Feeling Our Pain

Even Hugh Hewitt, who tried to convince us that we were being served Dom Perignon when President Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, has finally woken up and tasted what's actually in the cup:

At this point I take out my Harriet Miers Fan Club charter membership card and put it on the table: This push for this [immigration] bill is a disaster, Mr. President. Much much worse than the Miers nomination on which you had many good arguments, or the ports deal, on which you had fewer. On this issue there is no place to stand, and you are asking your friends in the Senate to go down fighting for a bad bill. It is a bad bill because no one believes the government can conduct millions of background checks (many spokesmen for the bill don't even pretend to know where the paperwork will go!). No one believes the bill will halt the next 12 million. No one believes you are going to assure the fence gets built. No one believes that the employer verification system will get done or work when some half-assed version of it does get done. No one believes that the probationary visas don't automatically convert illegal aliens with few if any rights into Due Process Clause covered legal migrants, with a Ninth Circuit ready and waiting to keep them here for decades.

....This isn't a talk radio fueled shout from the far right. It isn't the Minutemen or the Tancredo people. It is the GOP faithful who don't want it, nor anything like it.

...[T]he deal has to be one worth taking, not the same deal we'd get under a second President Clinton. That's why the political rebellion is here: This looks like a bill that Hillary would have sold as tough on enforcement. We can wait two years for that.

Of course, the outrage at the Miers fiasco and the ports deal weren't "far right" kook attacks either. Now perhaps Hewitt, who helped press the White House's strategy of painting conservative critics as sexists and bigots, will understand what it's like to be on the conservative side of this clueless Republican White House. All this time the administration's been soaking his leg, he actually believed them when they told him it was raining.

Related Tags: Hugh Hewitt, Harriet Miers, George W. Bush, immigration reform