An Election Day Without A Conservative

There are some among my fellow Republicans who think that those of us who are profoundly unhappy with the GOP performance on immigration reform are a little, well, "out there", to be polite.

Let's hear from some other voices, more in tune historically with the GOP leadership on the great issues of the day:

Mark Levin:

So now the Republican president and the Republican Senate are cobbling together an illegal-immigration bill that will badly damage both the Republican party and the country. The bill would make permanent so-called temporary guest-workers as they wouldn't have to return home (so much for going to the back of some imagined line); it would expand greatly the number of legal aliens invited to come to our country by tens of millions (apparently there's no end to the number of jobs Americans won't do); it would legalize virtually all of the 11 million illegal aliens currently in our country (the number is probably much greater); it would apply Davis-Bacon union wage requirements on jobs performed by so-called temporary workers (so much for cheap labor and cheap lettuce); it would confer Social Security benefits on immigrants for the period of time they were working using stolen or fake Social Security numbers (but it's not amnesty, they tell us); and it wouldn't recognize English as the nation's official language (so much for promised assimilation). And, of course, the same federal politicians and bureaucracy that won't and/or can't enforce the current law assure us that they'll manage and enforce a far more complicated, multi-tier, multi-level system involving far more people.

Meanwhile, we're supposed to accept all of this and more in exchange for what is essentially a sound-bite about using a few thousand National Guardsmen on the border—who are not going to be doing border enforcement. A 370-mile fence will supposedly be built, leaving about 85% of the southern border without a physical fence. But there will be sensors and gliders that will presumably get an accurate count of the number of illegal aliens crossing our border since there won't be enough physical barriers to stop them or border agents to apprehend them.

And the primary culprit in all of this—the Mexican government—will continue to insist that America isn't doing enough and America is not a friendly neighbor. It will continue to send its lawyers into our courtrooms to challenge any effort to stem the mass exportation of Mexico's poor to our country. And why not? Let Americans pay for the public services Mexico refuses to confer on its own people. And the illegal aliens in the U.S. send billions of dollars back to Mexico, which helps prop-up its socialist economy. Besides, so much of the United States really belongs to Mexico, doesn't it? But for American imperialism under the presidency of James Polk, we'd all be speaking Spanish now. The Mexican government is playing a nasty game with its people, and our government is complicit. There’s nothing compassionate or humane about our government’s timidity in dealing with Mexico’s ruling class.

Kate O'Beirne:

Administration officials who have been briefing Hill Republicans on the details of the president’s proposal to deploy the National Guard have made it clear that there is even less to the reinforcements than meets the eye. The White House estimates that the 6,000 National Guard troops, intended to help with back-up duties in order to free up Border Patrol agents, will make only 500 additional agents available to apprehend and detain lawbreakers at the border. The White House adamantly insists that Guard troops take no role in law enforcement, even though, so long as they are under the command of their governors—as they will be under the president’s proposal—they are allowed to do so. Republicans worry that when the Guard shows up for duty, Lou Dobbs’ cameras won’t be far behind, recording their impotence as they merely alert border agents to the whereabouts of entering illegal immigrants whom they must passively watch. “How’s that for a television image this fall?” asks a disgusted congressional aide.

Deroy Murdock:

As the son of legal, Costa Rican immigrants whose mother learned English, taught in the Los Angeles city schools, and earned a masters degree from Pepperdine University, I found the president’s words pertinent, touching, and heartwarming.

How crushing, then, to discover Bush’s remarks at jarring variance with federal policy. Rather than persuade immigrants to speak English and flourish—as my parents did, to their children’s ultimate benefit—the Bush administration actively steers immigrants away from English while actually prosecuting those who expect immigrants to speak America’s (and Earth’s) lingua franca.

From ballot boxes to hospitals, workplaces, and even the Internet, President Bush’s words and deeds are perpendicular to each other.

The Bush administration aggressively promotes multilingual voting. “The Civil Rights Division has made the vigorous enforcement of the [1965] Voting Rights Act’s language-minority requirements one of its primary missions,” explained Rena J. Comisac, principal deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, to the House Judiciary Constitution Subcommittee on May 4. “Since 2001, this administration has filed more minority language cases under sections 4 and 203 than in the entire previous 26 years in which these provisions have been applicable,” she bragged. But DOJ will not rest! “And the pace is accelerating,” Comisac continued, “with more cases filed and resolved in 2005 than in any previous year, breaking the previous record set in 2004 . . . The enforcement actions include cases in Florida, California, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington. Among these cases were the first suits ever filed under section 203 to protect Filipino and Vietnamese voters,” who vote in those tongues. “Our enforcement program shows the continuing need for the minority language provisions of the Voting Rights Act, and we support their reauthorization,” Comisac concluded. The Bush Administration thus supports legislation to extend multilingual voting through 2031.

Orange County California Supervisor Chris Norby testified at this hearing that under the VRA, he already “must provide translations in Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean.” Worse, he warned, “If these standards are left unchanged, after the 2010 Census, my county could be required to print ballots in Tagalog, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, and Farsi, depending on future immigration patterns.”

This is madness.

David Frum:

Supporters of the Senate bill keep describing the bill as a compromise. That is true only in a very specialized sense: The bill gives enforcers a little more than nothing, and offers the open-borders lobby a little less than everything.

It's like the robber's demand, "Your money or your life." You could see that offer represents a compromise: After all, he is not demanding your money and your life. It would, however, stretch the truth to claim that the robber is meeting you halfway ...

