This AP report on the coming conflict over the immigration bill’s family reunification provisions suggests at least four scenarios. The best scenario would see family reunification amendments passing, Republican pulling out of the compromise, and the death of the bill.

The next two scenarios are bad. In the first, family reunification amendments pass and Republicans continue to support the bill anyway. (This would surely compound both the policy and the political disaster.) The third scenario plays out along the lines of the “compromise” floated at the end of the article. Here, the Republicans agree to more liberal family reunification laws in exchange for a “touchback” (i.e. a brief return home, say, to Mexico) for illegals before they are granted amnesty. That strikes me as giving away the store on family reunification while getting an essentially meaningless touchback in return.

The fourth and only slightly less bad scenario is the simple failure of the family reunification amendments, which would presumably keep the coalition for passage together. In any case, these seem like the key scenarios we’ll be facing over the next few days.