McCain’s bill now foreign to him

Carolyn Hileman - The Voice* | July 13, 2008

By Dan Moffett

Palm Beach Post Editorial Writer

It’s easy to forget that just last year, Barack Obama and John McCain were part of a bipartisan group that tried to push a comprehensive immigration reform bill through the Senate.

Their effort failed, and now that they’re campaigning against each other, it gets very confusing trying to figure out who actually did what with the bill, or who was even there to watch it die
Let me explain.

Sen. McCain was a leader on immigration reform in the Senate and coauthored much of the proposed legislation with Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. It called for a guest-worker program and an incremental path to legal status for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.

But Sen. McCain would prefer that Republicans forget that.

Most of his party hated the bill and considered it amnesty for lawbreakers. Any association with Sen. Kennedy - or for that matter, most anyone from Massachusetts - sends shivers through the GOP base.

So, today, Sen. McCain often talks as if he wasn’t even there when the immigration bill hit the Senate floor.

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