Senate stumbles on 'English only'

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate voted Thursday to make English the national language of the United States. Sort of.

Moments after the 63-34 vote, it decided to call the mother tongue a "common and unifying language."

"You can't have it both ways," warned Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., a fan of "national" but not "common and unifying." Two dozen senators disagreed and voted for both as the Senate lumbered toward an expected vote next week on a controversial immigration bill.

The debate occurred as President Bush traveled to Yuma, Ariz., to dramatize his commitment to curbing illegal immigration.

Bush visited a town on the U.S.-Mexico divide where the authorities are contending with a surge in illegal border crossings. The state's governor, Democrat Janet Napolitano, has pushed for National Guard help at the border, and the president announced Monday the federal government will pay for such assistance for Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and California.

"Our country is a nation of laws, and we've got to enforce our laws," Bush said after touring a Border Patrol facility. "But we're also a nation of immigrants," he said, and those two attributes "are not contradictory."

Bush's proposal to create a temporary worker system and give some of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the U.S. a path to citizenship has split his Republican Party. House Republicans have called the guest-worker and citizenship plans amnesty for law-breakers. The Senate is debating legislation that largely follows Bush's outline, which the president today called "a good immigration bill."

The president said the Republican-controlled Senate "needs to act by the end of this month" to pass immigration legislation.

At the same time, the White House sent Congress a formal request for $1.9 billion to cover the costs of steps he announced earlier in the week, including the deployment of up to 6,000 National Guard troops to states along the Mexican border.

Bush generally favors the outlines of the Senate measure, a bill that calls for great enforcement, a new guest worker program and an eventual opportunity at citizenship for most of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the country.

Inhofe led the attempt to declare English the national language, a campaign he said began more than a century ago. The Oklahoma Republican quoted President Theodore Roosevelt as having said that among other things, those living in the United States "must also learn one language and that language is English."