The immigration “deal” cooked up by the gang of eight Senators and the resulting bill is destined for attack from all sides, given the difficulty of reconciling the many different concerns and viewpoints involved. Very odd, then, to learn that the bill includes a range of special provisions favoring interest groups that have the ear of one or another of the eight Senators–as if the bill needed any additional causes for controversy.

And odder still to see in the bill an apparent attack on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the law passed nearly unanimously in 1993 to restore a high standard of protection for religious exercise in the context of federal policy. In a section on tightening border security, the bill authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security “to waive all legal requirements” that the Secretary thinks might stand in the way of “expeditious construction” of border barriers needed to throttle illegal immigration. RFRA is presumably a “legal requirement” that could be set aside for the sake of quickly building new border fences or other barriers.

This isn’t what the Senators meant? Perhaps not, but recent Congresses have witnessed a series of efforts to confine the jurisdiction of RFRA in the name of strengthening border security, preserving military discipline with regard to uniforms, rooting out fraudulent funeral practices, and eliminating supposed wrongful job discrimination in federal drug treatment programs (by taking away the religious hiring freedom of faith-based grantees).

Whatever else happens to the bill, it ought to be rewritten to clarify that it does not authorize any undermining of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

(Thanks to Galey Cary, VP for government relations, National Association of Evangelicals, for his sharp eyes.)