RUSH: All right. This is hilarious: “The long-fought Senate immigration bill that opponents say grants amnesty to 10 million illegal aliens is unconstitutional and appears headed for certain demise, Senate Republicans now say.” Here is why, “A key feature of the Senate bill is that it would make illegals pay back taxes before applying for citizenship, a requirement that supporters say will raise billions of dollars in the next decade. There’s just one problem: The U.S. Constitution specifically prohibits revenue-raising legislation [taxes, tax cuts, what have you, has to come from the House] from originating in the Senate. ‘All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives,’ according to the ‘origination clause’ in Article I, Section 7. Republicans — including the bill’s supporters — say this will kill the bill, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says he’s offered a simple solution. He wants to attach the immigration bill to a tax bill that has already passed the House.”
So this immigration bill will become a giant amendment to a tax bill that’s already passed the House of Representatives. “It would then proceed as planned to a ‘conference committee,’ where negotiators” would try to work out their differences. But what’s fascinating about this is that Dingy Harry, Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, says he’s not going to “go along with that fix.” He said yesterday “that the concerns raised by Mr. Frist and House Republicans are ‘technical in nature’ and can be ignored.” Unconstitutionality is just a technicality! This is from an idiot who couldn’t understand the ethics rules and took complementary boxing tickets.
What next, folks? John McCain’s going to be turned to for constitutional advice ? la the First Amendment? What a great irony. Senator McCain, we found out that the bill you and Senator Kennedy wrote is unconstitutional. (McCain impression.) “What? It’s not. It’s not. It’s not! I wouldn’t put it in there if it was. It is? It is? Ah, well, fix it. We’ll fix it. Simple.” (Laughing.) I say, “Don’t fix it.” Challenge in court and then throw out. Folks, this is Sixth Grade elementary understandable. Especially for these wizards, these guys are all smarter than the rest of us. Does this give you confidence that these senators know which end is up as they remake our society?
Any idiot, folks, knows that tax bills and spending bills have to be initiated in the House. Some people are speculating now, ladies and gentlemen, that Harry Reid’s intransigence on this is purposeful, that Reid doesn’t want to fix the bill, that Reid doesn’t want a bill at all. There are theories abounding that the purpose for his intransigence is so that the bill gets killed because he’s part of the conventional wisdom that believes if there’s no bill, why, that’s the end of the Republican Party. It’s the end of President Bush, because it will show that Bush can’t govern. He can’t lead his own party in Congress, and that the Republicans leading Congress can’t govern, can’t get anything done. See? The whole theory rests on the notion that unless they pass legislation for legislation’s sake, even if it’s the worst piece of legislation in the last number of years, if they don’t pass it, why, why, it’s horrible! Why, we’re not doing our jobs. I’m telling you, if this bill fades away into obscurity, it will be one of the best things to have happened to the country and its future in a long, long time. I don’t know what’s going to happen with this, but I couldn’t resist passing this on to you because it’s just primo.
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RUSH: Open Line Friday rolls on, and Northport, Alabama. This is Steve. Welcome, sir, to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, dittos from a 14-year-listener.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Just wanted to talk a little bit about the unconstitutionality of this immigration bill. Truth to tell, I think our moderate Republican friends and the Democrats have looked around at all these primaries that are going on, and seeing these pro-illegal immigrants getting their heads handed to them I think they finally came up with a way to weasel out of actually voting for the bill, and they can go back home to the folks they were pandering to and say, well, we really wanted to do this immigration bill, but that pesky little Constitution wouldn’t let us do it.
RUSH: Well, you know, the problem with that is that if they do that, they make themselves look even stupider than they did when they wrote the bill because any sixth grader knows that spending and tax bills have to originate in the House. Now, if they really care (interruption). Yes, they should! (interruption). Well, a sixth grader should know that. I guarantee you this. These guys in the Senate should have damn well known it. I don’t care about every sixth grader, but you know that they did. They might have forgotten it; it might have been an oversight. I don’t think that this is a way to get the bill killed. This is an embarrassment to these guys. 
Here is Senator McCain — campaign finance reform, John McCain; the Straight Talk Express. Apparently these guys don’t even read the legislation, is one thing this might point out. Number two: the others don’t even know what’s in it even after they’ve written it. They can’t go out and say, “Well, you know what? We put something in there and the pesky little Constitution screws all this up,” because this is easily fixed if they want to fix it. You take it out. You take it out. What we’re talking about, if you’re just joining us, folks, this immigration bill in the Senate grants amnesty on back taxes to illegal aliens. They’ll only have to pay three out of five years in back taxes.
Okay, you can have whatever opinion you want on that. But the Senate can’t pass a bill that has that kind of provision because that is a tax-and-spend or a revenue generating provision, and those can only originate in the House. So this goes to conference. It’s gotta come out. Now, Dingy Harry says, “Well, it’s just a technicality. It’s not a big deal. I refuse to have it out.” Now, Dingy Harry may want to keep it in so he can kill the bill, but he wants to kill the bill because he thinks the Republicans and President Bush will be forever creamed if they don’t get legislation on this. Typical liberal Democrat. The only thing progress is defined by is if we get a bill.
