ABSTRACT
Through nearly the entire winter of 1995-96, until about a month before Smith’s immigration bill was due to be debated on the floor, the Committee to Preserve Asylum lavished attention on the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, but expended much less effort on the House of Representatives. Five reasons account for the difference in its approaches to the two houses of Congress. First, it had pitifully few organizational resources. The Lawyers Committee allowed Pistone to spend most of her time working on the legislation, but for everyone else, effort to affect the bill was a part-time addition to other work. Second, the task of organizing for a House debate seemed daunting. The committee could do a thorough job of keeping in touch with eighteen Senate offices, and it could barely imagine a campaign directed at all 100 senators if that became necessary. But trying to educate 435 congressional offices was probably more than the CPA could undertake. It didn’t have enough people or contacts to identify potential advocates across the entire country. Third, Schumer had been a forceful defender of the thirty-day provision in the Judiciary Committee. Many House Democrats would follow his lead, just as Republicans would follow Smith and McCollum, so finding 218 votes to strike the provision, even if more resources had been available, seemed politically impossible.
