Thursday, January 31, 2013

A Striking New Consensus on Immigration Reform—Thus Far - COLORLINES

A Striking New Consensus on Immigration Reform—Thus Far - COLORLINES

A Striking New Consensus on Immigration Reform—Thus Far

Sen. Chuck Schumer addresses a Jan. 28 press conference in Washington, D.C., in which a bipartisan group of senators released their shared principles on immigration reform. Sens. Dick Durbin, John McCain, and Marco Rubio (l.-r.) are among the group of eight. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Tuesday, January 29 2013, 9:56 AM EST Tags: Border, Immigration Enforcement, Immigration Reform
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Yesterday the U.S. Senate set down the path toward the most significant shift in U.S. immigration policy in two generations. It has been more than a quarter century since the last significant immigration legalization passed. In the period since then, immigration laws have hardened and immigration enforcement has expanded beyond what even hardline immigration restrictionists dreamed.
So when a bi-partisan group of senators appeared yesterday on a Capitol Hill stage to declare 2013 the year of immigration reform, they restored a vision of a way forward for many. The senators released a document of guiding principles that provides a path to legal residency for many of the country’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants. It also creates avenues for new immigration, while bolstering immigration enforcement at the border and in workplaces. If these principles lead to a bill, as expected, it could transform the social and political fabric of the country.
Yet even as senators yesterday offered a genuine reform outline, with striking new areas of consensus, some worry they also wove into the agreement enough loose strings to cause its unraveling.
A New Political Landscape
The framework released yesterday by four Republicans and four Democrats is a dramatic shift for the GOP. Republicans have repeatedly refused to support what many pejoratively call “amnesty,” demanding first that before creating legal residency for undocumented immigrants, the border must be fully secured.
Most observers agree that the 2012 elections changed the terms on immigration reform, shaking the GOP out of its entrenched obstructionism on the issue. Latino and Asian voters turned out by broad margin against Mitt Romney and it’s been widely noted that the Republican candidate’s hardline position on immigration helped lose him the election.
“As I’ve stated before, elections, elections,” Arizona Sen. John McCain said at yesterday’s press conference announcing the principles he helped draft. McCain was part of previous attempts to reform immigration law. “The Republican Party is losing the support of our Hispanic citizens, and we realize there are many issues in which we think we are in agreement with our Hispanic citizens, but this is a pre-eminent issue for those citizens.”
The eight senators who drafted the principles now agree that ultimately, those living in the country without authorization who pass a set of tests and hurdles should be allowed to apply for citizenship. This agreement marks a significant shift in the debate.
“The fact that there’s no quibbling about citizenship is huge,” said Lynn Tremont, the deputy director of America’s Voice, a leading immigration reform group.
Tremont and others add that relative to what many advocates feared, the initial principles from the senators do not include significant investments in new kinds of enforcement or paths to deportation. Past iterations of immigration reform have included more stringent enforcement provisions than what’s included in the senate platform, and certainly many Republicans will try to squeeze in more once negotiation begins on actual legislation. But “so far,” says Tremont, “I have not seen anything in the principles that’s gratuitous.”
Few observers think immigration reform will have an easy journey to the president’s desk. Veteran Republicans like McCain and South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham can take a long view about the party’s future, as can Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who is staking his likely 2016 White House run on votes from Latinos. But many Republican members of Congress from conservative districts can’t get behind an immigration reform bill if they hope to keep their jobs. This is especially true in the House, where incumbents still tremble before the memory of the tea party’s 2010 sweep that pushed out moderate incumbents.
Still, there’s little doubt the landscape has changed. “For the first time ever there’s more political risk in opposing immigration reform than in supporting it,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer, a leading Democrat on immigration reform and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where a bill will first land.
Along with Schumer and McCain, the drafters include Democratic Senators Michael Bennet of Colorado, Dick Durbin of Illinois, and Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Republican Senators Jeff Flake of Arizona, Graham and Rubio.
Will Border Security Undercut Reform?
The question remains what pre-conditions Republicans will demand for creating paths to citizenship. Many warn that, despite newfound agreement on the need to offer existing undocumented residents routes to legal residency, the senators tucked into their language opportunities for the same old obstructionism. This is particularly true in the principles around border security. Legalization, the senators wrote, is “contingent upon our success in securing our border…to prevent, detect, and apprehend every unauthorized entrant.”
The language sounds a lot like the old Republican demands that derailed reform efforts. The plan would grant undocumented immigrants who pass background checks and pay fines a provisional status that allows them to work legally, but until the border is secure, there will be no path to citizenship, according to the document.
Securing the border has become a trope in Washington that must be uttered by members of both parties whenever they so much as whisper about legalization. Few imagined the Senate proposal would flout this unspoken rule. But the language in the Senate framework demands border security as a precondition before anyone gets in the citizenship queue, and that raises red flags for reform advocates.
Rep. Raul Grijalva is a progressive immigration reform proponent from Arizona. He says the guidelines released yesterday are an exciting sign of progress, an opening to move forward. But he told Colorlines.com that the idea that the border has to be secured before immigrants can apply for citizenship threatens to undermine the promise of the legislation.
“Any transgression at all will be used to make the border look less secure,” said Rep. Grijalva. “It’s an impossible standard. At what point is it secure?”
According to the guidelines, a “commission comprised of governors, attorneys general, and community leaders living along the Southwest border,” will be tasked with evaluating when the border is sufficiently closed. But when questioned yesterday, none of the senators explained how the system would work and what kind of power the commission would have.
“The concern I have is that it’ll be a highly politicized body they’d never acknowledge that we’ve reached a place of security on the border. Governor Brewer and Tom Horn have made their political careers on stringent anti-immigrant agenda,” Grijalva said of the Arizona governor and attorney general who helped usher in their state’s notorious immigration laws.
Others say worries like Grijalva’s are outsized because the commission won’t have that much power. A Hill staffer who worked on the guidelines told Colorlines the senators imagined a commission comprised of an “equal number of Democrats and Republicans,” adding that the legislation itself would provide commission members with a clear list of factors that indicate border security.
“They do not have an automatic veto—it’s an internal check on whether the [Department of Homeland Security] is doing what the bill says it has to do,” the staffer said. The list of preconditions in a bill might include additional drones to patrol the border as well as added surveillance technologies and more border patrol guards.
Democratic members of Congress have been consistently clear that they will not accept a reform package that does not include a certain route to citizenship. Today, President Obama will deliver a speech in Las Vegas on immigration reform and he is expected to draw that line even more firmly in the sand. Ultimately, some worry that skittish Republicans will back away from a path to citizenship, or use the committee to demand impossible preconditions. But for now, the most promising drive to reform immigration laws since 1986 continues full steam ahead.

