Bush ready to OK border barrier

President Bush will sign the bill to construct 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border if it is approved by the Senate, the White House said, as Congress continued yesterday drafting more legislation to combat illegal immigration. On Wednesday night, Mr. Bush told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he would sign the bill if approved by the Senate, which spent the past two days debating whether they should even consider the fence bill.

Why the movement on this? Methinks that the pols are catching a whiff of the concern about this issue from back in the hustings.

Even the Senate has started moving out of its languor and has (at last!) shown some signs of life on this, but as always in dealing with the Senate, it ain’t over ’til it’s over:

Late yesterday, Democrats finally agreed to allow the bill to be taken up…While the bills passed the House by wide margins yesterday, they face an increasingly dim future in the Senate, which has refused to approve major border-security legislation unless it is coupled with a guest-worker program and a direct path to citizenship for most of the illegal aliens currently in the U.S.

Well, one can still hope they wake up and smell the electoral coffee on this and advance the bill.