority opposition to overall amnesty that we saw among Senate Republicans today.
I want to give special thanks to all of you who helped us get to this very good moment because you have faithfully provided the financial support that has made everybody else’s activism possible.
The battle the last five months has been by far the most expensive we’ve ever engaged (although a pittance compared to the money spent by the Fat Cat Lobbies).
We must re-build our battle funds for the July fight.
The pro-amnesty, low-wage, labor globalization folks want Congress to believe that Americans will lose their will to fight and will just go back to reading celebrity news. But that’s not the Americans I’ve known ever since we’ve worked together to stop every amnesty attempt in every year starting in 2001 (after seven amnesties passed between 1986 and 2000).
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