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Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R) on Thursday warned his colleagues in the Senate that people who were "wearing some form of turban" were illegally immigrating into the United States by crossing the Southern border.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to consider amendments to the bipartisan immigration reform bill, Cornyn asserted that he had "anecdotal" evidence that only 25 percent of undocumented immigrants crossing the border were caught by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

"In fact, anecdotally, the border patrol last -- on Sunday and Monday were telling me, they think they maybe catch one out of every four people coming across the border," he declared. "Maybe one out of every three. And that's a problem."

The Texas senator argued that this made the case for an amendment offered by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), which establishes "triggers" that prohibits legalizing undocumented immigrants until the Department of Homeland Security has established "effective control" of the border for six months.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), however, pointed out that a 2012 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that the Border Patrol had a 82 percent effectiveness rate at catching illegal border crossings.

"I would love to see that report because I don't believe that's the case," Cornyn replied. "The problem is the effectiveness rate you referred to doesn't take into account the people that cross illegally and the department is not tracking. In other words, it doesn't take into account the people that get away, which could, according to the anecdotal reports, be two out of every three, three out of every four."

Cornyn added that he had also been told during his recent visit to the southern border in Texas that "we're not just seeing the border penetrated by people from Mexico or Central America."

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Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on Monday became irate and yelled at Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) during a Senate hearing at the suggestion that he had used last week's Boston Marathon bombing to try and delay immigration reform.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Friday, Grassley had said that knowing the immigration status of the Boston bombers would "help shed light on the weaknesses of our system."

"How do we ensure that people who wish to do us harm are not eligible for benefits under the immigration laws, including this new bill before us?" he asked.

In his opening remarks on Monday, committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said that he was troubled that some people would use the tragedy in Boston to slow down immigration reform.

"Let no one be so cruel as to try to use the heinous act of these two young men last week to derail the dreams and futures of millions of hardworking people," Leahy remarked. "A nation as strong as ours can welcome the oppressed and persecuted without making compromise on our security. We are capable of vigilance in pursuit of these values."

Grassley made it clear that he had taken Leahy's opening statement personally.

"If you want to want to avoid partisanship, I would say, let's be very deliberate," the Iowa Republican said. "And I want you to take note of the fact that when you proposed gun legislation, I didn't accuse you of using the Norsetown [sic] killings as an excuse."

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During a Wednesday debate on the Senate floor, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) could be heard laughing out loud after Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) claimed that expanded gun background checks was part of a "push for a federal registry."

After Cruz said that he objected to a bipartisan plan to extended background checks to gun shows and Internet sales because it "would put us inexorably on a path to a national gun registry," Schumer pointed out that the same background check system had been used for 17 years for federal fire licensees (FFLs).

"It's the same technique, it's the same entry into the book and everything else," the New York Democrat argued.

"But what is consequential," Cruz opined, "is extending it to private sellers, not licensed dealers because the argument surely would be -- if this bill passed, the argument would immediately become, 'Well, it can't possibly be effective because we don't know who owns those firearms.'"

Schumer pressed: "Just one more question, has my colleague in the last 17 years detected any move out of Washington for national registration, any specific substantive move by ATF, the Justice Department or any other federal agency to begin a campaign, a move to any kind of national registration?"

"It is not currently proposed, but if the bill that is being considered were adopted it would put us on that path," Cruz insisted.

At that point, laughter could be heard off camera. A Senate Democratic aide later confirmed to The Huffington Post that the guffaw had come from Schumer.

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From ABC's This Week, Sen. Jeff Sessions was happy to do a little fearmongering over the effect of more legal immigration on our economy and cites a flawed study from a right-wing anti-immigration group while doing it. Republican Senator Blatantly Lies and Claims More Legal Immigration Is Bad for the Economy :

The conflict within the Republican Party on immigration was fully exposed when Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) made the opposite point on Fox News Sunday, “When with we reform our legal immigration system, we get these people that are already here now paying their taxes and not taking anything out of the system, this will be a net positive for the country economically now and in the future.”

Rubio was making the argument to his fellow Republicans that they can get something for nothing by increasing legal immigration, but both liberal and conservative analysts agree that adding more legal immigrants will be good for the economy.

Sen. Sessions was relying on a paper from the anti-immigrant Center For Immigration Studies (CIS). The right wing group arrived at their conclusion that immigration reform would have a net negative impact by not counting the 11 million immigrants that already illegally in the country.

Republicans like Jeff Sessions are preaching to a vanishing choir. Read on...

