Via Senator Jim DeMint:

“Senator Jim DeMint:

Senator Reid has been trying to portray this immigration nightmare as solely the responsibility of President Bush, but today we saw just how bad Reid wants it. He used his power as Majority Leader to manipulate and abuse the rules of the Senate to ram this bill down our throats. He has set up a process that guarantees votes on a few amendments while blocking all others. This has never been done before, and it’s the most heavy-handed and rigged thing I have ever seen. This bill may have Ted Kennedy’s name on it but it belongs to Harry Reid now.After the Senate voted to cut off debate on the question of whether to resurrect the Senate immigration bill, Senator Reid set up unique debate process that guarantees votes several hand-picked amendments but blocks consideration of all others. Senator Reid used a parliamentary tool called a “clay pigeon” to divide a giant amendment into multiple amendments and then moved to block all others. No other member of the Senate besides Reid could have accomplished all of this without being stopped by another Senator. No other Majority Leader in history has done this.

Republicans better wake up soon or they can expect Senator Reid to use this tactic in the future to raise taxes, increase spending, and weaken our national security.”

What’s he talking about? Robert Minter at Pajamas Media has more. It’s scary stuff and also brings up a few points about the s. 1639 you might not have known about.

S. 1639 was introduced in the Senate on June 18, 2007
S. 1639 did not get referred to the appropriate Senate committee which is regular order
S. 1639 did not receive any hearings in committee and receive the benefit of experts in the field of immigration testifying as to their knowledge of our present immigration system and the new immigration system contained in S. 1639
S. 1639 did not receive a markup in committee where Senators, who sit on that committee, could listen to the testimony by immigration experts, and could have had the opportunity to make changes to the text of S. 1639 by offering amdts.

So one might ask why? Why wouldn’t the bill have gone through the normal channels and so was basically created in back door dealings?

The answer of course is the old fashion “Cigar smoking, back slapping, money changing deal making“. You might want to call your Senator and ask him just how much he got promised for voting “Yea”, for to be blunt, we are going to find out sooner or later.

As noted in the post below the House re-soundly rejected the bill which means it’s DOA as far as they are concerned.