The Numbers Just Don’t Add Up on Immigration Reform | The Nation

The Numbers Just Don’t Add Up on Immigration Reform | The Nation

 

George Zornick

Action and dysfunction in the Beltway swamp. E-mail tips to george@thenation.com.
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The Numbers Just Don’t Add Up on Immigration Reform


Demonstrators display placards during a rally in front of the Statehouse, in Providence, R.I., Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2011. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

Inside Washington on Monday, the realest talk on comprehensive immigration reform came around 3:45 in the afternoon, an hour after the “Gang of Eight” released its comprehensive immigration reform proposal.
That’s when Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III of Alabama walked onto the floor of the Senate and started throwing ice-cold water on all this highfalutin immigration talk:
In 2006 and 2007, with the full support of the Republican president of the United States, a bipartisan committee announced with great confidence they had a plan that’s going to fix our immigration system, and we were all just going to line up and vote for it. The masters of the universe decided.
They met in secret, they had all the special interest groups gather, and they worked out a plan that was going to change our immigration system for the better. And we should all be grateful.
It came up in 2006; it did not pass. It came back in 2007 with even more emphasis; it failed colossally. It failed because it did not do what they said it would do. It did not end the illegality. It did not set forth a proper principle of immigration for America, it did not sufficiently alter the nature of our immigration system to advance the national interest of the United States. It did not. And that’s why it didn’t pass.
It had all the powerful forces—it had the TV guys and newspaper guys and the Wall Street guys and the agriculture guys and the civil rights groups and the La Raza groups and the politicians. But the American people said no.
If you substitute “my overwhelmingly white, Southern constituents” for “the American people,” that is indeed exactly what happened. And it is quite likely to happen again. When one examines polls of Republican voters on immigration reform, and then looks at how many Congressional seats are held by the GOP, it is sadly easy to see that despite all the rosy talk, real immigration reform will remain elusive.
One week after November’s election, when defeat was presumably most raw for Republican voters, and stories abounded about the demographic doom facing the GOP, the Washington Post and ABC News conducted a poll about immigration reform.
The top line was that more Americans were now backing a pathway to citizenship. (A pathway to citizenship is essential to any comprehensive immigration reform—it is comprehensive immigration reform. Otherwise we’re just talking about more border security.) But when broken down by party identification, the results weren’t nearly as promising:

Not only did a mere 37 percent of Republicans nationwide favor a pathway to citizenship, only 11 percent strongly supported it. By comparison, 47 of the 60 percent who opposed it felt strongly about that view.
This fairly unified base of voters is who Senator Sessions is talking to when he goes on about “illegality,” and makes not-so-subtle nativist appeals to the “proper immigration policy for America,” one that is in the “national interest of the United States” and that the “American people” have already spoken on. (In Alabama, I doubt support for citizenship would even sniff the 37 percent level it receives among Republicans nationally.)
Many of Sessions’ colleagues, particularly in the House—where districts are small and meticulously tailored to include only the reddest voters—have already similarly dismissed the Gang of Eight proposal on its face because it contains a pathway to citizenship, or “amnesty” as they derisively call it. “This will be a green light for anyone who wants to come to America illegally and then be granted citizenship one day,” said Representative Lou Barletta. “When you legalize those who are in the country illegally, it costs taxpayers millions of dollars, costs American workers thousands of jobs and encourages more illegal immigration,” said Representative Lamar Smith, a key member of the immigration subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee.
Are these members acting in the best long-term interests of the Republican Party? Almost certainly not. Any strategist in D.C. can tell you that. But they are responding to different, more immediate incentives involving their deeply conservative base—and they are responding rationally.
Thanks to the gerrymandering that took place after the 2010 Census, Democrats would need to win the national popular vote by more than seven points to take back the House, according to an analysis by Ian Millhiser at the Center for American Progress. That’s a whopping margin unlikely to happen anytime soon: even Obama’s relatively overwhelming win in November was just under 4 points. The reality is that House Republicans almost need not worry about the national vote—they are nearly invincible to that.
Rather, the only obstacle to staying in office are primary challenges from the right. And when the base hates citizenship for undocumented residents, supporting it is your one-way ticket out of Washington. The consultant class in D.C.—the elites that Sessions was thumbing his nose at—just won’t be able to force real immigration reform upon these members.
So can real reform pass with a majority of Republicans opposing it? In the Senate, even assuming an immigration bill gets unanimous Democratic support—no sure thing, given the number of Democratic Senators up for re-election in red states in 2014—you’d need five Republican crossovers. In the House, even if every Democrat supported a comprehensive immigration reform, seventeen Republicans would have to vote for it as well to ensure passage.
Maybe, maybe this happens. Forget bipartisanship—this is the only real hope for real immigration reform: a Democratic bill with a small handful of Republicans willing to walk the plank.
But it’s more likely that the Republican leaders of this new approach to immigration reform will bail out long before that happens, thus denying everybody cover and scuttling the whole deal. Alex Pareene noted yesterday that Gang of Eight member Senator Lindsey Graham has a long, long history of pulling out of bipartisan negotiations at the last minute because of an objection he’d had the whole time anyway. (This familiar maneuver has allowed Graham to simultaneously portray himself as both a leading statesman and hardcore conservative, often with the help of a compliant Beltway press.) Since Graham is facing a South Carolina primary race in 2014, I’d bet almost anything he pulls the same switcheroo again.
Marco Rubio, too, has to first face Republican primary voters if he wants to be elected president in 2016. And in South Carolina last year, 49 percent of GOP voters in this key primary state said that if a candidate supported even “limited amnesty,” it would make them “unacceptable” as a nominee.
Accordingly, Rubio may already laying groundwork for a Graham-esque two-step. Tuesday morning, Rubio slammed Obama for a soft stance on border security the president had not yet taken, and said it “does not bode well in terms of what his role’s going to be in this or the outcome.” Later in the day, he told Rush Limbaugh—another powerful and dedicated foe of real immigration reform—that he would insist that any citizenship efforts be contingent upon certain border security “triggers,” likely in the form of certification by a panel of border state officials. This would probably kill the deal, because Democrats don’t want to give people like Arizona Governor Jan Brewer veto power over citizenship for 11 million people.
Rubio can walk away if and when Democrats don’t agree to these triggers. He can tell Republican primary voters he stood up to the Democrats and ultimately opposed a citizenship process—yet, if he makes it to the general election, he can flip the frame and remind everyone that he was leading a push for comprehensive immigration reform. This may not be best outcome for the Republican party, but it’s the best outcome for Rubio’s 2016 prospects.
(In that case, by the way, he’d be following in the footsteps of the last leading Republican crusader for immigration reform, John McCain—thus making make Sessions’ prediction all the more prescient. McCain co-sponsored that doomed 2006 and 2007 push, which included a pathway to citizenship. But when it fell apart, he pretended in the primary he was never really for a path to citizenship anyhow. You may recall his infamous statement in the primary debates that he would not have supported his own bill if it came for a vote.)
Talk about new electoral realities and real, comprehensive immigration reform is exciting—but ultimately, far too optimistic. The electoral realities are the same as they have ever been for the GOP, and ultimately Republicans will probably kill this bill. It’s not right, it’s not fair, but it’s simply the latest iteration of the prevailing political story of the past two years—Republicans can and will stop anything their ever-shrinking base wants them to.
In more disappointing news, read how Harry Reid and the Democrats capitulated on fillibuster reform.
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  • caliber1
    "Are these [Republican House] members acting in the best long-term interests of the Republican Party? Almost certainly not. Any strategist in D.C. can tell you that."
    It's not that simple. The question of what's in the best interest of their party is complex. Stoking the nativist prejudices of their base cost them 70-some percent of the Hispanic American vote in the last presidential election, definitely a losing proposition. However, enacting comprehensive immigration reform that creates a reasonably efficacious path to citizenship for 10 million more Hispanics in order to placate the current electorate would: (a) anger their base and jeopardize their personal chances of making it thru the next primary, and (b) increase the number of new probable anti-Republican votes by around 7 for every 10 new Hispanic-heritage voters admitted to citizenship. That's also a losing proposition.
    The Republicans are, hopefully, facing a lose-lose choice not unlike that of horse-drawn buggy manufacturers at the start of the automobile age deciding whether to increase or decrease their prices in light of falling sales. It doesn't really matter. Time has already passed them by.

