To listen to Cardinal Mahony, you would think that the House Republicans had passed a bill that said “Anyone who offers food or other charity to illegal immigrants will go to jail for five years. Anyone who does not check immigrants’ papers before offering charity will also go to jail.” Their bill actually made it a crime to “assist” an illegal immigrant to stay here, either knowing the illegality or in “reckless disregard” of it.

Mahoney’s reading of the Sensenbrenner bill isn’t a “plain language” interpretation of it, as the National Catholic Reporter claims in the editorial to which Jim Boulet linked below. It is a far-fetched, highly implausible reading of it. No one who wasn’t coming to this with the presupposition that a Republican bill must be trying to prohibit the charitable treatment of illegal immigrants–or with a political motive to accuse them of it–would read the statute the way he did.

That is, of course, an assertion on my part, just as NCR’s entire argument on this point consists of the assertion that the “plain language” of the statute would ban soup kitchens from serving illegal immigrants. But there is also evidence for the implausibility of the Mahony/NCR reading of the statute: namely, no one has ever interpreted similar language that is already on the books in this way. Nobody ever advanced this strained interpretation before the debates of 2006. It has been made to order for these debates.