Today's the day

The second, and deciding, cloture vote on the Bush-Kennedy amnesty bill is scheduled for this morning. There have been reports that some of Tuesday's 64 yes votes have committed to voting no this time, but no sign of whether any others will flip from no to yes. It's not yet clear whether the yes vote can be pushed below the critical number of 60. We must keep the pressure up.

In the meantime, here are a few more pieces on the issue worth reading.

Stanley Kurtz thinks Senators haven't grasped how the internet age is changing politics:

The Internet was critical to the immigration bill’s first failure. If not for the blogs, the bill’s deceits and flaws would not have been so well or quickly exposed, and "comprehensive reform" would probably otherwise have passed within a couple of days. Now we’re at yet another new level. The public is being exposed to a basket of legislative tricks–of a sort that are rare in any case, and surely of a kind that have never been subjected to mass and rapid-fire public exposure. The undemocratic character of all that is happening here is being conveyed to the public in short order and with clarity–often through the medium of Senate aides themselves.

Douglas MacKinnon denounces the pro-amnesty Republicans' barrage of invective:

Going down the GOP line, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina generically suggested I'm a "bigot." Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff (who should be protecting our nation and not attaching his nose to the president's backside) basically said I would prefer to kill illegal aliens. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez suggested that I am in favor of "mass deportation,"
and former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said I'm "anti-immigrant." Wow. All of that invective hurled my way because I want to protect our borders and my country.

NRO rejects the fantasy that passing the bill will at least get a divisive issue out of the public eye:

Immigration has become more than a discrete public-policy issue. Thanks in large part to the comprehensivists’ handling of it, it has become a symbol of everything that many Americans detest about our political class. Both the president and the Congress have very low approval ratings. This bill will send
them lower. The number of Americans who tell pollsters that “Washington doesn’t listen to people like me” will go up. As it should.

The Rocky Mountain News actually favors amnesty, but denounces the shabby process:

It has been appalling to witness the defensive and dismissive approach President Bush and his congressional allies have deployed.....When the bill passed its first procedural hurdle by a 65-34 vote on Tuesday, the bargainers permitted senators to consider only a handful of amendments, several of which were clearly included to buy off some of their colleagues. These include proposals to add a U.S. attorney's office in Utah; increase the number of federal judges in some states; and (improbable as this might seem) create a commission to study the World War II internment of Latin Americans of Japanese descent.

The 231st anniversary of the foundation of this country is less than a week away. If we the people can stop this thing, we'll have shown that here at least, we still have what it takes to preserve what was created nearly a quarter-millennium ago.