GOP inflicts Bush’s latest wounds

06/29/2007

The president's setbacks on Iraq and immigration this week are especially painful because they're dealt by Republicans.


By Noam N. Levey,
LA Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2007


WASHINGTON — President Bush began the week struggling to salvage his most important foreign and domestic initiatives: the war in Iraq and an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws.

He ends it closer to losing both than at any time in his presidency.

And in a remarkable reversal for a president who once commanded nearly unflagging loyalty from lawmakers in his party, those most responsible for his setbacks are Republicans.

On Monday, one of the party's most respected voices on foreign affairs, the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, publicly declared Bush's Iraq strategy a failure and urged him to plan a withdrawal.

Four days later, Republican senators roundly rejected the sweeping immigration legislation he has championed all year.

Despite months of stumping by the president, intense lobbying on Capitol Hill by Cabinet secretaries and a last-minute commitment to spend $4.4 billion to toughen border security, just 12 GOP senators voted for what was probably the last major domestic initiative of the diminished White House.

Thirty-seven Republican lawmakers, including the Senate minority leader, voted to kill the immigration bill.

In a sign of the president's reduced clout, GOP lawmakers even publicly blamed the administration's failures for the bill's demise.

"This is about the American people losing faith in a government to do the things that we say we're going to do," said freshman Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, ticking off intelligence failures in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, changing justifications for the war, the botched response to Hurricane Katrina and the recent inability of federal agencies to expedite passports.

In a brief statement, a grim-looking Bush sought to place blame for the bill's collapse on Congress, whose approval ratings are even lower than the president's.

"Congress really needs to prove to the American people that it can come together on hard issues," Bush said before quickly striding away and ignoring a question about whether he could have done more to build support for the legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who has become increasingly sensitive about the Democrats' inability to enact their legislative priorities, failed to unite Democrats behind the bill.

Fifteen of the 48 Democrats present Thursday voted against the measure.

At the Capitol, Republican supporters of the bill went out of their way to praise Bush's efforts and dismiss suggestions that Bush had lost.

"I will be forever grateful to the president of the United States for asking the Senate to confront this problem," South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said.

Many GOP lawmakers also noted that the failures to enforce current immigration laws that prompted them to oppose the bill predate Bush's 6 1/2 years in the White House.

But even some of the president's allies acknowledged the toll the administration's failures have had on the cause of immigration reform.

Americans "don't think we can control our borders, we can win a war, we can issue passports, we can solve other problems," said Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate.

The defeat did not come for lack of effort.