Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) filed a modified version of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act to address several of the concerns expressed by Republicans — namely the GOP talking points criticisms voiced in a memo put out by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) last week. Media Matter’s Political Correction already debunked several of Sessions’ claims before a new bill was even introduced. The latest version of the DREAM Act further blows each of his grievances out of the water:

CLAIM: “The DREAM Act Is NOT Limited to Children, And It Will Be Funded On the Backs Of Hard Working, Law-Abiding Americans”:

REVISION: The latest version of the DREAM Act lowers the age cap for eligibility from 35 to 29 on the date of enactment. It’s worth noting that an earlier version of the DREAM Act that was authored by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and co-sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), did not include any age cap and was approved by the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee on a 16-3 vote.

CLAIM: “The DREAM Act PROVIDES SAFE HARBOR FOR ANY ALIEN, Including Criminals, From Being Removed or Deported If They Simply Submit An Application and Certain Criminal Aliens Will Be Eligible For Amnesty Under The DREAM Act”

REVISION: Anyone who applies for the DREAM Act and has an outstanding deportation order must show that s/he is likely to qualify in order to receive a stay of deportation while the application is pending. Since the DREAM Act already requires security and law-enforcement background checks, criminals will not be able to delay their deportation nor will they qualify for a path to legalization.

CLAIM: “Despite Their Current Illegal Status, DREAM Act Aliens Will Be Given All The Rights That Legal Immigrants Receive—Including The Legal Right To Sponsor Their Parents and Extended Family Members For Immigration”

REVISION: The DREAM Act is not amnesty. Applicants must go through a rigorous process of background checks, in addition to paying taxes, learning English, and either serving in the military or attending college. The new version is even more stringent and does not grant legal immigrant status to anyone for at least 10 years. Instead, they receive “conditional nonimmigrant” status once they establish that they qualify. In other words, if they fail to meet any of the DREAM Act’s requirements during those 10 years, they can be stripped of their status. The new bill also specifically excludes nonimmigrants from the health insurance exchanges, Medicaid, Food Stamps and other entitlement programs.

DREAM Act individuals have very limited ability to sponsor family members for U.S. citizenship. They can not sponsor extended family and parents or siblings would have to wait 12 years before their DREAM Act relative can even start the sponsorship process. If those parents or siblings entered the U.S. illegally, they would have to return to their home country for ten years. Essentially, it could be decades before a DREAM Act student’s immediate family could legally live in the U.S.

CLAIM: “Current Illegal Aliens Will Get Federal Student Loans, Federal Work Study Programs, and Other Forms of Federal Financial Aid an Illegal Aliens Will Get In-State Tuition Benefits”

REVISION: Unlike previous versions of the DREAM Act, the latest bill does not repeal the ban on in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants. Also, it would not allow undocumented immigrants to receive in-state tuition or Pell and other federal grants.

Soon, Sessions and his Republican colleagues will run out of semi-rational excuses to vote against the DREAM Act. However, that doesn’t mean they won’t. My guess is that Sessions and the far right will continue to stall and further misrepresent the bill as they always have. Hopefully, though, the modified DREAM Act will give at least a few “moderate” Republicans enough cover to get the legislation over the finish line.

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) said Wednesday that he is going to hold the nuclear security of the United States hostage in order to pass the tax cuts for rich. Kyl said Obama must reach a deal on extending the Bush tax cuts by Monday if a nuclear arms treaty has a chance of passing the Senate by the end of the year:

Kyl said if negotiators don’t reach a deal on the Bush taxes within a week “then you’re not going to have time to do START.”… The emerging conventional wisdom has been that Senate Republicans would agree to ratify START if Obama and Democratic leaders agreed to a temporary extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

One exasperated GOP aide admitted to the National Review “the two are completely unrelated.” Instead of just allowing a vote to go through and approaching the treaty and US national security, as something above the standard political games of domestic politics, Kyl is willing to potentially risk nuclear security so people making over $250,000 have a tax cut.

After Kyl signaled that he would obstruct the treaty earlier this month, the entire top brass of the U.S. military, and a who’s who of Republican foreign policy leaders (including Colin Powell today), as well as the editorial boards of more than 40 newspapers across the country, ripped Kyl directly for trying to obstruct the treaty and for putting politics above nuclear security. Kyl and Senate Republicans now appear to have backed down and seem supportive of a START vote in the lame duck.

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) said today that President Obama must reach a deal on extending the Bush tax cuts by Monday if a nuclear arms treaty has a chance of passing the Senate by the end of the year. The Hill reports on Kyl’s willingness to hold the nuclear security of the United States hostage in order to pass the tax cuts for rich:

Kyl said if negotiators don’t reach a deal on the Bush taxes within a week “then you’re not going to have time to do START”… The emerging conventional wisdom has been that Senate Republicans would agree to ratify START if Obama and Democratic leaders agreed to a temporary extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

Through this latest maneuver, Kyl has demonstrated that nothing is more important to the Senate GOP than tax cuts for the richest Americans, not even the nuclear security of the United States. An exasperated GOP Aide even told the National Review “the two are completely unrelated.”

