Wednesday, April 26, 2006

A rare day-- the President provides leadership on an issue that he's also right about

I recently blogged that as a matter of fact, the President was fundamentally right in his approach to immigration, proposing a guest-worker program and opposing members of his own party who have been putting forward impractical and stupid solutions like building a wall, making being here illegally a felony and probably the stupidest of them all, the Kyl-Cornin bill, which requires that all illegals return home and enter the legal process (we already send them home when we catch them, so this bill accomplishes exactly nothing, except to waste paper and make people think they are doing something).

So, Tuesday, the President met with a bipartisan group of Senators to try and hammer out something that will work.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush met Tuesday at the White House with a bipartisan group of senators to discuss ways to overhaul immigration, a chat that earned the president kudos from two men normally among his staunchest critics.

The discussion came as an immigration bill sits stalled in the Senate and as Majority Leader Bill Frist prepares to bring the issue back to the Senate floor by Memorial Day.

After the meeting, the senators said Bush expressed support for a package that would create a guest-worker program and would determine ways to address the status of more than 11 million illegal immigrants in the country...

Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy called the meeting a "bipartisan coming-together" and said, "We still have a ways to go, but I certainly appreciate the president's involvement and his willingness to be engaged."

Kennedy was joined by another of Bush's most outspoken critics, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who acknowledged he wasn't "in the habit of patting the president on the back.

"This was really good, a good, good meeting," Reid said. "He laid out what he believes are the important issues of the legislation, and I think they are there."


In fact, when he was running for President in 2000, George W. Bush campaigned on immigration reform.

This and second amendment issues are about the only issues where I believe that the President is right (well, OK-- also he was right to invade Afghanistan after 9/11 and continue to hunt bin Laden.)

Hopefully something positive will come of this discussion.

I'll be back to bashing Bush tomorrow I'm sure, but on the rare occasions when he does something right, it's appropriate to say so.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I don't think it's about leadership, I think it's about making sure that his business buddies still have a supply of cheap labor they can exploit.