Your phone calls won the day!!!! Border security amendment passed 259-167

BIG CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL OF YOU!

You won!

And everybody on all sides in the U.S. House was surprised. You caused what may have been a watershed vote today. Thanks to every one of you who made phone calls as we requested the last two days.

You handed the open-borders leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives a huge defeat today. And what a margin!


259-167!

H.R. 324 (the Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage Area Act) late this afternoon was amended to ensure that nothing about the designation would affect the ability of the Border Patrol to carry out its enforcement duties. Without that language, there was a huge loophole that very well might have been used to block efforts to stop the movement of illegal aliens across that huge Arizona area.

Republicans voted unanimously 174-0 in favor of the pro-enforcement change. Even the usually-open-borders Republicans felt compelled to vote for it.

But Republicans can't make anything happen on their own. And they almost never persuade the necessary 40-45 Democrats it takes to win on anything the last three years.

But the Republican leadership won today because it rallied behind an immigration-enforcement measure that the public would overwhelmingly support.

This change of language won because your barrage of phone calls yesterday and today caused 85 Democrats to know that their constituents really care about border security, that they are paying attention to even obscure legislative happenings and that they very well might punish them if they continue to vote with the open-borders leanings of their Party leadership.

85 Democrats voted with us.

Go to our home page to see how your Reprentative voted. The Vote Tracker will be up soon.

BREAKING OPEN-BORDERS ARROGANCE

One reason this vote was so important is that it may have sent a message to Speaker Pelosi and all her team that they cannot afford to continue to be on the wrong side of the immigration issue on any bill they care about.

Pelosi's response to concerns about illegal aliens and the federal health plan was to demand that those concerns NOT be addressed. The result -- thanks to incredible work of NumbersUSA activists and others throughout August -- was that those concerns became a huge public negative on the health bill. Even Pres. Obama had to dissassociate himself from Pelosi's position.

THE INSIDE STORY OF YOUR VICTORY

It is always good to savor a victory. The NumbersUSA culture for 13 years has been to roll around in the victory, and then start fighting the next battle the next day.

Enjoy.

In committee, Rep. Bishop (R-Utah) expressed a concern about the H.R. 324 Arizona bill undercutting border security efforts, the leadership suspended the rules and refused to even allow a vote on a Bishop amendment.

Tuesday morning, we learned from Rep. Bishop that he was going to take on an uphill battle to persuade the House Rules Committee to allow his amendment to come up for a vote on the House floor Wednesday. There once was a time under both Parties that Members of the House were given lots of opportunity to amend and perfect a bill on the floor. Now, very few amendments are ever allowed unless the House leadership favors them.

We mobilized our members across the nation Tuesday mid-day, and within an hour had phones ringing throughout the House, asking that the Bishop pro-enforcement amendment be allowed a vote.

By Tuesday evening after hours of phoning that raised this issue to top visibility on the Hill, Rep. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) was ready to tell the Rules Committee that he would offer to change his bill to have language to meet the concerns of Bishop and the phone callers. We appreciated his new-found sensitivity.

By Wednesday morning, Rep. Bishop saw that the new Grijalva language was too loose but that the addition would preclude the Rules Committee from letting the Bishop amendment come to a vote. With the high visibility that your phone calls were giving this issue, Rep. Bishop was able to get the attention of Republican leadership which agreed to mobilize all the Republicans behind the one tool still available to the minority -- the Motion to Recommit.

At mid-Wednesday -- once we knew we had the Republican votes because of leadership support -- we mobilized NumbersUSA's members to phone Democratic Members to try to persuade 40 to vote for the Motion to Recommit (which generally is seen as a slam against the majority Party's leadership).

Frankly, when the voting started late Wednesday afternoon, we assumed we would lose by 10-25 votes. Early voting suggested we were right.

I think Bishop and the Republican leadership primarily hoped to make a statement, not to actually win.

But with only about 20 votes (mainly Democratic) still out, we had a basically tied vote at around 205-205. At that point, 37 Democrats were voting YES. Our experience is that Speaker Pelosi allows as many politically vulnerable Democrats as possible to vote with us but pressures others to either vote the other way or hold their votes until the end and then vote based on what will eek out a one-vote victory for the Speaker. So, we prepared ourselves for the Democratic vote staying just below the 40 it looked like we would need.

Suddenly just before the end of the voting, we saw that two or three Democrats who had voted NO were switching their votes to YES.

Then, all but three of the rest of the Republicans arrived and cast YES votes.

The Democratic tally went up to 40.

And then the dam burst, with the rest of the Democrats finally casting their votes, with most of them voting YES! Several more Democrats who had voted NO earlier now saw that the amendment was going to pass anyway and switched to YES because they knew their constituents would prefer a YES.

In those final frenzied minutes of voting, the tally went from around 205-205 to 259-167. A total of 38 Democrats changed from NO to YES. The number of Democrats voting for pro-border-enforcement went from 37 to 85. (I know what you are asking and the answer is that I don't know a way to find which 38 of the 85 YES-Democrats changed their votes after first voting NO.)

After our victory in approval of the Motion to Recommit, Rep. Grijalva accepted the language to guarantee no prohibitions on border enforcement and to make permanent a key highway checkpoint. After a series of quick parliamentary procedures, the bill came up for a vote and passed quickly, with the strong language intact. He could have avoided the whole controversy by allowing a vote on Rep. Bishop's amendment in committee. Rep. Grijalva claimed that the amendment was not needed and did not change anything about the bill. Perhaps sponsors of bills in the future will decide that it is just easier to accept our side's language that essentially verifies that what is promised on enforcement actualy happens.

Unfortunately, the Republican leadership at the last minute messed up the original deal which had the Motion to Recommit being only about immigration. It added a small amount of language about another issue and ruined our ability to score the vote as a clear immigration vote on our Grade Cards. That is why you won't see the vote showing up in the individual records or the Members.

WHAT DID WE LEARN AND ACCOMPLISH?

First, we escaped a potential disaster in which much of southern Arizona would be largely off-limits to intense Border Patrol activity -- while becoming more and more ON-limits to drug trafficers and human smugglers.

Second, we sent a clear message to the Pelosi regime that it can't count on its Democratic Members to deliver majorities to the open-borders agenda.

I don't believe for a minute that Pelosi isn't able to continue to arm-twist, threaten and make promises to keep a lot of those 85 Democrats in line. But we learned today that 85 Democrats definitely want their constituents to see them on OUR side.

I also think most of the first 37 Democrats who voted YES not only need to be seen with us for political reasons but are philosophically with us. They WANT to be with us or they NEED to be with us so badly that they aren't going to be taking any dives for Speaker Pelosi.

For those entities trying to force Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid to bring comprehensive amnesty up for a vote, their job got a lot harder today. How does Pelosi get a majority for an amnesty when 85 Democrats wouldn't hold with her on an obscure issue that was getting ZERO media attention today?

Finally, we learned a lot about all of you in the NumbersUSA membership. This was a situation in which NONE of our allied organizations got involved in this brief 30-hour battle. NO talk radio show joined in the mobilization. NONE of the Members of Congress took to the airwaves to promote this Motion to Recommit.

THE ONLY ENTITY MOBILIZING AND PUBLICLY PROMOTING PASSAGE OF THE MOTION TO RECOMMIT TODAY was NumbersUSA's army of committed volunteer citizen activists.

THANKS,
Roy Beck