Mark Steyn dissects Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott's floor speech today on the immigration bill.

Some excerpts:

...people like Trent Lott are in large part responsible for the debark last November, in that he embodies, both in his generally witless remarks, but also in the idea that he forms part of this permanent governing class, everything that he Republican base came to loathe about the Republican Congress.
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..the idea that somehow it’s a great thing that Congress is just passing so-called comprehensive bills, regardless of whether any of these Senators have read them, I don’t think that’s a good idea. And if he wants to vote to dissolve Congress, then Amen.
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But in this situation, you have a situation where both parties in a two-party system are at odds with the vast majority of the American public. And if bipartisanship means that the two parties agree to gang up on the citizenry of this country, then I’d rather have none of it.
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Republican Senators, this is what they loathe about them, that they become clubby, process bores, and the process, their love of the process overrides everything else. You know, people have reservations about this bill, and objections to this bill, because the only thing that matters about it, which is this immediate, instant, probationary legal status it confers on millions and millions of people, plus the attendant implications of that for their extended families.
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That’s bipartisanship at the very definition of it. The Republicans agree with Ted Kennedy. That’s the official version of bipartisanship in the United States Senate.
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the interesting thing about immigration, I think, is that in some ways, this is not seen by the Republican base, and indeed, large numbers of the Democratic Party, too, as primarily an immigration issue. It’s seen as a criminal issue, it’s seen as an assault on sovereignty. And I think that’s what the Republicans don’t get, that they’re looking at it, people like Trent Lott look at it as a way of making a technical adjustment to an existing situation. And I think, for example, Harry Reid’s reference to 12 million undocumented Americans, as he put it, that’s a term I’ve been using as a joke for five years, ever since people started introducing this phrase of undocumented workers. I’ve been making jokes about fine, upstanding members of the undocumented American community. It’s an absurd proposition.