Delay of New START would likely mean its death and would almost certainly lead to: a rapid deterioration in US-Russian relations; the fraying of the sanctions coalition against Iran; jeopardizing supply routes for troops in Afghanistan; and as Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned yesterday, it would lead to a new nuclear arms race. The collapse of this modest treaty would have immodest results.

Kyl, in fact, likely knows the implications. He has never outwardly opposed the treaty, and on Meet the Press this past Sunday, he refused to attack it. In the past he was supportive of START. Kyl appears to have just been trying to stall the treaty to deny Obama a perceived political victory.

After Kyl signaled that he would obstruct the treaty earlier this month, the entire top brass of the US military, and a who’s who of Republican foreign policy leaders (including Colin Powell today), as well as the editorial boards of more than 40 newspapers across the country, ripped Kyl directly for trying to obstruct the treaty and for putting politics above nuclear security.

Kyl and Senate Republicans now appear to have backed down and seem supportive of a START vote in the lame duck. But instead of just allowing a vote to go through and approaching the treaty and US national security as something above the standard political games of domestic politics, Kyl is willing to potentially risk nuclear security so people making over $250,000 get a tax cut.

Karim Sadjapour applauds the Obama administration for resisting calls for preventive war against Iran, but also notes that a strategy that focuses primarily on the military containment of Iran “ignores the fact that Iran’s strength lies primarily in its political influence, not its military prowess”:

Tehran’s military budget is less than a quarter of regional rival Saudi Arabia’s. But its soft power, along with it support for militias, can undermine governments with vastly superior armies, as has been evidenced by the US in Iraq.

As I write in an article today in the American Prospect, the Bush years were boom years for Iran’s influence in the Middle East. It’s enormously important to understand Arab leaders’ concern in that context, as well as to understand that the idea that we can fix the problems created by one boneheaded preventive military intervention (in Iraq) with another (in Iran) is, to use an obscure political science term, just nuts.

Sadjadpour also raises a great question about what sort of Iran hawkish Arab leaders might actually like to see:

The WikiLeaks revelations make clear that Arab officials believe Iran to be inherently dishonest and dangerous. The feeling is probably mutual. But they hide perhaps a more interesting issue, namely what type of Iranian government would actually best serve Gulf Arab interests.

President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad and the Islamic Republic may be loathed, but equally the advent of a more progressive, democratic Iran would enable Tehran to emerge from its largely self-inflicted isolation and begin to realise its enormous potential. In the zero-sum game of Middle Eastern politics, a democratic Iran would pose huge challenges to Persian Gulf sheikhdoms.

It’s also worth mentioning here that, while Arab leaders obviously haven’t been pleased with the the rise in Iranian influence that occurred during the Bush administration, we’d be kidding ourselves to think that they’re remotely interested in a less repressive Iran, or that they viewed Iran’s post-election Green movement protests with anything other than complete dismay and trepidation. Their fear of an actual, successful Iranian democratic reform movement echoing across the region may not be as high as their fear of a nuclear-emboldened Iran, but it’s not too far down the list.

So when Iranian human rights activists like Akbar Ganji and Shirin Ebadi say that an attack on Iran would deal a deathblow to Iran’s democracy movement, we should understand that this is really not something that would bother Arab authoritarians too much. Nor, apparently, their new neoconservative boosters, a point I address in a bloggingheads I did with Rob Farley yesterday:

Bill Gertz of the conservative Washington Times should be applauded for the amazing piece of journalistic gymnastics he does this morning. Gertz, in Glenn Beck-conspiratorial fashion, takes an issue that is uncontroversial and that the State Department has been quite open about – its efforts to cooperate with Russia on missile defense – and contorts it into “secret” talks in the effort to reach a “secret” deal that would somehow secretly constrain missile defense. If there was an anti-Pulitzer award for bad journalism this piece would put Bill Gertz in contention.

Let’s start with the premise that the Obama administration is seeking to cooperate with the Russians on missile defense. This is true. That sounds like some shady left wing effort to gut missile defense and surrender to the Russians, right? Republican Senators are even concerned! Mark Kirk yesterday said “I was also concerned about this entirely new proposal bringing the Russians into the missile defense program of the United States.”

Except every US president has tried to do this, starting with Ronald Reagan. Reagan offered to cooperate with the Soviets on missile defense at the Reykjavik summit in 1986. At the summit in Sochi in April 2008, Presidents Bush and Putin even agreed to a strategic framework document that endorsed exploring a broader anti-missile architecture that would involve Europe, Russia, and the United States as “equal partners.” A State Department in a fact sheet notes that:

In 2004, under the Bush Administration, the United States began seeking a Defense Technical Cooperation Agreement (DTCA) with Russia. The DTCA is a broad agreement that, once concluded, would address the Parties’ responsibilities and rights with respect to a broad range of defense-related cooperative research and development activities, including missile defense. The last DTCA discussions with Russia were held in 2008.

