Why the Lame Duck Session of Congress is So Dangerous

Why the Lame Duck Session of Congress is So Dangerous
By Floyd and Mary Beth Brown
12/4/2010

To understand Washington DC, you have to first stop listening to the rhetoric, and start watching the behavior. As TV character Michael Weston aptly puts it, “Watch my actions, not my words.” Underneath all the bluster, we live in a single party country where the Republicans and Democrats are just different factions of a big-government loving elite feasting on the plunder of an enormous bureaucracy.

The reason both Republicans and Democrats fear the Tea Party movement is because its members aren’t from the club. Many of the policies that are quietly agreed upon by the current cast of characters still in power during the lame duck session will be radioactive after January, when the Tea Party representatives arrive.

Case in point: amnesty for illegal aliens. Masquerading under the positive sounding name of “the Dream Act,” is a piece of legislation that will reward law-breaking with the highly prized gift of US citizenship and all the benefits forthwith.

One of the champions of amnesty, Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, may have unintentionally summed it all up last Thursday when she ranted: "I've been in the Senate since 2001, and I just remember Republicans being passionate about it [the Dream Act] and sponsoring the bill. One of the most passionate speeches I heard was Orrin Hatch in the Judiciary Committee."

Cantwell went on to say that in the past, "Republicans were so supportive of it,” and now she is at a loss to understand why some of these former amnesty champions are suddenly opposed to the DREAM Act.

No, Cantwell is not living in some dream-land. She’s right. While it goes without saying that part of the reason for this reversal of opinion by some Republicans is due to the message that patriotic Americans sent our elected officials last month, the sad and unfortunate truth is that far too many Republican Senators have supported amnesty in the past and may still secretly support amnesty for millions of illegal aliens. A number of them will look for any excuse to support it again. According to a report released by Michelle Malkin just before Thanksgiving, at least five GOP Senators "haven’t made up their mind on whether they should oppose a bill that amounts to a 2.1 million future Democrat voter recruitment drive."

For the record, at that time, those Republican Senators were John McCain, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Sam Brownback. And, of course, there are a number of Republican Senators who supported amnesty (the Dream Act) in the recent past such as, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, George Lemieux, Lindsey Graham and Orrin Hatch.

Simply put, the Dream Act is a nightmare of epic proportions, and it is a back-door amnesty for millions of illegal aliens.

Mark Krikorian, writing for National Review Online, gives us two important reasons to oppose the Dream Act. First, this incredibly poorly thought-out bill will simply encourage more people to enter the United States illegally.

Sound like deja vu? That's because it is. We've already been down this road before. In 1986, with the passage of Simpson-Mazzoli, we granted amnesty to 3 million illegal aliens in exchange for the false promise that we would put a stop to the flood of illegal aliens coming into the United States. Today, after supposedly stopping the flood of illegal aliens coming into this country back in '86, there are now 12-20 million illegal aliens living in the United States.

Of course, the biggest irony here is that the Dream Act is nothing more than a Trojan-horse attempt to grant amnesty to those who came to the United States illegally, by first giving amnesty to their children. After the passage of Simpson-Mazolli, which was supposed to stop massive amounts of illegal aliens from coming into the country, the problem mushroomed.

Speaking of Simpson-Mazolli and ironies, Krikorian continues: "Perhaps one-fourth of those legalized under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act received amnesty fraudulently, including Mahmud Abouhalima, a leader of the first World Trade Center attack. The fraud in that first big amnesty program was so pervasive as to be almost comical, with people claiming work histories here that included picking watermelons from trees and digging cherries out of the ground."

Some of these corporate stooge Republicans love illegal immigration because it keeps wages depressed across America. Profits, to these big business Republicans, are more important than living wage jobs. The false Dream Act (back-door amnesty for millions of illegal aliens,) can only pass the US Senate with Republican support.

Let’s hope they heard the message of November and stop this lame duck madness.