U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin is under no illusions that there will be an easy path forward for a joint resolution aimed at curtailing the amount of money being used to influence voters, but he also isn’t willing to wait on a better political climate.

“The U.S. Supreme Court said that money had a constitutional right to speech,” Harkin said by phone Thursday, referencing the landmark Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case decided in January 2010. “They equated money with speech [and said] that you couldn’t limit the amount of money that a corporation or any individual could give in a campaign. Now, the Supreme Court said we could limit, through campaign finance laws, how much a candidate can raise, but that we could not limit a corporation or a person on how much that corporation or that person wanted to spend of their own money to influence an election.

“This bill that we are pushing would amend the Constitution to basically say that money is not speech.”

In a Congress that has been loathe to pass meaningful legislation, the idea that any joint resolution to amend the Constitution could gain enough bipartisan traction to reach the two-thirds majority it needs in both chambers is, to be blunt, laughable — something Harkin and the bill’s other 14 supporters openly recognize.

When asked by The Iowa Independent if the bill stood any chance at all, Harkin was quick to answer: “No, not now.”

“I think as we go into the campaign next year, and as people see more and more of these distorted ads, which the candidates have no control over — you are going to see all of these devastating ads on candidates and where they stand and all of that, paid for by some bogus group. And the Supreme Court has given them a shield so that they don’t even have to say where [the money] comes from,” he said.

“I think the Supreme Court was wrong, but they’ve raised this to a constitutional position. So the only way to address this is to amend the Constitution; to say that money is not speech.”

What has resulted, Harkin said, is “an abundance of money in political campaigns” and a situation that isn’t in the best interest of the American people.

Marybeth Gardam, Iowa organizer for a grassroots movement known as Move to Amend, agrees with Harkin’s sentiments and shares his frustration with a political process that’s being overrun by money. She and her organization do not, however, agree that this proposal to amend the Constitution goes far enough or that it is traveling through sustainable channels.

“Move to Amend, in general, feels that this is counter-productive because it will be shot down, and also because it’s like asking for a slice of the pie when you need the whole thing,” said Gardam, who is also on the national leadership team for Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and serves on their Corporations Versus Democracy Committee.

Passage of a constitutional amendment, which requires not only a two-thirds vote of each chamber of Congress, but ratification by three-quarters of U.S. states, will be a great deal of work, she said, which mandates a need for massive grassroots understanding and support.

“So this just seems like a lot of work for something that only going to get you half the way there — not even half really,” she said.

Move to Amend’s position is that while reversing Citizens United is an important step, the country isn’t going to get to where it need to be until corporate personhood is abolished and all the constitutional rights that were intended for persons are removed from corporations.

“This [proposal] addresses the ‘money is not speech’ piece of it, but it does not address the ‘corporation is not a person’ piece of it. And as long as they have that right — which they got very illegitimately in the 1880s — they will be able to use that power against ‘we the people,’” Gardam said.

“There is quite an uneven playing field and, until we fix corporate personhood, the game will stay rigged.”

Here’s the full text of the proposed joint resolution:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years after the date of its submission by the Congress:

`Article–

`Section 1. Congress shall have power to regulate the raising and spending of money and in kind equivalents with respect to Federal elections, including through setting limits on–

`(1) the amount of contributions to candidates for nomination for election to, or for election to, Federal office; and

`(2) the amount of expenditures that may be made by, in support of, or in opposition to such candidates.

`Section 2. A State shall have power to regulate the raising and spending of money and in kind equivalents with respect to State elections, including through setting limits on–

`(1) the amount of contributions to candidates for nomination for election to, or for election to, State office; and

`(2) the amount of expenditures that may be made by, in support of, or in opposition to such candidates.

`Section 3. Congress shall have power to implement and enforce this article by appropriate legislation.’.

There is also a video of the press conference organized by U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, a New Mexico Democrat and author of the proposal, and attended by supporting Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer, Sheldon Whitehouse, Dick Durbin and Jeff Merkley in introducing the joint resolution.

Gardam says Move to Amend is hoping to allow time for community organizing at a grassroots level to raise the voices of individuals throughout the country, which will ultimately provide the language that will be used in a future constitutional amendment.

