The pro-immigration enforcement National Review and the open-borders Wall Street Journal have been engaged in a battle over the shamnesty bill.

Now, NR has issued a challenge to the WSJ. Get ready to rummmmble:

We hereby challenge the Journal’s editors to debate the immigration bill in a neutral venue with a moderator of their choosing — two or three of us versus any two or three of them. We propose to do it in Washington next week so it will have the maximum impact on the Senate’s consideration of the most sweeping immigration reform in decades (time and place to be worked out in a mutually satisfactory fashion).

It shouldn’t be a problem for the Journal’s editors to take up this challenge, since opponents of the bill aren’t “rational” on the question, have no arguments, and are “foaming at the mouth,” as they explained in a videotaped session of one of their editorial meetings last week. Click here to watch — you have to see it to believe it.

We urge them to come out of the shadows, and hope defending the bill in this forum is not another one of those jobs that no American will do. (We would challenge President Bush himself to a debate on behalf of the conservatives he has maligned, but we fear he hasn’t read the bill.)

Har.

I’d pay to see that smackdown.

Longtime readers of this blog know that the Wall Street Journal is notorious for refusing to acknowledge its factual errors in editorials about immigration policy and for tarring its opponents as anti-immigrant racists. Will they rise to NR’s challenge or continue to smear amnesty opponents from the safety of their Manhattan offices?

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How about a Laura Ingraham/Tamar Jacoby match on the card?

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Why the Wall Street Journal is snort-worthy
The Wall Street Journal: Bordering on idiocy
The Wall Street Journal’s immigration foul