WASHINGTON — The vote was close. A cluster of senators from both parties, authors of the immigration bill under debate, hovered over the clerk tallying the votes on an amendment that could bring down their fragile compromise legislation.
At 45 to 45, Arizona's Jon Kyl, the lead Republican architect of the bill, put his hand to his chin. At 48 to 45, he crossed his arms and bit his lip. Ken Salazar, the Colorado Democrat who helped write the bill, leaned in.
The count stopped: 49 to 48. The amendment had passed, and their bill looked doomed. The bipartisan team sprang into action.
Kyl shot across the room to urge two Republicans still in the chamber to switch their votes. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) targeted Democrat Daniel K. Akaka of Hawaii, who listened, hesitated as Kyl drew close, then gestured to the clerk to change his vote.
In the center of the room, Salazar and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) kept their eyes locked on the clerk until he called out the new tally: 48 to 49.
They had won.
In deeply divided Washington, the coalition behind the Senate immigration bill is unusual and -- so far -- unusually effective. The lawmakers, who span the political spectrum from deeply conservative to passionately liberal, spent hundreds of hours together in Senate conference rooms writing the 628-page immigration bill, phrase by painstaking phrase.
They endured stony silence and denunciations shouted by colleagues. Some members of the coalition defected, unsettled by the final bill, but a dozen stuck with it. At a time of abrasive partisanship, they forged a compromise on one of the most contentious issues of the day.
That commitment will be tested this week as other senators target the "grand bargain" at the heart of the bill: Democrats get a path to legal status for 12 million illegal immigrants; Republicans get a new way to award green cards that tilts toward skilled and educated immigrants.
The 12 senators, who have dubbed themselves the "grand bargainers" and are evenly divided by party, swore a rare bipartisan blood oath and promised to defend that trade-off from amendments. If either side of the trade-off crumbled, members said their coalition would too, and with it a bill widely seen as the last chance for years to fix a broken immigration system.
"If we had not gotten together as Republicans and Democrats to develop this bipartisan consensus," Kyl said, "we can be assured that there would not be a bill passed this year and probably not next year."
