“Let ‘The Good Ones’ Return”: Why Donald Trump Is The Only GOP Presidential Hopeful Who Can Talk Straight On Immigration
Four years ago, deep within a process of convincing Republican primary voters that he was “severely conservative,” Mitt Romney declared that his solution for dealing with the millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States was “self-deportation” — in other words, making life so miserable for them that they’d prefer to return to the countries they fled from rather than stay here. The chairman of the Republican Party later called Romney’s words “horrific,” not so much out of some moral revulsion, but because they sent a clear message of hostility to Hispanic voters, the country’s largest minority group and one that is growing fast. Since then, most Republicans have acknowledged that they have to be careful about how they talk about those 11 million immigrants if they want to have any hope of winning the White House again.
Then along came Donald Trump, who isn’t careful about anything (other than that glorious and extremely delicate mane of hair). Barreling into the campaign, Trump said he’d deport all 11 million, then let “the good ones” return to the United States. How would the unfathomably complicated task of locating all those people, detaining them, and moving them back to their countries of origin be accomplished? “It’s feasible if you know how to manage,” he said. OK then.
Compared to Trump, the rest of the GOP candidates have been models of reason and thoughtfulness on this issue, and between them they’ve taken a couple of different positions on how to handle the undocumented. If comprehensive immigration reform ever happens, this will be one of its key components, so it’s important to know where they stand.
But first, what about the public? Gallup just released a survey that sheds some light on this question, showing both why Trump is getting support and why most of the other candidates are taking a different tack. Asked whether the government should “deport all illegal immigrants back to their home country, allow illegal immigrants to remain in the United States in order to work, but only for a limited amount of time, or allow illegal immigrants to remain in the United States and become U.S. citizens, but only if they meet certain requirements over a period of time,” a full 65 percent said they should be allowed to become citizens, and only 19 percent said they should be deported.
But right now, the GOP candidates aren’t seeking the support of the whole country, they’re going after the Republicans who might vote in upcoming primaries. Among Republicans, the numbers are different — but not as much as you might expect. Fifty percent of Republicans said there should be a path to citizenship, while 31 percent said they should be deported.
Thirty-one percent isn’t a majority, but it’s still a lot — and you could say the same about Trump’s support in the polls. Right now he’s averaging around 24 percent, and while there are certainly people supporting him who don’t agree with him on immigration (and those opposing him who do), if you want the candidate taking the clearest anti-immigrant stance, your choice is pretty clear.
So where do the other candidates come down? When you ask them about a path to citizenship you’ll inevitably get a complicated answer, but most of them say one of two things: either they support a path to citizenship, or they support a path to some other kind of legal status, but not citizenship itself.
Interestingly enough, among the candidates who take the latter position — the more conservative one — are the son of a Cuban immigrant and the husband of a Mexican immigrant. Ted Cruz may be the farthest to the right (other than Trump) — he spends a lot of time decrying “amnesty” — but if pressed will say that he’s open to some kind of restrictive work permit that would allow undocumented immigrants to stay in the country. Jeb Bush talks about a “path to legal status,” but pointedly says that the path does not end in citizenship, but rather in something that resembles a green card, allowing the immigrant to work and live in the U.S., but not be an American citizen. (Bush used to support a path to citizenship, but not anymore.)
Others have taken the same position. Carly Fiorina says that some legal status might be acceptable, but not citizenship. Rick Santorum not only opposes a path to citizenship, but wants to drastically curtail legal immigration as well. Chris Christie used to support a path to citizenship, but has since changed his mind. Rick Perry is also opposed to a path to citizenship, but doesn’t seem to have answered a specific question about the undocumented in some time.
Whenever any of them describes their path, whether to citizenship or some kind of guest worker status, it contains some key features. It winds over many years, involves paying fines and any back taxes, and also involves proving that the immigrant speaks English. The truth is that this last provision is completely unnecessary — this wave of immigrants is learning English no slower than previous waves did — but it’s actually an important way for voters with complex feelings about immigration to feel less threatened and be reassured that the immigrants will become American.