“What we are trying to accomplish is a really broad outreach and education program to get citizens aware of what’s going on, to get them to understand the difference between an initiative like the one that Senator Harkin sign onto and one that actually has a chance of curtailing the unchecked powers of national and trans-national corporations,” she said. “Through this process we will be building the type of awareness and demand from below, which we believe will be the only thing that will truly work.”

One of those educational opportunities will be taking place Friday evening in Cedar Rapids when Iowa Move to Amend shows the video embedded below to members of the Occupy Cedar Rapids movement. (More details available on our political calendar, available through Factbook or on our Facebook page)

FERRECHIO: Governor Romney, turning to you, in 2008, you said you favored allowing American companies to hire more skilled foreign workers. With the unemployment rate now at 9.1 percent, do you still think that employers need to import more foreign labor?

ROMNEY: Well, of course not. We’re not looking to bring people in and — in jobs that can be done by Americans. But at the same time, we want to make sure that America is a home and welcome to the best and brightest in the world.

If someone comes here and gets a Ph.D in — in physics, that’s the person I’d like to staple a green card to their — to their diploma, rather than saying to them to go home.

Instead, we let people come across our border illegally or stay here and overstay their visa. They get to stay in the country. I want the best and brightest to be metered into the country based upon the needs of our employment sector and create jobs by bringing technology and innovation that comes from people around the world.

Romney has used the “stapling a green card” line before many times, both in this campaign and in his 2008 campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. Despite being the preferred candidate for many immigration enforcement hawks who distrusted Romney’s opponent Sen. John McCain, Romney joined McCain in voicing strong support for giving foreign students at U.S. graduate schools permanent residence.

Indeed, “stapling a green card to their diploma” has become a catchphrase for high-skilled immigration reformers. It’s a policy strongly favored by many Silicon Valley and high-tech firms, whose workforce is disproportionately foreign-born. It’s even inspired the name of a bill, the STAPLE Act, repeatedly introduced by Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). Flake’s bill, which has both Democratic and Republican cosponsors, grants an exemption to the cap on permanent visas to any Ph.D graduate in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM).

Permanent residency for U.S. Ph.D grads is one of the few policy ideas that establishment Republicans and business lobbies like the Chamber of Commerce see as something that shouldn’t cause much partisan friction and thus can be dealt with on its own. But Democrats, including Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) who chairs the immigration subcommittee in the Senate, have rejected the idea of pushing high-skilled immigration reform bills, such as the STAPLE Act, without a comprehensive reform effort that also deals with issues related to low-skilled and undocumented immigration. And many tea party and conservative Republicans reject the idea of any immigration reform, including the STAPLE Act, without further border security measures.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), the chair of the House immigration subcommittee, this year introduced the IDEA Act, which goes further than the STAPLE Act by expanding permanent residency visas for foreign-born entrepreneurs and STEM workers. Not a single Republican has endorsed Lofgren’s bill.

Nevertheless, Lofgren’s bill has strong support among high-tech companies, which have signaled impatience with the GOP’s current enforcement-only ideology. Unusually, these companies have given more to Democrats than to Republicans, and in particular to Democrats who care about issues such as high-skilled immigration. This can be seen in the strong support Lofgren receives from Silicon Valley: Computer- and internet-related industries were far and away the top donors to her 2010 campaign, and no single House candidate received more from internet-related companies than Lofgren in the 2009-2010 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

It’s clear that among the GOP candidates currently running for president, Romney is Silicon Valley’s pick. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, computer- and internet related industries have donated $145,805 to Romney’s campaign in this election cycle, more than any other candidate except for Barack Obama. But whether Romney will continue to toe the strict “border security first” line that has become a tenet of GOP and tea party orthodoxy by endorsing, even in the smallest way, policy innovations like STAPLE remains to be seen. With the entrance of Gov. Rick Perry (Texas), himself a candidate with an ambiguous history on immigration, into the GOP primary, the question of whether enforcement-only is a necessary position for a GOP presidential candidate may become a salient issue in the weeks and months to come.

Both Schumer and ranking member John Cornyn (R-Texas) framed reform of high-skilled immigration policy as necessary for American economic competitiveness and, in particular, for keeping foreigners who are educated in U.S. universities in the national workforce after they graduate.

“We should staple a green card to their diplomas,” Schumer said in his opening remarks, instead of requiring them to leave once their student visas expire.

