An e-mail passed on to me from Brent raises a great question:

Why is it that Russert/Cooper et.al. keep asking McCain if he would sign the hated S.1639 as President if given the opportunity (allowing him to weasel out of a direct answer by claiming it won’t ever happen? Why not ask him this instead:
“Senator McCain, there are currently two Senate versions of HR 4088, Rep. Heath Shuler’s “SAVE Act”, which focuses exclusively on border security and interior enforcement, and enjoys bipartisan support in the House. In light of your commitment to ‘securing the borders first’, will you work to assure passage of that bill, and would you sign it into law as President if granted the opportunity?”
Try to make him say yes or no, and see how he reacts.
I simply don’t understand why they keep bringing up the issue in a way he can weasel out of stating unequivocally what he will do if elected.

I’m ashamed I hadn’t thought of this myself. People on the Hill have told me that the House Democrat leadership may actually move Shuler’s enforcement-only bill to give their vulnerable members a better chance in November. So unlike a big amnesty bill that McCain keeps telling us isn’t going to happen, it’s perfectly plausible that he would have to decide whether to vote for Shuler’s bill this year or sign it next year. Would he do it? I know what I think, but someone needs to ask him.

Also, a prominent California Republican whom I respect e-mailed me yesterday:

McCain’s chairman in California, who shares our views on illegal immigration, assures me McCain has committed to building the fence and prosecuting employers who hire anyone without a tamper-proof card — which is what he said in the debate last night. I don’t expect to hear such a public commitment from Hillary or Obama. And if I did, I wouldn’t believe it.

I, of course, don’t believe McCain either, and nor should you. But if McCain does want to placate immigration critics, he can take Mickey Kaus’s advice and pledge not to promote or sign any legalization bill during his first term, focusing exclusively on enforcement, and reserve legalization and a “temporary” worker program as issues for his reelection campaign — at which point the voters could assess his progress in clamping down on illegal immigration, not the border governors, who would gladly lie for McCain to get an amnesty through.