“You Did Build That”: As Trump Embarrasses Them On Immigration, Republicans Have No One To Blame But Themselves
The always excellent Greg Sargent makes a great point this morning at the Plum Line: Republicans have no one to blame but themselves for the quandary Donald Trump is putting them in.
Just as Southern conservatives could have saved themselves from looking like racist neanderthals desperate to keep a symbol of hate and slavery flying over their governments by taking action of their own accord, so too could the GOP have stood up for immigration reform and put the kibosh on a xenophobic huckster like Trump. But it was not to be:
Really, now — nobody could have predicted that if Republicans failed to pass immigration reform when they had the chance in 2013 and 2014, it would become a major issue in the 2016 race, in ways that are alarming GOP strategists. Yet, shockingly, here we are.
Donald Trump’s foray into the immigration debate has now sparked a flare-up between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. And some Republicans are openly warning that Trump’s comments threaten to do severe damage to the GOP brand among Latinos.
Of course they will, and for good reason. Trump is merely saying in front of a microphone what millions of Republicans across the country say behind closed doors and anonymously in online comments sections. That Trump’s vicious beliefs are widely shared among conservatives is precisely the reason why otherwise business-friendly Republicans eager to win back a greater share of the Hispanic vote could not see their way to passing immigration reform, for fear of Tea Party challenges from the right.
Republicans in leadership could have simply told their nativist base to pound sand, but that might not have been an option: after all, merely sneezing the wrong direction on the issue may have cost Eric Cantor his seat. Either way, the GOP has only itself to blame for the Trump debacle. They had the opportunity to nip this in the bud and take the tough stand to pass immigration reform. They chose not to, and now they’re reaping the whirlwind.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, July 12, 2015
“Polls Show Most Americans Favor Pathway To Citizenship”: GOP Continues To Be Held Hostage By Aging, Nativist Tea Partiers
With all the high drama in Washington over immigration, you’d think the fate of undocumented workers represented a cataclysmic political divide — an ever-widening chasm that cannot be bridged. But it doesn’t.
Polls have long shown that a majority of Americans favor a pathway to citizenship for those residents who entered the country illegally. But new data show that isn’t a matter of blue states overwhelming red ones. In fact, there isn’t a state in the union, from the bluest to the reddest, where a majority opposes a path to citizenship, provided certain criteria are met, for those without papers, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.
The PRRI has used its data to create an American Values Atlas that shows the political inclinations of voters in each state. Unsurprisingly, some states are more immigrant friendly than others. In California, for example, 66 percent support a path to citizenship for the undocumented. In crimson-red Alabama, that drops to 56 percent. But that’s still a majority.
Yet, that very pathway is the mechanism that congressional Republicans have denounced as “amnesty” and refused to support. House Speaker John Boehner’s caucus has declined even to hold a vote on a proposal for comprehensive immigration reform.
Last fall, when President Obama took action through executive orders to grant temporary papers to as many as 4 million immigrants who met certain criteria, Republicans were apoplectic, claiming he was violating the Constitution and behaving like a despot. They have used every instrument at their disposal, from lawsuits to a pitched battle over funding for the Department of Homeland Security, to overturn the president’s orders.
Yet even the president’s executive action on immigration is not as unpopular as you might think. While his decision to use executive powers does not draw universal support, the aim of his action does. Three-quarters of Americans favor his policy of granting temporary documents to certain groups of immigrants. Said Robert Jones, CEO of the institute, “In today’s polarized politics, there are few major issues that attract this kind of bipartisan and cross-religious agreement.”
It makes you wonder: Who are those congressional Republicans listening to? Why are they opposing a policy with widespread support, even among GOP voters? (While more Democrats — 70 percent, according to the PRRI — support a path to citizenship, 51 percent of Republicans do, as well.)
The answer is depressing, if not surprising: The Republican Party continues to be held hostage by an aging and nativist minority of Tea Partiers who cannot stomach the idea of a browning America. (It isn’t considered polite to point this out, but more Tea Partiers hold views that show racial resentment than the public at large. As just one example, a 2010 New York Times poll showed Tea Partiers are “more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people.”)
