“An Incredibly Clear Message To Hispanic Voters”: Did Republicans Just Give Away The 2016 Election By Raising Birthright Citizenship?
It may not seem like it, but this week has seen the most significant development yet in the immigration debate’s role in the 2016 election. I’d go even farther — it’s possible that the entire presidential election just got decided.
Is that an overstatement? Maybe. But hear me out.
For months, people like me have been pointing to the fundamental challenge Republican presidential candidates face on immigration: they need to talk tough to appeal to their base in the primaries, but doing so risks alienating the Hispanic voters they’ll need in the general election. This was always going to be a difficult line to walk, but a bunch of their candidates just leaped off to one side.
After Donald Trump released his immigration plan, which includes an end to birthright citizenship — stating that if you were born in the United States but your parents were undocumented, you don’t get to be a citizen — some of his competitors jumped up to say that they agreed. NBC News asked Scott Walker the question directly, and he seemed to reply that he does favor an end to birthright citizenship, though his campaign qualified the statement later. Bobby Jindal tweeted, “We need to end birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants.” Then reporters began looking over others’ past statements to see where they stood on this issue, and found that this isn’t an uncommon position among the GOP field. Remember all the agonizing Republicans did about how they had to reach out to Hispanic voters? They never figured out how to do it, and now they’re running in the opposite direction.
Here is the list of Republican candidates who have at least suggested openness to ending birthright citizenship, which would mean repealing the 14th Amendment to the Constitution: Donald Trump, Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Lindsey Graham, and Rick Santorum. That’s nearly half the GOP field, and more may be added to the list.
The 14th Amendment states in part: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It was passed after the Civil War to ensure that former slaves had all the legal rights of other citizens. You can’t end birthright citizenship without repealing it. That means that no matter who gets elected in 2016, birthright citizenship is not going to be eliminated. The bar is so high for amending the Constitution that it’s impossible to imagine any amendment this controversial getting ratified, which is as it should be.
But the political impact is going to be very real, whether or not the idea goes anywhere in practical terms. The simple fact is that if Republicans don’t improve their performance among Hispanic voters, they cannot win the White House. Period.
This discussion about birthright citizenship sends an incredibly clear message to Hispanic voters, a message of naked hostility to them and people like them. It’s possible to argue that you’re “pro-immigrant” while simultaneously saying we should build more walls and double the size of the Border Patrol. Indeed, many Republicans do, and while their argument may not be particularly persuasive, it’s not completely crazy. But you can’t say you’re pro-immigrant and advocate ending birthright citizenship. You just can’t.
I promise you that next fall, there are going to be ads like this running all over the country, and especially on Spanish-language media:
“My name is Lisa Hernandez. I was born in California, grew up there. I was valedictorian of my high school class, graduated from Yale, and now I’m in medical school; I’m going to be a pediatrician. But now Scott Walker and the Republicans say that because my mom is undocumented, that I’m not a real American and I shouldn’t be a citizen. I’m living the American Dream, but they want to take it away from me and people like me. Well I’ve got a message for you, Governor Walker. I’m every bit as American as your children. This country isn’t about who your parents were, it’s about everybody having a chance to work hard, achieve, and contribute to our future. It seems like some people forgot that.”
When a hundred ads like that one are blanketing the airwaves, the Republicans can say, “Wait, I support legal immigration!” all they want, but it won’t matter. Hispanic voters will have heard once again — and louder than ever before — that the GOP doesn’t like them and doesn’t want them. Will it be different if they nominate one of the candidates who doesn’t want to repeal birthright citizenship, like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio? Somewhat, but the damage among Hispanic voters could already be too great even for them to overcome.
Now let’s look at the magnitude of the challenge the Republicans face. A number of analysts have all come to the same conclusion: given that Hispanics are rapidly increasing their share of the population and whites’ share is declining, Republicans need to improve their performance among Hispanics to prevail.
