Irony - Obama That Killed Immigration Reform Gets Majority of Latino Votes

I spent a good bit of the day away from social media in the aftermath of election that gives President Obama another term. Doom and gloom on one side and a lot of spiking the football on the other.

On election night though I could not get past an extreme irony. That the man that killed immigration reform in 2007 got a second term  by Hispanic and Latino votes.

The short story is that the immigration bill was the work of a small, bipartisan group of senators. Late in the game, Mr. Obama joined the process, where he asked for (and received) changes in the bill. Yet when the legislation moved forward, Mr. Obama backed a series of poison-pill amendments. One was pushed by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D., N.D.) to weaken the guest-worker program. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.) was outraged because he knew this amendment was really organized labor’s effort to kill the immigration bill, not to help workers. “Who is the senator from North Dakota trying to fool?” Mr. Kennedy snapped from the Senate floor.


Mr. Obama voted “yea” on the Dorgan amendment. We know he knew it was a deal-killer because several senators had said so (Sen. Jim DeMint, who had voted “nay” on an earlier version, switched his vote for precisely that reason). Thus Mr. Obama pulled off a trifecta: appeasing Big Labor while telling Latinos he supported the bill and blaming Republicans for its failure…What makes Mr. Obama’s 2007 Senate vote so galling—and different from that of others who voted the same way—was that his support for the poison pills betrayed the bipartisan group of senators who had let him in on the writing of the bill.

As a Republican working for immigration reform at the time I was floored when Senator Obama did that. It is at root the reasons of some intense dislike for him I have to admit.

In order to rob the Bush administration and especially Sen John McCain a victory I believe this was also done. What is amazing is the media pretended this never happened and never called him out on it.

The effect was the that Republicans that stuck their neck out on this retreated back into a stance of doing nothing. It was quite apparent in this episode and during the McCain / Obama election they would get no political cover from social justice groups even.

Obama won the White House that year but at extreme cost to a lot of human of beings that saw any hope of their legal status being regularized . This of course affected many familes of mixed legal status.

I have long argued that the GOP was playing with fire on the immigration debate. As Senator Rubio has mentioned even on complicated issue such as this tone matters. Therefore I was glad to see that some conservative voices seem to be more open to immigration reform today it appears.

But that being said I cannot get over the irony. That the man that in my view defeated immigration reform for his own motives got so many Latino votes.  The questionable morals aside one has to view that vote as even being more polticially brilliant today in light of his reelection.