Among those who identify with the Tea Party, only 37 percent support a pathway to citizenship, according to the PRRI poll. Twenty-three percent would give them legal residency, while 37 percent want to deport each and every one of them, the poll said. (Never mind the logistical and financial nightmare that trying to round up every undocumented resident would represent.)
This is a huge problem for the GOP, as its strategists have pointed out for years. The party cannot afford to alienate Latinos, a growing bloc, as they have alienated black voters with their resistance to civil rights measures.
So rather than pander to an ultraconservative and xenophobic minority, the Republican Party’s leaders ought to educate them about the need for comprehensive immigration reform. As a practical matter, demographic change is already preordained: By the year 2042, according to the U.S. Census, whites will no longer constitute a majority, no matter what happens to undocumented immigrants. The GOP needs the allegiance of more voters of color if it is to regain the Oval Office.
But there is more at stake here than the survival of a political party. The nation also needs those immigrants; it needs their energy, their youth, their hopes and dreams. We ought to welcome them with open arms.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, March 2, 2015
“Drag-Racing Off A Political Cliff”: Republicans Attack Immigrants While Putting America In Danger
The House of Representatives’ Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill, which is really a law seeking the mass deportations of undocumented people, including children, died on the Senate floor, victim of arithmetic certainty.
Mathematical reality seems to be a challenge to the GOP House majority. While most Americans have heard about the 60-vote rule in the U.S. Senate that impacts most legislation — the cloture/filibuster, as it is commonly known — House Republicans insist in passing bills that cannot make that threshold, and are subsequently dismayed that their legislation dies an ignominious death.
Yet once again, and this would now seem to be par for the course for Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) House, Republicans have passed a bill that, with zero support of Senate Democrats, failed to meet the basic 60-vote threshold — three times.
It has been clear for some time that Democrats will not support the liquidation of President Obama’s executive actions on immigration. Moreover, should such a bill pass by some deus ex machina event, the president would veto it.
So why insist on passing a bill that cannot become law? One must assume that the potency of a quixotic quest to achieve the impossible is irresistible to many members of the Republican caucus in the House. Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) seemed to insist that two plus two does not equal four when he told The Hill that “There’s not a Plan B, because this is the plan.”
In other words, after the mass deportation bill crashed and burned in the Senate, the House has no other plan, no other path forward to fund America’s shield from terrorism, Homeland Security.
Showing the triumph of ideology over logic, The Hill further reports that Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) said before the Senate vote that: “[M]any of us agree that we should stand behind the one bill that we sent over there. Most of us feel that way. … Anything less than that, we’re not going to get any better result anyway. So why not just go for what’s really right?”
Of course, the obvious “better result” would be not to put America’s security at risk, and instead pass a clean DHS funding bill that would keep the nation safe. Immigration can always be tackled as a separate issue by the Republican-controlled Congress.
In fact, Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.) recently told me on my radio show that the House leadership has given immigration-reform Republicans encouragement to develop a set of sweeping immigration reform bills. So at least in the pro-arithmetic wing of the Republican Caucus, there is a reality-based path forward to deal with immigration without the perennial government shutdown threat — implicit in Scalise’s “not a Plan B” comment — that has become Republicans’ go-to tactic for forcing through their agenda when they fail to muster the votes necessary to pass legislation in both chambers.
It would be refreshing to see the big House Republican majority have as much passion for governing as they do for deportation. As Americans look at our society, polling clearly suggests that bread-and-butter issues dominate the agenda of the people. The economy, of course, and education, healthcare and the sense of economic insecurity that hangs like a shadow over most American families are the issues that should be tackled by a giant majority with ambitions to govern for more than two years.
I have yet to see one poll in which Americans rank mass deportations of undocumented immigrants as a top priority. Moreover, it’s hard to imagine that Americans favor such deportations over the continued funding and smooth operation of the country’s principal anti-terrorist agency, DHS.
