New Amnesty Gamesmanship: Reid Suggests Passing Amnesty Now But Delaying Enforcement Until 2017

The idea is to undermine Republicans' beliefs that Obama can't be trusted to enforce the, um, enforcement provisions of any "deal," so we'll wait until we have new president who could possibly be trusted.

Of course, any amnesty proposed to take effect in 2017 would be implemented immediately -- Obama is already ordering federal agents, and strongly suggesting to state agents, to enforce immigration laws leniently, if at all.

So of course any amnesty supposedly taking effect three years from now would actually be ordered into effect -- unlawfully, of course -- immediately.

So it's just more nonsense from the Nonsense Caucus.

Of course we have our own Nonsense Caucus, also looking for ways to pass amnesty over the objections of a large fraction of Americans. Eric Cantor is claiming that the ENLIST bill -- which would let "DREAMers" enlist in the military -- is off the table, but it's only off the table while he has a potentially serious primary challenge from David Brat.

Mickey Kaus claims he has the "silver bullet" for the GOP on amnesty, but I'm not sure how this is a new scheme. He proposes the party take a position of "Enforcement First, Amnesty Second."

Isn't that our current position? What's he talking about?

Well, anyway, here are his thoughts on how to win (or survive) the political fight:

It’s all in the sequencing. First, take the necessary steps to block another wave of illegal immigrants. Once those measures (mandatory E-Verify for new hires, a border fence, a visa overstay system) have survived legal and political assault then (and only then) afford compassionate relief to otherwise law-abiding illegals already here.

Enforcement First (let’s call it E1 for short) is another “comprehensive” enforcement-for-amnesty trade–as was Reagan’s 1986 immigration reform, as is the current Senate “Gang of 8″ bill. But by putting the amnesty half second it promises to guarantee that (unlike what happened with the 1986 law) the enforcement part of the deal actually gets carried out.

I guess the "new" thing is that Amnesty would be promised (or at least, implicitly promised) to come later, which many Republicans don't actually promise now. I guess his idea is to make that promise more explicit.

Eh.

We're doomed. But you knew that.

posted by Ace at 06:22 PM

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