The missteps of the past 48 hours

All day long we've been following the immigration aftermath. We've been looking at the jubilation about killing this thing once and for all, and I just now hit NRO's the Corner. Man, the mistakes couldn't have been worse, and they picked up on just about all of them. First, there's the sad plight of Senator Brownback. For those unaware, when the vote started this morning, Sam Brownback, presidential candidate, voted yes for cloture. As you scroll through the order, you'll see he changes his vote well after the forty vote count against. He switched when he saw that cloture was going to fail. Where are all of the "flip-flop" yappers now? And no, we don't buy the campaign's line that this was some sort of strategy on his part. He was the second guy to vote Yes.

Second on my list of mistakes, and the biggest booby prize award winner is Harry Reid. As Rich Lowry explains, Harry was just plain stupid last night:

A key moment was last night when the Baucus amendment on REAL ID wasn't tabled. The Bargainers had been running through the clay pigeon, tabling amendments to get them out of the way so they could get to the Graham-Kyl-Martinez "apprehend and deport" amendment. Then, the plan was, that amendment wouldn't be tabled, signaling that it would pass and giving some cat-nip to on-the-fence Republicans to vote for cloture. But Baucus wasn't tabled, stopping the process before it got to Lindsey "Deportation" Graham's creation. That helped blow away a big piece of the political strategy of the Bargainers.

A few shrewd conservatives had seen the potential here and voted against tabling Baucus—even though they didn't support the amendment—because they knew it would throw a monkey wrench in the process. When Baucus wasn't tabled because of those surprise conservative votes, a desperate Reid moved to vote on it right away to try to get it out of the way. But he couldn't because he couldn't get unanimous consent from opponents of the bill. Procedurally, he had been check-mated; politically, the cover of the Graham-Kyl-Martinez amendment wouldn't be available; and it was downhill from there.

Reid was nailed. He couldn't do anything. He needed unanimous consent -- all 100 senators -- to proceed, and he knew he wasn't getting those votes. But K-Lo isn't to be outshined. For her wisdom is the most penetrating of them all:

"The real victory today for conservatives is that now all the presidential candidates on our side are free to run against Bush — they've just robbed the Dems' of their most potent weapon."

Absolutely. The president is now very irrelevant. He was soundly defeated by the same people who voted for him. This fight was waged in the Senate, but we started the war, and we cvarried the day in the end. It was the American people that stood up and yelled "fix it, or we'll kill it." Kill it we did, and while it wasn't all done at our hands, it was done as a collective effort; from the most unknown citizen to the most wel--known senator. We collectively killed this bill. And now the Dems are left with no platform. Sure, they'll still take swipes at the president, but with the loss of this bill GOP nominees are free to slap around the president, too. The Dems can't use the "you won't criticize the president" argument any more. Rudy Giuliani issued a statement on the vote today, and I'm sure Fred and Mitt will be following up sometime today (as yet, there's not statement issued). But this is one issue that is off the table.

Publius II