By Glenn Hurowitz
Having been around the block in Washington, I've become accustomed to good things happening for bad reasons. Last night was no different. 38 Republicans turned against their president to kill his immigration bill. Meanwhile, the majority of Democrats voted with Bush for the bill - even though it represents a disaster for workers, immigrants, and the environment.
Of course, their floor speech paeans to the working class notwithstanding, those negative impacts were pretty far from the
minds of the Republicans who voted to let it die. The impact they were concerned about was what a vote for the immigration deal would do the xenophobes and nativists who'd been clogging right wing radio and their telephone lines with angry denunciations of the immigration measure - which they feared would bring more people of non-European origin into the country. I suspect that given their druthers, more Republicans would have endorsed the bill as a way to provide their corporate backers with a steady supply of cheap labor. But sometimes, for a Republican, crazy right wingers really can trump a corporate lobbyist's check.
The vote proved that Republican politicians can be just as craven as Democratic ones, with one key difference: whereas Republicans are afraid mainly of their own conservative base, Democrats fear controversy more than the anger of the progressive base whose support they rely on for money, volunteers, and votes.
Of course, in politics, controversy is unavoidable, and that repeatedly puts Democrats in the kind of ridiculous and untenable situation they found themselves in on the immigration bill. Most Democrats recognized that the bill would lower wages, create an underclass of "guest workers" (known in prior centuries as "indentured servants"), and make it harder to keep families together.
Accordingly, soon after the bill emerged, several Democrats sharply criticized it.
"I have serious concerns about some aspects of this proposal, including the structure of its temporary-worker program and undue limitations on family immigration," said Harry Reid.
But like many other Democrats who initially criticized the bill, Reid ended up getting caught up in the idea that voters were demanding action on immigration - any action, no matter how damaging - and wouldn't care what the actual impacts of the deal were.
But although that demand for action has been aggressively peddled by the mainstream media, it's a gross misreading of public sentiment on the issue. The polls on immigration show a very deeply divided and ambiguous public. With such a complicated proposal on the table, the idea that many people except immigrants themselves and right wing anti-immigrant activists know or care a lot about what the Senate does on immigration is just absurd.
Just seven percent of Americans named immigration their top priority issue in a recent New York Times poll - that's a record high for the issue, but as with most polls of this type, it's driven more by the fact that immigration has been in the headlines, not on the basis of any lasting broad obsession with the issue (it's likely to fall back to one or two percent now that the legislative debate has, for the time being, concluded).
I also find the notion that Americans are more interested in legislative action for its own sake, regardless of the content of that action, insulting of our intelligence.
While people may not have known the details of the legislation, they will see the impacts of Congress's action - or inaction. If Congress passes a bill that doesn't work, voters will factor that failure into their judgment.
Of course, America's immigration system remains flawed: most of all, corporations continue to exploit immigrant labor, driving down wages in some sectors of the economy while denying immigrants the civil and political rights (like joining a union) they need to fully realize the American dream.
But the flaws of the current system are no reason to make it worse, something only a handful of Democrats seem to have realized.
"I know how hard my colleagues have worked--on both sides of the aisle--to put this immigration bill together," said one such Democrat, Senator Barbara Boxer. "But I believe that this bill, as it currently stands, is unworkable and unfair...I believe we can achieve an immigration bill that will be fair and just to all, and the best chance for that is to vote against cloture and continue working as long as it takes to get it right."
That's the kind of principled position that more Democrats need to embrace - or else Democrats will continue to have to rely on the Republican base to save them from policy and political disaster.
Glenn Hurowitz, who blogs at DemocraticCourage.com, is the author of the forthcoming book Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party.