RUSH: Let’s go back to the audio sound bites. I’ve been promising to do this. Yesterday, we have some Democrats here. Start with Ted Kennedy on the Senate floor. This is sort of frightening.
KENNEDY: I have my differences with the president but he’s absolutely right. He understands history. He’s a border state governor, and he knows you can’t do this by itself, only at the border.
RUSH: All right, so Ted Kennedy, who for most of the last five years has been doing his best to politically destroy George W. Bush, is all of a sudden embracing him over this immigration bill. The Hagel-Martinez compromise bill, and of course this was about the amendment that would have said, “Okay, we’ll deal with guest worker, but not ’til we seal the border,” and 18 Republicans joined the Democrats to vote against the concept of sealing the border, and Kennedy is praising the president for understanding the importance of that. Then here’s Dingy Harry.
REID: The president, if he wants to help us in comprehensive immigration reform, needs to look first at the Republican leadership in the Senate and say something negative about this monstrous House bill.
RUSH: That’s your answer right there. That’s the best bite I can play for you today. That tells you where the action on this issue is. The action on this issue is in the House. It is the House version that has the Democrats apoplectic. It’s the House version they want killed and they are trying to entice the president into going out there and killing it for them, because when the House bill, it’s already done, when they start conferencing that with whatever idiocy comes out of the Senate, it’s going to be real hard to reconcile these two bills, and that’s why a lot of people, even if the Senate passes a bill, it may be meaningless because by the time you start trying to reconcile these two in the conference, will there even be a bill by election time?
There are still people with theories that there’s not going to be an immigration bill. All these politicians just want the credit for talking about it and being on the, quote, unquote, right side of the issue. But when it comes time to actually doing something, ain’t going to do it. Well, I don’t want to roll the dice on that and that’s why the House bill and the House itself, don’t let it change hands out there voters. Whatever you do. Here’s Senator Sessions, he’s last night on CNN. Anderson Cooper said, “You had blasted the legislation, the Senate is debating, saying it would have allowed more than 130 million new immigrants into the U.S. over the next 20 years. Today the Senate changed that provision. Now the number of new immigrants would be less than 10 million.” That’s not right, but… “Do you still think this compromised legislation standing is fatally flawed as you’ve said in the past?”
SESSIONS: Well, I think that was tremendous advancement, but the one area they fixed was one that was most egregious and it did go from perhaps a hundred million or more people over twenty years to eight, but there will be other provisions in the bill that will allow immigration here in the future. We need to tighten up a number of things, from enforcement to actually how we handle the amnesty portion of the bill and how we do future immigration.
RUSH: The next question: “Well, senator, it seems the word amnesty has become such a buzzword. President says that his road to citizenship is not amnesty, is it?”
SESSIONS: Well, I think it’s pretty close to it, but it’s getting a little bit away from it, maybe. It’s not an automatic path to citizenship, but it basically allows that to happen with a small fine. I think we probably need to better than that, and I’m not — that’s too close to what I would call amnesty and what I have said I would not support.
RUSH: Now the Senate continued debating this today, and Senator Sessions continued to hammer this whole point on the Senate floor today.
SESSIONS: All the economists that we’ve heard testify, and we haven’t had a lot, but they all agree basically that low-skill workers tend to be a net drain on the economy. They utilize more in government benefits — welfare and health care — than high skill workers, and that any program that we pass ought to emphasize high skill workers. This bill does not do that. This bill does nothing about the chain of migration in which people who work their way to citizenships can bring in their parents, their brothers and sisters, adult children, regardless of the needs of the United States for workers, regardless of what skill sets they may have and whether or not we need them in the United States. It’s an automatic right.
RUSH: We wouldn’t be who we are, folks, if we didn’t have a grand finale to all this, and we do from Senator Kennedy this morning on the floor of the Senate.
KENNEDY: Four hundred miles of urban area on the border. Let’s be serious, 400 miles. That’s almost a quarter of the whole southern border, stretching from California to the Gulf of Mexico, and you’re trying to convince a person from Massachusetts that’s an urban area? Come on. Let’s put the 1800-mile fence down there and triple-wire it so now we can go show how tough we are on it. Is that — is that the challenge that’s out here now when we’re trying to deal with a comprehensive program? I don’t think so, Mr. President.
RUSH: Screaming here about barbed wire fences? (Laughing) Is that what he says he’s for? He’s trying to be facetious, but, senator, it wouldn’t hurt.
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