But the senior members sparred over whether reform of the employment visa system should be piecemeal, or part of a broader comprehensive package. Cornyn, addressing his Democratic colleague, said, “I think we can do just this,” arguing that the current stalemate in Congress over comprehensive reform didn’t mean that individual reforms couldn’t be achieved. But Schumer retorted that comprehensive reform is necessary because so many other stakeholders in the immigration debate want to be a part of successful legislation. Other Senate Democrats on the committee, including Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (R-Conn.) agreed.

Dr. Puneet S. Arora, an Indian-born clinical researcher who first entered the U.S. 15 years ago and is still waiting for a green card, told the committee that the policy that prevents him and thousands of otherwise successful Indian immigrants in the United States from acquiring a permanent visa is the requirement that the fixed quantity of employment-based visas not exceed a certain percentage for each country of origin. Thus, the disproportionately large number of Indian immigrants to the U.S. means that Arora must wait many years on a long waiting list before getting his green card.

Chuck Grassley

One point of controversy, picked up on by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), was whether there really are labor shortages in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) reliant industries. Dr. Ronil Hira, an immigration policy expert from the University of Rochester, said that other experts on the panel (those representing the employer side of the immigration debate) were misrepresenting the extent to which high-skilled jobs are really going unfilled because of a lack of qualified workers. He pointed out that high-skilled native-born American workers are suffering from high unemployment rates (although not as high as low-skilled workers are). But other panelists, including the chief executive of NASDAQ OMX and the president of Cornell University, responded that looking at raw unemployment numbers fails to capture the ways in which jobs requiring very particular skills aren’t being filled for lack of candidates.

“For years, our country has struggled to find a way forward on immigration reform. Since the debate reached its peak in 2007, our economy has experienced turmoil comparable to the Great Depression. Americans are out of work, families are being foreclosed on, and businesses are suffering. I agree we must do all we can to improve our economic situation. However, I have concerns with the notion that increasing immigration levels and enacting legalization programs is the answer to the current economic downturn,” Grassley said.

Hira argued that temporary visas are abused by companies located in the United States that use them to hire foreign engineers at below-market prices. Schumer agreed that he believes this is a problem, which was why he sponsored last year’s border enforcement bill, which raised the fees that high-tech companies must pay if they wish to sponsor foreign workers.

Perhaps the most contentious moment in the hearing was when Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), after lecturing the business leaders present for supporting the torpedoed 2007 Senate comprehensive reform bill, began to debate Microsoft’s top lawyer Brad Smith over whether a Canadian style points system would be better than the United States’ employer-driven immigration system: “I would take Canada’s system in a heartbeat,” Sessions said, because it was a “national policy” rather than a policy allowing businesses to pick and choose who should get a visa.

Canada’s immigration system assigns points to visa applicants based on their economic desirability, including such factors as the education level, languages spoken and other specific skills possessed by the immigrant. Business leaders and immigration experts have criticized points systems because they fail to directly take employers’ needs into account.

During the second part of the hearing, the committee heard from three mayors from across America, one of whom was the Republican mayor of Uvalda, Ga., who is a party to the lawsuit against that state’s new immigration law. Mayor Paul Bridges argued that the immigration law will devastate Georgia’s economy and actually decrease public safety because local police will be diverted to enforce the law.

Mayor David Roefaro of Utica, N.Y., highlighted the contribution that Bosnian refugees had made to his city’s economy. These Bosnian immigrants were admitted under the humanitarian, not employment or family, visa quota provided under existing U.S. immigration law, but Roefaro stated that they had nevertheless empowered Utica to create more jobs than they would have otherwise.

Schumer concluded the hearing with the concurring observation that many different types of immigrants can contribute to economic growth.

Hydraulic fracturing or fracking is a method of collecting methane (natural gas) from shale deposits by blasting the gas out of tiny pores using large volumes of water, sand and chemicals.

During the Bush-Cheney administration in 2005 Congress granted hydraulic fracturing an exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act. This exemption is named the “Halliburton Loophole” in recognition of the oil and gas service company previously headed up by former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Reports of groundwater contamination and health problems in gas production areas around the country have spurred efforts to close this loophole.

In the House Reps. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), Jared Polis (D-Colo.) and Maurice Hinchey, (D-N.Y.) have introduced the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act (FRAC Act).

