New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says golf fairways would suffer if illegal immigrants were returned to their native country.
"You and I are beneficiaries of these jobs," Bloomberg told his WABC-AM radio co-host, John Gambling. "You and I both play golf; who takes care of the greens and the fairways in your golf course?"

One recalls the famous line in the movie "Touch of Evil," when Orson Welles, a corrupt U.S. cop, asks Marlene Dietrich, a fortune-telling madam in Tijuana, to read his future. "You haven't got any," she says ominously. "Your future is all used up."

There are worse things than the status quo. Bush has shown time and again that he knows how to create them. Now, if he would only just go away.

June 29, 2007 -- PRESIDENT Bush's disastrous second term has not been without its moments. Unfortunately for him, these moments have come primarily when members of his own party have risen up against him to defy his wishes.
That's what happened yesterday. For the second time in four weeks, Republicans in the Senate put a stake through the heart of Bush's beloved but politically catastrophic immigration bill.

It's also what happened in the early months of the second term, when Bush chose to nominate his unqualified aide, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court - and finally backed down and had her withdraw her name after three weeks of lobbying and complaining.

It happened, too, when our clever Democratic senator, Chuck Schumer, stirred up a frenzy last year about the sale of various American ports to a company owned by the emir of Dubai. Bush stoutly defended the deal, which was dead in the water the minute Schumer began his campaign against it, until finally Bush was forced to back down by members of his own party.

He would not and could not back down on immigration reform, an issue far too close to his heart. But after the Senate first rejected the bill at the end of May, Bush could have left it alone and accepted defeat.

He could have seen reason, as he did in January 2004 when he first proposed a piece of legislation and was met with an uprising from his conservative base - whereupon he prudently dropped the subject because he was running for re-election and needed a united and enthusiastic Republican electorate behind him.

But he miscalculated, as he has done so often since his re-election. He chose to believe polls that said Americans generally support the nice ideas in the bill rather than the polls that showed Americans disliked the actual bill as written and described.

And perhaps most interesting, Bush chose to believe it was more important to court potential future Republican voters - those illegals who would have gained a "path to citizenship" under the terms of the bill in 13 years' time - rather than listen to the concerns of present-day Republican voters.

Those concerns were entirely justified. I write as someone out of step with my fellow conservatives on the issue, as someone with a very liberal view of immigration, including illegal immigration. And yet the more I read about the bill, the more it was clear to me it was an unholy mess and that the nation would be far better off without it.

Neither the president nor any of the bill's supporters was able to make a convincing argument that illegal immigration would be "reformed" in any way. The bill was a classic case of a supposed fix that would only make things worse. It would have levied significant penalties on those who chose to play by the rules without punishing those who remained outside the boundaries in any credible way.

And the bill's opponents made a very strong case that its passage would only lead to an even greater human flood across the border - a case no one on the pro-bill side ever even bothered to address substantively.

On those previous occasions when President Bush was saved from his own counterproductive impulses by a revolt within his own party, his defeat was actually a benefit to him. The Miers withdrawal led to the brilliant appointment of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. And an American company now owns and manages American ports.

But the parlous decision to revive the dead immigration bill and fight for it, only to see it go down to defeat again, was an act of political suicide from which this White House will not recover. On the domestic side, Bush will now only govern until the end of his term in an entirely defensive manner - through the veto and not by being a party to the passage of legislation.

In his first term, Bush had been a party leader and vote-getter so gifted that he single-handedly improved the GOP's standing in the House and Senate in two successive elections and received 21 percent more votes in his re-election bid than he had in his maiden effort.

The failure to secure victory in Iraq is the key to understanding the administration's second-term woes, but that isn't the whole story. Something got broken on Election Night 2004.