Vin Suprynowicz

Republican senators Tuesday used their slim 41-vote plurality to filibuster and thus block passage of a military appropriations bill to which Harry Reid and his Democrats had grafted various unpopular measures, including a precipitate repeal of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy which is intended to allow homosexuals to serve in the armed forces so long as they keep their sexuality “in the closet,” and the so-called “DREAM Act,” at thinly disguised “camel’s nose under the tent” toward full immigration amnesty.

The “DREAM Act would grant legal status to immigrants younger than 36 who arrived in the U.S. as children, have lived here for five years, and are currently either in college or serving in the military,” the Monitor reports.

So granting full citizenship to those who subject themselves to the strenuous torture of, um … attending two years of community college somehow isn’t “amnesty”?

There’s no denying this was a political ploy, though analyses differ as to precisely what the Democrats think they’re up to.

At the simplest level, the unsightly grafts were doubtless intended precisely to make Republicans vote against the defense appropriations bill, so Democrats can claim the GOP are “against providing our troops in Afghanistan with food and ammo.”

(Sure enough, Wednesday’s headlines read “Republicans block defense bill.”)

Will this resonate with voters, who surely know Republicans will be happy to authorize the military expenditures once the unnecessary and unpopular “social” measures are stripped away?

Looked at from that point of view, it was in fact the Democrats who (theoretically) put the troops at risk of running out of ammo by “playing politics” with an appropriations bill which otherwise could have sailed through on a voice vote. So how does that help them?

The repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is particularly odd, since the armed forces are conducting a study which is expected to lead to a gradual replacement of the policy within only a few months. Needless to say, ultra-liberal Democrats, who little care how the majority of Americans feel about such issues, prefer to encourage openly gay and cross-dressing Americans to serve, and to force such a change on the military by brute political force, rather than allowing those who must actually pull such duty to decide, for instance, whether an all-gay submarine crew would be likely to present fewer disciplinary problems than a mixed gay and straight submarine crew.

But it is Harry Reid’s favorite, the so-called DREAM Act, which may reveal the strangest assemblage of gears within gears.

Many letter-writers are under the misimpression the proposal would grant citizenship to children born here of illegal immigrant parents. But such children are, at present, automatic U.S. citizens at birth.

No, the problem with the proposal is that it would create a new and more powerful incentive for illegal aliens to sneak into this country with their foreign-born children, who would thus be promised automatic citizenship if they can just dodge the authorities for a few years (not hard to do, these days, when the entire Obama administration seems to be doing its best impression of Sgt. Schultz from “Hogan’s Heroes,” insisting, “I see nothing! Nothing!”)

Such amnesty is vastly unpopular with voters. So what can Sen. Reid — currently in a neck-and-neck re-election race — be thinking?

“The timing of Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s push for the DREAM Act raises questions about whether it is an attempt to curry favor with Hispanic voters in his home state,” Amanda Paulson of the Christian Science Monitor speculated this week.

The Democrats — some of whom including Sen. Reid are attorneys and should thus be disbarred if they knowingly failed to report the presence of lawbreakers — arranged for several young illegal aliens to wander the halls, lobbying senators for the measure, and later to watch the vote from the gallery, wiping away tears on cue, some clad in graduation caps and gowns.

“Hispanics make up 26 percent of Nevada’s population. (In 2008, they accounted for about 15 percent of the electorate),” the Monitor reported. “In his neck-and-neck battle with ‘tea-party’ favorite Sharron Angle, the majority leader needs every vote he can get, and he’s counting on a big positive response from Hispanics for pushing a bill that is popular with them.”

Is it, though?

The DREAM Act is presumably popular among illegal aliens. But — at least in theory — they can’t vote.

Meantime, voter turnout rates even among legal Americans of Hispanic descent have never been high, and plenty of U.S. citizens of Hispanic ancestry — a majority here in Nevada, according to a recent Review-Journal poll — want to see the nation’s immigration laws enforced, arguing they or their ancestors “did it legally,” so why shouldn’t everyone else?

Republican Senate challenger Sharron Angle has already released a TV spot calling Senator Reid “the best friend an illegal alien ever had.”

The Democrats’ latest ploy is desperate. Like a losing football team throwing nothing but Hail Marys from its own 10 yard line, it runs the chance of having an effect diametrically opposite to that intended.