This bill would restore EPA power to require permits for the underground injection of chemicals used in fracking. It also requires fracking companies to disclose the chemicals that they inject.

An identical Senate bill was sponsored by Sens. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

“As we recognize the need for energy independence and alternative sources to power our nation, natural gas is an important economic driver and a critical bridge fuel,” DeGette said in a release as she announced the reintroduction of the bill.

“However, it is incumbent upon us to ensure the process for extracting natural gas from our land is done safely and responsibly. The FRAC Act takes necessary but reasonable steps to ensure our nation’s drinking water is protected, and that as fracking operations continue to expand, communities can be assured that the economic benefits of natural gas are not coming at the expense of the health of their families.”

But some fracking opponents say that restoring EPA’s authority to regulate fracking is inadequate protection for rural well users because EPA rules for handling the underground injection of chemicals are unclear about whether and how surrounding private wells must be taken into account.

According to EPA, the Safe Drinking Water Act requires the agency to provide safeguards so that injection wells do not endanger current and future underground sources of drinking water (USDWs). By regulation, a USDW is defined as an aquifer or portion of an aquifer that:

* Supplies any public water system or contains a quantity of ground
water sufficient to supply a public water system, and

* Currently supplies drinking water for human consumption, or

* Contains fewer than 10,000 mg/L total dissolved solids and is not an exempted aquifer.

In an article for un-natural gas.org, the website for the Chenango Delaware Otsego Gas Drilling Opposition Group in New York state, Anne Marie Garti writes that these rules are not clear about how the EPA decides whether an aquifer contains enough water to supply a public water system.

The FRAC Act would remove the hydrofracking exemption to the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), but the proposed bill will not protect most of the land area of the US because many aquifers, especially in the northeast, do not flow into a PUBLIC water supply of 25 + users, and whether they would be capable of supplying municipal water in the future is open to interpretation. The required flow rate is not defined anyplace, and needs to be so that there is a uniform standard across the US.

Specifically, the Underground Injection Control (UIC) section of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) needs to include a definition, or standard, of the following phrase: “sufficient quantity of ground water to supply a public water system”

“Sufficient” needs to be defined in the FRAC Act so that the flow rate of individual homeowner’s water well or spring is covered. It should be a federal standard, not open to different interpretations by Courts in every region of the EPA. The Atlanta or Georgia region of EPA uses a 1 gallon per minute flow rate.

EPA did not respond to a request for comment on Garti’s concerns but did say that the Safe Drinking Water Act does give the agency “imminent and substantial endangerment authority in certain circumstances, even when there are no specific other regulations which apply.”

According to EPA, approximately 15 percent of Americans rely on private drinking water wells.

In Michigan, where natural gas exploration companies bought exploration rights to 392,000 acres of public land last year, 1.12 million people are served by private wells, according to the state Dept. of Environmental Quality.

Schumer and his staff are still in the drafting stage, but the New York senator has shared salient details of the bill, which currently has no co-sponsors in the Republican-dominated House of Representatives. It would cut funding to states that fail to comply with all aspects of the federal background check system, create a national do-not-sell database of people not legally eligible to own guns and require both licensed dealers and private sellers to perform a background check on anyone seeking to buy a gun.

The first of those three is likely a response to the results of an AP review that were released last week. The review found that 26 states have thus far not fully complied with a 2008 federal law passed in the wake of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre requiring all states to furnish mental health records to the national background check system. Of those 26 states, nine failed to provide a single name in two years. The remaining 17 all provided fewer than 25 records, a figure several thousand times smaller than where it should be, according to National Institute of Mental Health statistics stating that about 6 percent of Americans, or more than 18 million people, suffer from a serious mental illness. Already, the states that have failed to supply records could be hit with a 3 percent cut in federal justice funding; Schumer’s proposed bill would up that to 25 percent.

The latter two aspects of the bill are Schumer’s response to what he feels are lenient regulations regarding private gun sales. All states prohibit the sale of handguns to minors, felons, illegal immigrants, the mentally ill and disabled and drug addicts. However, “gun show loophole” laws in many states make it easy for even those legally prohibited from buying a gun to do so without seeking out the black market.