And they may have to improve dramatically. For instance, in this analysis by Latino Decisions, under even the most absurdly optimistic scenario for Republicans — “that white voters consolidate behind the Republican Party at levels that were observed in 2014; that black participation and Democratic support returns to pre-Obama levels; and the expected growth in the Latino vote does not fully materialize” — the Republican candidate would need 42 percent of the Hispanic vote to win. As a point of comparison, according to exit polls Mitt Romney got 27 percent of Hispanic votes in 2012, while John McCain got 31 percent in 2008. Under a more likely scenario, with an electorate that votes something like in 2012 but with African-American turnout reduced, the Republican would need 47 percent of the Hispanic vote. In their worst-case scenario for Republicans — an electorate that votes identically to the way it did in 2012, but adjusted for changes in population — the Republican would need a stunning 52 percent of Hispanic votes.
So to sum up: even in the best possible situation when it comes to turnout and the vote choices of the rest of the electorate, the Republican presidential candidate in 2016 is going to have to pull off an absolutely heroic performance among Hispanic voters if he’s going to win.
That seemed awfully unlikely a week ago. How likely does it seem today?
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, August 18, 2015
“The National Bitch Hunt Is Definitely On”: Why Hillary Clinton Drives Her Enemies Crazy
Same as it ever was. Once again, according to pundits on the influential Washington, D.C. cocktail party circuit, Hillary Clinton is in deep trouble. The National Bitch Hunt is definitely on. Surely you didn’t think we could have a female presidential candidate without one?
Rolling down the highway, listening to Diane Rehm’s NPR talk show last week, I wondered if I hadn’t driven into some kind of weird political time warp.
In a sense, I had.
“Someone said the other day that Washington may now have reached the state-of-the-art point of having a cover-up without a crime,” pronounced the Washington Post. By failing to come clean, Hillary had managed “to make it appear as if the Clintons had something to hide.”
“These clumsy efforts at suppression are feckless and self-defeating,” thundered the New York Times. Hillary’s actions, the newspaper continued, “are swiftly draining away public trust in [her] integrity.”
OK, I’m teasing. Both editorials appeared over 21 years ago, in January 1994. They expressed outrage at Hillary Clinton’s decision to turn over Whitewater documents to federal investigators rather than to the press, which had conjured a make-believe scandal out of bogus reporting of a kind that’s since grown too familiar in American journalism. (Interested readers are referred to Joe Conason’s and my e-book The Hunting of Hillary, available from The National Memo.)
However, by failing to roll over and bare her throat, Hillary Clinton only “continued to contribute to the perception that she has something to hide.”
Another joke. That last quote was actually The Atlantic’s Molly Ball on the Diane Rehm program just last Friday. It’s the same old song, except that Ball was complaining about Hillary’s turning her email server over to investigators looking into a dispute between the State Department and the CIA about which documents should have been classified, and when.
She should have turned the gadget over six months ago, Ball opined.
Ah, but to whom? There wasn’t a State Department vs. CIA dispute back then.
No cage filled with parrots could have recited the list of familiar anti-Hillary talking points more efficiently than Rehm’s guests.
The email flap, opined the Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “creates and feeds into this narrative about the Clintons and Mrs. Clinton that the rules are different for them, that she’s not one of us.”
Most Americans, she added indignantly, “don’t have access to a private email server.”
Actually, most Americans don’t know what a server is, or why the hardware is supposed to matter. Then, too, most Americans have never been Secretary of State, aren’t married to a former president, and don’t enjoy Secret Service protection at home.
Stolberg saw a perception problem too. Nobody was rude enough to ask her about the perception caused by the Times’ public editor’s conclusion that her own newspaper appeared to have an axe to grind against the Clintons after it falsely reported that the emails were the object of a criminal investigation.
Stolberg also complained that both Clintons “play by a separate set of rules, [and] that the normal standards don’t apply.”
