And The Dems Just Lost The Battle On Immigration

I honestly don't know how the Democrats can be this friggin' stupid, but there you go.

A plan by Senate Democratic leaders to reform the nation’s immigration laws ran into strong opposition from civil liberties defenders before lawmakers even unveiled it Thursday.

Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure.

Congrats, guys.  You actually managed to find a way to make Arizona's immigration nightmare look like a reasonable and controlled idea next to a NATIONAL IDENTIFICATION CARD PROGRAM.  Are you serious?  Fingerprint every American worker?  Really?

You know what?  You guys just lost the immigration battle and just fed the Teabagger outrage machine for years.  You blew it.  Completely.  And this time, the Teabaggers are right.  A national ID card is exactly the kind of stupidity that's going to cost the Dems dearly in 2010.  They're going to rage on this for months, if not years.  You managed to validate every paranoid fantasy the tinfoil hats have about the Democrats in one fell swoop.

Holy crap.  This is insane.  What were you guys thinking?  This is far, far worse than Arizona's law.  Ezra Klein thinks it's a game changer, but for the wrong reasons.

The oddity of this strategy, of course, is that anti-immigration sentiments run highest among the same communities that are most opposed to national ID cards. Now, it's also the case that if you're going to support citizenship searches for people with Hispanic-looking shoes, it's a bit odd to worry about an ID card to verify employment. But even so, without Republicans on the bill to give this strategy cover, it'll be interesting to see whether the anti-immigrant right embraces the ID card as a way of staunching the flow of illegal immigrants or assails Democrats for trying to create a biometric police state.

That thud you just head was my forehead hitting the desk.  Gee Ezra, you think the GOP might use the latter there?  Gosh, I sure as hell do.  It's a game changer alright.  Jesus.