Editorial: Seeking political security

Thursday, Sept. 7, 2006 | 7:13 a.m.

As Congress convenes this week for its final legislative showdown before November's midterm elections, Republican leaders are expected to hang tightly onto the politically popular banner of national security while forsaking any real action on immigration.

Port security measures, money for domestic security programs, legislation to authorize President Bush's terror surveillance program and creation of military tribunals for terror suspects are expected to be the issues du jour for Congress, while immigration reform fades into the politically safe background.

Republican congressional leaders have backed completely away from discussion of reforming the nation's immigration laws - except in the context that allows them to, under the guise of improving homeland security, call for making felons of those who have been living and working in the United States illegally.

With stagnant wages, rising energy and household costs, a costly and unpopular war raging overseas and vast differences over immigration reform polarizing the parties and threatening to lure some Republican moderates to the opposing team, conservatives figure talk of keeping America safe is their only hope of prevailing in November.

But the Republican-led administration's security policies offer slim pickings. The U.S. Supreme Court has stricken down Bush's domestic surveillance program and also his administration's plans to circumvent the Geneva Conventions in dealing with terrorism suspects. And Democrats' calls for a plan to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq and the growing insistence that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resign are becoming increasingly difficult to muffle.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, of Nevada, told The New York Times, "Every day, people around the country recognize that this is a failed administration."

And that failure is as evident in the national security policies that GOP leaders are hiding behind as it is in the immigration reform they refuse to discuss.