We're On a Roll!

First, the immigration amnesty bill goes down to defeat--with some Democrats getting the message, after the Senate switchboard crashed from the volume of incoming calls. (Alas, Larry Craig, one of my Senators, voted on the wrong side.)

The 46-53 rout was 14 votes short of the 60 needed to end the debate and move the bill forward. It was a major defeat for President Bush, who had pushed hard to achieve his last major domestic initiative. It was also a bitter finale for the bipartisan team of senators and two Cabinet secretaries who worked for months to craft the intricate bill.

About two-thirds of the Senate's Republicans joined almost a third of the Democrats to kill the bill, which had been carefully constructed to appeal to both parties, but also drew bipartisan opposition.

Second, the House passed by a strong margin, which must have included a fair number of Democrats, a ban on the FCC reimposing the Fairness Doctrine. The left has been muttering about restoring the Fairness Doctrine as a way to muzzle the right. The left discovered that while it has control over the broadcast networks, Hollywood, and most newspapers, it not only doesn't control talk radio, but when it tries to compete in that space--it fails. Why? Because there aren't that many leftists in America. There some liberals (perhaps 25% of the population), but leftists--the sort of people who believe that the Religious Right is far more of a threat to our liberties than Islamofascists--are only a few percent of the population. If the left wasn't concentrated among journalists and in the ranks of the multimillionaires and college professors (no overlap there, however), they would have no influence at all.