Here’s some more on that amnesty bill we reported on yesterday.
As noted then, the lame-duck Congress is hustling to pass as many bills as possible before the Christmas break and before control of the House goes over to the Republicans when the new Congress is installed on January 3.
Chief among the hustlers is North Carolina’s Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), a former IBMer who never met an amnesty bill he didn’t like. Along with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Tillis has cooked up a draft bill that would “provide a path to legalization for 2 million undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.” As a sop to immigration restrictionists, the bill would also provide $25 billion in increased funding for the Border Patrol and border security. It would also extend Title 42 (scheduled to be abandoned on December 21), but only until new “regional processing centers” can be built to enable wholesale opening of the border.
Framed as a “compromise,” the Tillis-Sinema bill is a flagrant and desperate move to salvage Obama’s DACA, or Dreamer, program, which last year U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen of Houston found unlawful. Hanen has nevertheless permitted the program to continue pending appeals by the administration and, in October, again allowed it to continue for an undefined period. Fearing that the law might actually be enforced someday, however, Tillis and Sinema are attempting to keep the Dream alive through some last-minute hustling.
The two hope that at least 10-12 Republican senators can be persuaded to follow lead RINO Tillis over the immigration cliff. They may well get them.
For more, see Axios.