For most of the candidates, the end of the long process is indeed citizenship. Scott Walker, after a bunch of incoherent and seemingly contradictory statements, finally said that he could eventually foresee a path to citizenship, once the border is secure (more on that in a moment). Marco Rubio will describe for you an intricate process that ends in citizenship, even if he seems reluctant to say so (Rubio was essentially cast out of the Tea Party temple after he proposed a comprehensive reform bill, which he has since dropped). Rand Paul has essentially the same position — he describes a path to citizenship, but doesn’t like using the word. Bobby Jindal also supports a path to citizenship, as does Mike Huckabee, and John Kasich, and George Pataki, and Lindsey Graham, who has even said that he would veto any immigration reform bill that didn’t contain a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Ben Carson has been vague on the subject, and as far as I can tell no one has asked Jim Gilmore.
But don’t get the idea that any of these candidates are all that eager to move undocumented immigrants down that path too quickly. All of them say we need to “secure the border” before we even begin talking about how undocumented immigrants might eventually become citizens. And they seldom elaborate on what “securing” the border would mean. Would it mean not a single person could sneak over? If not, then what? In practice, they could always say that we can’t get started on laying that path to citizenship because the border is not yet secure.
What all this makes clear is that you have to pay very close attention to understand what most of the candidates actually want to do, and even then you might not be completely sure. And even if there are plenty of Republican voters who would like to see a path to citizenship, at this point their voices are far quieter than the ones complaining about the invading horde. So if a Republican gets elected next fall, I wouldn’t expect him to be in too much of a hurry to create a way for undocumented immigrants to eventually become Americans under the law.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, August 17, 2015
“The Junk Politics Of 2015”: You’re Getting A Sugar High, It Feels Good, It Won’t Last, And Ultimately, It’ll Make You Sick
When you eat a bowl of Simply Granola in the morning, you may think you’re making a healthy start to the day, courtesy of Quaker Oats. But you’re taking in the amount of sugar in almost four Oreo cookies.
When you listen to the politicians who want to lead the United States through the treacherous early 21st century, you may think you’re doing your job as a citizen of this clamorous and vulgar democracy of ours. You’re not. You’re getting a sugar high. It feels good. It won’t last. And ultimately, it’ll make you sick.
I’ve been trying to eat healthy, metaphorically, for the month of August. But it’s been a bust. There’s just too much bad stuff to binge on. We have a pending deal with Iran that could imperil Israel, or make the Mideast safer for a decade. We have an approaching visit of a transitional pope. We have a fledgling health care plan that’s given coverage to 15 million Americans who never had any — and one party wants to take it away. And we’re muddling through the hottest year on record, so far, surpassing the last warmest one, 2014.
And yet, what are the leaders-in-waiting talking about? Roll the highlight reel of our junk politics, starting with the also-rans:
At least one Republican wants to sic the Internal Revenue Service on his political enemies. So promised Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, in a remarkable statement overlooked at the kids’ table debate last week. “I guarantee you under President Jindal, January 2017, the Department of Justice and the I.R.S. and everybody else we can send from the federal government will be going into Planned Parenthood.”
Other Republicans think we should be living in a theocracy. “It’s time we recognize the Supreme Court is not the Supreme Being,” said Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, testing the latest version of his church-lady demagogy. He wants to ignore the high court on both gay marriage and abortion — breaking the law while waving his Bible.
Huckabee would also use the force of government to intervene with any woman seeking an abortion, claiming a constitutional right, the 14th and 5th Amendments, to protect a zygote. When he mentioned this Brave New World idea in the debate, no one challenged him. Instead, other candidates were equally extreme, refusing to make abortion exceptions even when the life of a woman is at stake. This is junk women’s health care, driven by religious fanaticism.
More empty calories: Scott Walker, the governor whose foreign policy experience is limited to breakfast at the old International House of Pancakes, threatens to start at least two wars upon taking office. He promises to use military action if necessary to coax Iran into doing what he wants it to do. He also wants to pick a fight with Russia, sending weapons to Ukraine and erecting a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Walker’s home state of Wisconsin ranks 35th in private sector job creation. But New Jersey is worse, suffering nine credit downgrades and ranking near the bottom in job growth. Even the governor of the state, Chris Christie, would not rise to Jersey’s defense after fellow candidates described Atlantic City as something akin to Baghdad on a hangover.
Those governors want to apply their ruinous models to the rest of the country. In the same vein, a failed former chief executive officer, Carly Fiorina, having fired 30,000 employees and driven her company’s stock price into the ground, feels more qualified than ever to be president. She’s never held elective office and rarely voted while living in California. A junk comeback.
