Editorial: Punting on vital legislation

Sunday, May 21, 2006 | 7:36 a.m.

Nevada's Republican members of the U.S. House - Jim Gibbons and Jon Porter - told the Sun this past week that they favor President Bush's plan on immigration reform. Bush is calling for beefed-up border enforcement, but it also is notable that he wants a guest-worker program and the creation of a path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants.

That Gibbons and Porter support Bush's approach is interesting - to say the least. A better characterization would be to call it a flip-flop. You may recall that in December they both voted for an immigration bill that passed in the House and that was largely punitive - dramatically different than the more moderate approach the president is proposing.

The House legislation focused on increasing border security. The bill also would make felons out of undocumented workers and offer no path to citizenship. The House legislation, taken to its logical conclusion, would result in rounding up 11 million immigrants, potentially tearing apart families along the way as they were sent back to their native countries.

The question, then, is this: Why exactly would Porter and Gibbons vote for such a draconian bill in the House when they now say they favor Bush's more moderate approach? "The arrangement was for both houses to do border security, and the Senate to do a guest-worker program," Porter said. "Our bill wasn't intended to become the final product," said Gibbons, a candidate for governor. "It was meant to start the ball rolling."

It sounds to us like they are afraid to firmly come down on one side of an issue that is dividing the Republican Party. For that matter, it is pure nonsense for Gibbons to imply that the House bill was simply to get the immigration issue moving legislatively.

In December there was a real debate among members of the House about just what should be done. Indeed, it was a fellow Republican, Rep. Jim Kolbe of Arizona, who authored an alternative plan that would have created a guest-worker program and allowed some undocumented immigrants to one day be eligible for citizenship. He noted that the stakes were high and demanded action. He is right, particularly for states such as Arizona and Nevada that, respectively, have the top and second-highest rates of undocumented workers.

Before the vote on the House bill, Kolbe correctly pointed out that the legislation he opposed didn't address the need for a guest-worker program. "It also does not address the millions of people already here and living in the shadows," Kolbe said. "If we do not do a comprehensive approach to immigration reform, we will fail to fix the problem, fail to secure our borders, and fail the American people."

Kolbe acted as a leader, someone who understood the gravity and the urgency of the situation - unlike his two Republican colleagues in the House from Nevada. Taxpayers are paying Gibbons and Porter quite handsomely to make these kinds of tough decisions, but instead they chose to punt.

The result is that it is uncertain whether the Senate, which is likely to pass a plan similar to the one Bush is advocating, and the House will be able to bridge their huge differences and pass immigration reform. If legislation that Kolbe had authored had passed instead, the odds would have been much greater that immigration reform would be a certainty.

The Senate and the House still may work out their differences on immigration reform, resulting in legislation that will be signed into law - but it sure won't be because of any effort from Gibbons and Porter, who sat on the sidelines when it really mattered.