Next!

Hope you weren't planning on catching your breath anytime soon:

Open Congress reports:

While Congress continues to plow full steam ahead on health care, Democrats in the House recently took a big step forward on another huge and contentious issue, immigration. On Tuesday, Rep. Solomon Ortiz [D, TX-27] and Rep. Luis Gutierez [D, IL-4] introduced comprehensive immigration reform legislation that will serve as the starting point for Congress’ work on the issue this session....

H.R. 4132 – Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America’s Prosperity and Security Act of 2009

As a first step on immigration reform for the 111th session of Congress, it’s pretty aggressive. The bill touches on just about all elements of immigration reform, from border security to foreign worker visas to employment eligibility verification. It generally follows the same framework of the comprehensive immigration bills that were attempted by the 110th Congress under President Bush and failed mainly because of public opposition to providing a process for immigrants who are currently undocumented to eventually become legal residents.

Is there a sense anywhere that public opinion on immigration has changed since the last time this was attempted? Given the low opinion of Congress, I would think that sentiment on immigration would have to have improved dramatically since then, something that I see little evidence of.

On the up-side, at some point we are simply going to run out of big issues to tackle. At which point we will no doubt begin tackling the unforeseen consequences of our earlier actions.