Christopher “Kit” Bond and Claire McCaskill voted last Thursday to block a bill that would have provided a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants.
The 46-53 Senate vote fell well short of the 60 votes needed to move toward a final passage.
Although some supporters of the bill said they would try to revive it at a later date, McCaskill told reporters after the vote “it’s dead.”
Just last week, the Texas County Republican Committee voted unanimously to oppose the legislation that would have allowed amnesty for millions of illegal residents. According to the resolution, local Republicans said the country “must seal our borders totally. We cannot afford to not seal our borders. We must return all illegal immigrants to where they came from. We must not increase legal immigration quotas. We support legal immigration.”
The resolution suggested current laws need enforcement and employers who hire illegal immigrants should be punished.
“The president couldn’t even get the Republican leader of the Senate (Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.) to vote with him,” McCaskill said. “I can’t imagine that there would be any bigger signal to the White House that this bill is dead.”
Both senators consistently opposed the legislation, but for different reasons.
McCaskill, D-Mo., opposed the bill because it would expand the guest worker program.
Bond, R-Mo., considered the legislation to be “fundamentally flawed” because it would allow illegal immigrants to become citizens.
“We need to do more to secure our borders, but we cannot be held hostage by those who want amnesty for illegal aliens,” Bond said in a statement.
“This bill would legalize illegal immigrants who broke our laws and flaunted our rules,” Bond said. “Unfortunately, my attempts to strike that legalization and cut their path to citizenship failed.”
The Senate voted 56-41 last Wednesday to set aside an amendment by Bond that would have prohibited illegal immigrants from becoming citizens.
“The amnesty provisions and the $20 billion in new unfunded mandatory entitlement spending for illegal immigrants doomed this bill, and I was proud to oppose it,” Bond said.