They cannot for the life of them understand that no bill here is a good thing as opposed to what this bill would be if it were passed. Now, there’s room here for a good bill, but this ain’t it. This isn’t it. I only say “this ain’t it” when kids are in school and will not be influenced by it, but school is out in most places now, so I apologize for that. Dingy Harry doesn’t want to take it out. But, folks, the thing you really have to look at here. Here’s John McCain who already with one piece of legislation screwed up the First Amendment, campaign finance reform — and now here’s another one, that’s written with either arrogance, ignorance, or total disregard for the Constitution.
Bill Frist, so he wants to save it. Here’s what we do. We simply attach this bill as an amendment to a tax bill that’s already passed that came from the House, and therefore that provision will stand. The simple thing is to take this out. Why in the world do these people get amnesty on back taxes? If I were William Jefferson (Democrat-Louisiana), or if I were Tom DeLay, or if I’m anybody under indictment, you know, I’d point to this bill, and I’d say, “I want the same treatment that 20 million illegals are getting in the United States Senate. They’re being given amnesty from identity theft; they’re getting amnesty from not having to pay back taxes. How come you’re coming after me? I’m a servant of the American public. I have done great things. I came from abject poverty. I came up from dirt and dust — and you want to put me in jail, and you’re going to let these people go scot-free, and they haven’t accomplished diddly-squat compared to what I’ve accomplished. I’m a servant of this country.”
I can just hear it now. It’s a rhetorical point. Congressman Jefferson would never make it, but whatever happened to equal protection? There’s an equal-protection clause in the Constitution, too. Whatever happened to that? So I don’t believe the people who wrote this bill want this bill to go by the wayside and have there be no bill. Some of them might, but I don’t think McCain wants that, I think McCain wants the bill. I think Ted Kennedy wants the bill. I think Hagel wants the bill. I think Mel Martinez in Florida wants the bill. Obviously Bill Frist wants the bill. So this would be easy to fix, without going through this rigmarole of attaching this whole monstrosity as the amendment to a House tax bill that’s already passed. You just take it out. 
It won’t survive in the House conference anyway precisely for constitutional reasons. By the way, do you recall, ladies and gentlemen, when we first reported to you via Jeff Sessions, senator from Alabama, and Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, based on their independent analyses of the Senate bill, the numbers of immigrants, legal and illegal, that would flood this country in the next 20 years? The range was anywhere from a hundred to 200 million. People said, “That’s outrageous, why, that’s silly, why that’s the whole population of Mexico, common sense says that can’t possibly be the truth.” Well, people that read the bill looked at it and came up with it. So they changed the bill, modified some provision, and those numbers of a hundred to 200 million reduced to 60 to 90 million.
“Well, that’s still outrageous. Anybody would look at this and see this can’t possibly be true, it’s just scare tactics, I can’t believe people would abandon their own common sense to believe scare tactics.” Then Robert Samuelson earlier this week writing in the Washington Post said: You know what? I just found, and it’s been out there for anybody in the media to find, the White House own analysis of the Senate bill, and their number is between 40 and 60, and how come the media hasn’t been reporting this? Well, easy. The media’s agenda is to get the bill passed, pure and simple.
Today, in the Washington Post: Senate Bill Would Add 20 Million Legal Immigrants, report Says. Seems like this large number of immigrants, regardless of the number, is true, folks. Once again, on the cutting edge of societal evolution here on this program. You are, if you listen, doing the job the mainstream media used to do. Here it is almost a week afterwards, and the mainstream press and the New York Times still hasn’t gotten to it, just arriving at the details of what the legislation actually means. Remember, we went through a list of things that the AP had as highlights in the bill, and they left out this whole identity theft provision.
They just totally left it out. It’s not that they investigated it and saw it and said, “Oooh, can’t put that in there.” They relied on press releases from proponents of the bill to tell them what was in it and reported that. Or repeated it. They’re stenographers. “The nation’s population of legal immigrants would increase by nearly 20 million over the next decade if the recently passed Senate immigration bill becomes law, and taxpayers would spend more than $50 billion to operate a new guest-worker program and pay for extra welfare, Social Security and public health-care costs, according to a Congressional Budget Office report.”
Everything we told you on this program about the bill finally now shows up in the Drive-By Media. “The report, the first definitive look at the impact of the Senate bill, was commissioned by the Senate Finance Committee and was submitted on May 16, nine days before the measure was passed. The study has been embraced by the Bush administration and the bill’s supporters, but opponents said crucial omissions greatly lowered its population and cost estimates.” Probably true there. But still, even with this conservative analysis, two million people a year, legal and otherwise, brought into this country and the increasing pressure on our social services programs.
So the truth is out now, folks, and it’s going to be real fascinating to watch this conference committee. One point that Steve made: I think it’s a little soon for some of these guys to be noting what’s happening in these primaries out there, there’s just been two or three of them. Chris Cannon coming up on the 27th of this month in Utah, that will be an interesting one to watch, and that will be going on probably during the conference negotiations. So that will get their attention. But there is a rebellion brewing out there on this, and the people in the House know it, and the Senate doesn’t care because they don’t have to face voters, most of them. The ones that are promoting this bill and all for it, they’re not going to face the voters, and even if they did, it wouldn’t matter. Ted Kennedy? He’s not going to lose an election because of this bill up in Massachusetts, so it doesn’t matter. But the House takes the temperature of the American public on issue after issue because those guys and gals have to, you know, face the voters every two years.
