In a new chapter of the often topsy-turvy story of the Tea Party era, Colorado Democratic US Rep Diana DeGette this week finds herself championing local government rights against Republican efforts to expand federal power. DeGette on Wednesday urged House and Senate appropriations committees staffers to reject legislative stipulations that aim to prohibit the District of Columbia government from using local tax dollars to pay for abortions as part of its employee insurance policies. 

“Not only would this proposed language undermine the self-governing rights of the people of the District of Columbia, it would deny low-income women access to basic, constitutionally protected, medical services,” DeGette, co-chair of the Pro-Choice Caucus, said in a release. “Congress should not violate the District’s right to use its own tax dollars as it sees fit in order to simply advance congressional Republicans’ extreme assault on women’s access to quality reproductive healthcare.” 

The political right has long championed local government over federal government as best to represent constituent interests. The Tea Party has leaned on states rights arguments, for example, in its aggressive opposition to the federal health care reform law passed two years ago.

The debate over the abortion restriction references the long struggle to grant the District of Columbia statehood. DC residents have no true representatives in Congress yet Republicans have long opposed statehood for the fact that the District’s largely liberal population would add Democratic votes on Capitol Hill.

The language opposed by DeGette appears in the Fiscal Year 2012 Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill and is one of several attempts on the part of Republican lawmakers this year to limit access to abortion.

“This intrusive initiative sadly sends a clear signal that this Congress does not believe vulnerable women are worthy of the same access to quality health as their middle-class and wealthy counterparts.” 

One of the clear effects of the law would be to price out abortions for any government employee unable to foot the bill out of pocket.

DeGette made her case to the committees staffers in a letter signed by 59 members of the House, including Colorado Rep Jared Polis, and co-authored with New York Rep Louise Slaughter.

“Washington D.C. is not Congress’ petri dish,” Slaughter said. “We should not be using federal power to experiment with the rights of women, which is why I encourage every member of the Appropriations Committees to reject any effort to limit the District’s control of local funds. “Congress should not be in the business of punishing low-income women and stripping them of their constitutionally-afforded rights. I believe we’d all do well to remember that.”

On Wednesday the Senate is scheduled to mark-up or consider again the various provisions of the appropriations bill.

The DeGette-Slaughter letter: 
 

Dear Democratic members of the House and Senate appropriations committees:
 
As you consider Fiscal Year 2012 Financial Services and General Government Appropriations legislation, we urge you to protect the District of Columbia’s right to self-government as well as the health and reproductive rights of low-income women in the District of Columbia.  We respectfully request that you ensure that language that undermines self-government is not included in subsequent legislation as it was in the House Appropriations committee-approved bill.  Specifically, we urge you to not adopt Section 810 of the House bill, which prohibits local tax dollars from being used for abortions for women whose insurance is provided by the District government.
 
The autonomy of the District is necessary for democratic self-governance, and Congress should be mindful not to violate District residents’ rights to control their own tax dollars.  The Home Rule Act of 1973 was a result of decades of efforts to protect the rights of District residents.  Republicans have spent much of the 112th Congress interfering in local District matters.  Each time Democrats accede to violations of the District’s home rule, we embolden Republicans to continue their attacks. 
 
By failing to permit the District of Columbia to spend local government funds on abortion, we are sending the message that low-income women should not have access to the same medical services that middle- and upper-income women can access.  Ultimately, this prohibition may threaten the health of medically vulnerable women and deny patients the right to access constitutionally protected medical services.  We must strive to expand health care services for Americans throughout the nation – not place barriers in the road of a woman seeking medical care simply because of the state, city, or district that she lives in. 
 
The District does not have a vote in the House or Senate.  But other Democrats do.  We urge you to stand strong and to protect the democratic self-government of the District of Columbia.

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“We came from a political environment where we got elected by people who said on [the day after the election], Phase 2 starts, we’re holding your feet to the fire,” Gardner said. “We’re the direct pipeline to the leadership, because we’re a third of the caucus that just came from an environment where it’s a no-nonsense environment. Now it’s our job to make sure they are no-nonsense leaders.”

