After all -- who really gives a tinker's damn about what the American people think about this legislation?

Legislation to overhaul the nation's immigration laws cleared a key hurdle yesterday when the Senate voted 64 to 35 to take up the measure again after a nearly three-week break. But opponents of the proposal insisted they would scuttle it by week's end.

The procedural vote squeezed past the 60-vote threshold needed to bring the bill back for debate, but even advocates said that was the easy part. The immigration bill must run a gantlet of 26 politically charged amendments and clear another 60-vote hurdle tomorrow to cut off a filibuster before a final vote Friday.

The bill's most ardent opponents forced the Senate clerk last night to read all 26 of those amendments in their entirety as a delaying tactic. "This is going to begin some very heavy trench warfare," Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said. "It's going to be like World War I."

Still, Bush administration officials who have championed the proposal insisted that a bill once left for dead was now on its way toward passage.

"We are confident in Senate passage, because we look at the alternative, and the alternative is nothing," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said.

"In the end, logic, common sense and wisdom will prevail," added Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez, in a shot against detractors, who continue to say the immigration bill's border security provisions are unworkable and its path to citizenship for 12 million illegal immigrants amounts to "amnesty" for lawbreakers.

And lest you doubt that this is an amnesty bill, even the President admitted that it is in a rare moment of truthfulness on the subject.

"You know, I've heard all the rhetoric — you've heard it, too — about how this is amnesty," Bush told supporters of the bill at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. "Amnesty means that you've got to pay a price for having been here illegally, and this bill does that."

Tony Snow and the White House Press office released a statment "correcting" the president's true statement.

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