Text size:

A push in House for immigrant bill

BY TOM BRUNE | Newsday Washington Bureau

September 26, 2006

WASHINGTON - As Congress headed into its last week before taking a recess, House Republicans continued to press ahead on their version of enforcement-only immigration overhaul, over the objections of many Senate Republicans and Democrats.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) held up action on the defense authorization bill yesterday to demand the adding of unrelated measures to detain and deport illegal and criminal immigrants to deter gang violence and for stepped-up federal court security.

"The speaker will not move the bill unless these two security items are added to the measure," Hastert's spokesman, Ron Bonjean, told The Associated Press yesterday.

The House GOP leadership had also discussed, but backed off from, adding a broad array of border security and immigration enforcement amendments to the Homeland Security appropriations bill.

After the Senate-House conference meeting on the bill produced a report without amendments, the House GOP leadership issued a statement saying it "will continue its efforts to send President [George W.] Bush additional border security measures for his signature this week."

The sweeping immigration overhaul debated nationally and in Washington, however, is widely believed to be dead for this session, which ends either Friday or Saturday so House members and a third of the senators can go home to campaign for the Nov. 7 elections.

The House, with its enforcement-only bill, and the Senate, whose comprehensive measure includes a guest-worker program and path to citizenship, remain at odds.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), the outspoken Senate Judiciary Committee chairman and a prime sponsor of the Senate's immigration bill, complained about House Republicans yesterday in a speech to the National Press Club.

"Now, the House wants to take their key provisions and enact them, which would take all the leverage away from the Senate bill," Specter said.

"We have pending in the Senate provisions for a fence," he said. "I'm for that fence. But I'm not for the fence piecemeal."

Specter also predicted that Congress would accomplish little this week, despite taking on bills on appropriations, warrantless wiretaps, and detainee tribunals and interrogations.

"We're unlikely to finish up very much, and we've got a lot to do," he said. "I've never seen so much work left to do."