This is a follow up to my post After passing immigration amnesty, Republicans should go on an overseas apology tour.
There’s one sentence in Lindsey Graham’s prediction of a “breakthrough” passage of the Gang of 8 bill which is particularly troubling:
“I think we are going to get plus 70 votes,” he said. “I’ve never been more optimistic about it.”
Think about that.
There are 54 Senators who vote Democratic (including two nominal “independents”) and will vote for the bill.
So the “breakthrough” passage requires just 16 Republicans — just over 1/3 of the Republicans in the Senate.
Put another way, Lindsey Graham will declare a breakthrough victory if almost 2/3 of Republican Senators vote against the legislation.
I don’t know how many more of these breakthrough victories we can take.
Update 6-18-2013: While Rubio is the face of the Gang of 8, maybe Graham is the driver:
Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, is a jovial sort, but he was scowling like a man who’d just discovered that he might have boarded the wrong bus.”How do we put together a bill and then the guy who put it together says that he may not vote for it?” Graham asked me. “I just don’t get what we’re doing here.”His specific complaint: that GOP Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a fellow member of the Senate “gang of eight” who had spent months drafting a bipartisan immigration reform bill, seemed to be backing away from the legislation.
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