Limbaugh to Arizona’s critics: The time for talk is over

Via the Right Scoop. Silly Rush, doesn’t he know that only The One is entitled to arbitrarily declare public debate over? For instance, remember when he started waving the checkered flag on ObamaCare alllllll the way back in July 2009, eight months before a bill finally passed and weeks before even the first health-care townhalls were held? I’ve got a crazy hunch that the “time for talk” about Arizona’s law, its passage notwithstanding, will drag on for considerably longer than that, albeit not a moment beyond its usefulness as a political football for the White House.

In fact, some Arizona voters are planning to make sure that it does:

A group calling itself One Arizona filed petitions with the state Wednesday to refer Arizona’s new immigration law to the November ballot…

Both efforts require the signatures of 76,682 registered voters within 90 days of the end of the legislative session. With the Legislature working toward an adjournment today, 4/29 that would mean petitions would be due at the end of July…

If organizers fail to make the November ballot, the measure would go before voters in the November 2012 general election. However, the mere filing of the petitions would put the law on hold until it could get before voters in November 2012.

Doesn’t matter. As I’ve said half a dozen times, the chief aim of the law was to spur Congress to act on comprehensive border enforcement and it’s doing a bang-up job on that front. In fact, Reid’s set to introduce a new amnesty bill this afternoon that’s reportedly light on the amnesty and heavy on the security. (I’ll post later when the details are out.) It won’t go anywhere unless it’s really heavy on security, which it won’t be, but the fact that Arizona’s raised national awareness about problems on the border has totally scrambled the Democrats’ plans to use this as a wedge issue. The idea originally was to introduce a comprehensive bill and let the GOP vote no, thereby infuriating Latino voters and mobilizing them for the midterms, but now you’re likely to see boatloads of centrist Dems defecting too. That’s why pols as starkly different as Obama and Boehner are now warning that a new bill might be DOA. And needless to say, the last thing Reid wants to be doing is pushing a bill that’s strongly pro-enforcement, but he has no choice if he wants to keep his promise to Latinos in Nevada to bring some sort of comprehensive bill to the floor. Come to think of it, to the extent that the state referendum in Arizona will postpone enforcement of the law, I wonder if it actually plays into supporters’ laws. The Dems’ best political chance to kill this thing will be if it’s put into practice and civil-rights violations start happening. If it’s not put into practice, they lose that ability and the cries for border enforcement will grow louder.

And of course, if the referendum does come off, it’s a lead-pipe cinch that Arizonans will approve it. Proof of how fringey they are? Not according to this new national poll from Gallup:

It’ll be a long and winding road for this thing in the courts, but for most voters, the time for talk really is over.

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