It's pretty clear at this point that immigration reform is a thing whose time has come. It's going to happen. The only question is how long Republican opponents can delay it and, more to the point of this post, how much centrist Democrats can screw up the details. That's how it is with these Gangs of 8 or whatever where a group of more moderate Republicans - the only ones who would ever vote for this kind of thing - and a group of moderate Democarts - who really serve no useful purpose at all since all Democrats except for a few conservative hold-outs will vote for it - get together and come up with these nutty compromises. The current one being floated includes an idea that undocumented workers will get "amnesty" now and then have to go through a 10+ year process to actually become citizens. Why? Because Republicans don't want to create a whole bunch of new Democratic voters. But why would any Democrats help enable that delay? The pressure is on to pass a bill. And if a bill isn't passed, people will know who to blame. There's no need to be compromising now.

There are plenty of legitimate arguments to be made against this dumb split between amnesty and citizenship. We shouldn't be creating a practically permanent underclass. And these people will deserve to be represented in the government (you might not agree with these points but then you are opposed to the idea behind the bill altogether). The whole thing smacks of the "civil unions" idea that people tried to use to deflect gay marriage with until recently. Separate and not quite equal.

But more practically, you'd think the Democrats would be interested in increasing their voting base now. And there's nothing wrong with that; the system is designed so that politicians are responsive to their citizens because they want to be re-elected. They should be like, yep, we want these people to get representation, and yes, we want their votes.

Now, maybe this will backfire for Democrats. Rand Paul will happily tell you that black people used to vote for Republicans until the passage of the Civil Right Act. And maybe these new citizens will start responding to the Republicans' lower tax and anti-abortion message once this whole citizenship thing is out of the way. But there's nothing wrong with Democrats explicitly thinking this will be a good move for them in terms of increasing their vote count.

It's the same thing with statehood for Washington D.C. or Puerto Rico. Democrats should be pushing for that like it's the number one priority in the country. That would probably end the gridlock in the Senate for a long while. And legitimately. The people in those "territories" deserve representation. But again, whenever discussion about that sounds like it might be going anywhere, people start coming up with weird compromises like also adding eastern Oregon as a new state. No! These types of things should not be voter-count neutral. Or it defeats the purpose of giving people their representation.

By contrast, when the Republicans won all the statehouses back in 2010, they wasted no time in redrawing the House districts to their advantage. They didn't say, ok, let's redraw these districts but let it take effect 10 years out when who knows who will be living where. They did it and it took effect immediately. And it was a legitimate, legal thing for them to do. There's no reason for Democrats to not use the same reasoning here.