Tancredo does Paris Hilton

Tom Tancredo is mad as hell, and he wants you to know he's not going to take it. "Mom, it isn't right," he sobs. Congressional Democrats and Republicans have reached across the aisle to write the first enforceable immigration legislation in decades, and Tancredo is furious.

"The whole focus of him traveling is to stop this bill. He's going to go wherever he's needed to make the best case to kill this."

So said Tancredo presidential campaign spokesman Alan Moore, explaining why Tancredo has decided to all but drop out of the presidential race. Tancredo says he intends to travel to Republican-held Congressional districts to run against fellow GOP members who favor solving the immigration problem.

The Senate this week is developing a bipartisan bill that will strengthen border security, and penalize undocumented workers and the companies that hire them. After such immigrants pay their debt to society for arriving unlawfully, they will have a path to clear up their status and work toward legal residence, even citizenship if they remain law-abiding. The labor needs of businesses will determine the allocation of visas.

It's not a perfect bill, but considering all the hot air on every side of the issue, perfection is the sworn enemy of the good. It's a solid bipartisan compromise, having even the president's support. It's the best our democracy can do. It deserves passage.

But Tancredo will have none of it. His entire career, based on anger toward immigrants, will come to an end if the immigration problem is solved. His voice is that of someone whose job is about to be downsized.

"This is the whole ballgame here to a large extent," Tancredo said.

Republican Senators temporarily delayed the bill with a filibuster on Friday, claiming that the bill isn't sufficiently cruel for their tastes. But Sen. Salazar plans more work on it next week. He has Archbishop Chaput's support.

"We can no longer wait to address this pressing humanitarian issue," [Chaput] said in a statement. "Delaying would lead to more enforcement raids, confusion, and resentment."

Salazar's challenge is very straight-forward: gradually increase the cruelty of the law until you satisfy enough Republicans to stop a filibuster. So the endlessly patient Salazar will keep introducing gradually more punitive versions of the bill, each time counting up the cries of "amnesty" (a Republican word meaning "excessively humane"). As soon as the number of "amnesty cries" drops below 40, the bill can pass.

Congressman Tancredo entered the presidential race to find a platform to preach about his pet issue, and use his support among Republican voters as a gauge of public support for his petulant stand. His poll numbers, well below the margin of error in every major poll, show the public doesn't have any measurable interest.

Will that stop his quixotic campaign? Probably not any time soon, but eventually fund-raising realities will catch up with him and he'll be back here asking the voters of Douglas County to re-elect him.

But voters in Douglas County aren't so fond of Tancredo's approach to immigration either. To our business-oriented voters, the Senate's approach looks very sensible. The next problem, according to our voters, isn't the flow of low-wage labor to the US; it's the flow of high-wage jobs overseas. Tancredo hasn't got a clue on that issue. We need a Congressman who does.