RUSH: A little immigration news: “Senator John McCain called on Orange County Latino leaders yesterday to support his immigration bill, saying that it was time for them to speak for people who cannot speak for themselves. ‘You are the role model.’ [(McCain impression) “You — you are role models, see?”] McCain said to a mostly Latino audience of 350 gathered at the Hyatt Regency Irvine. McCain came to Orange County to garner support for the Hispanic 100, a three-year-old organization that has organized events with President Bush, Governor Schwarzenegger, and the gubernatorial candidates. 
“McCain later attended a fund-raiser for his PAC in Los Angeles, canceled an appearance [as we told you yesterday] in San Diego for GOP congressional candidate Brian Bilbray, apparently over their differences on illegal immigrations. In Orange County, McCain said Latino leaders must press Congress to approve a final measure that mirrored legislation he co-wrote with Senator Edward M. Kennedy. The Senate approved a version that increased…” Well, won’t get in details. At any rate, Senator McCain out pandering now to this group, and it reminds me, folks, of the way Senator McCain was pandering to sell his campaign finance reform legislation. See, a lot of parallels here, loaded with platitudes for the group that he’s speaking to.
“You’re the backbone of America, the future! We’ll cease to exist without you.” Dire predictions of what will happen if his bill doesn’t become law — and of course if you look at campaign finance reform, it screwed everything up. Why does anybody listen to the guy? He’s got a terrible track record on these kinds of big pieces of legislation, and yet, you know, people just seem to get in line and follow this guy wherever he goes, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because he gets favorable coverage in the Drive-By Media, and that’s what his Republican colleagues would love to also get and benefit from. That’s why. But it’s astounding.
Now… “The Senate immigration bill that’s being talked about here makes the same mistake as the ’86 amnesty by restricting the ability of Citizenship and Immigration Services to share information on illegal alien guest worker applicants who are criminals and terrorists.” You know who said this? Emilio T. Gonzales, whose agency would have to administer a guest worker program. He said, “Not allowing the US Citizenship and Immigration Services to share information on someone who applies mean they can’t begin the process of removing criminals and national security threats even after they’re rejected from the guest worker program.”
Well, shazam! This is precisely what I told you. There’s no enforcement in this bill anyway. Not only is there no enforcement, there are obstacles to accomplishing what the bill’s supporters promise us will happen! I mean, this has echoes of the Gorelick wall prior to 9/11, where CIA and FBI couldn’t share information because of basically grand jury secrecy. We were fighting terrorism in the courts. Mr. Gonzales said, “It’s important for us to be able to act on what we get when we run a background check on somebody.” He said this in a briefing with reporters in which he weighed in on the Senate immigration bill which would offer a chance for citizenship to millions of illegal aliens. 
You have to understand who this guy is. This guy is part of the executive branch. This guy runs it. He’s the director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, USCIS, and he’s out there ripping the bill. “Mr. Gonzales says he hasn’t seen any deal-breakers in the bill, but he said, ‘Moving forward, policy makers are going to have to answer key questions about eligibility, types of acceptable documents, information sharing, and limits to judicial appeals. We don’t ask those hard national security questions, shame on me,’ and he’s being told he can’t on the basis of what’s in the bill. On the issue of information sharing and confidentiality of applications, Mr. Gonzales said the law usually allows his agency to share information when its employees come across an application that raises questions, but he said the 1986 amnesty included confidentiality provisions that prohibited sharing information from those applications, and he said the Senate bill makes the same mistake.
“‘We ought not to be kept from using that information.'” Well, the bigger question is — I told you this is just a rehash of the Simpson-Mazzoli bill. It’s just a rehash, and Ed Meese did a whole column in the New York Times about how the wording is in many cases identical. This is not an immigration bill. It’s anything but. “Senator Kennedy, a key backer of the bill, said that the underlying bill struck a balance that still allows law enforcement to go after cheaters, while at the same time not discouraging illegal aliens from coming forward. Senator Kennedy said, ‘Our bill removes criminals and those trying to game the system, but it also…'” My gosh! They’re not enforcing anything now.