Such laws are commonly known as “gun show loopholes” because of the infamous ease of legally obtaining firearms without a background check at gun shows, but they in fact apply to any sale of a gun not made through a licensed dealer. By claiming to be selling guns from a personal collection and not being in possession of enough firearms to make that claim unlikely, anyone can legally sell guns to anyone else without performing a background check, as long as the guns in question aren’t of the type that require a federal license under the National Firearms Act (those being automatic weapons and sawed-off shotguns and rifles, as well as silencers and explosives) and the sale doesn’t somehow cross state lines. In all, 33 states allow private sales without any regulation, another four allow private sales with no background check for long guns such as rifles, and one, Florida, has different laws from county to county. In just twelve states are background checks required for all gun purchases: seven whose laws do so explicitly and five where gun owners need permits whose application processes include a background check.

Although state laws still make it illegal to sell a gun to someone legally barred from owning firearms, in states with no background check requirements, that law is virtually unenforceable in private sales. Gun advocates argue that the presence of legally acquired private sale guns is negligible in crime. However, a U.S. General Accounting Office report from 2009 indicates that the biggest problem with gun show loopholes may not be domestic at all. The GAO reveals that over 87 percent of all drug cartel weapons seized by police in Mexico were acquired legally from gun shops and gun shows in the U.S. and smuggled across the border. Of the four border states, only California does not have the gun show loophole built into its state firearm laws.

Schumer was forthcoming on many aspects of his intended bill during Wednesday’s event, but one aspect of it that he has not yet made entirely clear is the “do-not-sell list” provision, which he says would “provide greater incentive for reporting individuals who should not have access to guns.” Presumably, this is to address cases like that of alleged Tucson gunman Jared Loughner, who was assessed as at-risk by several professors and peers but never legally declared mentally incompetent or committed to a mental health institution, voluntarily or otherwise. But privacy and civil liberties advocates will surely bristle at the notion of any citizen being able to report another to a national database of potentially dangerous people. Whether or not the bill as drafted will address this remains to be seen.

Yet Despite Schumer’s enthusiasm about the bill, if the national tenor of the gun control conversation is any indication, he may not find much support for it in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives (if indeed it makes it out of the Senate). The American Independent News Network has previously reported on legislative attempts in Colorado and Texas to allow concealed weapons on the grounds of educational facilities, as well as a ballot initiative being pushed by a political action committee in Florida that would eliminate all permits for gun ownership and concealed carry. According to Florida state records, the ballot initiative still has yet to receive a single signature, but that’s no indication that such ideas exist only on the fringe of American society. A Utah bill allowing any legal gun owner to carry a concealed weapon without a permit stalled in committee this week, but its sponsor, Rep. Carl Wimmer (R-Herriman) is hopeful that he can get the bill passed after revising it. Meanwhile, Wyoming is set to pass just such a bill. The bill, which eliminates permits for concealed weapons, has passed the Senate and has overwhelming support (48 to 8) in a preliminary House vote. An amendment to the bill that would ban the intoxicated from carrying concealed weapons was voted down.

The only job that remains up in the air for Democrats — chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) — is a result of the fact that no one seems to want to take it. The position, which is appointed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), has reportedly been turned down already by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), and it’s unclear who will step up to fill the important shoes of going toe-to-toe with National Republican Senatorial Committee leader Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) in the battle for the Senate in 2012.

The reason, it seems, is that the position, typically a launching pad to the upper echelons of Democratic leadership, is looking more and more like a sand trap when it comes to 2012. In two years, 21 Democratic senators — along with two independents who caucus with the Democrats — will come up for re-election, compared to only 10 Republicans. Even with President Obama on the ticket, those numbers make the odds of notching a winning record nearly nil, while the potential for a drubbing is much greater.

A big part of the answer has to do with trust. The process of drafting the DISCLOSE Act alienated Republicans from the start. The bill was drawn up by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) — two men best known for their efforts to get Democrats elected to Congress. The whole thing smacked of partisan gamesmanship. Then Democrats loaded up the bill with provisions that Republicans regarded as irrelevant, little more than Democratic pet issues. Although Democrats say they reached out to Republicans for input, GOP offices soon stopped responding to emails from Democratic staffers. Whatever trust had existed initially was entirely wiped out.

And now? If a stripped-down DISCLOSE Act has any chance of passing, it has to be right now, in the lame-duck session. Some Democrats still hope that by limiting the bill to its popular core, they can win Republican support. But relations between the congressional offices on the issue are so frayed that it’s hard to imagine much cooperation at this point.