Which gets us to Donald Trump, who boasts of four company bankruptcies, and paying people to come to his wedding. He is “a very smart person” and will be “phenomenal to the women” just like “the blacks.” It’s hard for women to attack him, he says, “because I’m so good-looking.”
Normal politics can’t explain Trump. For that you need Freud. Trump fits the classic definition of narcissistic personality disorder, as Marc C. Johnson, an astute observer of American politics, noted in a recent blog post. Everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth is junk, but at least it fits a pattern.
Finally, to the Democrats. A 73-year-old socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is getting lots of attention because Hillary Clinton’s email story is boring, by Clinton scandal standards. When a noisy intruder, an African-American, jumped to the podium and refused to let Sanders speak, it was widely interpreted as a big problem for the candidate and race relations.
Wrong. The censor with the mouth was, it turns out, a self-described “extremist Christian,” from a family that once backed Sarah Palin. Some members of Black Lives Matter distanced themselves from her.
How did this stunt become a thing among the national press corps? Junk media. Sadly, the sugar high goes two ways.
By: Timothy Egan, Contributing Op-Ed Writer, The New York Times, August 14, 2015
“Judgment Of A Woman’s Value”: Republicans Make Their Incredibly Unpopular Abortion Position Crystal Clear
With all the talk about Donald Trump and Megyn Kelly, people might not have noticed that there was quite a bit of discussion of abortion in Thursday’s Republican debate, and that discussion is continuing through today. While it wouldn’t be accurate to say the party and its candidates are moving to the right, what’s happening is that they’re making clear just how far to the right they are.
One moment in the debate that may have struck some as odd occurred when Marco Rubio got a question about him supporting exceptions for rape and incest victims to abortion bans, and he insisted that he supports no such thing. Mike Huckabee declared that “I think the next president ought to invoke the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution now that we clearly know that that baby inside the mother’s womb is a person at the moment of conception.” Scott Walker went even further, stating his opposition to exceptions to save the life of the pregnant woman (“I’ve said many a time that that unborn child can be protected, and there are many other alternatives that can also protect the life of that mother”). Walker recently signed a ban on abortions after 20 weeks, which did contain an exception to save the life of the mother, but no exceptions for rape or incest.
This is a deeply unpopular position, to say the least. When pollsters ask whether people think that rape and incest victims should be able to get abortions, more than 80 percent will say yes, including majorities of Republicans (there are some examples here). Between 60 and 70 percent are against overturning Roe v. Wade, a position on which Republicans are united. And the GOP platform has for some time called for a complete ban on abortion without any exceptions.
Rubio in particular is attempting to take a radical position and present it as the soul of thoughtful moderation. Yesterday, he went on “Meet the Press” and clarified that he has supported legislation with rape and incest exceptions because “I’ll support any legislation that reduces the number of abortions,” and if that means voting for a ban that contains those exceptions, he’ll go along. But I don’t think Rubio is quite telling the truth on that point. For instance, I doubt he’d support legislation that mandates comprehensive and fact-based sex education and does away with the farce of “abstinence only” — which would absolutely reduce the number of abortions. What he really means is that he’ll support any legislation that reduces abortion by restricting women’s reproductive rights.
Even though I’m firmly pro-choice, I’ll grant that Rubio (and the party itself) is being intellectually consistent by opposing rape and incest exceptions to abortion bans. If you think abortion is murder, then you should believe it’s murder no matter what led to a woman becoming pregnant. When you say we’ll make exceptions for rape and incest victims, what you’re saying is that whether a woman is able to get an abortion should be a function of someone else’s judgment of her virtue. If she got pregnant because she was the victim of a crime, then okay, she can have the abortion. But if she willingly had sex, then she should be punished by being forced to carry her pregnancy to term.
If Rubio is at all different from other members of his party, it’s only in his tone. Here’s what he said when Chuck Todd asked where the line is between the fetus’ rights and those of the woman:
That’s why this issue is so hard. There is no doubt that a woman has a right to her own body, has a right to make decisions about her own health and her own future. There’s no doubt. And there’s this other right, and that’s the right of a human being to live. And these rights come into conflict when it comes to this issue, and so you have to make a decision. And it’s hard. I don’t say it’s easy. Listen, you’re 15 years old, and you become pregnant, and you’re scared, and you have your whole life ahead of you, and you’re facing this, that is a hard situation. I tell people all the time, don’t pretend this is easy. This is a difficult question. But when asked to made a decision between two very hard circumstances, I’ve personally reached the conclusion that if I’m going to err, I’m going to err on the side of life.
