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Over the past few months much has been made of the possibility of the enactment of immigration reform by the current Congress. The President has promised on numerous occasions to make immigration reform a top priority, Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid (D-NV), has assured that he has the votes to move legislation forward, and the Chairman of the Senate Immigration Subcommittee, Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who will take the lead on crafting any new legislation, has laid out a seven-point blueprint for new legislation.
Against this backdrop, advocacy groups are ramping up campaigns to lobby legislators and mobilize activists to aid in the upcoming battle. And while the effort to coalesce a unified front by the pro-reform forces is unprecedented, having both a level of organization and outreach unseen in past legislative battles, the campaign thus far has been long on familiar sloganeering and promises to trust the DC establishment to do the right thing, and very short on the specifics of what any new legislation will look like.
As those of us who have engaged in past reform battles know, (albeit more as outsiders and observers than real participants at the table), the devil really is in the details of any legislation, and those details are, more often than not, kept secret until the very last moments.
During the 2007 battle, much of the "compromise" part of the Grand Compromise was kept under wraps until the legislation was about to be moved to the Senate floor for the amendment process. In fact, a strategy to revise the legislation after passage in both houses, while in Conference Committee, or through legal challenge, was only revealed by DC insiders after the bill had already crashed and burned.
Those advocacy groups who have been privy to the past efforts to craft legislation have often acted unilaterally, without the knowledge of friends, allies, and those they claim to represent, to decide what principles and policies they believe are negotiable and expendable in the quest of compromise and consensus.
With that past history in mind, the current ambiguity surrounding the coming legislative battle becomes all the more troubling.
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