The Politico story interviewed several of the freshman in an article that referenced the flameouts of ambition and graft and hypocrisy that afflicted many of the similarly fired-up 1994 “Contract with America” Republican freshman class.

In a separate but related story, Politico reported that freshman Maryland Republican Congressman Andy Harris, a doctor who ran an unabashed anti-”Obamacare” campaign against Democrat Frank Kratovil (who Harris didn’t seem to care voted against health care reform) made a splash for omplaining in an orientation meeting that the government- health care insurance he was eligible for as a member of Congress wouldn’t start until a month into his term. Harris reportedly caused a ruckus, saying he had never heard of such a thing and wondering what to do to cover his family.

Harris later said he was just trying to make the point that the government doesn’t do anything well. Harris, who has five children, has so far not said that he will not be motivated by his principles to reject the government health insurance when it arrives to cover his family in February.

Instead, “Harris asked if he could purchase insurance from the government to cover the gap,” added [an] aide, who was struck by the similarity to Harris’s request and the public option he denounced as a gateway to socialized medicine.”

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Only 8 percent of Latino voters view the Republican Party favorably, compared with 86 percent who view it unfavorably, according to a nonpartisan Research 2000 poll released Monday by Daily Kos. That’s down from the already low esteem Latino voters had for Republicans before the Sottomayor nomination, The Plum Line’s Greg Sarget points out. In May, the GOP was viewed favorably by 11 percent of Latino voters and unfavorably by 79 percent.

Sargent draws a direct connection: “New poll numbers really seem to bear out the fears of some Republicans: The GOP’s quasi-opposition to Sotomayor seems to be hurting the party among Latinos in a big way.”

Politico reports Tuesday that some GOP senators appear to be backing off from early, vitriolic attacks on Sotomayor that saw out-of-office Republicans branding the nominee a “racist.”

The calculus could certainly change when Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings begin July 13. But the Republican senators’ initial review of Sotomayor’s record, together with the meetings they’ve had with her, have left them doubting that she’ll be controversial enough to help them or hurt the Democrats heading into the 2010 elections.

But not all Republican senators are on the same page. Roll Call reports Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions, the ranking senator on the Judiciary Committee, “and other Republicans on the panel” plan to kick off a new round of criticism of Sotomayor from the Senate floor on Tuesday.

Specifically, Sessions and other Judiciary Republicans will take aim at her position on gun rights, the role of “empathy” in her rulings as a federal judge, and whether she has allowed foreign laws to inform her decisions in the past.

Republicans will also focus their critiques of Sotomayor on her involvement in the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the nation’s oldest Puerto Rican civil rights group.

If they’re concerned at all about those tumbling support numbers among the nation’s fastest-growing group of voters, Sessions and others might want to reconsider their plans to tar Sotomayor with membership in a Latino civil rights organization.

Former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo gained more ridicule than traction last month when he blasted the federal judge’s membership in the nation’s largest Latino civil rights organization, comparing the National Council of La Raza with the racist Ku Klux Klan. In a cable television interview, Tancredo called La Raza ““a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses,” drawing a swift rebuke from the organization:

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” National Council of La Raza spokesperson Lisa Navarrete told The Colorado Independent. “He’s defamed our organization and told falsehoods about our organization without any basis in fact or evidence. That’s not who we are or what we do.”

Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall connects the dots between problems Republicans are encountering with Latino voters, whom GOP operatives believed were a natural GOP constituency as recently as a few years ago, and the sway of politicians such as Tancredo and Sessions in the party:

The only problem is that the modern Republican party’s panic switch, or at least one of them, is rancid jingoism and more or less open anti-Hispanic (though often specifically targeted at Mexicans) prejudice.

[...] In other words, it’s not a mistake or incompetence or any lack of planning that has Republicans in such a bad position with Hispanics, America’s fastest growing ethnic group. It’s just that people who are hostile to Hispanic immigration and just Hispanics in general are one of the GOP’s key constituencies. That puts some real obstacles in the way of becoming the party of Hispanics. To put it mildly …

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State Rep. Christin Scanlan, D-Dillon, and state Sen. Dan Gibbs, D-Silverthorne, whose districts have been ravaged by the rice-sized bugs, testified before the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forest and Public Lands Tuesday that resulting wildfires could knock out the nation’s electrical grid and spoil water supplies for millions of downstream consumers in other states.

