Bayh
Liberal Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) was a surprise vote against both Bush-Kennedy cloture motions last week. Here’s why he voted no:
About two weeks before [the Bush-Kennedy amnesty] died, I sat down with Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), who up to that point had voted to let the bill go forward. Bayh was blue about the legislation’s prospects, and his explanation had more to do with the political climate than with the bill’s particulars – although he cited some of those in explaining why he voted, in the end, to block a measure he called “a theoretical hodgepodge.”“The timing of this is all wrong,” Bayh said. “There’s a tremendous amount of middle-class anxiety in the country right now,” and anger over immigration reflected “the complete lack of a domestic agenda to address the needs of the middle class” in areas such as health care, pensions and education. When voters saw Congress directing its attention to 12 million illegal immigrants, he said, “They asked: ‘When are you going to get around to me? Are you going to get around to me?’ ” Bayh himself strongly favors legalizing the status of the 12 million. He opposed some of the bill’s more punitive sections and sided with Latino groups in trying to strengthen the rules on family reunification.
But he said he understood why many voters weren’t buying immigration reform this year. “When people are feeling more secure about their own situations, they’re more willing to welcome others,” he said in a follow-up interview yesterday. “If we had moved first to address the middle class’s anxieties, we would have had a much better chance of success.”
And the strongest arguments in the restrictionists’ arsenal played on a widespread belief that the federal government was too incompetent to enforce whatever tough provisions the bill contained. Bayh pointed to poor planning for the Iraq war and the failure to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as leading inevitably to skepticism. “A government that’s going to permit that is suddenly going to know how to make an entirely new employment system work?” Bayh asked.
– PoliPundit