In the past several years, Congress has written some incredibly bad legislation – the Stimulus, PPACA and the Senate’s attempts at immigration reform are part of the highlight (lowlight?) reel of recent horrors from Congress.

Now we hear that immigration reform might be in for another grand push from all sides. No less a political luminary than Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame is calling it ‘the civil rights issue of our time’ as part of the effort to wrap the coming law with an aura of perfection and incorruptibility.

This effort really is really more than a ‘civil rights issue’ — this is really our Rubicon…our tipping point beyond which we should not travel. If we allow another massive piece of legislation to pass that no one will read and which will become the basis for even more thousands of pages of regulations that no one can follow, we will have lost the very basis for our nation – that we are a nation of laws that set the minimal bounds of conduct for a free society.  We must not allow that to happen.

If Congressional leaders, with less than 10% approval of its citizens, deem it necessary to push through a set of laws that reward lawless behavior and enable selective enforcement (“The Secretary shall determine…”) with minimal ability to correct the law in the future, we must emphatically say “No.”

Each and every representative must understand that we are exhausted by their recent efforts, distrustful of results that cannot be simply portrayed or explained and entirely frustrated with the “trust us, we know better” attitude that is emanating from the Capitol.

The false ‘straw man’ that ‘immigration is broken and something must be done’ must be destroyed. All of us understand that the system is broken and needs to be addressed — every last one of us — conservative or liberal, old or young, rich or poor. We have, through a combination of benign neglect, misplaced compassion and outright deception, allowed our immigration laws to become wholly ineffective and detrimental to our prosperity as a nation.

But the solution cannot be wrought from secret back room deals and 2,000 page laws. The solution must arise from ‘first principles’ found in our Constitution, and clear, simple legislation that safeguards our national sovereignty and rule of law, equally enforced.

Political leaders who insist “the time is now” and we must “meet this crisis” should be reminded that it was they who generated the problem in the first place, by diverting from our first principles and ignoring laws that were in place, all in the name of ‘fairness’ and ‘diversity.’ We must ask some basic questions, such as ‘How is it possible that we are rewarding those here illegally more than than native born residents with things like access to education and health care?’ ‘Why are we enabling and sustaining those that shouldn’t be here over those that have a legitimate claim of citizenship?”

We must spend the next few months in earnest debate and discussion, so that clear and unambiguous laws and plans can be articulated, with election of the next Congress as the ‘referendum’ of the people as to which path to take.

We must not allow another ‘rush job’ of legislation to usurp the power granted to the people in the Constitution. In light of the debacles of the stimulus that didn’t work and health care reform that is destroying what it set out to save, we must be especially vigilant and skeptical of any reforms of immigration that are buried in this massive legislation.

Giving in to open borders and amnesty for the current mass of people who circumvented our laws is simply an invitation to destruction – one that we should not accept, no matter how nicely presented.