Jesse Zwick has the full story of the DISCLOSE Act’s troubled history, and its prospects for passage in the lame-duck session.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) criticized the DISCLOSE Act in July, but Democrats hope for her vote on a modified version of the bill. (Louie Palu/ZUMA Press)

Despite widespread public opposition to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and multiple exhortations by the president for Congress to act, Senate Democrats were unable to overcome a Republican filibuster to pass the DISCLOSE Act, a bill requiring interest groups to name the donors behind their campaign ads, in the months leading up the midterm elections. Next year, when the GOP claims a majority in the House, the odds of passage are slim. “Um, no,” said presumptive House Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman when asked if Republicans might introduce a version of the DISCLOSE Act next year.

[Economy1] The last chance, then, for Congress to put some form of disclosure legislation on the books before the shadowy spending process repeats itself, in grander fashion, in 2012 might be now, the lame-duck session in advance of the swearing-in of the much more Republican 112th Congress in January.

But if the numerical chances of the bill’s passage in the Senate — it will only need the votes of two Republican senators to overcome a filibuster when Congress returns from its campaigning break next week — will never look better, the level of trust and communication between key Democratic and Republican Senate offices typically engaged on the issue of campaign finance stands at a seeming all-time low.

Democrats in leadership are now weighing the idea of stripping the less essential provisions of the DISCLOSE Act — measures to prohibit spending from companies holding government contracts or those exceeding a certain threshold of foreign ownership — as an act of good faith in order the counter Republican qualms about the bill and make one last-ditch effort to pass it. They’ll only do so, however, if they anticipate success, and the current breakdown in negotiations between the key parties is making them wary about the bill’s chances of garnering any GOP support at all.

How has a year’s worth of legislative effort on a popular measure now found itself on the brink of failure, and what might make it still succeed? An understanding of the bill’s chances in the lame-duck session requires a look back at its struggles through Congress and the reasons for the current standstill.

*****

The DISCLOSE Act’s problems began with its personnel. The bill originated in the offices of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), legislators best known for their efforts, as chairmen of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, respectively, to get their fellow Democrats elected. Consequently, it was viewed with suspicion by House Republicans.

“When you immediately go to the two lawmakers who are responsible for getting Democrats elected and say, ‘Please write us the bill,’ a lot of Republicans looked at that and said, ‘Huh, that’s a curious choice,’” said Sean Parnell, president of the Center for Competitive Politics, which advocates against imposing limits on campaign spending. “It was the chair of the DCCC and former chair of DSCC leading the process. There was no way that was not going to be seen as partisan. From there it just kind of all went downhill.”

With the Senate calendar and key staffers still tied up with health care reform and financial regulation, it fell to the House to get the ball rolling — but House Democrats said the bill’s basic idea never gained traction among Republicans.

“We released a framework to the public four months in advance of introducing the bill and we reached out to specific Republicans who normally engage in campaign finance issues,” said a Democratic aide who worked on the bill. “We never were approached by Republicans to say they’d vote for stripped-down disclosure provisions.”

Only two Republicans — Reps. Ahn Cao (La.) and Mike Castle (Del.) — signaled support for the bill, so House Democrats proceeded to make it something of a wish list. They added provisions barring companies with federal contracts or those exceeding a certain threshold of foreign ownership from spending independently to influence elections. And they also made an exception for longstanding nonprofits — like the Sierra Club or the National Rifle Association — that met certain membership requirements.

The result was a bill that arrived fully formed in the Senate at the end of June, but one that also provided ample opportunity to its opponents (or would-be supporters) to hammer it as partisan or unfair. The provisions barring certain companies from spending looked to some like built-in advantages for unions, while the NRA carve-out, as it became known, provided an ironic special-interest twist on a bill meant to be about good government.

When the bill came up for its first Senate vote in July, however, Democrats hoped they could still pressure Republicans with a reputation for past leadership on campaign finance issues — like Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins — or newly elected Sen. Scott Brown to cast a vote in favor of the overarching concept of disclosure. But these senators objected to the lack of a committee mark-up or other opportunities to make constructive changes to the bill.

