“Marco Rubio’s Tangled Web”: Don’t Let President Obama Stop Immigration Reform!
Marco Rubio has a big op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today explaining to conservatives why they should support immigration reform, and WaPo’s Greg Sargent has a persuasive take on it:
So how can Republicans who want immigration reform get conservatives to accept it, given that Obama also wants it?
Republicans pushing for reform have come up with a strategic answer to that question, one that isn’t really acknowledged openly. They are subtly making the case to their base that a defeat for immigration reform is actually a hidden victory for Obama, and that passing the Senate compromise is actually worse for the President than the alternative, i.e. doing nothing.
In this sense, the immigration reform debate is perhaps the ultimate test of what Obama referred to as the need to create a “permission structure” — that is, a way for conservatives to accept something Obama wants, too. The message — which is carefully couched – is that, yes, Obama wants immigration reform, but conservatives should accept the Gang of Eight compromise because the alternative is actually better for the President.
The basic idea here is that the status quo with its alleged weak border enforcement is as bad as or worse than legalizing the undocumented workers already here. There’s even a hint in Rubio’s op-ed that absent reform legislation, the radicals in the administration will find other, more devious ways, to legalize undocumented folk, even as they are inviting more to come in.
Perhaps understanding that this argument isn’t exactly open-and-shut, Rubio also invites conservatives to “toughen” the border enforcement language in the Gang of Eight bill–as he’s been doing in interviews for several days. I guess ideally he’d like Obama to play his part by yelling and screaming about any modifications before eventually caving in, because he’s so weak, you know.
Greg notices something else interesting about Rubio’s pitch: it doesn’t contain the usual political arguments that are actually the motive for virtually all the Republican interest in immigration reform:
There’s a key nuance here. As I understand the thinking, GOP base voters are turned off by the political argument that we must reform immigration because if we don’t, Obama will be able to screw Republicans over politically with Latinos. The reason the political argument doesn’t work is partly because many GOP base voters are persuaded that immigration reform will create a whole lot of Democratic voters — in purely political terms, rank-and-file members of the GOP base believe immigration reform is a net win for Democrats no matter how you slice it.
I’d add to that observation the equally important fact that a lot of Tea types are turned off by electoral arguments generally: they don’t want to hear about how the Republican Party might wrangle a few more Latino voters via a betrayal of principle–they want to pursue their ideological tenets to the ends of the earth. There’s just not a lot of openness to strategic or tactical thinking here; it’s fight-fight-fight, based to some degree on the iron conviction that all the strategery of the Republican Establishment of the past hasn’t worked while howling at the moon worked just fine in 2010.
In any event, it’s a tangled web ol’ Marco seems to be weaving, and if Greg and I can see through it, I’m reasonably sure a lot of his intended audience can see through it, too.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 3, 2013
“Politics Dressed Up As Math”: The GOP Starts Eating Its Own On Immigration
The conservative Heritage Foundation today – in a re-run of theirs from 2007 – released a “cost estimate” for immigration reform. Not surprisingly, Heritage predicts that the price tag of immigration reform will be just shy of astronomical: $6.3 trillion over the next few decades.
Back in 2007, Heritage helped prevent comprehensive immigration reform from becoming law by claiming that it would cost $2.6 trillion (in the last six years, something evidently happened to more than double Heritage’s estimate). In the intervening years, the GOP’s trouble attracting minority voters has only increased, so this time, Republicans in Congress and their allies who want to see immigration reform become a reality were ready.
“Here we go again,” tweeted Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., one of the so-called “gang of eight” in the Senate. “New Heritage study claims huge cost for Immigration Reform. Ignores economic benefits.” Former Congressional Budget Office director and McCain campaign adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin wrote that the study “failed to consider the implications of reform and instead looked solely at the cost of low-skilled immigrants.” The Immigration Task Force at the Bipartisan Policy Center, cochaired by Republican former Gov. Haley Barbour and former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, said in a statement, “We strongly believe that this study’s modeling and assumptions are fundamentally flawed.”
For the record, the Congressional Budget Office found that the 2007 immigration bill – which Heritage said would cost $2.6 trillion – would have actually boosted revenue by tens of billions of dollars. And past Heritage studies on immigration have been, to put it mildly, a bit off the mark.