The president's non-compromise has had the predictable effect of riling the Republican base. It's not just the substance of his proposals that offend conservative voters, although they do. It is the deceptive quality of the proposals that do the most harm. An amnesty presented as enforcement; a dramatic increase in the flow of immigration described as a reduction; a plan that opens the borders wider than ever touted as a "compromise" - this is what sticks in the craw.

The terrible irony is that the first and most direct victims of the president's immigration proposals will be the House Republicans - that is, the group that has most strenuously resisted them. But if they go first, they will not go alone.

Barnes in the Weekly Standard suggests that the House Republicans can retrieve the situation by giving in to the president. Even leaving aside the question of principle, however, there is the trouble that such a maneuver would no way fool conservative voters. The cat is out of the bag. Pro-enforcement conservatives by now well understand that the president's call for enforcement is a sham - and if the House joins in the sham, it will cost House Republicans votes, not gain them.

Bob Novak:

The problem is that President Bush's efforts to take control of the border have been unconvincing. Sources in the Homeland Security Department say that his summoning of 6,000 National Guard troops, who cannot arrest anybody or discharge firearms, will release only 500 Border Patrol guards for actual duty on the border.

Bush adviser Karl Rove's mission last Thursday was to convince a closed session of the hard-line House Republican Conference that progress really was being made on the border. Individual House members did not think he got the job done. These congressmen have been inundated in their home districts by anger from the conservative base that surpasses their past reactions over gun control, abortion and taxes.

The consensus on Capitol Hill is that Bush and Rove were blindsided by the immigration tide and are still foundering. The fear of America being undone by immigrants resembles nativist alarms in the country's past history. The flawed bill that the president supports only spawns more of this sentiment.

Rush Limbaugh (responding to Lindsey Graham's comments this weekend):

Oh, man, that's absurd. He just says it's about the election. You're welcome to be a part of this party, and you're welcome to be an American under conditions that make sense. Then he says it's not about next election. It's about doing things that are good for the country down the road. So there you have it. At least with Senator Graham, ladies and gentlemen, it's out there. It's honest. This is about a competition with Democrats for these people and their votes. That's what this is. Thank you, Senator Graham for making the statement, and then couching it in terms, "and this is good for America, too."


So what's good for the Republican Party is good for America, and this is a fast-rising demographic. Okay, let's say that's the objective, and he says it is. Is this the way to go about it? Do you just tell the existing base of your party, "Screw you for a while. We've gotta go out and recruit these new members because we know when it gets down to the pedal meeting the metal, the rubber meeting the road you're going to be with us, you're not going to go to the Democrats. You can get mad at us right now all you want, but you know when the going gets tough you're going to come back to us."

So in effect it's take-for-granted-the-support they have now in the base. Don't worry about that, and then get into competition with this new demographic, the new arrivals. Then after all that, we get into a competition with the Democrats over how to get these people, and what does it say about competing with Democrats? That in order to have a chance -- which we don't, by the way, in this technique, but I'm just speaking hypothetically, philosophically and theoretically. If we have to compete against Democrats by getting this demographic, by saying, "If you steal it, you earn it. If you pay Social Security taxes, if you're here illegally, we're going to find a way to forget it."

The Democrats have made it clear, with Mrs. Clinton, they're going after the felon vote. The felony provision that is in the House bill, don't forget, some guys in the House who are livid at the administration because they say that a lot of what's in their bill is what the White House asked for, and now the White House has abandoned them and has turned its attention over to the Senate on these various compromise proposals. That felon provision was in there apparently because the White House thought it would be cool to have it in there. The Republicans voted at some point when they're revising the bill to take it out and the Democrats voted to keep it in for the express purpose of being able to run around and say the Republicans want to call all these immigrants here felons.

They're trying to make big hay out of it, yet at the same time Democrats are making a move on the felon vote. So it's really instructive when you see Republicans in the Senate particularly who think that there is a competition for votes, how they think they have to go out and get those votes, and it certainly appears to me that they don't think conservatism will do it. They think stateism, pandering, demagoguery and all that is the way to compete with Democrats. So, in other words, to outdo a Democrat, they're going to trying to be better Democrats than the Democrats are rather than be conservatives.

Yet what is it that assembled their base, what is it that put together the base that swept them to power in 1994 and some of these -- Graham, by the way, was a freshman class member in '94 I think, and now he's in the Senate. What does he think put him there? A bunch of Democrat voters in South Carolina? It's not what put him there. So it's clear that they think that they can run the risk here of angering you and take you for granted because when the time comes, for whatever reason, you aren't going to vote Democrat. You'll vote these guys back into office, and it's a calculation, sort of like, if I can draw an analogy, the way the Democrats take for granted the black vote. They said, "Ah, they're not going to vote for Republicans. We've taken care of that for the last 50 years. So we can campaign against Nagin. We can campaign against Carl McCall and we can do all that. The blacks are still going to stay with us."

I guess that's what Senate Republicans think of their base, based at least on this sound bite.

Folks, these are mainstream conservatives, one and all. Media types. They're the folks who put on a suit and tie or a blazer and skirt and represent conservative views on the radio, in print, or over the television airwaves.

And they are not happy.

If the GOP leadership keep kicking sand in our faces, keep telling conservatives to sit down and shut up, keep refusing to do their Constitutional duty, they are going to find out what an election day without a conservative is like.