Graham made it clear that if a same-sex-marriage amendment were added to the immigration bill he would walk away from the deal. “If you want to have an argument about same-sex marriage, let’s do it, but if you want to pass immigration reform let’s focus on immigration reform,” he said. “I can take and absorb a lot. That was not fair. That wasn’t right to make me and others do that. What if the House had put pro-life stuff in the bill? Or if they said all illegal immigrants have to have sonograms when they have abortions? There’s no stopping this.”

Schumer and Durbin, who support gay marriage, spent weeks trying to figure out whether Leahy really would offer the amendment. Durbin had been lobbying legislators back in Illinois to pass marriage equality, while in Washington he was deciding whether to vote against Leahy’s amendment. “I’m thinking to myself, How will I ever explain this?” he said. “It’s as tough as it gets in this business. It really is. . . . I grew up witnessing and living through the civil-rights movement. This notion of civil rights is one of the reasons I’m here. . . . It was the ultimate dilemma. Are you going to vote this matter of principle if it means losing immigration reform?”

Durbin said that the Leahy amendment had been “a topic of every conversation for the last three weeks” between him and Schumer. They argued that Leahy could wait until the bill was debated before the full Senate, rather than derail it before it even got there. Nobody seemed to have any leverage with Leahy or know what he was really going to do. “He wouldn’t commit himself,” Durbin said. “He always held out the possibility he was going to call the amendment. We would gather information based on what he told others.” Leahy believed that his colleagues were leaking to the press that Obama was telling him not to offer it. But the President told Leahy, “It’s your judgment. I’m not going to try to tell you what to do.”

As everyone waited for Leahy’s decision, Schumer was attempting to persuade at least one more Republican to publicly support the bill. The tech industry was not satisfied with the Gang’s legislation. The concern is H-1B visas, which allow companies like Google and Facebook to bring highly skilled engineers from abroad to work for them temporarily in America. The industry wants the maximum number of H-1B visas with the fewest regulations. Durbin, who is close to organized labor, has argued for years in favor of the visas but with more stringent rules, including tougher provisions to insure that the companies try to find qualified Americans first. During the markup, Orrin Hatch, who has sometimes been sympathetic to immigration reform, stepped forward as high tech’s champion, offering a series of amendments at the industry’s behest.

Schumer, who knew that Kennedy and Hatch had been close allies, thought he saw an opportunity, but he was warned to tread carefully. “There’s a lot of people who were telling Schumer, ‘Watch out for Hatch,’ ” a Democratic senator said. “I love Orrin, but he can be a piece of work. We all used to tell this to Ted Kennedy: ‘Your best friend sells you out. He’s always with you when you don’t need him. He’s never with you when you need him.’ ” Despite Hatch’s habit of demanding concessions in bills and then failing to support the final legislation, Schumer cut a deal: Hatch would vote for the bill in committee if his amendments were accepted. Even if Hatch later abandons the bill on the floor, as some predict he will, Schumer believed that the H-1B amendments would get the tech industry excited about the deal.

Durbin didn’t like the idea. “When they told me that we had to sit down and renegotiate a major section of the bill to get [Hatch’s] vote, I was skeptical,” he said. Graham, who is not as sympathetic to the tech industry’s demands as other Republicans, thought the deal was worthwhile. “Hatch made the bill much better for the high-tech community and that’s why they came on board,” he told me. Rubio supported the Hatch amendment, and the tech community showed its gratitude. FWD.us, the political group backed by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, defended Rubio from conservative attacks by buying ads on talk radio. The spots didn’t mention H-1B visas, but they assured listeners that Rubio’s plan was tough. It would “deport any illegal immigrant guilty of a serious crime. For the rest, no amnesty, period.”

On the afternoon of May 21st, the final day of the bill’s markup, nobody in the Gang knew what Leahy would do with his amendment. According to several Democratic senators involved, none of the Democrats wanted the amendment in the bill, but nobody wanted to take the blame for excluding it. Schumer and the other Democrats hoped that Graham could be the fall guy. “They wanted me to talk,” Graham said. “They said, ‘You need to explain. Leahy needs to hear from you.’ ” Graham made a simple case. “You got me on immigration,” he told his colleagues on the committee as the amendment was debated. “You don’t have me on marriage.”

When Leahy still didn’t budge, Schumer and Durbin, and several Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, announced that they would have to vote against the amendment. After they were finished, Leahy announced that he wouldn’t put the amendment up for a vote, thus saving the bill. Schumer was furious. Leahy had dragged out the drama for weeks and forced him to publicly declare that he would vote against an issue dear to the gay-rights community. Other relationships within the Gang were also frayed. McCain and Graham were irritated with Rubio for grandstanding and declaring his support for the biometric amendment that Graham had to vote against.

Nevertheless, the bill cleared the committee by a vote of thirteen to five. Hatch made good on his promise and voted yes. A group of Spanish-speaking DREAMers watched from the sidelines of the committee room. As Leahy’s gavel came down, they stood up and cheered: “Sí se puede! Sí se puede! ”

Perhaps McCain was right that, under the right political circumstance, the Senate can still solve significant problems. The Gang members will try to guard the bill in coming weeks, as they did when it was before Leahy’s committee. And last week they picked up a new Republican ally: Kelly Ayotte, of New Hampshire. If the bill makes it through the floor debates more or less intact, Obama’s bitter rival from 2008 will have helped him finally fulfill his promise of bringing bipartisanship to Washington.

The White House is cautiously optimistic about the prospects for immigration reform, even in the House, where it faces the most arduous journey of all. Last week, as the Senate voted, eighty-four to fifteen, to start debate on the Gang’s bill, Democrats wondered how many Republicans they needed to attract. Liberals like Durbin think that Schumer has already pushed his Democratic colleagues as far to the right as they can go. Meanwhile, Leahy has introduced the same-sex-marriage amendment.

Schumer told me that he wanted a super-majority. “There’s some talk we don’t need seventy votes,” he said. “We need seventy.” There are fifty-four Democratic votes in the chamber, and Schumer argued that support for a comprehensive bill would collapse in the House unless more Senate Republicans supported the bill. “If you get sixty-one, you get only seven Republican votes, then the House will say we don’t need a path to citizenship. They’ll say, ‘We’ll do high tech, we’ll do ag, we’ll let the people work, but no path to citizenship.’ And the Hispanic community will say no and there will be no bill. You need momentum, particularly on the Republican side.”

The White House agrees. “The best way to get things through the House is to pass them through the Senate first with a bipartisan stamp of approval,” the senior Obama official said, noting that the House Speaker, John Boehner, has been unusually accommodating. “I think by the end of the year, we could have a bill,” Boehner told ABC News last week. The White House official went on, “It could prove that Washington isn’t one hundred per cent broken. If a Gang of Eight-style bill is signed into law by the President, it will probably be one of the top five legislative accomplishments in the last twenty years. It’s a huge piece of business. The lesson is that, if both parties see something in their political interest, they’re very good at getting it done.” ♦