Monday, August 07, 2006

Know-Nothing sham hearings staged in districts where House Know-Nothings face tightest races

Several immigration hearings are being held far from the border with Mexico, in districts where Republican lawmakers are engaged in competitive races for the House, including Evansville, Ind.; Concord, N.H.; and Glens Falls, N.Y. Hearings are also being held in Dubuque, Iowa, where Republicans are fighting to hold on to the seat being vacated by Representative Jim Nussle, and in Hamilton, Mont., where Senator Conrad Burns faces a tough challenge. ...

“Of course it’s not happenstance,” said Representative Jim Kolbe, Republican of Arizona, who is not running for re-election. He would rather have House Republicans negotiating with the Senate for a compromise on immigration legislation as opposed to the hearings, like the one set for his district, where Republicans are battling to hold on to his seat.

“They are very deliberately planned,” Mr. Kolbe said of the hearings. “A lot of Republicans are listening to a very shrill part of their base who are very loud about this issue, and they believe that this translates into votes in the base.”

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Isn't the IRIL loud and shrill about this issue? Duh!

Anonymous said...

Isn't the IRIL loud and shrill about this issue? Duh!

Anonymous said...

paddy o'furniture, proving Kolbe's point about the shrill base with the shrill and base comment.

IRIL? ILIR. Duh!

Anonymous said...

Love this post. Just found out about the Legalize the Irish group. I want to ask is do you guys have any figures on how much these hearings are costing the American taxpayer?

How much money are they spending on these election-related sojourns?

They could probably pay ten border partrolmen's yearly salaries for the cost of flying themselves, their staff and their sycophant witnesses out to these hearings.

Never mind the cost of putting themselves and their chums up in fancy hotels and feeding them at the punblic trough.

They DON'T REALLY CARE about border security. If they did they would have done something long before now.

What they really care about is trying to convince the voters to blame immigrants for all the problems they did absolutely nothing about while in office for two years.

Tough talk and no walk is their area of expertise.

The only significant action they have taken on immigration this summer is deciding on their inflight meals or what to order for room service.