They urged Congress to find more money for fire prevention and suppression, pass a strong version of the FLAME Act, which would separate suppression and prevention funding and to follow Colorado’s lead on state laws that allow more cross-jurisdictional cooperation.

Also Tuesday, Colorado Sen. Mark Udall brought up the bark-beetle epidemic during his first hearing as chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks.

Udall questioned acting National Park Service director Dan Wenk on the Obama administration’s plans to deal with the backlog of badly needed repairs in national parks in Colorado and other parts of the country, including widespread bark-beetle devastation.
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Udall admitted the park service has been under-funded for decades under both Democratic and Republican administrations, but said he’ll work to find more money and examine funding policies before the committee begins hearing park-related bills next month.

(Image/pinkpistols.org)

The plan — to add an amendment that would allow gun owners to carry their weapons from one state to another in accordance with concealed carry laws. The possible rationale — to defend gay rights.

“It makes sense for a group of people who would be protected by hate crime legislation to support something that would let them defend themselves before or after the crime,” said one Republican Senate aid familiar with the discussions. “It’s relevant, and we want to work together with gay groups to get the message out.”

While the aide described the discussions over a gun rights amendment to the hate crimes bill as “very fluid,” conservative and pro-gun rights gay groups outside of the Senate are ready to make a real push for it. GOProud, a new gay rights group that broke away from the Log Cabin Republicans in April, has talked with top staffers for Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., about how to make the civil rights case for conceal and carry reciprocity.

“We support this because we think it’s advantageous to make it legal and relatively easy for gay people to arm themselves so they can protect themselves,” said Jimmy LaSilva, who became the executive director of GOProud after three years working on policy for the Log Cabin Republicans. “In the next few weeks we want to start highlighting some of those stories. There are people who have averted gay bashings because of their ability to use guns.”

LaSilva and GOProud are currently putting together the names of some of those people. They’re collecting their statements for the first rock-solid deadline in the push for concealed carry reciprocity — a June 23 hearing that came together as a result of a previous Thune gun rights bill. In February, Thune and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., offered similar amendments to legislation that would extend a vote in Congress to residents of Washington, D.C. Both amendments would have legalized gun ownership in the district. Ensign’s passed, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., approached Thune on the floor to offer a hearing on conceal and carry reciprocity instead of a protracted fight on his D.C. gun rights amendment.

“Everyone here is focused on that hearing,” said Kyle Downey, a spokesman for Thune. “It’s too early to talk about the chances of this as a separate bill or as an amendment, but getting the commitment from Leahy on a hearing was quite a victory in and of itself.”

The hate crimes bill was sponsored by Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and is supported by a range of minority rights groups. The senator’s office and the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign did not comment on this potential amendment when contacted by The Washington Independent.

Liberal opponents of Coburn and other Republicans criticized last month’s amendment to the credit card bill that legalized the possession of loaded weapons in national parks. The National Rifle Association and other gun rights groups pushed back hard against the argument that Coburn’s amendment had been irrelevant, or that it had been passed as a trick. At the time, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence called the amendment “reckless and extraneous,” while NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre argued that the vote was bipartisan and proved “there is broad and bipartisan support for the Second Amendment in Congress.”

Supporters of concealed carry reciprocity argue that the case for attaching it to a hate crimes bill — if that is the way that it can be passed — makes even more sense than the case for Coburn’s amendment. “Plenty of people have used guns to defend innocent people,” argued attorney and Second Amendment scholar David Kopel of the Golden-based Independence Institute, “including crimes motivated by bias. This is a legitimate thing to attach to any bill that’s concerned with violent crime.”

That’s the case being made by Pink Pistols, a gay gun rights organization whose slogan is “Armed Gays Don’t Get Bashed,” and whose members can recount stories of fending off potential attackers by brandishing their weapons.

“Self-defense with a firearm is a valid and viable method of self-defense and protection,” said Gwen Patton, a spokesperson for Pink Pistols. “Imagine that individuals follow you from a place known in the neighborhood as a GLBT gathering place. They follow you to your car, and when you try to open the door, they hold out pipes and yell — ‘Hey, faggot!’ You pull out a concealed weapon that you have a license to carry. They say, ‘He’s got a gun!’ They drop their pipes and run away. No shots were fired, but a beating was just averted.”