“Unfortunately, the Senate Majority Leader chose to bring forward a bill that doesn’t live up to its title,” Collins wrote in a statement after her first procedural vote against the DISCLOSE Act. “It was drafted by Democrats behind closed doors. No committee hearings were ever held on this legislation; therefore, there never was an opportunity to make any changes to this bill or mark-up in the committee process before we were asked to consider it.”

Democratic aides in the Senate, however, insist they gave Republican senators like Snowe, Collins and Brown every opportunity for input into the bill.

“When I say we offered them a seat at the table it was, literally, ‘Come write the bill with us. Here’s a list of principles and tell us how you’d like to write it,’” said a Democratic staffer who worked on the bill in the Senate. “It could not have been a more welcoming process, but there was very little input offered.” After initial signs of engagement on the issue, Republican offices stopped responding to emails from Democratic staffers. (The offices of Sens. Snowe and Collins also did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.)

But by allowing a vote on the same bill that had passed the House and not anticipating the attacks that would be leveled against it, Senate Democrats failed to move the bill and, worse, lost the battle of public perception over whether the bill was a push for transparency or a thinly veiled attempt to sway the outcome of the pending midterm contests in their favor.

By the time the bill was slated to be brought up again in Congress for a vote in late September, it suffered from a breakdown in trust. Both sides realized that the current bill was a nonstarter, but there was no time in the packed legislative schedule to take the multiple days required to introduce a new, stripped-down version. Instead, Democrats urged Snowe and Collins to vote for cloture on the bill as it stood, on the assurance that the Democratic leadership would scrap whatever the senators didn’t like when it came time for debate and amendments. But such a deal would have required the confidence of all parties.

“My understanding — and I’ve talked to both Republican and Democratic offices — is that Democrats were saying, ‘Well, just tell us what you want,’ and Republicans were saying, ‘Tell us how you’ll change it and then we’ll talk,’” said Meredith McGehee, who lobbies for greater transparency in campaign finance for the Campaign Legal Center.

Other campaign finance reform advocates take a more cynical view. “A pared-down version was being discussed in the last round and that wasn’t what the issue was,” said Craig Holman, a campaign finance expert at Public Citizen, a citizen lobby group. “The Republicans, down to Collins and Snowe, even though their public denunciations were about unions, none of them ever meant that. All they wanted was anonymous corporate support in 2010 and 2012.”

In either case, the Maine senators, having already decried the bill once, cited their same complaints and voted ‘no’ once again. A vote for cloture was too close to a vote for the bill itself, and moreover, it opened the door to the possibility of Democrats pulling a fast one and passing the bill without amendments, denying them any input and earning them the wrath of the Republican caucus for enabling Democrats to enact their agenda. The bill failed to overcome a filibuster by a single vote.

*****

Now, facing a lame-duck session with a host of pressing items on the agenda — from the START Treaty to an unemployment extension to the expiration of the Bush tax cuts — Senate Democratic leaders are skeptical that a disclose-only bill can earn Republican support. On the one hand, it would address the bulk of Republicans’ complaints about the current bill, but on the other hand, trust is so frayed that neither side is able to receive assurances as to the other’s thinking on the issue.

The impending seating of a new Republican senator later this month, special election winner Mark Kirk of Illinois, has added a new element of suspense to the mix. While his arrival raises the bar of Republican support required to proceed with debate, some campaign finance experts see in Kirk the kind of moderate voice who spoke in favor of better disclosure laws on the campaign trail and could champion a stripped-down bill as a triumph of good, clean government over the larded Democratic bill. But others doubt that casting a vote against the wishes of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — who has made a personal mission out of rolling back campaign finance laws — is high on the to-do list of the incoming freshman senator. (Requests for comment from Kirk’s office were not returned by the time of publication.)

Even if the bill is unlikely to pass, argue some advocates, at least Democrats could finally get Republicans to go on the record definitively on the issue of disclosure.

“Bring up a bill with just the disclosure provisions and take away a number of arguments that we feel are not correct but others have used to make excuses about not voting for it,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of the campaign finance reform group Democracy 21.

Whether the benefits of a symbolic vote on disclosure outweigh the importance of floor time that could be spent on other issues, however, remains an open question. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) office said that Reid will defer to Schumer on the content of the bill and that the Democratic leadership has not yet reached any decisions on what it will push in the lame-duck session.

