Congress listens to the people, finally

Ding-dong, the bill is dead.

The U.S. Senate on Thursday stopped its public approval ratings from plummeting further into the cellar by killing a comprehensively incomprehensible and controversial immigration "reform" bill.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass, said the vote amounted to "a victory for fear-mongering and obstruction over a bipartisan commitment to fix our broken immigration sytem."

Well, in a sense, Kerry is partly right. People were rightfully afraid of the profound long-term implications the bill would have for the country. There were no committee hearings on legislation that would instantly legalize at least 12 million illegal immigrants. There was no fiscal analysis of how much implementing it would cost, much less disclosure and discussion of long-term costs for schools, Social Security and health care.

The reason for the bill's failure is simple: The American people want the federal government to vastly improve its performance on border and immigration enforcement. The United States is a can-do country that can launch D-Day and build the Hoover Dam, so it's hard to understand why the country can't enforce its southern border, particularly six years after 9/11.

Americans rejected the arrogant and elitist insistence that border enforcement must be tied to amnesty reforms for the illegal population that's already in the country. It simply isn't the case.

The government can indeed address this problem one step at a time. Address the border. Then consider measures for managing the illegal population that's here.

And no, we're not talking about mass deportation.

We never heard bill opponents calling for mass deportation, but that's often how they were characterized - as xenophobic, racist nativists who want to ship millions of illegal Hispanics south of the border.

Hardly. Bill opponents simply want the government to enforce existing prohibitions on illegal residents working in our country or to follow through on the massive backlog of deportation orders that have already been issued. Some even had the audacity to suggest that maybe the government should work on deporting illegal aliens with criminal records.

And many bill opponents favor a substantial increase in LEGAL immigration.

Somehow, conservative Republicans seem to be bearing the brunt of the heat for the bill's defeat. That's odd, because there's a sizable roster of Democrats who staunchly opposed the legislation, too.

In fact, Montana's two Democratic Senators, Max Baucus and Jon Tester, have been credited in some publications for changing the bill in a way that ensured its demise. The Baucus-Tester amendment would have disposed of a requirement that employers check the eligibility of prospective employees with federally mandated "REAL ID" documents. The amendment passed Wednesday.

"We scored a major victory today in our efforts to protect privacy and defeat a bad immigration bill at the same time," Baucus said. "If Jon and I just brought down the entire bill, that's good for Montana and the country."

The demise of this bill will serve a higher purpose: Making immigration reform a top-tier issue for 2008 presidential candidates. Had the legislation become law, the candidates could conveniently avoid the matter. But now, all of them will need to explain in detail their views on immigration reform. And they would be wise to listen to the American people.