This is such an asinine premise that all of a sudden there’s going to be all this enforcement in this bill. Kennedy said his main worry was that sharing information would discourage some aliens from coming forward because they would fear making a mistake, an innocent mistake that would hurt them later. So we can’t share anything. We can’t allow these agencies to cross-check applications to find out, because the bill says, if you’re a felon, or whatever, you gotta go, we’re gonna deport you, you can’t come. But now they can’t check to find out because the same provision that’s in the ’86 bill was in this bill. Well, Kennedy says, we can’t discourage aliens from coming forward. They might fear making an innocent mistake, and that would hurt them later. So you can clearly see that the Senate has a totally different agenda on this than the vast, vast majority of the American people.
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RUSH: Jonesboro, Arkansas. Bo, welcome, sir. Nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Mega dittos.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: I’m calling. I just seem to have a problem — and I’m purely humbled because you are always right.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: Not rarely; always.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: And I just can’t seem to understand how or who or what is motivating John McCain when 70, 80% of Americans are against that piece of bogus legislation on immigration, who’s he pandering to? I mean, is he sitting back, looking at how George Bush, Mr. Compassionate conservative, worked with Kennedy on some of those other bills? What’s motivating him?
RUSH: Well, let me try to explain this to you, Bo. We’ve taken several stabs at this over the course of things. In the first place, you have so many things I think. I don’t mean to overwork this theme, but I do believe that it is salient, and that is guilt. I think that there are a number of people, particularly in the Republican Party, who will not do anything if it can be portrayed as discriminatory or any type of mistreatment against any people of color. I just don’t think, especially a presidential candidate, a guy who aspires to the high office.
The second thing is, McCain is not up for reelection any time soon so he doesn’t have to face the voters on this other than when he gets to the primaries, and he will face the voters on this. In a political sense, one of the things that’s amazing to me about this, just in terms 
of politics, we all know that McCain has been trying over the past number of months to make inroads with conservatives who cast him aside in the 2000 primaries. He’s gone and met with Jerry Falwell. He appeared on the 700 Club with Pat Robertson. He’s done a number of things to try to re-ingratiate himself with the conservative base. Then this issue comes along, and if he did make any inroads with the conservative base, which I doubt, but if he did, he’s just wiped that slate clean with this because there is no way the conservative base is going to reward John McCain for something like this.
There’s also arrogance. Those people, this disconnect is profound, and they really — look it, Bo, you and I are just a bunch of rubes, we’re just a bunch of hicks. We don’t know what’s good for the country. You know, we’re unsophisticated, we don’t know enough — they’re looking at us like liberals look at everybody. Unsophisticated, incapable, incompetent. In addition to that, all of these people represent voters, potential voters down the road, and there are Republicans who think they can get some of these newly arrived immigrants, legal and illegal, by acting like Democrats. Why would any Republican try to out-Democrat a Democrat?
It makes no sense. It would be as stupid as if a liberal came along and started trying to be a conservative, like Hillary did. Nobody bought it. Didn’t buy her anything but a bunch of angst in her own party and a bunch of disrespect that she’s paying the price for now. In addition to all of that, there are special interests that are contributing mightily to these people, and many of them are from big business. You don’t see big business types marching on the street and doing protests and all that, but they do contribute a lot of money. So there are a lot of reasons to try to explain this.
None of them are going to make any sense to you, but they all, taken separately or added together, will help you to understand it a little bit more. But at the end of the day the bottom line is, they’re doing it because they think they can get away with it. They’re doing it, Bo, because they think you’ll forget it. That something else will come along, some issue by the next election will come along, and you’ll have forgotten all of this, passions will be roiled on other things, because senators, only a third of them are up every two years.
That is why you look at the House of Representatives. Everybody in the House goes for reelection every two years. So when you find out what the American people’s pulse is, the pulse of the nation will be represented by the House of Representatives, because those people have to face their constituents every two years, and it’s a specific group of constituents. It’s districts. It’s not whole states like senators deal with. So we’ll see. This conference committee is going to get started sometime this month, and it will be interesting to see what actually happens. We have some audio sound bites from the president who spoke to the Chamber of Commerce today, and I haven’t read the transcript of them yet, I haven’t had time. But some people are telling me he took a little bit of a tougher stand on some of these things. We’ll maybe listen to a couple of them and see if it’s true.
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