As Sen. Chuck Schumer rightfully explained during the segment, what's driving down wages are those working in the shadows right now. Republicans like Sessions don't want a path to legalization for these immigrants because they don't want them voting and they like the cheap labor for business. I don't pretend to know what the legislation is going to look like that comes out of the Senate this week, but I do have no doubt that whatever their starting point is, Republicans will do their part to muck up the works and make it worse.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Jon Stewart took his viewers though some of the "highlights" of this week's Presidential inauguration, whether it was the media freaking out over whether or not Beyonce was lip syncing the national anthem, to Chuck Schumer overseeing the activities, to the media's reaction to President Obama's speech.

MSNBC was full of praise, Fox was doing their usual and broadcasting from some alternative universe where the likes of Peter Johnson, Sean Hannity, Stuart Varney and racist "Uncle Pat" Buchanan reside and then we had CNN, who had their anchors on fashion patrol.

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Given he's from New York and has done more than his share to make sure our government policies are friendly to Wall Street, the big banks and the hedge fund managers, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Chuck Schumer take his fellow Senator, Jon Kyl to task for trying to pretend that you're going to hurt a lot of small businesses if you raise taxes on those making over $250,000 a year.

I've heard this argument so many times from Republicans, it's ridiculous and ABC This Week host Jonathan Karl wasn't much better than Kyl here with trying to pretend like you're going to damage the economy if the wealthiest among us have their taxes go up a few percentage points for their income over a quarter of a million dollars.

KARL:  But I've got to ask you about this question about -- because this is one of the big sticking points left, is whose taxes go up?  Is it people making over $250,000, as the president wants, or Republicans suggested nobody, or people making over a $1 million?
 
But you, Senator Schumer, had proposed raising taxes only on those making over $1 million.  And I want to take a look at what you said about this proposal, going at $250,000.  This was last year.  You said, "In the eyes of many, it is hard to ask households making $250,000 or $300,000 a year -- in large parts of the country, that kind of income does not get you a big home or lots of vacations or anything else that is associated with wealth.  It also would affect too many small businesses." 
 
Weren't you right back then, when you said it was wrong to raise taxes on those...
 
(CROSSTALK) 
 
SCHUMER:  Well, look, we offered that to our Republican colleagues two years ago, when the political landscape was different.  They rejected it.  And then the president, sticking to $250,000, campaigned on it openly, overtly.  He won the election on it overwhelmingly on that issue; 60 percent of the public was with him. 
 
So that is our position.  It's a position that brings in more revenues.  And what we have learned, as the fiscal situation deteriorated, if you go much higher than $250,000, to raise the rest of the revenues you need, you're going to hurt the middle class as you take away their tax deductions.  So it's the right place...
 
KARL:  But you said back then...
 
SCHUMER:  ... to be.
 
KARL:  But you said back then it would affect too many small businesses.  Frankly, you sounded a little like Senator Kyl. 
 
SCHUMER:  Well, the bottom line is very, very simple, and that is that if you do -- if you go much above $250,000, you're going to hurt the middle class even worse and small businesses even worse by having to take away tax deductions.  That's not the place we were at two years ago.  It is the place we're at now, because the situation is deteriorating. 
 
KYL:  Jonathan, it's exactly the opposite.  The higher you set that level, the less small business you're going to hit.  And you're exactly right, and Chuck was right back when he talked about a million, because the increase in the tax rates for individual taxpayers sweeps in about a million small-business owners.  Remember, about half of small businesses are women-owned.  And it sweeps them up because they don't pay corporate tax rates; they pay as individuals. 
 
KARL:  But -- but...
 
SCHUMER:  Wait a second.  That's counting big hedge funds as small businesses, big Hollywood productions, like Oprah Winfrey, as small businesses.  It affects very few.  We all know mom-and-pop small businesses, the dry cleaner down the street and others, don't make millions and millions of dollars.

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Here we go again with Lindsey Graham continuing to threaten to use the debt ceiling to inflict pain on the working class, or as he calls it, "saving Social Security and Medicare." Graham made this exact same threat almost a year ago where he was a little more specific about his plans for our social safety nets.

Lindsey Graham: Don't Allow Debt Ceiling to Be Raised Without Cuts and Means Testing for Social Security

Here he was on the same show, Meet the Press, again telling David Gregory that we should risk the full faith and credit of the United States of America if Democrats won't give him his pound of flesh from our senior citizens:

GREGORY: Sen. Graham, the question for you is could you vote for a bill that extended tax cuts for $250 thousand and below, extended unemployment insurance as the President wants to do and in some way delays some of these automatic spending cuts? Could you vote for that in the short term?

GRAHAM: No. If you want leaders, then you have to lead and the President's been a pathetic fiscal leader. He's produced three budgets and can't get one vote for any of his budgets. You know, Boehner will be Tip O'Neill. Obama needs to be Ronald Reagan and here's what I would vote for. I would vote for revenues, including tax rate hikes, even though I don't like them to get a... to save the country from becoming Greece.

