In 2006, Bernie Sanders Voted In Support Of An Immigration Conspiracy Theory

[Cali_Democrat]

A few months before Democrats swept the 2006 elections, an outcry raged in the fringier corners of the immigration debate. Treasonous American officials were tipping off the Mexican government about the whereabouts of Minutemen patrols, the argument went, making it impossible for the private army bent on preventing undocumented immigrants from crossing the border to do their jobs.

The outcry made it to Congress, where Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston, a Republican, introduced an amendment clearly directed at the Minutemen story. The amendment barred the Department of Homeland Security from providing “a foreign government information relating to the activities of an organized volunteer civilian action group, operating in the State of California, Texas, New Mexico, or Arizona.”

Kingston’s amendment overwhelmingly passed the Republican-controlled Congress, including the votes of 76 Democrats, most of them from the party’s then-strong Blue Dog conservative wing. Another person voted for the measure, too: Rep. Bernie Sanders, an independent in the midst of the campaign that would send him the U.S. Senate.

The Minutemen have long since faded from the the national conversation and from memory — in an interview with BuzzFeed News, Kingston had to dig deep to remember the specifics of the vote, and other prominent Republican Minuteman supporters of the time didn’t recall it at all — but fears that the federal government is undermining efforts by local authorities to fight illegal immigration continue.

Read more:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/evanmcsan/in-2006-bernie-sanders-voted-in-support-of-an-immigration-co

[NCTraveler]

1. Really shocking how many times he is on record voting against a pathway to citizenship.

Interesting nuance you have brought. Thanks.

We are really seeing a different picture now that he is being vetted. Iraq Liberation Act, support for deregulation, arming foreign armies, etc....

[Cali_Democrat]

8. You're welcome!

[Renew Deal]

2. Sanders has so many of these bizarre wingnut votes in his history

Probably the worst of which was voting against the Brady Bill

[notadmblnd]

3. You really can't help yourself, can you?

“People put forward nuisance amendments all the time,” Michael Briggs, Sanders’s top communications strategist and longtime aide, told BuzzFeed News. “In this case, the Customs and Border Patrol [according to Sabo] said it was a meaningless thing and [Sanders] and Sabo voted for it.”

Kingston did not recall the specifics of the the legislative wrangling that eventually passed the amendment with some Democratic support (it was not included in a final DHS funding bill passed by the Senate), but he recalled Sanders in Congress as an unpredictable iconoclast.

“One thing that is nice about a guy like that, he’s really philosophically true. He’s kind of like Ron Paul, you couldn’t get him off his belief system,” Kingston said. “He was pretty true to what he believed in. He would kind of jump in and out of various issues — he wasn’t just a dependable liberal yes vote any more than a Ron Paul would be a dependable conservative no vote.”

Historians of the Minuteman debate of the 2000s don’t remember the issues surrounding the amendment as a libertarian issue. Harel Shapira, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of a 2013 book on the Minutemen, cast the debate as steeped in conspiracy theories and fears that the Bush administration was undermining those trying to protect the border.

Spin it any way you like, but you are not making any new friends or influencing for the HRC fan club here.

[cosmicone]

4. The interesting thing is that he has never admitted

that those votes were wrong and a mistake looking back.

[Cali_Democrat]

6. He voted against Ted Kennedy's immigration reform bill

What a terrible vote.

[MaggieD]

9. He's a lot like Dubya in that regard

He is adamantly against ever admitting he made an error. It's not in his nature to be self reflective. That is why, to this day, he insists that economic security = racial justice, despite how many people's life experiences prove beyond a doubt that it just isn't so.

[Cali_Democrat]

10. The interesting thing about his immigration vote in 2006...

he was actually to the right of Dubya who supported immigration reform.

[MaggieD]

11. Good point - that's true

I guess that's why he doesn't seem to even be bothering much to get the Latino vote.

[JaneyVee]

5. NOT GOOD ENOUGH!!!

[Number23]

13. Can you explain that graphic please? What is going on there??

[LexVegas]

7. Not ready to be a real leader. nt

[HerbChestnut]

12. Wow, this thread is choc full o' memes