  • lless
    Sorry to take a peripheral tack here but the latest meme is beginning to bug me. The notion that gerrymandering can be so effective that it would take a seven percent national shift to change control of the House, well I doubt it. A minority party (albeit barely) that gerrymanders its way to majority will necessarily put an awful lot of districts that are nominally in its favor in play. You set up a pretty wide target for a shallow avalanche. The deep red seats are so dogmatic as to be pretty insensitive to the peril on the perimeter. My guess is that the pathological obstructionism of the last two years will continue and the Republican House will come crashing down in the next midterms when the pink seats flock to blue. It will only take incremental change to get us there.

  • caliber1
    I agree with both of you. Zornick is right that gerrymandering is a serious problem. If the last Presidential election had been decided by House district rather than by state-level majorities, the outcome would have been different, despite Obama's large popular vote majority. Iless is also right that optimal gerrymandering of an entire state means that there will be plenty of districts where the preferred party's majority is slim, just large enough to swing the district.
    Zornick says it would take a huge 7-point popular vote swing to change control of the House. Iless says it wouldn't take that much. What's that alternative number? 5 points? We're arguing over 2 points?
    To me, the point is that Republicans will take a huge advantage into the next House election cycle because of all their gerrymandering, huge but not insurmountable. Of course, if you start with gerrymandering and then add in the effects of voter ID and other vote suppression measures, and then add a couple of Republican-controlled states that decide to count electoral college votes by district rather than winner-take-all, and that huge advantage could easily slide into an insurmountable one, even with a 5-to-7-point switch in the popular vote.

