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The on-again, off-again immigration reform compromise collapsed early Friday morning. I've seen plenty of commentary around the sphere as to why it happened and what it means, but until now finding a simple, easy to understand summary of the actual events has been difficult at best. But here it is, courtesy of The New Donkey:

Senate Republicans killed a bipartisan proposal reported by the Judiciary Committee they controlled. Senate Republicans then unveiled a face-saving compromise, got Dems on board, and then proved they couldn't muster support for their own proposal. Now, incredibly, they're pretending Democrats are at fault for sticking to the compromise and not agreeing to let it get unraveled through hundreds of amendments on the Senate floor. And let's not forget that throughout this fiasco the President of the United States, who supported both the Judiciary Committee bill and the discarded compromise, sat on the sidelines, unwilling or unable to sway his partisan troops.

I know plenty of people, including the President, are trying to portray this as some sort of Democratic failure, but that just makes no sense. First off all, Republicans have firm majorities in both houses of Congress, and have for the last 5 years been more than willing to govern with nothing more than a majority of their majority. If they can't keep their party together to ensure passage of this bill, that's not the Democratic Party's fault. Unless, of course, the Dems had been aiming to derail the bill, which they were not. Second, given that Senate Republicans have a long history of allowing much more conservative bills to come back out of the House-Senate Conference Committee, its entirely reasonable for Reid to back out of the deal if Frist cannot guarantee that the bill will return to the Senate for final passage unamended. After all, what's the point of agreeing to a compromise if the people you're compromising with don't intend to honor their deal? Only a fool would make that mistake. And thankfully, Reid is anything but a fool.

What we're seeing here is a problem with not one but two sources, both of which lay squarely within the Republican ranks. Immigration is splintering the coalition that Reagan built, and his party knows it. That's the reason for the huge difference between the Senate and House bills. Second, Republicans are reaping the results of years of dishonest bargaining with the Democratic Party. Senate Dems were more than willing to sign on to the compromise, but only if they knew the compromise would stick. With Frist unwilling to promise significant amendments would not be allowed, the Dems back out. To have done otherwise would have been foolish.

What's baffling to me is why people like Bull Moose don't understand that. His most recent post seems to suggest that it was the Dems that in the end sunk this bill, that they did it for short term political gain, and that as a result they sacrificed much larger long term gains. Worse, he suggests that their focus on short term gains sacrifices the needs of the nation. But he has that precisely backwards. Senate Dems were more than willing to pass the compromise bill, even if it meant giving Bush a partial victory. What they were unwilling to do, however, was risk allowing House Republicans to add a series insane amendments to the bill, thus producing something they could not support, both for policy and political reasons.

In the end, it wasn't the Dems who couldn't keep their members in line. It was Republicans.

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