There’s a lot of empathetic language there, but here’s the substantive difference between Marco Rubio and other Republicans on this issue: Other Republicans won’t even acknowledge that women have any right to control their own reproductive lives, while Rubio says women have such a right, but believes that in practice that right should always be trumped by the state’s desire to force her to carry that pregnancy to term. Which means that he doesn’t actually believe her right exists. He sounds a lot friendlier when he says it, though.
I’m sure he hopes that will be enough to overcome the fact that he’s taking a position most Americans disagree with. And in the right circumstances, it might be — so long as this isn’t an important issue on Election Day, and Democrats aren’t making too much of a big deal about all that “war on women” stuff. Republicans probably shouldn’t count on that, though.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, August 10, 2015
“Bad News, Republicans”: Donald Trump Is Practically Bulletproof
This time, he’s gone too far. That’s what Republicans said after Donald Trump insulted John McCain over his military record, people lined up to criticize Trump and the party’s leaders hoped this ridiculous (if entertaining) political reality show could finally be wound down. But it didn’t turn out that way, and now they’re saying it all over again, after Trump sparred with Fox News’s Megyn Kelly during Thursday’s debate, then continued to throw insults at her all weekend. As The Post’s Philip Rucker and Robert Costa wrote yesterday, “Republican leaders who have watched Donald Trump’s summer surge with alarm now believe that his presidential candidacy has been contained and may begin to collapse because of his repeated attacks on a Fox News Channel star and his refusal to pledge his loyalty to the eventual GOP nominee.”
Perhaps they really believe that in their hearts. Or perhaps they hope that if they tell themselves and the rest of the world it’s true, then it will come to pass.
Trump’s campaign may be a chaotic mess, as Costa and Rucker report today, but for the moment, it doesn’t seem to matter. The only poll released since the debate is this one from NBC News, which was conducted online and uses a sample drawn from people who have taken Survey Monkey polls. While they attempt to make it as representative as possible (with a large sample and weighting for demographics), it would be a good idea to wait for confirmation from other polls before putting too much stock in it. Nevertheless, the poll showed Trump still at the top with 23 percent support among Republicans. Don’t be surprised if the other polls we see in the next few days show his support essentially unchanged. I suspect that the people who are behind him don’t care if he threatens to run as an independent or if he insults women, just like they didn’t care that he jabbed at McCain and said we ought to deport 11 million people. It’s a feature, not a bug.
If this were an ordinary Republican presidential primary campaign — one obvious front-runner, five or six other candidates taking long-shot bids, a predictable arc in which a challenger emerges to that front-runner and is eventually vanquished — the presence of a character like Trump might not make much of a difference. In a year like that, he might still have managed to get support from the same one out of five primary voters who are backing him now, but it wouldn’t have put him at the front of the pack and made him the center of the campaign. After a while, he probably would have gotten bored and dropped out.
But it’s plain that as long as Trump is ahead of the other candidates, he can convince himself he’s going to win. With 17 candidates splitting the vote and the next-highest contender managing to garner only 12 or 13 percent, that could be for quite some time.
If you’re a Republican, you may be telling yourself that this will get sorted out eventually, and your party will get itself a real nominee. And you’d be right. But by the time that happens, the party will have spent months tying itself in knots. The voters Trump represents will be only more convinced that their party is, in the words Trump himself might use, a bunch of total losers. The GOP’s image is already hurting, not only among voters in general but also among its own partisans; according to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 32 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Republican Party, and only 68 percent of Republicans view it favorably (86 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of their party).
Keep this in mind, too: While Trump may be setting out to alienate one key demographic group after another, his opponents are doing much the same thing, albeit in slightly less vivid ways. Trump calls Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers, but the other Republicans are offering Hispanic voters exactly what Mitt Romney and John McCain did, i.e., not much. Trump insults women with, shall we say, colorful language. But in that same Thursday debate, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio emphatically declared their support for banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest. Their friends on Capitol Hill are trying to stop women from getting health care at Planned Parenthood, a position Barack Obama pummeled Romney for in 2012.
True to form, Trump himself is insisting that women will actually will flock to his campaign, just as he said Hispanics would. As he said on yesterday’s “Face the Nation,” “I will be phenomenal to the women.” (I was hoping he’d add, “And then, when the women hit their forties, I’ll trade them in for younger, prettier women, to whom I’ll also be phenomenal.” No such luck, though.)