  • Steve Day
    "“This will be a green light for anyone who wants to come to America illegally and then be granted citizenship one day,” saidRepresentative Lou Barletta."
    And, what's wrong with that?
    The "illegality" is just a "rule", written by the vested interests (i.e. corporations) that run America.

  • docb
    Flap-ears and mcgrumpy are the purest form of segregationists..isolated and opportunist to the extreme with nothing but pompous arrogance between their ears!

  • Muser
    It's hard to imagine the GOP supporting any pathway to citizenship for 11 million people who might well vote against them UNLESS the "pathway" is a contingent trick that never actually "triggers" because the border, say, is never certified as quite secure enough, or the "back of the line" is so long it might take the average person 20-30 years or more, etc.
    It's hard to imagine the GOP supporting mandatory use by employers of e-verify, UNLESS the GOP plans to slip in an "amnesty" for employers to grandfather in all their past sins and present improper employees on a go-forward basis.
    It's hard to imagine organized labor supporting anything that is likely to stagnate or depress wages for American workers.
    It's hard to imagine the other employers of service workers (hotels, restaurants, etc.) standing hitched for agriculture getting a pass for cheap guest workers----and them not.
    It's hard to imagine young college-educated Americans supporting corporations' goal in this of getting more visas for foreigners to compete with the young Americans for higher-level jobs.
    And, then, never, ever trust Lindsey Graham or seven others stupid enough to team up with a snake.

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Monday, January 28, 2013

Christine Lavin at MUUF's 27th Annual Benefit for Central America (1-26-...

Senators Agree on Blueprint for Immigration - NYTimes.com

Senators Agree on Blueprint for Immigration - NYTimes.com


Senators Offer a Bipartisan Blueprint for Immigration

J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
Senators Lindsey Graham, left, and Charles E. Schumer, shown in 2011, are two of the eight lawmakers behind the proposal.
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A bipartisan group of senators has agreed on a set of principles for a sweeping overhaul of the immigration system, including a pathway to American citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants that would hinge on progress in securing the borders and ensuring that foreigners leave the country when their visas expire.
Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press
Senator John McCain, also one of the eight, was optimistic about the plan’s prospects.

