John Cornyn: “This immigration bill is leaving all of us with a sense of deja vu. That is the sense that we have been here before.…”

“This immigration bill is leaving all of us with a sense of deja vu. That is the sense that we have been here before. Strangely, not much has changed. Once again we see that this process ignores the request, the stated desire of many of us, to have an open and transparent debate, an opportunity to offer amendments and to have votes on those amendments. As a matter of fact, I understand the condition upon which some of us are even being allowed to speak now is that we just debate, and we not even be so presumptuous as to seek to offer a unanimous consent request for amendments. This is a bizarre process. As we have seen so far, we started off rather inauspiciously, where because of constraints being placed on Senators, denying them the rights they have--Senators, I thought, had--and the responsibility that each of us has on behalf of our constituents to try to improve this legislation, to debate it--because we have been denied those basic rights of a United States Senator, we find ourselves in a strange position now.”