Recently, presidential front-runner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, stumbled on the topic of immigration. In a debate, she tripped over a question about whether she supported a plan by the New York governor to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

She basically said “yes” and “no,” drawing fierce criticism from her opponents for flip-flopping. That issue is now somewhat academic because Gov. Elliott Spitzer has withdrawn the idea. But policy toward immigration is still roiling Democrats. Just look at developments in the last couple weeks on Capitol Hill.

Earlier this month, Rep. Heath Shuler, D-North Carolina, introduced a bill that would increase the number of Border Patrol agents, enhance work-site enforcement and strengthen the investigative power of immigration and customs officers. It also would force every U.S. employer to adopt the controversial electronic government verification system called E-Verify, formerly known as Basic Pilot.

The bipartisan bill has 112 co-sponsors—45 Democrats and 67 Republicans. It likely won’t go anywhere before the end of this session of Congress in December 2008 because failure of an immigration bill earlier this year in the Senate has halted the issue.

But the Shuler bill does provide a sense of where Congress is on the issue. Many of the Democrats on Shuler’s bill are from districts similar to the ex-professional quarterback’s home region. They are rural and conservative. The members occupying those seats are the vanguard of the new Democratic majority on Capitol Hill. They’re not bashful about distancing themselves from their party’s front-runner on immigration.

The fact that they are embracing an enforcement-only bill is indicative of how difficult—if not impossible—it will be to move forward on immigration before next year’s election. If you’re in favor of cracking down on illegal employment, you’re not going to countenance any kind of guest worker system and path to citizenship for undocumented workers.

An example is Rep. Brad Ellsworth, D-Indiana, who defeated one of the most conservative Republicans in Congress last year, former Rep. John Hostettler. Ellsworth used to be sheriff in Vanderburgh County, which encompasses Evansville. He was given one of the first speaking roles at the Shuler bill press conference so that he could emphasize the law-and-order dimension of the measure.

But even if the Shuler legislation is approved first, Ellsworth indicated that he would be leery of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants that many of his more liberal colleagues—and most of the business community—support.

In an interview after the press conference, he said that he wants to improve the legal immigration system to make it more efficient. But his message to those who are already here was clear. “You can go home and start over,” he said. “Go home, apply and do it the right way.”

This week, Ellsworth and seven Democratic House colleagues traveled to the Mexican border to tour customs facilities. One of the people in the delegation was Rep. Niki Tsongas, D-Massachusetts.

She just barely won a recent special election. Her GOP opponent effectively used the immigration issue against her and came within 4 percent in a district that has 14 percent Republican registration. It’s no wonder that one of Tsongas’ first trips highlighted a get-tough attitude on immigration.

Ellsworth calls immigration one of the biggest concerns on constituents’ minds. He said, “I was getting a flu shot and a lady came up and said, ‘When are you going to do something [about illegal immigration]?”

As Ellsworth demonstrates, many Democrats in competitive districts are starting to sound like most Republicans on immigration. That means that it will be harder to achieve immigration policies that most executives and HR professionals want to see—a verification system that overhauls or scraps E-Verify, and a path to citizenship that will keep illegal immigrants in the U.S. labor market.

Thursday night in Las Vegas, the Democratic presidential candidates took swings at one another in a sort of rhetorical equivalent of the boxing championship matches that are often held in the neon desert.

The Republican contest is getting crankier too as we rapidly approach the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary—not to mention the other nominating contests that have been moved up to compete with the traditional launching states.

All the heat is not producing much light when it comes to policies that will help U.S. workers improve their skills so that they can improve their position in the global economy.

Oh sure, candidates will talk about threats to jobs, such as allegedly flawed trade agreements or the sometimes ruthless brand of capitalism practiced by private equity firms.

But Julian L. Alssid, executive director of the Workforce Strategy Center, argues that they’re missing a fundamental point—good jobs exist, but qualified applicants don’t.

“American workers just aren’t getting the training and education they need to fill the well-paying jobs,” Alssid said in an interview.

In a September 19 op-ed in The Christian Science Monitor, Alssid wrote that nearly half of adults over the age of 25 only have a high school diploma. But 65 percent of the fastest-growing occupations require more education than that.

“We’re talking about an issue of national importance,” he says. “If we can’t fill the skilled jobs we have, they really are going to go away. It is amazing to me that this isn’t at the forefront” of the presidential campaign.

To their credit, the candidates have discussed health care, Iran and other topics that will be critical for the next administration to tackle.

But what they haven’t done—nor has Congress for that matter—is move beyond hand-wringing about people left behind by the inexorable ascent of global competition.

There is no single answer to the problem. Federal, state and local governments as well as universities, community colleges, businesses and the K-12 education system must work together to develop education and training programs for emerging fields.

The C-suite can be a catalyst for the private-sector part of the equation. But the government side needs commitment from the top too.

“One of the challenges of workforce development is that it spans agencies,” Alssid says. “That requires leadership. It’s the president’s job to make it happen.”

