Mutiny of the masses over immigration

Rich Lowry:

BEWARE of an aroused citizenry. It's an admonition that should be ingrained in the brain of any run-of-the-mill politician, let alone someone who has ascended to the United States Senate.

But from the Olympian heights of the world's greatest deliberative body, it is often forgotten. So senators got a reminder in the humiliating defeat of a "comprehensive" immigration bill that had the support of the president of the United States, a bipartisan group of senators with the blessing of the leaders of their caucuses and the support of the editorial boards of the country's most important newspapers.

All of that was enough to get all of 46 votes on a key procedural vote that needed 60 to pass. The fight over the immigration bill was the first instance of an insider parliamentary struggle in which bloggers, talk-radio hosts and citizens were able to have a major voice through the synergistic power of the Internet, radio waves and telephone lines. Bloggers picked apart the bill, talk-radio-show hosts broadcast its flaws and ordinary people jammed their senators' phone lines - blocking what had begun as a kind of legislative coup.

The creators of the Senate's so-called Grand Bargain - giving illegal aliens legal status in exchange for new enforcement measures - originally hoped to slam it through the Senate in a matter of days. Even as they held a self-congratulatory press conference about the bargain, no one had seen the text of the 300-page bill. Their implicit axiom was, "Trust us."

It quickly became clear that was impossible. The bill's boosters repeatedly were caught mischaracterizing it. Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff seemed to suggest that illegals would have to pay back taxes, when the White House had quietly taken that provision out.

Bloggers and talk-show hosts publicized this and other problems that otherwise would have gone unnoticed (Sen. John McCain learned of the tax provision in a blogger conference call), slowing its momentum.

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What happened is that the bloggers and the guys on the radio knew more about the bill than the politicians and they made sure their readers and listeners knew what they did. It is clear that the passions on this legislation were on the side of the opponents. While the proponents kept saying that the majority wanted a comprehensive bill, it is pretty clear that the majority did not want this bill as shown by the Rasmussen survey where only 22 percent supported it.