Election 2008
Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee
have gutted enforcement funding
June 2008 
By Andrew Peterson
For CoverUps.com
The complete abdication by the Democrat Party of its responsibility for U.S. border security is an ongoing scandal happening in broad daylight.
Now the group ProtectOurBordersNow.com shows us yet another of Democrat Party treachery in congress. On the House Appropriations Committee, where badly-needed funding for illegal immigration law enforcement came up for a vote, every single Democrat on the committee voted to kill funding for border enforcement, while every single Republican on the committee voted in favor of funding. It's a scandal and a travesty and Democrats should be made to pay the price by American voters in November.
ProtectOurBorders reports how it happened:
The DHS (Department of Homeland Security) Appropriations bill, drafted by Rep. David Price (D-N.C.), took funding away from the 287(g) program, which enables state and local police to coordinate with federal authorities to enforce our immigration laws.
Rep. John Carter (R-Texas), offered an amendment to restore the 287(g) funding to the DHS Appropriations bill.
That amendment was defeated along party lines (All Republicans voted to restore the funding, all Democrats voted to gut the funding).
Many voters don't know that when a bill (i.e. a new law) is passed in Congress, the matter doesn't end there. You'd think it would, but it doesn't. A bill for or against anything is meaningless unless Congress chooses to set money aside to pay for its enforcement. It does this by passing another bill.
Politicians often feel public pressure to vote for things they personally don't like. So they make a big public show by voting for the bill, only to quietly vote against it when the time comes to actually provide money to pay for it. Politicians count on the short memory and short attention spans of voters, many of whom have little or no desire to follow up on their representative.
This problem is especially acute with immigration reform, which is a complicated issue that will take lots of time and money to work out politically (even if the money our country ultimately saves will be much greater). It's especially sobering to realize that for the politicians in Washington D.C., to truly solve this problem, they will have to voluntarily give up some of their power.
The consequences for our country if our elected leaders don't do the right thing could not be more serious, as Steve Hampton of ProtectOurBordersNow says:
Illegal aliens currently outnumber federal immigration agents by 5,000 to one, and only 2,000 federal agents are active in enforcing the immigration laws in the interior of our country. Clearly, those numbers indicate that a limited number of federal agents are incapable of confronting the estimated 12-20 million illegal aliens currently inside our nation's borders and would benefit from the assistance of the more than 600,000 state and local law enforcement officers nationwide who come into contact with illegal aliens every day.
Our Take
For genuine immigration reform to happen, American voters will have to be exceptionally vigilant. Sustained scrutiny of and pressure on our representatives is the only thing that stands a chance of working. Luckily, the public is passionate and engaged on this issue, and have shown themselves to be up to the task, so far, of insisting that their will be done in Washington. But we can't let up. There are powerful pressures pushing our lawmakers away from the will of the people. Money from groups like MALDEF. Praise and glory from the mainstream media. It's an amazing and awful thing, when you think about it. We shouldn't have to fight so hard to be heard on this. But we do.
Read the original article.