Ironically, the party that has claimed the mantle of being the true fighters against a global jihadist threat is willing to drag-race off a political cliff to deport people rather than fund Homeland Security.
This is a choice that has both practical and symbolic resonance. The practical impact is obvious: Even one day, contrary to Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart’s (R-Fla.) jaunty declaration otherwise, when DHS is not funded is one day too many. Republicans willfully weakening America’s national security would be irresponsible, bordering on seditious.
And the political and symbolic effects would also be notable. Will Americans easily forget that Republicans bet with their safety, indeed the safety of the nation, for the unachievable policy goals of deporting millions of people?
Perhaps we’re seeing here the inherent weakness of a Republican majority so divided among ideologies and passions that it is literally incapable of governing for the benefit of the nation.
At the very least, we are witness to the fact that even GOP leaders such as Rep. Scalise are a little weak on the universal truths of basic arithmetic.
By: Fernando Espuelas, Univision America Host; THe Blog, The Huffington Post, February 6, 2015
“Go For It, Mr. Speaker”: Eric Garner Offers Boehner A Path To Redemption
What does the death of Eric Garner, following a police chokehold, have to do with immigration? For House Speaker John Boehner, perhaps quite a lot.
Boehner has been trying to contain the Republican reaction to President Barack Obama’s recent executive action on immigration. Boehner’s hopes of passing comprehensive immigration reform were dashed long ago. But he would still like to mute his conference’s most virulent anti-immigration voices — call it the Steve King caucus — to keep his party from becoming further identified with intolerance. (Thursday’s debate on the “Preventing Executive Overreach on Immigration Act of 2014,” a bill sponsored by Republican Representative Ted Yoho, won’t help. It essentially puts the party on record in favor of mass deportation. And the House passed it.)
Republicans are quick to mount the barricades against Obamacare or taxes on high incomes. When it comes to protesting injustice against the poor and marginalized, their reflexes can be unnervingly slow.
Senator Rand Paul shrewdly (and even bravely, despite some dissembling) has tried to shift perceptions that Republicans don’t care about racial minorities, speaking before black audiences and citing his belief, however unreal, that the Republican coalition can bring in a substantial number of black voters in 2016. Confronted by the news of a grand jury’s refusal to bring charges against a police officer who put Garner in a chokehold, however, Paul whiffed. In effect, he focused his outrage on the supreme injustice of New York’s cigarette taxes rather than the loss of a man’s life in police custody.
Boehner’s reaction was both smarter and more humane. Asked about the grand jury decision, Boehner said, “The American people deserve more answers about what really happened here.” Significantly, Boehner also “hasn’t ruled out holding congressional hearings on the matter,” according to BuzzFeed.
Hearings chaired by Republicans would be good for the country and good for Republicans. They would establish precisely what protesters say they are fighting for: an assertion that “black lives matter” to the nation’s leaders and political institutions. At the same time, they would show that Republicans know how to be a party of all Americans, not just the white parts. And they would showcase Republicans grappling with a complex problem instead of unleashing the party demagogues on Benghazi for the umpteenth time.
The timing is auspicious. The Republicans’ aggressive turn against immigrants is highly unlikely to sit well with Hispanics and Asians. Black voters already shun the party by embarrassingly large margins.
It’s not all about political opportunism. Plenty of conservatives are genuinely appalled at the circumstances of Garner’s death. Thursday’s Department of Justice report on the Cleveland police department, released in the wake of a police officer’s fatal shooting of a 12-year-old boy there, underscores the need for a serious federal inquiry. Hearings would be good for everyone. Go for it, Mr. Speaker.
By: Francis Wilkinson, The National Memo, December 5, 2014
“How Obama Boxed In Republicans With His Immigration Order”: Revoking It In 2017 Will Be A Lot More Complicated
If there’s an elected Republican who thinks it wasn’t a bad idea for President Obama to take executive action on immigration, he or she has yet to make that opinion known. Not surprisingly, the 20 or 30 men (and one woman) hoping to get the GOP nomination for president in 2016 have been particularly vocal on the topic. But while thunderous denunciations of the Constitution-shredding socialist dictator in the White House may seem to them today like exactly what the situation demands, before long they’re going to be asked a simple yet dangerous question: If you become president, what are you going to do about it?