Which normal standards? According to, yes, the New York Times: “When [Clinton] took office in 2009…the State Department allowed the use of home computers as long as they were secure…There appears to have been no prohibition on the exclusive use of a private server; it does not appear to be an option anyone had thought about.”
So why are we talking about this at all? No Secretary of State previous to Clinton had a government email account.
Bottom line: when they start talking about narratives and perceptions, these would-be insiders, they’re talking about themselves.
But leave it to the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, who’s written about little else lately, to sum it all up with classic wifebeater logic. Hillary’s emails, he told NPR’s audience, “remind [voters] of the things they don’t like, the secretiveness, the paranoia, the sort of distrust….And then I also think it just feeds the perception that she is a candidate of the past. Do you really want to go back to this? Yes, the Clintons bring many good things. But they also bring this sort of baggage, this stuff that always follows them.”
See, if Hillary would just quit fighting for herself and her issues, they could quit ganging up on the bitch. Meanwhile, this has to be at least the fourth time the same crowd has predicted her imminent demise, if not indictment and conviction. All based upon partisan leaks (this Trey Gowdy joker is nothing compared to Kenneth Starr’s leak-o-matic prosecutors) and upon presumed evidence in documents nobody’s yet seen.
From the Rose Law Firm billing records to Benghazi, it’s the same old story. Because when the evidence finally emerges, it turns out that Hillary has been diligently coloring inside the lines all along.
And that’s because she’s smarter and tougher than her enemies — the very qualities that drive them crazy.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, August 19, 2015
“No Experience Necessary”: A Cycle In Which ‘The Base’ Isn’t Buying Anti-Washington Rhetoric From Senators Or Governors
My editor at TPM asked me to take a look yesterday at the historical precedents for so many candidates with no experience in elected office managing to run non-trivial presidential campaigns at the same time. And indeed, I can’t immediately find any precedent for three such candidates in a single cycle. As noted in my column, Trump, Carson and Fiorina registered a total of 42% support in the post-debate Fox News national poll of the GOP presidential nomination contest. Add in Ted Cruz, whose brief service in the U.S. Senate has mostly been devoted to attacking his colleagues, and you’ve got a clear majority preferring as little experience as possible.
Past “non-politician” candidates for president mostly had an abundance of other forms of public service. The last president without a prior elected position was the epitome: Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was on the public payroll most of his life, and was noted among generals more for his political acumen than his military skills. 2008 candidate Wes Clark was from the same mold. 2000 candidate Liddy Dole had served in two Cabinet positions, and was married to the ultimate Congressional Insider.
Steve Forbes and Herman Cain were entirely innocent of public office, like today’s trio. But they didn’t appear in the same cycle.
In writing my column, I added up the elected experience of the other 14 candidates in the ’16 GOP field, and came up with 144 years. That’s a lot of experience. But the only candidate who seems to be putting a lot of emphasis on how much experience he has is Rick Santorum, who is going nowhere fast.
Of the three novices, Carly Fiorina is the most unique historically insofar as she really has no great successes to boast of in the private or public sectors. Yes, she was by some accounts the first woman to head up one of the world’s largest corporations, but by even more accounts she ran HP into the ground and then used her golden parachute to run a notably unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign. Other than that, she’s good at getting appointed to the advisory committees of Republican presidential nominees–both McCain and Romney–and has the kind of communications skills you’d expect from someone used to doing Power Point presentations at shareholder meetings.