Still, it’s not yet clear whether Thune and his allies will have to go this route to pass concealed carry legislation. It’s still possible that a new hate crimes law will be be folded into the defense authorization for 2009, which would effectively remove it from the amendment process. Thune’s most recent version of the legislation, S. 845, still could be introduced on its own for an up-or-down vote. But only one Democrat, Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, has co-sponsored the bill, and Thune’s spokesman Downey worried that “the political side” of the Democratic Party would keep it from coming to a vote. “As we get closer to the election,” said Downey, “they will want to avoid these types of tough votes.”

If they do go the amendment route, supporters of concealed carry reciprocity are confident that it would be passed as part of a hate crimes bill, and not become a poison pill that kills the entire package. “Every Republican senator is on the record with a position on hate crimes legislation,” said GOProud’s LaSilvia. “If this were to be attached, a vote for the bill could be explained as a vote for concealed carry. Gosh — what would happen when the Family Research Council realized that their people were voting for the ‘gay bill.’ It would put a bunch of people in a really weird position. It would be fun to watch.”

(Photo/S.C. Axman, Flickr)

Supporters of adopting a public plan, a national insurance program anyone could opt into, argue that it’s an indispensable component of the Democrats’ soon-to-be-unveiled health care overhaul proposals, providing an affordable option to patients and keeping private insurers honest through increased competition. But critics contend that a federal plan is the first step to a single-payer system, tipping the scales unfairly with government subsidies and threatening the very existence of the private insurance market.

Aside from aligning Democrats against Republicans, the young debate is also threatening to put liberal Democrats at odds with moderates, incite another intra-party rift between Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, and leave President Barack Obama — who wants to pass reforms supported by all parties — struggling to find some middle ground.

The episode highlights the difficulties facing Democrats in Congress and the White House as they try this year to make good on one of their very highest legislative priorities: revamping the nation’s health care delivery system in an effort to cover the 46 million uninsured Americans and slow the skyrocketing growth in medical costs. The debate will be a test of the political skill and will of party leaders, who are trumpeting the urgency of health reforms at the same time they’re urging caution in enacting them; who are hoping to trim the fat in the health care system at the same time they don’t want to eliminate jobs in the middle of a recession; and who are proposing enormously expensive reforms at a time of record deficits.

Lawmakers will also have to contend with the powerful insurance industry, which opposes the adoption of a public plan — and is lobbying furiously to keep it out of the Democrats’ proposal.

On Friday, the debate over public plans was launched in full after news leaked that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate health committee, intends to include the government-sponsored option as part of his sweeping reform proposal, expected to be unveiled next week. The leak inspired thoughts that Kennedy’s bill would be much more liberal than that being drafted by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who works closely with Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), a fierce opponent of the public option.

Kennedy and Baucus insist they remain on the same page, issuing a rare Saturday statement vowing to craft “complementary legislation that can be quickly merged into one bill for consideration on the Senate floor before the August recess.”

Joseph Antos, a health-policy analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said the leak — probably intentional — was likely intended to send a message to liberal Democrats that Kennedy’s on their side. It might also have been a message to Baucus that he’d better be prepared to nudge his proposal left — a situation that puts the Senate Finance Committee chairman in a squeeze between an allegiance to party and the promise to find bipartisan consensus on health care reform.

“He wants to be left of the 50-yard line, but he doesn’t want to be too far left of the 50-yard line,” Antos said of Baucus. “It’s the sort of thing we’ve seen often out of the Finance Committee … There’s a lot of game-playing going on here.”

The same dilemma faces Obama, who appears torn between his support for a public plan and a desire to have a bipartisan bill. The White House did not return requests for comment Wednesday.

Supporters of the public plan option argue that it’s vital if Democrats hope to slow the growth of health care spending, which is skyrocketing at a rate well above that of the rest of the economy. A government-sponsored plan, they say, could provide cheaper coverage because it wouldn’t have to pay the marketing and outreach costs that burden private insurers; it would cater to more people, lowering costs for reasons of sheer volume, and it wouldn’t be bound to produce profits for shareholders.

