With the possibility looming last week that the major immigration reform bill pushed by Marco Rubio and the Gang of 8 might be in trouble, a veritable bomb was dropped on Thursday in the form of a border-security amendment proposed by two GOP Senators, Tennessee's Bob Corker and North Dakota's John Hoeven. Their amendment would add 20,000 new border patrol agents and the completion of 700 miles of fence along the southern border. Funding the patrol agents would cost $30 billion over ten years, and estimates show the fence could cost up to $6.5 million per mile.
But that's still not going to move certain Republicans in the Senate to support the legislation, including Kentucky's Rand Paul and Alabama's Jeff Sessions, who told CBS' Bob Schieffer on Face The Nation that the bill "grants amnesty first, and a mere promise of enforcement in the future."
This article appears in Jun 20-26, 2013.