| Thursday, April 06, 2006 |
| A bridge to nowhere |
I must admit that I don't understand why the White House proffered this immigration reform gambit now. Bush's approval ratings are continuing to sink (even the Fox News poll has him at 36 percent, and that's with no fewer than eight anchors and chat hosts a day stumping for him full time, Brit Hume probably counting twice...) Perhaps the idea is to get this conflagration over with in the spring, in hopes that GOP voters will have forgotten about it by election day, and with the anger at their particular members of Congress waning, the White House and Republican Congressional and Senatorial campaign committees could move on to more turnout-friendly issues, like gay marriage.
That may or may not be true. Some on the right are calling the entire immigration move just plain boneheaded, since all it does is divide Republicans and benefit Democrats, who don't have to say much or take responsibility for whatever dreck comes out of Congress, but who will reap the reward with Hispanic voters regardless of the outcome. In other words, if a Sensenbrenner type bill -- sealing the borders, throwing up a fence and pushing pure enforcement and criminalization -- passes, the Dems can cry Prop 187! and watch the Latino votes roll in, especially in crucial purple states like Colorado and Arizona. If a McCain-Kennedy style amnesty bill passes, the legalization of perhaps millions of Hispanics will also benefit the Dems, since most of the influx is coming from Mexico, and historically, Mexican and Central American origin voters vote 70-30 Democrat. Only Cubans (and increasingly, Venezuelans,) are reliably Republican, and most of them are in places like New Jersey and especially Florida, where there are no Democratic seats to take away (forget Bill Nelson's seat. Seriously.) Not to mention the typhoon of rage that such passage will spark among the large majority of Republican voters who abhor anything that even smells faintly like amnesty. Whom do the president, and Bill "against amnesty before he was for it" Frist think those voters are going to punish in November?
So what has been the point of all of this? Republicans have created an issue that has riled up the Lou Dobbs populist wing of their party, reminding middle class, lunchpail-carrying Americans about the Bushian one-two punch of exporting technology and factory jobs out, and importing cheap farm, building, restaurant and lawn labor in. They have pitted House Republicans like Tom Tancredo -- whose bread and butter is the anti-illegal immigration platform -- against Senate Republicans, who need those stray Hispanic votes to pull off statewide victories this fall, but who face far fewer contested races in November (33 of 100 seats are up, including seats in crucial border states like Arizona, Texas and New Mexico, while all House seats are up, which with redistricting usually means about zero are competitive, but this year it's an entirely different ballgame, with crucial races in Colorado, Arizona, California, Florida and more. To take over, the Dems need to pick up a net 16 seats to take over the House, 6 in the Senate.) And then there are the wannabe presidents in the game, like Bill Frist and John McCain, who are playing a high stakes game for the future loyalty of a national Hispanic constituency, at the expense of their colleagues with skin in the game this November.
So if the new Senate compromise yields a bill -- and that's after what's sure to be a contentious amendment process, followed by a bloodletting conference with the House -- what will have been gained? The Congress will have passed, and Bush will have signed, yet another cross-your-fingers amnesty bill (sorry ... "probation" bill...) that will in reality change nothiing. You're simply not going to see millions of zero to five year illegal residents coming forward to take their punishment, pack their bags and leave the country to comply with their new "path to citizenship" by essentially deporting themselves. And without any real incentive to come forward, all that will have been created is a legal means to import another 11 million indentured servants -- something that will please business interests (they'll have to import lots more to keep the wages low, and to discourage the newly semi-legal ones from doing something crazy -- like trying to unionize -- another reason the Dems are so warm to these fresh ideas...) but continue to sap the formerly robust middle class American economy.
If the Congress doesn't come up with a "comprehensive" bill -- in other words if they strip out the guest worker and "path to citizenship" stuff and send a pure enforcement bill to the president's desk, he could finally whip out his veto pen, forcing yet another embarrassing showdown in which the president is either overridden by a rebellious GOP, or in which he sends the whole matter back to the Congress for another round of televised sniping that creeps closer and closer to the summer election ad season.
And if the Congress can't git'er done this week, then the president faces the Social Security reform debacle -- debacle meaning failure to launch -- all over again.
So tell me again, why was any of this a good idea?
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Tags: immigration, Politics, border, MEXICO, McCain, illegal aliens, Illegal-Aliens, Illegal immigration, Mexico, Mexican flag |
posted by JReid @ 10:32 PM   |
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