While all this is going on, Hillary Clinton is waltzing toward the Democratic nomination with a bunch of popular policy proposals (today she’ll unveil a plan to make college more affordable) and a broad electoral coalition. That isn’t to say that Clinton doesn’t have her own image problems, but her eventual Republican opponent will have to slog his way through this crazy primary, offering voters reasons not to vote Republican all along the way.
So the next time Donald Trump says something outrageous or offensive (or, more likely, both) and Republican leaders say that this is finally going to be the end of his campaign, remember that you heard it before.
By: Paul Walman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, August 10, 2015
“Obama Vs The Republican Cavaliers”: Defending A Long Bipartisan Tradition Of Negotiating Even With Adversaries We Deeply Mistrust
If you wondered why President Obama gave such a passionate and, yes, partisan speech on behalf of the Iran nuclear deal Wednesday, all you had to do was tune in to the Republican presidential debate the next night.
Anyone who still thinks the president has any chance of turning the opposition party his way after watching the candidates (or listening to Republicans in Congress) no doubt also believes fervently in Santa Claus. In fact, the case for Santa — made so powerfully in “Miracle on 34th Street” — is more plausible.
The candidates gathered together by Fox News in Cleveland suggested that the hardest decision the next president will face is whether killing Obamacare or voiding the Iran deal ought to be the first order of business. All who spoke on foreign policy sought to paint the “Obama-Clinton” international strategy as “failed” and “dangerous.”
Obama does not need any private briefings on how Republicans are thinking. He realizes, as everyone else should, that there’s only one way to save the Iran accord. Republicans will have the votes to pass a measure disapproving it, and he needs to keep enough Democrats on his side to sustain his veto.
He also knows that he is in an ongoing battle for public opinion over a very big issue. In broad terms, this is an argument over whether the foreign policy of George W. Bush, with its proclivity toward unilateral military action, or his own approach, which stresses alliances and diplomacy, is more likely to defend the United States’ long-term interest.
The president was not wrong when he said that “many of the same people who argued for the war in Iraq are now making the case against the Iran nuclear deal.” And in light of the language used by Cleveland’s Cavaliers of Unilateralism, it was useful that he reminded Americans of the run-up to the Iraq invasion, when “those calling for war labeled themselves strong and decisive, while dismissing those who disagreed as weak — even appeasers of a malevolent adversary.”
Lest we forget, in September 2002, shortly before the midterm elections, Bush dismissed Democrats who called for U.N. support before U.S. military action in Iraq. “If I were running for office,” Bush said, “I’m not sure how I’d explain to the American people — say, ‘Vote for me, and, oh, by the way, on a matter of national security, I think I’m going to wait for somebody else to act.’ ” Now that’s partisan.
In foreign policy, the past isn’t even past because we have not resolved the debate over how to use U.S. power that opened after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In a June Gallup survey , Americans were as split as ever on whether the war in Iraq itself was a mistake: 51 percent said it was, 46 percent said it wasn’t. Among Democrats, 68 percent said it was a mistake; only 31 percent of Republicans did. Independents split much like the country as a whole.
Those who counsel Obama to be more conciliatory toward Republicans in defending an agreement that could block Iranian nuclear ambitions for at least a decade (and probably more) are nostalgic for a time when many Republicans supported negotiated settlements, saw containment policies as preferable to the aggressive rollback of adversaries and were committed to building international alliances.
Such Republicans still exist, but there are not many of them left in Congress. And we should have enough respect for the party’s presidential candidates to believe that they mean what they are saying when, for example, one of them (Scott Walker) insists that “Iran is not a place we should be doing business with,” while another (Jeb Bush) declares that “we need to stop the Iran agreement, for sure, because the Iranian mullahs have . . . blood on their hands.”
Obama is defending a long bipartisan tradition of negotiating even with adversaries we deeply and rightly mistrust, the prime example being the Soviet Union. For now, the consensus across party lines in favor of such diplomacy is broken. Many of us would like to see it restored, but the evidence of Obama’s time in office is unambiguous: Friendly gestures won’t win over those determined to block his policies.
In the short run, Obama simply has to win enough votes for his Iran deal. For the long run, he has to convince Americans that his measured approach to the world is the safest path for the country. Defending this view aggressively is no vice.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 9, 2015
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