In other words, there is nothing new here. The Obama administration is seeking to get the Russians to drop their opposition to missile defense by finding ways to cooperate with them so that we can build more missile defenses. At the Lisbon NATO summit this month the Administration scored a big victory when it got Russia to climb down from its opposition to European missile defense. This was a huge get for missile defense proponents, but now to the right wing this is part of some conspiracy theory to kill missile defense. In reality, the fact that there is movement on this issue is another success of the Administration’s reset of US-Russia relations.

But if this is good for missile defense why were the talks secret? What do you say to that Obama! Gertz writes:

The internal report contradicts congressional testimony by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in June denying a missile defense deal was in the works.

The only problem here is that the “secret talks” were not secret! Gertz must have dozed off during the START hearings or perhaps he lost his Lexis-Nexis account due to the downturn in the newspaper business, but both Secretary Clinton and Gates testified about the effort.

Here is Hillary Clinton testifying on May 18th in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC):

And furthermore, we continue to offer to work with the Russians on missile defense. We have a standing offer, and we hope that eventually they will because we think we now have common enemies.

Here is Gates at a June 17th hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the very time Gertz alleges they denied a secret deal:

Separately from the treaty, we are discussing missile defense cooperation with Russia, which we believe is in the interests of both nations. But such talks have nothing to do with imposing any limitations on our programs or deployment plans.

At a June 15 SFRC Hearing, Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller said:

I would just like to underscore one point that we have not yet addressed this afternoon, and that is that the United States have been talking very extensively to Russia about missile defense cooperation… my under secretary, Ellen Tauscher, has been working very extensively with the Russians to develop missile defense cooperation.

And as for denying that a deal had been reached, that’s probably because no deal had been reached! Gertz’s only piece of evidence is a draft document that State used for the talks. Is it a bad thing that the State Department before entering talks on missile defense cooperation — talks they told Congress about — went in prepared with a possible draft agreement in the unlikely case the Russians said yes? That is what the State Department is supposed to do.

Finally, this all ties in with a broader right wing conspiracy theory that this non-existent “secret” missile defense deal, along with the New START treaty is all part of some plot to unravel missile defense. But the fact is that the START treaty in no way constrains missile defense. The Bush-appointed head of the Missile Defense Agency, General Patrick O’Reilly, even testified that the New START treaty was good for missile defense, as it “actually reduces constraints on the development of the missile defense program.” Right wingers need to read that line again and again and again.

This past summer, Utah State Rep. Stephen Sandstrom (R) introduced an enforcement-only immigration bill that closely mirrored the controversial law that was passed in Arizona earlier this year.

However, it appears his bill won’t be the only immigration legislation on the docket. Utah state Sen. Luz Robles (D) has teamed up with the Sutherland Institute — a local conservative think tank — to write a bill that would require undocumented immigrants in Utah to learn English, enroll in civics classes, undergo criminal-background checks, and eventually carry a state-issued work permit. Employers would be penalized for hiring undocumented immigrants without the permits. Salt Lake City’s Fox13 reports:

Robles introduced Tuesday a 21-page piece of legislation still in the drafting stages called the Utah Pilot Accountability Permit Program. [...] Robles says the program is not amnesty or a path to citizenship.

“Immigration is a federal issue and we all recognize that, but the federal government has failed to take care of this issue and it has been an issue for at least decades,” said Robles. “The state have been working on reactionary and proactive solution and we believe this is a Utah solution.”

There to support Robles’ bill, The Sutherland Institute’s president, Paul Mero says it is the most conservative legislation in Utah that will ultimately hold undocumented immigrants living in the state accountable. “The only other option that is out there right now has been suggested by representative Sandstrom. And that’s a catch and release bill and there is zero accountability,” Mero said.

Watch Fox13′s coverage:

 

Anti-immigrant groups have blasted Robles’ proposal. Cherilyn Eagar of the Utah Coalition on Illegal Immigration, stated, “If they are working and undocumented, they are committing felonies. So I don’t know who they are planning on identifying, other than those who are committing crime, and that’s why we need Sandstrom’s bill.” (The act of being in the U.S. unlawfully is actually a misdemeanor).

However, Robles and the Sutherland Institute claim that their proposal is far more practical than Sandstrom’s alternative. Paul Mero, president of The Sutherland Institute said the bill offers total accountability, stating, “It prescribes, in no uncertain terms, that if you’re an undocumented immigrant in Utah, you’ll either proudly carry an accountability card or you won’t. If you do, you’re welcome among us. If you don’t, you’re not welcome among us. It’s that simple.”

Dimitri Mumulidisz of the Democratic Lawyers Council further explained that the bill makes economic sense. Mumulidisz went as far to say that it would create a “positive revenue stream for Utah,” as putting undocumented immigrants in the system and on tax rolls would raise wages for those currently being exploited.

Although it sounds like Robles’ bill certainly represents a commonsense approach to immigration, it’s too early to say whether it will overcome several of the federal preemption issues that often conflict with state and local immigration bills. However, at the very least, it presents an offensive move and an alternative to all the draconian, Arizona copycat laws that are currently popping up across the country. Also, the fact that polls show that most Americans support a rational approach to immigration that is similar to the Utah Pilot Accountability Permit Program over Arizona’s SB-1070 suggests that it may even be met with more widespread support.