House GOP frets that get-tough bill on immigration gives pain, no gain

WASHINGTON — In the wake of this week's massive demonstrations, many House Republicans are worried that a tough, anti-illegal-immigration bill they thought would please their political base has earned them little benefit while becoming a rod for the fast-growing national movement for immigrant rights.

House Republicans rushed through legislation just before Christmas that would build hundreds of miles of fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, mandate that businesses verify the legality of all employees through a national database, fortify border patrols and declare illegal immigrants and those who help them to be felons. After more lenient legislation failed in the Senate last week, the House-passed version burst into public this week, as hundreds of thousands of protesters nationwide turned out to denounce the bill.

On Tuesday, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., issued a joint statement seeking to deflect blame for the harshest provisions of the House bill onto Democrats, who they said showed a lack of compassion. "It remains our intent to produce a strong border security bill that will not make unlawful presence in the United States a felony," Hastert and Frist said.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., fired back: "There's no running away from the fact that the Republican House passed a bill and Senator Frist offered one that criminalizes immigrants."

House Democrats acknowledged they helped block the efforts of some Republicans on the House floor last December to soften the Republican-crafted section declaring illegal immigrants to be felons, but they said ultimate responsibility for the bill rests with Republicans, who voted overwhelmingly for its passage.

"The Democrats were not going to do anything to make it easier for Republicans to pass an atrocious bill," said Jennifer Crider, a spokeswoman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Tuesday's maneuvering underscores how the immigration issue has mushroomed into a fierce political debate with potentially large political stakes heading into the November congressional elections. The hundreds of thousands of protesters in the streets Monday demonstrated the power of the issue, which some strategists say threatens to undercut President Bush's longstanding hope of making Hispanic voters a GOP constituency.

"This has galvanized and energized the Latino community like no other issue I have seen in two decades, and that's going to have electoral consequences," said Rep. Raśl Grijalva, D-Ariz.

Republicans say they could accept that sentiment if they believed they had won political points from the GOP's restive base. But for all the negatives, they don't have many positives to show for their efforts.

"From the standpoint of those who would applaud the House's stand, I'd say we have not gotten sufficient credit," said Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga.

The politics of the issue have shifted markedly since the House acted. Republican lawmakers are saying they will now consider some avenue to grant illegal immigrants access to lawful employment.

Although much has been made of last week's failed efforts in the Senate to forge a bipartisan measure to toughen border security while creating a system to allow many of the 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants here to achieve legal status or citizenship, the actions in the House late last year have received little attention until now.

House GOP leaders had rushed lawmakers back to Washington for a rare December session to vote on the immigration measure, hoping to give their members an accomplishment to brag about over winter recess. But it was the maneuvering of Democrats that preserved the bill's provision declaring illegal immigrants felons, and that has helped turn the bill into a political albatross for some Republicans, Democrats say.

The bill, written by House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., was passed in a matter of hours, nine days before Christmas. Just seven amendments were allowed to come to a vote, none of them fundamentally altering the legislation.

Sensenbrenner's committee bill included the felony provision, but when he took it to the House floor Dec. 16, he offered an amendment to downgrade the offense of being an undocumented worker from a felony to a misdemeanor.

The Democratic leadership pushed its members to vote against the amendment, and 191 Democrats did. Only eight Democrats voted with Sensenbrenner.