As I’ve discussed here often, there’s a big reason Fiorina has been largely bullet-proof despite her dubious resume; her gender makes her a very valuable party asset in a cycle where it’s still largely assumed Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee. But you’d have to say she’s also benefiting from the same strange climate that has made Trump the GOP front-runner (in the polls at least) and Carson a grassroots favorite. Decades of attacks on the public sector combined with decades of broken promises by Republican pols have produced a cycle in which “the base” isn’t buying anti-Washington rhetoric from senators (other than perhaps the systematically irresponsible Cruz) or even governors. Maybe one of the experienced candidates with Establishment backing–you know, those who together are pulling a small minority of the vote in the polls–will eventually be the nominee. But said Establishment and the pundits and political scientists who view it as all-powerful need to take a long look at the dynamics of this nominating contest.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 19, 2015
“Republicans Against Retirement”: Republicans Who Would Be President Seem To Be Lining Up For Another Round Of Punishment
Something strange is happening in the Republican primary — something strange, that is, besides the Trump phenomenon. For some reason, just about all the leading candidates other than The Donald have taken a deeply unpopular position, a known political loser, on a major domestic policy issue. And it’s interesting to ask why.
The issue in question is the future of Social Security, which turned 80 last week. The retirement program is, of course, both extremely popular and a long-term target of conservatives, who want to kill it precisely because its popularity helps legitimize government action in general. As the right-wing activist Stephen Moore (now chief economist of the Heritage Foundation) once declared, Social Security is “the soft underbelly of the welfare state”; “jab your spear through that” and you can undermine the whole thing.
But that was a decade ago, during former President George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize the program — and what Mr. Bush learned was that the underbelly wasn’t that soft after all. Despite the political momentum coming from the G.O.P.’s victory in the 2004 election, despite support from much of the media establishment, the assault on Social Security quickly crashed and burned. Voters, it turns out, like Social Security as it is, and don’t want it cut.
It’s remarkable, then, that most of the Republicans who would be president seem to be lining up for another round of punishment. In particular, they’ve been declaring that the retirement age — which has already been pushed up from 65 to 66, and is scheduled to rise to 67 — should go up even further.
Thus, Jeb Bush says that the retirement age should be pushed back to “68 or 70”. Scott Walker has echoed that position. Marco Rubio wants both to raise the retirement age and to cut benefits for higher-income seniors. Rand Paul wants to raise the retirement age to 70 and means-test benefits. Ted Cruz wants to revive the Bush privatization plan.
For the record, these proposals would be really bad public policy — a harsh blow to Americans in the bottom half of the income distribution, who depend on Social Security, often have jobs that involve manual labor, and have not, in fact, seen a big rise in life expectancy. Meanwhile, the decline of private pensions has left working Americans more reliant on Social Security than ever.
And no, Social Security does not face a financial crisis; its long-term funding shortfall could easily be closed with modest increases in revenue.
Still, nobody should be surprised at the spectacle of politicians enthusiastically endorsing destructive policies. What’s puzzling about the renewed Republican assault on Social Security is that it looks like bad politics as well as bad policy. Americans love Social Security, so why aren’t the candidates at least pretending to share that sentiment?
The answer, I’d suggest, is that it’s all about the big money.
Wealthy individuals have long played a disproportionate role in politics, but we’ve never seen anything like what’s happening now: domination of campaign finance, especially on the Republican side, by a tiny group of immensely wealthy donors. Indeed, more than half the funds raised by Republican candidates through June came from just 130 families.
And while most Americans love Social Security, the wealthy don’t. Two years ago a pioneering study of the policy preferences of the very wealthy found many contrasts with the views of the general public; as you might expect, the rich are politically different from you and me. But nowhere are they as different as they are on the matter of Social Security. By a very wide margin, ordinary Americans want to see Social Security expanded. But by an even wider margin, Americans in the top 1 percent want to see it cut. And guess whose preferences are prevailing among Republican candidates.
You often see political analyses pointing out, rightly, that voting in actual primaries is preceded by an “invisible primary” in which candidates compete for the support of crucial elites. But who are these elites? In the past, it might have been members of the political establishment and other opinion leaders. But what the new attack on Social Security tells us is that the rules have changed. Nowadays, at least on the Republican side, the invisible primary has been reduced to a stark competition for the affections and, of course, the money of a few dozen plutocrats.