There are other advantages to the public option. Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a consumer health care group, pointed out that private insurers operating under Medicare have been known to alter the terms of coverage, leaving patients without necessary treatments. A public plan, Pollack argued, “provides some stability” to patients. The government option would also create an enormous database of health coverage information that could inform future policy decisions, Pollack said — information private insurers often won’t disclose for proprietary reasons.

Conservatives and the insurance industry have other thoughts. Summing up the criticisms of the public plan option, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday argued that a federally subsidized plan could offer “artificially lower prices” that would quickly attract interest from individuals and businesses alike. The result, McConnell contended, would be the death of the private insurance market.

“The very concept of a government ‘option’ is itself misleading,” McConnell said on the Senate floor. “What starts out as an option could quickly become the only option.”

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who floated his own health reform proposal this week, said the public option would eventually lead to “delays and rationing” for patients.

“The first rule of health care is, do no harm,” Gregg told MSNBC Tuesday. “Well, one thing which would do serious harm would be if the federal government came in and stood between you and your doctor or created a system which led to delays and rationing, which is what a public plan would.”

Several proposals floated on Capitol Hill in recent weeks seek to satisfy both supporters and critics of the public plan option. Under one measure, sponsored by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), the government would administer, but not be permitted to subsidize, the public plan. Instead the plan would have to rely on premiums and co-payments to cover claims, like any other insurer. The Schumer plan would also force the public plan to pay health care providers at rates higher than Medicare pays.

Another proposal would offer private plans the opportunity to expand coverage and reduce rates on their own, with the public option kicking in only in regions of the country where the private market failed to meet certain minimum thresholds of coverage and cost. Opponents of that strategy, including Schumer, argue that the nation’s 46 million uninsured residents are evidence enough that those thresholds have already been met.

Antos, of AEI, said one of those compromises could work, but first the language surrounding the debate would have to change so that the Republicans who’ve so adamantly opposed the public option wouldn’t be seen going back on their word.

“You’ve got to find a face-saving way,” Antos said. “So the first thing you do, you don’t call it a public plan.”

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former head of the Congressional Budget Office, said that, without any details, it’s still too early to speculate about the fate of public plans in the coming debate. “There are many different flavors of a public option,” said Holtz-Eakin, the chief economist for the 2008 presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). “We’ve got to see a specific proposal.”

Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy at Harvard University, pointed out that, even if the Senate isn’t able to pass the public plan provision, House Democrats will almost certainly include that option in their version of the bill, which is currently being drafted by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and George Miller (D-Calif.). For all the controversy swirling around public plans, Blendon added, there’s a larger barrier to the Democrats’ push for health care reform this year.

“This is very contentious, but not as contentious as how they plan to pay for it,” said Blendon, an expert on the Clinton administration’s failed attempt to pass comprehensive health care reform in 1993. “If they can find savings someplace, they would not stop the train for this issue. They would find some Sen. Schumer-like compromise and push the thing on through.”

David Cutler, a health economist at Harvard University who’s advised the Obama administration, downplayed the significance of the partisan griping over public plans, arguing on Tuesday that overall support for health care reform this year remains as strong as ever.

“You see these sorts of splinters,” Cutler said, “but you don’t see anyone walking out yet … We are in so much better shape than 16 years ago.”

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and liberal supporters of the Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee are backing the “Medicare for All” public option — a guaranteed government-run plan that was the subject of a Denver town hall meeting headlined by former DNC chair and physician Howard Dean.

Meanwhile Montana Sen. Max Baucus, chair of the centrist-top heavy Finance Committee, is angling for a more health insurance industry-friendly plan.

And still single-payer is off the table in both committees.

The Times explains that, with the president’s August due date looming for a health care reform package, a quick settlement may be in the works between the two camps:

President Obama has championed a public plan, saying it would help “keep the private sector honest,” though he has indicated he will be flexible on the details.

House Democratic leaders, including three committee chairmen drafting the House bill, are close to Senator Kennedy’s position.

