President Barack Bush's immigration reform

Immigrtion reformers (Getty Images).

Call Republicans the Stupid Party.

The remarkable irony about this week’s triumphant immigration announcement by President Barack Obama on immigration reform is that it was plagiarized from George Bush’s immigration reform just six years ago.

That’s right. In 2007, having won an impressive 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, Dubya stood on the precipice of making Republicans the Party of Hispanic Voters with sweeping, bipartisan immigration reform (the co-sponsors? McCain and Ted Kennedy).

“The immigration bill, ardently sought by President Bush, would make the biggest changes in immigration law and policy in more than 20 years,” reported The New York Times in 2007. “It would increase border security, crack down on companies that employ illegal immigrants, establish a guest worker program and offer legal status to most of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.”

Sound familiar?

But the reactionary Republican Right – together with Big Labor on the Left – strangled Bush’s proposal, the Stupid Party lurched right on immigration, Republicans lost the Hispanic vote in a landslide in 2012, and now they are forced to crawl back to the negotiating table behind Marco Rubio to beg for Hispanic votes as a junior partner in Obama’s immigration reform. . . based on Bush’s reform.

As I said, the Stupid Party.

The only irony as delicious as this GOP debacle is Barack Obama’s own 2007 immigration disaster. A Big Labor stooge, Obama was a key player in killing Bush’s reform because he refused to sign on to guest worker permits despised by unions (who can organize citizen immigrants more easily than temporary workers).

Notably, the essential guest worker permit piece was left out of Obama’s speech this week (though not the bipartisan Senator Rubio draft). Still a stooge. Just as Bush’s own party denied him his immigration win, will Obama’s union allies snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?