Although they haven’t actually answered that question yet, their feelings have been unambiguous. Ted Cruz said Obama has “gotten in the job of counterfeiting immigration papers, because there’s no legal authority to do what he’s doing.” Rand Paul compared the order to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Rick Perry threatened to sue over it. So did Scott Walker. So did Mike Pence.
Because these guys would all like to be president, we have to place their opposition in a different context from their current jobs as senators and governors. So let’s imagine it’s January 2017. You, Republican candidate, have just been sworn in as president. Two years ago, Barack Obama made this policy change, and as a result, millions of undocumented immigrants registered with the government, submitted to background checks, paid back taxes, and obtained work permits. They’re now working legally and not living in fear of immigration authorities. You have to decide what’s going to happen to them. This is a very different situation than it was back in 2014 when the move was announced. Instead of wondering whether we should give legal status to a group of undocumented immigrants, we’re now wondering whether to take away legal status from a group of people who are documented, even if they’re not actually on a path to citizenship.
And don’t forget, these are pretty sympathetic folks — they’ve been in the United States for at least seven years now (under the order, only those who came before 2010 are eligible), and they were either brought here as children and grew up in America, or are the parents of children who were born in the U.S., or are legal residents. Deporting them would mean breaking up families. Just think how that’s going to play on the evening news—the image of children crying desperately as their parents are carted off by law enforcement on your orders isn’t exactly going to go over well.
That’s what the next president will confront. So what are the possible answers a Republican candidate could give to the question of what they will do about Obama’s order? They might say what a lot of Republicans fear, which is that however much they opposed the move in the first place, by 2017, undoing it will be impractical and cruel. But saying that would pretty much doom them with the extremely conservative white Republican primary electorate, because it both capitulates on the substance and reflects a stance of less than maximal opposition toward something Barack Obama did.
Alternatively, they could say they’ll immediately reverse the order and start deporting these immigrants. In fact, if they believe as they say that the order is illegal, wouldn’t they have no choice but to revoke it? And immediately? The trouble is that saying so would risk both alienating and mobilizing Latino voters, for whom undocumented people aren’t an abstraction or an invading horde but individual human beings.
If the eventual nominee said explicitly that he’ll revoke Obama’s order, it could remind a lot of people of 2012, when Mitt Romney suggested that given the impracticality of rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants, the way to deal with the problem was “self-deportation” — in other words, making life so miserable for them that they decided to return to the countries from which they fled. Even RNC chairman Reince Priebus later called that comment “horrific” because of the message it sent to Latinos. Pledging to start breaking up families would be even worse.
Since both those answers are extremely unappealing, the GOP candidates might try to retreat to a dodge — something like, “I’ll sit down with congressional leaders to determine a way forward.” Any reporter or debate monitor with a pulse is likely to follow up with, “O.K., but legislation can take time, and there’s little appetite among Republicans in Congress for immigration reform that goes much beyond building fences. So in the meantime, would you leave Obama’s order in place or issue your own order revoking it?” And they’d be right back where they started.
There are times when it’s perfectly reasonable for a candidate to answer a tough question with “It depends,” and this could be one of those times; for instance, how a Republican president would address the issue could depend on how many people actually sign up for this new legal status. But let’s be realistic: Republican primary voters are unlikely to accept that as an answer. They’re going to want a declaration of resolve and commitment, a signal that the candidates feel the same way about undocumented immigrants that they do. And there is bound to be at least one candidate (Ted Cruz, I’m guessing) who will open the bidding with an emphatic pledge to reverse Obama’s order on his first day in office. That will raise the pressure on all the other candidates to follow suit.
If they do, it will send a message of hostility that Latino voters will hear loud and clear, a message the GOP has been trying (unsuccessfully) to avoid for the last couple of years. Barack Obama sure boxed them in on this one, didn’t he?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 1, 2014
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