And it’s the job of candidates for that office to talk about it in Iowa, New Hampshire and the rest of the country.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts, didn’t get everything he wanted in the historic sexual orientation discrimination bill approved by the House last week.

Originally, Frank and other supporters included provisions that would extend protections to transgender people in addition to homosexuals and bisexuals. But he couldn’t find enough backing in the Democratic caucus in the House to pass a broader bill.

So, he took what he could get now—momentum for legislation that could potentially stop discrimination from setting back the careers of millions of people.

Many homosexual organizations were livid with Frank for removing the transgender provisions. He asserted that these groups were letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

They wanted it all right now, even though they had not gotten as far as a House vote on the bill in a generation. Washington rarely produces a bill that everyone can embrace, unless it has to do with renaming post offices.

Trying to reach agreement on legislation, or at least cobble together a bare majority (or 60 votes in the Senate), takes a lot of work.

Sometimes folks in the C-suite don’t understand that—perhaps because they operate in an environment where they don’t do the heavy lifting of consensus-building. A CEO’s word is law, and it is often endorsed by a handpicked board.

In Washington, there are 535 C-suites on Capitol Hill. The occupant of each one has to answer to 600,000 bosses every two years in the House or a whole state of bosses every six years in the Senate.

That can make for a messy situation in Washington that frustrates CEOs—and most of the rest of us too.

So, chief executives periodically come to town to exhort Congress to make progress on important issues. That was the case a couple weeks ago at the Council on Competitiveness annual meeting.

In a colloquy with other CEOs and experts, James Hagedorn, chairman and CEO of the Scotts Miracle-Gro Co., expressed exasperation about Washington’s inability to formulate effective energy policy.

“This city … is so full of crap,” he said.

Now, I don’t entirely disagree. Don’t get me started on what’s wrong with Washington.

But most of the time, I would make just the opposite point that Hagedorn does. Washington is not full of crap. In fact, the way it functions is often beautiful.

Look at what’s happening right now. The Democratic Congress and the Republican White House have to struggle together to reach compromises on everything from Iraq to children’s health care. Neither side ever gets exactly what it wants.

We may be a long way from solutions to major challenges like health care and energy. But the journey, even in fits and starts, will lead us to a good destination.

Our founders understood that one way to ensure Washington doesn’t run the nation off the road is to make it difficult to get anything done. In our check-and-balance government, it takes a lot of effort and patience to build coalitions and overcome opponents.

It’s a system that the rest of the world admires, even envies. Understandably, it’s not one that often gets an endorsement from CEOs. But they should appreciate its strengths before they come to town and cast aspersions.

On Wednesday night (November 7), the House of Representatives approved a measure that would ban workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation.

The bill would provide the same protections for homosexuals that currently exist for women and minorities. But the historic vote was close, 235-184, and proved that Rep. Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts and author of the legislation, had done his political math correctly.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a Frank press conference in which he laid out his reasons for removing protection for transgender people from the bill. He said that such a provision would sink the bill.

It turns out he was right. For proof, look at the vote taken just before the final vote. Republicans put forward a “motion to recommit,” which would have sent the bill back to the House Education and Labor Committee, potentially killing it.

The motion ostensibly would ensure that nothing in the bill could be construed as limiting a state’s definition of marriage as a union of one man and one woman. Substantively, the action would have been meaningless because there was no language in the bill about marriage.

But politically, such a move forces Democrats in tough—and conservative—districts to vote on marriage. The Democratic majority held together on the motion to recommit, defeating it 222-198.

But you can see by the narrow victory that a broader discrimination bill including transgender protection would have been vulnerable to defeat. Instead, a separate amendment was offered by Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin, on gender identity.

Baldwin’s insistence on putting the amendment forward caused more political machinations and delayed House action on the sexual orientation bill by two weeks.

But Baldwin’s measure was pulled before a vote occurred because its defeat could have caused negative repercussions for the underlying bill. Still, many homosexual advocacy groups are incensed that the final bill didn’t include gender identity.

Frank knew he wasn’t going to please everyone, even among his own constituency. But he was determined to get as much he could this time around—protection for the vast majority of homosexuals—and come back later for more.

Just before the vote on the motion to recommit, Frank, who is openly gay, made a passionate plea to the House to vote against Republican maneuvers to kill the bill. He said that he was fortunate to get to where he is in life without being held back by discrimination against homosexuals.

But he said he hurts for the worker “who is afraid of losing his job because of who he loves” and for the kid who “dreads going to school” because of who he is.

With his voice breaking, Frank said, “Please don’t turn your back on them.”

As with most employment law bills, it’s difficult to predict what will happen in the Senate. In addition, a veto threat looms over the bill. The Bush administration raised concerns about the measure causing burdensome litigation and curtailing people’s religious freedom at work.

But with major business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce remaining neutral and many major corporations having supported the broader bill that included gender identity, it’s not a certainty that the bill will die.