Democrats on the Finance Committee said Mr. Baucus was exploring a possible compromise. Under this proposal, the public plan would be created only if private insurance companies had not made meaningful, affordable coverage available to all Americans within several years.

Senate Democrats said they believed that Mr. Baucus might settle for this “fallback plan,” which could win some support on both sides of his committee, from people like Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat, and Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, a Republican.

Enter Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, who is also authoring what he describes as a compromise plan both Kennedy and Baucus could embrace.

Schumer proposes that a public option would comply with the same regulations and standards required of private health insurers. The Medicare-like program, open to any individual regardless of age or pre-existing condition, would also need to be financially self-sustaining — without a direct pipeline into the U.S. Treasury to keep it afloat. The public option plan, backed by the full faith and credit of the federal government, has become one of the bigger sticking points raised by the insurance industry as unfair competition with the private sector.

The Washington Post describes the bill as lending the FDA “broad new enforcement tools, including the authority to recall tainted food, the ability to ‘quarantine’ suspect food, and the power to impose civil penalties and increased criminal sanctions on violators.”

Among other things, the proposal would put greater responsibility on growers, manufacturers and food handlers by requiring them to identify contamination risks, document the steps they take to prevent them and provide those records to federal regulators. The legislation also would allow the FDA to require private laboratories used by food manufacturers to report the detection of pathogens in food products directly to the government.

Just one question: Why doesn’t FDA have these powers already?

“Sonia Sotomayor is a tremendous choice for the U.S. Supreme Court. She is a thoughtful and balanced judge with a keen intellect and a broad academic and legal background. Her skill and fair-mindedness on the federal bench has won the praise and support of Republicans and Democrats alike.

“Judge Sotomayor’s nomination is historic. If confirmed, she will be only the third woman and the first Hispanic to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. She brings with her a compelling life story and personal experience that will add to the Court’s diversity and its shared understanding of how its decisions affect the daily lives of hardworking Americans.

“Today, President Obama has showed us how he can bring this country together. By selecting Judge Sotomayor, he has chosen a nominee who has previously been nominated for judicial appointments by President George H.W. Bush and by President Bill Clinton. Judge Sotomayor has been confirmed twice before by the full Senate and her nomination to the Supreme Court should be considered swiftly.”

Bennet reminds that Sotomayor won bipartisan support when she was confirmed to the 2nd Circuit as a federal judge in 1998. The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent makes the same point in a post noting seven sitting GOP senators backed Sotomayor, which could portend a rift in the party if Republican hard-liners oppose her nomination to the Supreme Court.

Colorado’s two senators — both Republicans — split on Sotomayor’s confirmation to the federal bench a decade ago. Former Sen. Wayne Allard voted nay, along with 28 of his colleagues, all Republicans. But former Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell joined 24 Republican senators and 42 Democrats voting yea.

As Sargent notes, current GOP senators Richard Lugar, Olympia Snowe, Robert Bennett, Thad Cochran, Susan Collins, Orrin Hatch, and Judd Gregg all voted to confirm Sotomayor. Arlen Specter, who recently switched parties, also supported Sotomayor in 1998.

“Today across the United States, there are not enough agricultural workers to pick, prune, pack or harvest our country’s crops,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the sponsor of the bill, said in a statement. “With an inadequate supply of workers, farmers from Maine to California, and from Washington State to Georgia, have watched their produce rot and their farms lay fallow.”

Feinstein’s proposal would create a special “blue card” status for undocumented immigrants who’ve worked a minimum number of hours in the agriculture sector in the past two years. The bill would also allow blue card recipients to apply for green card status after working an additional stretch on America’s farms — either three years working at least 150 days a year, or five years working at least 100 days a year.

The message is clear: Americans may be out of work, but there are certain jobs we simply won’t do. And while it’s true that many of these jobs are temporary, and therefore not terribly attractive to folks with mortgages and monthly cable bills, not all of them fit that category. Indeed, here’s Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., a co-sponsor of the bill, on the troubles facing his state’s dairy farmers:

This problem is particularly acute for the dairy industry, where the employment needs are year-round and require a significant investment from the farmer in terms of training and development.

Immigration restrictionists might want to acknowledge these dynamics as they continue their fight to barricade the borders and deport the undocumented workers already across the line.