But I'm not going to set aside the $1.2 trillion in cuts. Any hope of going over the fiscal cliff must start in the Senate. Not one Democrat would support the idea that we could protect 99 percent of Americans from a tax increase. Boehner's Plan B I thought made sense. To my Republican colleagues, the Ronald Reagan model is that if you get 80 percent of what you want, that's a pretty good day. We have the same objective of lowering taxes. I like Simpson-Bowles. Eliminate deductions, lower rates, put money on the debt. Tax rate hikes are a partisan solution driven by the President, but he's going to get tax rate hikes. […]

There will not be a big deal. The big chance for a big deal is with the debt ceiling. That's when we will have leverage to turn the country around, prevent it from becoming Greece and save Social Security and Medicare. And anybody listening to this program, I will raise the debt ceiling only if we save Medicare and Social Security from insolvency and prevent this country from becoming Greece. No more borrowing without addressing why we're in debt to begin with. That's where the real chance for change occurs, at the debt ceiling debate.

Chuck Schumer responded by reminding the viewers just how reckless Graham's remarks are and by reiterating that President Obama is not going to allow what happened the last time around to happen again. That apparently has had zero affect on Graham who is still going to go out there and stomp his feet and make ridiculous comparisons to Greece to try to scare the public, when the ones they ought to be afraid of are Graham and his fellow Republicans who are determined to continue to destroy what's left of the middle class in America and to shred every one of our social safety nets for the most vulnerable among us.

Graham feigns concern over the budget deficit now, but he never has those same concerns back when Bush was blowing mile wide holes in it with tax cuts for the rich and invading a couple of countries which he refused to put on the books. Graham's solutions never seem to include any military spending, since that's apparently the only jobs program that Republicans like -- putting military contractors to work.

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Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) says that his party should agree to raise taxes on the wealthy before January because Republicans can force cuts to earned benefits like Medicare and Social Security next year by holding the debt ceiling hostage.

"I do think it's time for the president -- he knows there's a growing body of folks who are willing to look at the rate on the top 2 percent but that's only -- it could be $400 billion, it might be $800 billion, depending on how you deal with that," Corker told Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday. "Many of us that are fiscal and conservatives are beginning to see that we could end up with a lesser revenue increase by agreeing to that."

"The shift to focus in entitlements is where we need to go," the Tennessee Republican added. "And again, it's a shame that we're not just sitting down and solving this, but Republicans know that they have the debt ceiling that's coming up right around the corner and the leverage is going to shift as soon as we get beyond this issue."

Corker pointed out that Republicans could use the debt ceiling to "do the same thing we did last time."

"If the president wants to raise the debt limit by $2 trillion, we get $2 trillion in spending reductions. And hopefully this time it's mostly oriented towards entitlements," he insisted.

Speaking to business leaders last week, President Barack Obama said that he would refuse to let Republicans use the debt ceiling in budget negotiations this time.

"I will not play that game," the president explained. "Because we've got to break that habit before it starts."

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It seems the Republicans are finally figuring out that they'd better do something different if they don't want more elections where they lose 75 percent of the Latino vote -- Schumer: ‘Darn Good Chance’ We Get Immigration Reform This Year:

Appearing Sunday on NBC's "Meet The Press," Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) sounded an optimstic note about the prospects for a comprehensive immigration reform deal this year.

"Senator [Lindsey] Graham and I have talked, and we are resuming the talks that were broken off two years ago," he said. "We had put together a comprehensive detailed blueprint on immigration reform. It had the real potential for bipartisan support."

Schumer described the contours of the plan: close the borders, crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants, clear the way for immigrants the country needs and a path to citizenship for undocumented people.

"Graham and I are talking to our colleagues about this right now, and I think we have a darn good chance using this blueprint to get something done this year," he said. "The Republican Party has learned that being anti-immigrant doesn't work for them politically."

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Media darling Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is blasting Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for spending too much time in front of the television cameras.

In a Wednesday interview with Fox News host Greta Van Susteren, the Arizona senator accused Schumer of holding hearings on Arizona's controversial immigration law just to get attention from the media.

"I have never seen Sen. Schumer address any issue unless it was political in the United States Senate," McCain told Van Susteren. "Bob Dole once said, the most dangerous place to be in Washington D.C. is between Sen. Schumer and a television camera."

"That holds true today," he added.

But very few, if any, senators in recent years have been given more airtime than McCain himself.

"The press loves McCain," MSNBC host Chris Matthews once declared. "We're his base."

Between his loss in the November 2008 presidential election and January 2010, McCain had appeared on Sunday morning talk shows at least 19 times.

By March 2012, he had broken former Sen. Bob Dole's (R-KS) record by appearing on NBC's Meet the Press 64 times.