But critiquing the Heritage study on an economic basis means accepting that it is meant as a good-faith effort to assess the impact of proposed legislation. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent and the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky both note, that isn’t really the point. As Tomasky writes:
The Heritage Foundation has now come out against immigration reform, without exactly taking that position, indeed while claiming to take the opposite position … This is an old conservative play – go after the cost of something, which permits them not to be against the idea per se, only against its fiscal ramifications. “We’re not against immigration reform. Quite the contrary! We’re just against the cost of this particular bill.” It’s a cousin of the old saw one always heard back in the Cold War days: “We’re not against arms-control treaties in general at all, but we are certainly against this one,” which just happened to be the case with regard to every single one.
Heritage analysts even freely admit that their estimate isn’t of the gang of eight’s specific proposal, but about some phantom comprehensive reform bill. Adding in one more level of absurdity, Heritage chose not to use so-called “dynamic scoring” when assessing the impact of immigration reform, even though most of the time it screams bloody murder when dynamic scoring is not used to figure out how much a bill might cost.
So Heritage is not really trying to figure out what immigration reform will actually do to the economy; it is just giving the right-wing base a number to wield as a cudgel. But this time, other conservatives, rather than progressives, are trying to show Heritage’s politics-dressed-up-as-math for what it really is. Those of us on the other end of the political spectrum just get to sit back and watch.
By: Pat Garofalo, U. S. News and World Report, May 6, 2013
“The Choice Now Is Between Bad And Worse”: Is It Too Late For The GOP To Save Itself With Latinos?
Since the 2012 election, there’s a story we’ve heard over and over about Republicans and the Latino vote. After spending years bashing immigrants, the party got hammered among this increasingly vital demographic group this election cycle, whereupon the party’s more pragmatic elements woke up and realized if they don’t convince Latinos the GOP isn’t hostile to them, they could make it impossible to win presidential elections. They’ve got one shot on immigration reform. Pass it, and they can stanch the bleeding. Kill it, and they lock in their dreadful performance among Latinos for generations.
This story is mostly true. But I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t already too late for the GOP to win Latinos over. It’s going a little far to suggest that Latinos could become the equivalent of African Americans, giving 90 percent or more of their votes to Democrats in every election. But is it possible that so much damage has already been done that even if immigration reform passes, Republicans won’t see any improvement in their standing among Latinos?
Since we’re talking about what might happen in the future, this is all speculative, and it’s a little ridiculous to predict that anything that happens now will hold for “generations.” One generation, maybe, but nobody can say what the political landscape will look like in 30 or 40 years. But let’s think about how this is likely to play out in the near term.
If immigration reform fails because of anti-immigrant sentiment from the GOP’s right wing, that’s obviously a disaster for them. But even if it passes, that might be only a marginally better outcome. The debate itself could be making things worse by giving the anti-reform forces a bigger platform to express their views, even if other elements of the party are trying to put on a friendlier face. And if a bill does pass, who’s going to get the credit? Barack Obama, of course. It’ll be trumpeted in the media as the major legislative accomplishment of his second term (either the first, or the only, depending on how the next few years go), and much of the story will be about him for no reason other than that he’s the president and that’s how these things work; the president is the protagonist of most of the stories told about what happens in Washington, whether he deserves to be or not.
Furthermore, the legislation will almost certainly pass with the votes of almost every Democrat in both houses of Congress, and over the opposition of most Republicans. It doesn’t need many Republican votes, and for every Republican officeholder who wants to see it pass, there are probably two or three who feel enough pressure from the party’s right wing that they’ll end up voting against it, if for no other reason than to forestall a primary challenge— the primary thing every Republican member of Congress fears these days.
So how is this debate going to look to the public as the vote approaches? On one side you’ll have Obama and the Democrats, along with a few Republicans; on the other side you’ll have a whole lot of Republicans, some of whom will no doubt continue to say offensive things about immigrants. For good measure, many people will assume, whether it’s true or not, that the Democrats are sincere in their support of immigration reform, while the Republicans who join them are doing it just to save their political skins. When it’s over, Obama will declare victory, and everyone will know that it happened because the intransigent Republicans were defeated. Some conservative Republicans running in primaries around the country will still see immigrant-bashing as a potentially fruitful campaign tactic, giving voters the occasional helpful reminder about where much of the party stands. And in the next election (and the one after that, and the one after that), the default assumption among Latino voters will continue to be that your average Republican despises and distrusts them. That isn’t to say that any individual Republican candidate can’t overcome that assumption and win the votes of significant numbers of Latinos, but it will be a very difficult thing to do, and most will fail when they try.
