House, Senate announce competing series of public hearings on immigration bills

June 21, 2006

Both the U.S. House and the Senate in mid-June announced a series of made-for-media public hearings around the country to highlight the pros and cons of the Senates immigrant amnesty bill.

Republican leaders in the House of Representatives announced a series of public hearings on the Senate’s immigration bill, and the next day, Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., countered with plans for hearings of his own.

The Senator said the sessions are intended to appeal to those who prefer the Senate’s wide-ranging bill, giving citizenship to illegal aliens, as opposed to the House’s legislation, which focuses on border security.

The competing hearings are unusual when both the House and Senate have already passed legislation. The usual next step is a House-Senate conference committee to reconcile differences between the bills.

The campaign to garner support for the bills features a contest of Republicans vs. Republicans. It also pits President Bush's domestic legacy against his party's congressional majority.

Bush is a former Texas governor who speaks some Spanish. He has worked hard to woo the nation's fast-growing bloc of Hispanic voters to the Republican Party and has made overhauling the nation's immigration laws a priority since the beginning of his first term more than five years ago.

But the elected members of his party in Washington don’t agree. The House passed legislation, with overwhelming Republican support, focusing strictly on controlling the border and controlling immigration. A majority of Republicans in the Senate opposed the Senate immigration bill, which was passed with substantial Democratic support.

One of Bush's chief obstacles is a man who has been one of his most loyal lieutenants: House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. Hastert is trying to hold together restive House Republicans in an election year when polls show growing public dissatisfaction with the GOP.

Election-year politics may be a crucial element in Hastert's strategy. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said the victory by Republican candidate Brian Bilbray in a June 6 special election for a Southern California congressional seat influenced House Republicans' decision to put off negotiations on the immigration bill. Bilbray campaigned aggressively on the need to crack down on illegal immigration and held a seat the Republican Party feared losing.

'A lot of them obviously drew the conclusion that the Bilbray election was an affirmation of a hard line on immigration,' McCain said.