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The senators were able to reach a deal by incorporating the Democrats’ insistence on a single comprehensive bill that would not deny eventual citizenship to illegal immigrants, with Republican demands that strong border and interior enforcement had to be clearly in place before Congress could consider legal status for illegal immigrants.
Their blueprint, set to be unveiled on Monday, will allow them to stake out their position one day before President Obama outlines his immigration proposals in a speech on Tuesday in Las Vegas, in the opening moves of what lawmakers expect will be a protracted and contentious debate in Congress this year.
Lawmakers said they were optimistic that the political mood had changed since a similar effort collapsed in acrimony in 2010. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and one of the negotiators, said he saw “a new appreciation” among Republicans of the need for an overhaul.
“Look at the last election,” Mr. McCain said Sunday morning on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” “We are losing dramatically the Hispanic vote, which we think should be ours.” The senator also said he had seen “significant improvements” in border enforcement, although “we’ve still got a ways to go.”
He added, “We can’t go on forever with 11 million people living in this country in the shadows in an illegal status.”
According to a five-page draft of the plan obtained by The New York Times on Sunday, the eight senators — including Mr. McCain; Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York; and Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina — have agreed to address the failings of the immigration system in one comprehensive measure, rather than in smaller pieces, and to offer a “tough, fair and practical road map” that would eventually lead to a chance at citizenship for nearly all of the immigrants here illegally.
“We on the Democratic side have said that we are flexible and we want to get a bill,” Mr. Schumer told reporters in New York on Sunday. “But there’s a bottom line, and that’s a path to citizenship for the 11 or so million people who qualify. We’ve made great, great progress with our Republican colleagues.”
Under the senators’ plan, most illegal immigrants would be able to apply to become permanent residents — a crucial first step toward citizenship — but only after certain border enforcement measures had been accomplished.
Among the plan’s new proposals is the creation of a commission of governors, law enforcement officials and community leaders from border states that would assess when border security measures had been completed. A proposal would also require that an exit system be in place for tracking departures of foreigners who entered the country through airports or seaports, before any illegal immigrants could start on a path to citizenship.
The lawmakers intend for their proposals to frame the debate in the Senate, which is expected to take up immigration this spring, ahead of the House of Representatives. Compared with an immigration blueprint from 2011 that White House officials have said is the basis for the president’s position, the senators’ proposals appear to include tougher enforcement and a less direct path for illegal immigrants than Mr. Obama is considering.
In a parallel effort, a separate group of four senators will introduce a bill this week dealing with another thorny issue that is likely to be addressed in a comprehensive measure: visas for legal immigrants with advanced skills in technology and science. The bill, written primarily by Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, a Republican, and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democrat, would nearly double the number of temporary visas, known as an H-1B, available each year to highly skilled immigrants. It would also free up more permanent resident visas, known as green cards, so those immigrants could eventually settle in the United States and go on to become citizens.
In a sign of the rapidly changing mood in Washington on immigration, the two groups of senators and the White House have been vying in recent days to see who would unveil their proposals first.
Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, a Democrat who was one of those negotiating the comprehensive principles, said the senators finally agreed that any legislation should include a pathway to citizenship.
“First of all, Americans support it, in poll after poll,” said Mr. Menendez, who was interviewed along with Mr. McCain by Mr. Stephanopoulos on Sunday. “Secondly, Latino voters expect it. Thirdly, Democrats want it. And fourth, Republicans need it.”
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican, also joined the group of eight senators in recent weeks and endorsed its principles.
Mr. Rubio, a Cuban-American who is a fast-rising figure in his party, had insisted on including the exit tracking system as one of the triggers for opening the path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Mr. Rubio cited estimates that as many as 40 percent of immigrants in the country illegally had overstayed their visas.
Mr. Rubio also insisted that any immigrants who gained legal status under the legislation would “be required to go to the back of the line” behind other immigrants who applied to come through legal channels.
Under the senators’ proposal, border security would be immediately strengthened with new technology, including aerial drones, for border patrol agents, while the Department of Homeland Security would work to expand the exit control system. The United States currently has some exit controls to track departures of foreigners at most airports and seaports, but it does not track exits by land.
At the same time, immigrants here illegally would “simultaneously” be required “to register with the government.” After passing background checks and paying back taxes and fines, those immigrants would receive a “probationary legal status” that would allow them to live and work legally in the United States. Immigrants with that status would not be eligible for most federal public benefits.
The senators also called for a mandatory nationwide program to verify the legal status of new hires, although the details of whether that would include some form of identity card remained vague.
The senators would require that “our proposed enforcement measures be complete before any immigrant on probationary status can earn a green card,” according to the draft principles. The group also includes Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, both Democrats, and another Republican, Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona.
The proposals would offer major exemptions from the requirements for citizenship to young immigrants here illegally who came to United States as children, giving them a faster path to become Americans.
Immigrant farmworkers would also be given a separate and faster path to citizenship, according to the principles.
Still ahead are difficult negotiations over how long immigrants who gain provisional status would have to wait before they could become citizens. Mr. Rubio’s ideas are for a far longer and less direct pathway than Democrats would like. The senators also anticipate a fight over how to bring in low-wage workers in the future. Many labor organizations are skeptical of the temporary guest worker programs that employers favor, and the principles are vague on that point.
Considerable resistance remains among Republicans in the House of Representatives to granting any kind of legal status to illegal immigrants.
Mr. Rubio was also a sponsor of the bill to offer more visas to highly educated technology workers, along with Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware. Senator Klobuchar, also a sponsor, said on Sunday that she expected the bill would become part of the comprehensive measure the other senators were preparing.




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