So at this point, it certainly looks like the two potential outcomes are that conservative Republicans succeed in killing immigration reform, which is disastrous for the GOP, or it passes, which is only a little bit better. If they’re going to change their image among Latino voters, it’s going to have to be a long-term project.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 30, 2013
“The Party Of Nothing”: Republicans, An Immovable Wall of Nays
So far, it doesn’t look like the story of the Tsarnaev brothers is killing Republican support for immigration reform. John McCain and Lindsey Graham insisted that their identity makes reform all the more important. But Boston aside, if you pay a little attention you see signs that the right is getting a bit restive about all this reasonableness. There’s a long and winding road from here to there, but if the GOP does drop immigration, then it will essentially be a party of nothing, the Seinfeld Party, a party that has stopped even pretending that policy is something that political parties exist to make.
Yesterday in Salon, political scientist Jonathan Bernstein wrote up the following little discovery, which has to do with the numbering of bills. Historically, the party that controls the House of Representatives reserves for itself the first 10 slots—HR 1, HR 2, and so on. Usually, the majority party has filled at least most of those slots with the pieces of legislation that it wants to announce to the world as its top priorities. When the Democrats ran the House, for example, HR 1 was always John Dingell’s health-care bill, in homage to his father, a congressman who pushed for national health care back in the day.
Today, nine of the 10 slots are empty. Nine of the 10. The one that is occupied, HR 3, is taken up by a bill calling on President Obama to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Even this, insiders will tell you in an honest moment, is completely symbolic and empty: the general expectation among Democrats and Republicans is that Obama will approve the pipeline sometime in this term, but that eleventy-jillion lawsuits will immediately be filed, and the thing won’t be built for years if at all, and nothing about this short and general bill can or is designed to change that. One other slot, HR 1, is provisionally reserved for a tax-reform bill, so at least they have settled on a subject matter, but if you click on HR 1, you will learn that “the text of HR 1 has not yet been received.”
This wasn’t true of even the GOP in earlier vintages. Newt Gingrich had an aggressive agenda, as we remember all too well, and even Denny Hastert filled most of the slots. (The Democrats of 2009 didn’t, for some reason, but obviously the Democratic Congress of 2009 was the most agenda-heavy Congress since 1981 or arguably 1965.) Today’s GOP can’t be bothered to pretend.
I became a grown-up, to the extent that I am one, right around the time Ronald Reagan took office. Lots of people say things like, “Gee, the Republican Party was really a party of ideas then.” I argue that that assertion is vastly overaccepted today. The central conservative “idea,” after all—supply-side economics—was and remains a flimsy and evidence-free lie that has destroyed the country’s economic vitality and turned our upper classes into the most selfish and penurious group of people history has seen since the Romanovs. Other conservative ideas of the time were largely critiques of extant liberalism or gifts to the 1 percent dressed up in the tuxedoes of “liberty” and “freedom.” I’ll give them credit for workfare and a few other items. But the actual record is thinner than most people believe.
Still, there was some intellectual spadework going on. And still (and this is more important), there were people in the Republican Party who tried to bring those ideas into law. The Orrin Hatch of the 1980s and 1990s was a titan compared with the Orrin Hatch of today. When I look at Senate roll-call votes and see that immovable wall of nays on virtually everything of consequence that comes before them, I wonder what someone like Hatch really thinks deep down, but of course we’ll never know. He is doing what the party’s base demands of him, and those demands include that he clam up and denounce Obama and not utter one sentence that could be misinterpreted as signaling compromise.
This brings me back to immigration. The Tsarnaevs may not have derailed things, but other cracks are starting to show. Last Thursday—before we knew who the Boston bombers were—Rush Limbaugh speculated that immigration reform would constitute Republican “suicide.” A Politico article yesterday made the same point—an analysis showed that if 11 million “undocumented residents” had been able to vote in 2012, Obama might have won Arizona and would even have made a race of it in Texas. This did not go unremarked in right-wing circles yesterday. The Big Bloviator himself weighed in: “Senator Schumer can taste this. He’s so excited. All the Democrats. Why would we agree to something that they are so eager to have?”
Immigration is the one area today on which a small number of Republicans are actually trying. Limbaugh’s position last week is a change from a couple of months ago, when Marco Rubio had him admitting that maybe the GOP needed to embrace reform. It’s not hard to imagine him and Laura Ingraham and others turning surlier as the hour of truth on the bill approaches.
I will be impressed and more than a little surprised if the day comes and a majority of Republicans back an immigration bill. Passing such a bill is undoubtedly in their self-interest, as everyone has observed. What fewer have observed is that doing so is just not in their DNA. And life teaches us that genes usually get the better of reason.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 24, 2013
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