“This is an issue that is boiling, and it is not one that is going to be a happy outcome for Democrats,” said Lamm, who favors tougher immigration and border enforcement policies.
The White House pre-empted the suit —which it insisted it had no immediate role in — with a sweeping speech last week in which President Obama talked up the need for "comprehensive reform" and a bipartisan fix.
But the speech got little by way of traction, and didn't do much to offset the political dangers for Democrats dealing up close with an immigration law that has the support of nearly 60 percent of Arizonans.
At least three Arizona Democrats saw trouble they could face in November, and broached the topic with the White House well in advance of the court filing, which the administration first announced last month.
Three House Democrats who are all facing tough reelection fights — Reps. Ann Kirkpatrick, Harry Mitchell and Gabrielle Giffords — asked the Obama administration last month to ditch any planned court battle, saying legal maneuvering isn't going to fix a system that's widely seen as broken.
Kirkpatrick on Tuesday called the suit “a sideshow, distracting us from the real task at hand.”
“A court battle between the federal government and Arizona will not move us closer to securing the border or fixing America’s broken immigration system," the freshman lawmaker said in a statement.
“Washington failed us on this issue again today, and Arizonans have had enough. ...” she added. “Our law enforcement and communities are at risk right now — this is a time for solutions, not new obstacles.”
Mitchell, who was elected 2006, said he was disappointed by the lawsuit, calling it “the wrong way to go.”
“Arizonans are tired of the grandstanding. Political posturing on this issue has to end,” he said.
Republicans, meanwhile, seized on the suit as more evidence that Washington has gone soft on the issue and abdicated it role in securing the border.
“There is a perception that the president is not only out of touch but really asleep at the wheel,” Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) told POLITICO.
Franks is among the many GOPers who have urged the president to visit the border.
“I don’t have confidence it would change [Obama’s] mind, but it might go a long way toward demonstrating his arrogance-to-competency ratio is not as catastrophically out of balance as it appears to be.”
Franks was one of 20 House Republicans who signed a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday taking the administration to task for filing suit over the Arizona law and ignoring the broader illegal immigration problem.
Both sides of the issue are well aware that, in every survey since Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed the bill into law, voters have shown support for the measure, which greatly complicates the situation for Democrats. Now, at a minimum, they’ll spend what should be a relatively sleepy stretch of summer months defending themselves on a wedge issue.
A May national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found 73 percent of Americans support requiring people to produce papers verifying their legal status if police ask for them.
In Colorado, home to a competitive Senate and gubernatorial race this fall and several vulnerable House Democrats, a Denver Post/9News Poll conducted last month showed even 62 percent of Colorado Hispanic voters — roughly the same percentage as white voters (61 percent) — would favor their state implementing a law similar to the one in Arizona.
Brewer has also gotten a bounce. A Rasmussen Reports poll released last week found 58 percent of all voters in the state approved of the job she was doing, a spike from 41 percent in March.
Not surprisingly, the administration's move drew near-uniform support from advocates pushing for comprehensive reform that includes a pathway to citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants — including labor heavyweights such as the AFL-CIO.
Yet one notable pro-reform group denouncing the move was ImmigrationWorks USA, a national federation of small business owners, whose leader feared the larger goal of a comprehensive reform bill next year is now in jeopardy.
It energizes the conservative Republican base in time for the crucial midterm elections and angers Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), whom the president should want on his side, said the group's president, Tamar Jacoby.
“This is tantamount to dropping a nuclear bomb on the senator they need most to pass comprehensive immigration reform,” Jacoby said. “If Jon Kyl is on the warpath against you, just forget it. Don’t bother. Today, the administration is making a choice that I am very concerned about.”
The issue for Republicans, one Democratic strategist said — and a potential saving grace for the House Democratic majority — will be how the GOP handles messaging.
There is a split among Republicans about how to approach immigration reform, with conservatives and tea party activists backing the Arizona measure and moderate GOP-ers using language similar to that Obama has used.
"If they don't package it right, then I think it could be a tie, with the tie going to the Democrats," the strategist said.
The illegal immigration issue already reared its head in the California gubernatorial primary last month, with state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner dragging former eBay CEO Meg Whitman to the right in ads over the issue, in which she vowed to be "tough as nails."
She won the primary, but is now plowing her personal fortune into Spanish-language paid media aimed at moving back toward the center and undoing damage caused with the state's Hispanic voters, who still recall the Prop. 187 fight with fury.
Chris Lehane, a California-based Democratic strategist, said the suit might help Democrats in the long run and also invoked the Pete Wilson comparison, saying the legacy of that maneuver was "good short-term politics for the Republicans and bad short-term for the Democrats, but it created an entire consituency that became Democratic."
Another point in the administration's favor? New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's recently announced coalition on immigration reform, which involved business leader and Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch. The mogul's involvement might serve to neutralize the heated discussion of immigration on the influential conservative cable network leading into the fall.
The problem with the politics of illegal immigration, said Dan Schnur, chairman of the California Fair Political Practices Commission and director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California, is that it's really "two issues in one."
"It's an issue of border security, but it's also an issue of civil rights," he said."In a general election,
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