What this means, in turn, is that the eventual Republican nominee — assuming that it’s not Mr. Trump —will be committed not just to a renewed attack on Social Security but to a broader plutocratic agenda. Whatever the rhetoric, the GOP is on track to nominate someone who has won over the big money by promising government by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 17, 2015
“The Worst-Foot-Forward Problems”: Look Out, Republicans; Donald Trump Is Shaping Policy Now, Too
The moment he officially entered the Republican presidential race, and through the first debate, Donald Trump began to influence (or cheapen, if you prefer) the antics and rhetoric of other candidates.
This wasn’t new or unexpected in presidential politics, let alone Republican presidential politics. But the specter of someone like Trump driving the dynamic—as opposed to a more polished or pragmatic candidate—terrified Republican elites for obvious reasons. Many of them were hoping that 2016 would be the year that Republicans managed to avoid the worst-foot-forward problems that hobbled their nominees in 2008 and 2012, yet here was the GOP frontrunner calling Mexican immigrants rapists, another contender comparing nuclear diplomacy with Nazism, and still another one cooking bacon on the tip of a semi-automatic rifle.
The problem persists to this day, thanks to Trump’s persistent polling advantage and command of the media. But it just got meaningfully worse and now threatens to deteriorate into an outright catastrophe. For the first time since he joined the race several weeks ago, Trump has laid out a comprehensive policy approach—perhaps the most nativist, antagonistic, right wing immigration plan any leading Republican has ever proposed—and it’s earning rave reviews and approving nods from conservatives and other candidates.
Trump isn’t just shaping Republican rhetoric and antics anymore. He’s starting to shape Republican policy as well.
By design, the primary campaign is putting rightward pressure on everyone, forcing viable candidates to stake out positions they’ll ultimately regret, even in realms where Trump isn’t much of a player. At the first debate, both Governor Scott Walker and Senator Marco Rubio claimed to favor abortion bans without rape, incest, and life-of-mother exceptions. But Trump’s foray into policy will make him a standard-bearer in realms like economic and foreign policy, where he has thus far skated by on trash talk and empty sloganeering.
On Monday, Walker said his own immigration ideas are “very similar” to Trump’s—both want a wall built along the U.S.-Mexico border—and his campaign promised, like Trump, to “end the birthright citizenship problem.”
Birthright citizenship is a longstanding right wing bugaboo. It emerged briefly at the zenith of the Tea Party movement, when several leading Republican members of Congress proposed examining remedies to the Constitution’s broad citizenship guarantee. In 2011, Senator Rand Paul proposed amending the constitution “so that a person born in the United States to illegal aliens does not automatically gain citizenship unless at least one parent is a legal citizen, legal immigrant, active member of the Armed Forces or a naturalized legal citizen.”
Neither Walker, nor Trump, has specified how they’d achieve their goals. Trump’s white paper is more consistent with support for a constitutional amendment, while Walker’s comment is more consistent with support for ramping up enforcement so dramatically that unauthorized immigrants are deported before they can give birth. But the details are almost beside the larger point, that as cruel and damaging as the immigration debate was during the last Republican primary, it has become more so this time around. After they lost in 2012, Republicans set about to neutralize immigration as a campaign issue, by moving quickly to the left and helping Democrats update immigration policy for a generation. Instead they have moved significantly to the right.
That reflects a broader, more troubling trend. Three years ago, the GOP recognized the need to move in a subtly but meaningfully different direction. What they’re finding instead is that their coalition lacks the cultural and ideological space to nurture that kind of moderating impulse. Now, as on immigration, Republicans have moved right on a host of other issues, from abortion rights to voting rights. This massive strategic failure by the party apparatus has been investigated at length, and the party’s inability to prevent the 2016 primary from degenerating into another 2012-like fiasco will become the focal point of a thousand postmortems if Republicans lose the presidency again. Their mistake would be to blame it all on Trump, a GOP tourist. The problem runs so much deeper.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, August 18, 2015
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