But Holman, speaking on the eve of the election, was less hopeful. “If the results are a fairly sweeping Republican victory,” he said, “then I would fully expect the lame-duck Congress to honor the tradition of doing lame-duck work.”

All of the races listed below could go either way, but it’s worth speculating on where the election could have an effect on immigration policy:

Majority leader: The Senate race between Sen. Harry Reid (D) and Sharron Angle (R) could open up the position of majority leader, which Reid currently holds. It’s unlikely Republicans will take over a majority of the Senate, but losing Reid would put another Democrat in charge of the push for immigration legislation. Luckily for reform supporters, both of the senators likely to take over as majority leader if Reid loses are equally strong supporters of immigration reform as Reid — perhaps even stronger.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), currently second in command, is the chief sponsor of the DREAM Act, which would provide legal residency states to some undocumented students and military service members, and supports comprehensive immigration reform. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is considered the favorite to take over as majority leader because of his past success as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. He also supports comprehensive immigration reform, and wrote a blueprint for comprehensive immigration reform this spring with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

Immigration subcommittee: Schumer heads the Judiciary subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security, which will remain in the hands of Democrats unless Republicans take over a majority of the Senate. The committee could see some shifting if the current members lose their seats, but most who are up for re-election have comfortable leads. Schumer looks certain to win against Republican challenger Jay Townsend, while Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) looks like he’ll be safe against Republican candidate Len Britton and his five other challengers. The other Democrats on the committee — Durbin, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse — aren’t up for re-election this year.

On the Republican side, only Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is up for re-election. He is favored to win over Democratic challenger Roxanne Conlin. The other GOP members of the subcommittee — Texas Sen. John Cornyn, Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl and Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions — aren’t up for re-election. In the very unlikely event that Republicans win control of the Senate, Cornyn would be the chairman of the subcommittee on immigration.

Other immigration-related races: In the Senate especially, every member’s views on a given issue are important for passing legislation. A few races between pro- and anti-immigration reform candidates could make the difference for passing comprehensive immigration reform or, in lieu of that, smaller-scale legislation such as AgJOBS to create paths to legalization for some farm workers.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) faces a challenge from Republican Carly Fiorina, who supports the DREAM Act and reform of the guest worker system but argues against “amnesty” for illegal immigrants — the derisive term used by conservatives to refer to efforts to allow some undocumented immigrants already in the United States to earn legal status. Boxer, on the other hand, has been a consistent supporter of comprehensive immigration reform, arguing Congress should pass a bill increasing border security and enforcement efforts while also allowing some illegal immigrants in the country to remain here legally.

In New York, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who was appointed to Hillary Clinton’s old seat, is favored to win over Republican Joseph J. DioGuardi. Gillibrand was originally considered an anti-immigrant pick for the Senate seat, but has since shifted to a pro-immigration reform view and advocates legislation that would allow some undocumented immigrants in the country to become legal residents.

Open seats could see the addition of some immigration hardliners. Rand Paul, a Republican running for Senate in Kentucky against Democrat Jack Conway, supports state-led solutions to illegal immigration such as Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law. He also wants to built an electric fence between the United States and Mexico and move overseas military bases back to the country to man the border. Conway, on the other hand, said he supports more border agents but also paths to legalization. “Let’s take people out of the shadows and turn them into taxpayers,” he said during a debate.

Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Alexi Giannoulias are facing off for Obama’s former seat in Illinois. If Giannoulias wins, the Democrats will have a nearly sure vote for comprehensive immigration reform as well as the DREAM Act. But Kirk has said that the Senate should tackle border security first, and that he would vote against the DREAM Act and other immigration reform.

How often does document fraud actually happen? It’s tough to say — USCIS does not track incidents of fraud for immigration documents. Pro-enforcement groups such as Center for Immigration Studies claim document fraud is rampant and was partially to blame for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when foreign nationals with driver’s licenses were able to board planes they later hijacked. (Of course, some states allow non-citizens to obtain driver’s licenses legally.)

The new documents would not prevent illegal immigrants from giving false Social Security numbers, but they would make it more difficult to fake naturalization documents. Some senators have argued Social Security cards also need a high-security overhaul to become more resistant to fraud. Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) have proposed biometric Social Security cards and criminal penalties for using fake Social Security numbers as part of their proposals for comprehensive immigration reform.