Senators Webb, Tester, McCaskill are key votes

Three centrists whose razor-thin election victories in November tipped control of the Senate to the Democrats now hold potentially decisive swing votes on the immigration measure the chamber will try to revive later this week.

All three Democratic freshman senators — Jim Webb (Va.), Jon Tester (Mont.) and Claire McCaskill (Mo.) — voted against efforts by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to shut down debate over the measure earlier this month. The freshmen each have controversial amendments in the package that will be considered once the Senate moves to resume debate later this week. And no member is decided on how he or she will vote on the underlying bill.

{mosads}How these Democrats approach the debate is one of a host of obstacles the legislation’s supporters face as the Senate attempts to complete the immigration bill by next week. Yesterday a number of Republicans lashed out at what they said were unfair tactics by Reid to limit the Senate’s second attempt on the immigration bill to 24 amendments, but key negotiators on both sides of the aisle vowed to keep the process moving.

The freshman Democrats’ votes not only will have major repercussions on the fate of the bill, but also for their own local political standing. Hard-line illegal immigration foes from the new members’ respective states are bombarding their offices with telephone calls to oppose proceeding to the bill, while left-leaning groups, which were critical in bolstering support for each of their candidacies in states President Bush carried in 2004, are using similar tactics.

Webb, who may be facing the greatest backlash of the three moderates, is proposing an amendment that has been denounced by members of Virginia’s immigrant communities. The amendment would add criteria for 12 million illegal immigrants trying to qualify for “Z visas” by requiring the visas be made available to those in the country for longer than four years and those who have “strong roots” in their communities. In a bid to appease immigrant-rights groups, it would strike a “touchback” provision in the bill that would require that immigrants return to their home countries while their visa applications are being processed.

Webb sees the amendment as an attempt to bridge the debate, and says he would vote against the bill if his amendment is not adopted.

“I think if this bill is going to have a chance to succeed, it’s going to have to have a fairness provision in it,” Webb said yesterday. He would not say whether he would vote on the motion to proceed to the bill.

Critics say the measure would carve out the core element of the bill, and some pro-immigration groups are threatening to withdraw support for the bill if it is adopted.

“It guts the legislation,” said Claire Guthrie Gastañaga of the Virginia Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, whose members have been calling Webb’s offices to oppose the plan. “Senator Webb’s amendment essentially leaves millions and millions of people in the shadow.”

Immigrant groups say their work for Webb was crucial in 2006, when they campaigned vigorously to bring out the hundreds of thousands of immigrant voters to defeat former Sen. George Allen (R), who famously dubbed an Indian-American volunteer of the Webb campaign “macaca.”

“It’s premature to say that the community has given up on Jim Webb, but there are a lot of questions on what is it he is trying to achieve and [whether] our trust [was] well founded,” said Mukit Hossain, president of the Virginia Muslim Political Action Committee, which campaigned for Webb last election. The immigrant groups are pushing for a meeting this week with Webb.

Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), a negotiator who helped craft the bipartisan compromise bill, said of the Webb amendment: “I don’t think it makes any sense, myself.”

Webb, who lost to Allen in Virginia’s conservative southwestern districts, also is facing a groundswell of pressure from the right. The anti-illegal immigration group NumbersUSA says its membership has grown exponentially since last month’s announcement by a bipartisan group of senators and the White House that they had agreed to compromise legislation.
Almost 2,500 new Virginia members have joined since last month, bringing the total to nearly 10,300, according to the group.

Leaders of the group say they are doing little to organize the opposition because their activist members are taking it upon themselves to make their voices heard.

“We don’t have to drum up opposition,” the group’s director of government relations, Rosemary Jenks, said. “People are coming to us.”

In Tester’s sparsely populated state of Montana, the group says it has 1,531 members, with 345 joining since the middle of last month. Tester voted for an amendment by John Cornyn (R-Texas) that failed 46-51 and would have established a permanent bar on criminals’ receiving immigration benefits. But Tester is cosponsoring an amendment, backed by liberal
groups, that would eliminate references to the “Real ID” national identification program.

In McCaskill’s home state, activists for NumbersUSA total nearly 8,000, with 1,670 new members since last month. McCaskill is pushing an amendment that would ban repeat violators of immigration rules from receiving federal contracts for five years. Her spokeswoman said the senator is concerned about the guest-worker provisions in the bill as well as the employer sanction provisions that she is seeking to strengthen.

“It’s difficult to tell where she would be on a cloture motion at this point; she has had significant concerns, and if those things are not addressed, she wouldn’t vote to proceed to the bill,” the senator’s spokeswoman, Adrianne Marsh, said.
But pro-immigration groups are putting the pressure on the senator, who voted against the Cornyn amendment but has supported other provisions they have lambasted.

“Her votes and positions have been troubling with regard to” the immigration bill, Jennifer Rafanan of the Missouri Immigrant and Refugee Advocates Coalition said.