The Crisis Deepens

Does the Republican elite even care?

Andrew Cline:

Republicans in Washington have run their party's ship onto the rocks and it is sinking rapidly. Conservatives, who should have mutinied long ago, have to assert control now or they will be forced to abandon ship. They cannot let Republicans sink the conservative ideology along with the party's political fortunes.

Americans have lost confidence in Republican governance. A May Washington Post-ABC News poll says it all: 56 percent of the public would rather see Democrats in charge of Congress. It took Democrats half a century to prove that their approach didn't work. Bush and the GOP Congress lost the trust of the American people in just five years (12 if you count from the 1994 Republican "revolution"). That's very quick work.

Americans see the Republican Party's leadership as untrustworthy, which is a reputation it has earned. The challenge for conservatives is to convince American voters that Republican and conservative are not synonyms. Conservatives have to remind the country that the principles Republicans claimed to uphold but abandoned once in office still offer the best approach to governing the country.

Conservatives need an aggressive campaign to hold Republicans accountable for their apostasy and remind America that conservatism's Jeffersonian principles remain an untried and viable alternative to the programs the two main parties are offering.

"The freedom and happiness of man... [are] the sole objects of all legitimate government," Jefferson said. What Republicans have pushed for the past five years is not Jeffersonian conservatism. It is a neoconservatism that has married big-government activism to an ostensibly conservative political agenda. That is not what America needs, nor is it what America voted for when it sent Republicans to Washington in the first place.

When Americans handed Republicans the reins of government, they thought they were getting a conservative regime, one that would be honest, frugal and competent. Instead, they got a big government regime that has been dishonest, profligate and incompetent.

That rather nicely explains why Bill Kristol and the neocons over at The Weekly Standard are busily defending the indefensible and calling anyone who disagrees with big government lovely little terms of endearment like "yahoo."

Even yahoos understand English, unlike the people the elite wish to foist upon us regardless of prior violations of our laws:

We have lost sight -- as we have lost sight of so much else -- of the essential "goodie" in the immigration question: the presence of a person in the United States. Like the money from the bank, the stolen car, or the shoplifted merchandise, such a possession cannot be left to someone who has stolen it.

You cannot take back presence in the United States from someone here and still leave that someone here. Any legal measure that does leave that someone here is an amnesty, as clearly an amnesty as allowing a bank robber to keep the loot, a car thief to keep the car, or a shoplifter to take home the merchandise.

Just a reminder.

Continued residency despite illegal entry equals amnesty. It's that simple.

Mark Tapscott:

Immigration is functioning today for the GOP much as the slavery issue did for Democrats in the years leading up to the Civil War. The party's most prominent leader, Sen. Stephen Douglas, thought he could straddle the issue with his doctrine of Popular Sovereignity. But that position simply provided the fuel for further ignition of the flames of war because it didn't resolve the issue one way or the other.

Similarly, Bush, McCain and company are trying to straddle the immigration issue by trying to seem tough on border enforcement while moving forward with what amounts to the biggest immigration amnesty in American history. It won't work because Bush and the GOP leadership have totally underestimated the intensity of opposition in the party's base and indeed far beyond the conservative realms of the electorate.

The GOP went from nowhere in 1854 to Lincoln in the White House and congressional majorities in a decade. Thanks to the Internet's power to link like-minded people, I doubt it will take so long this time around for a new party to become ascendant.

It has gotten so bad that a Republican president will not secure America's borders in wartime nor enforce her laws. Sounds like Mark's ruminations on 3rd party challenges aren't so far-fetched.

Cal Thomas:

Too many Republicans seem to care more about the future of their party than the future of the country. Congress should not behave like some ancient pope, handing out papal bulls for absolution of certain sins in exchange for contributions to the church. In the case of illegal immigrants, moderate-liberal Republicans want to "absolve" illegals, hoping for electoral contributions to their party. It won't work, because even if all illegals end up becoming legal and voting for Republicans (which is unlikely), the conservative disgust and abandonment of the GOP would outweigh any short-term gains the party might enjoy.

The bill passed last Thursday by the Senate genuflects toward tougher enforcement of the border and penalties on employers who knowingly hire illegals, but it is like the sinner who gets absolution without real repentance. It is political fraud perpetrated on the public.

Rep. Charlie Norwood, Georgia Republican, sees through the sham. In a press release, Norwood calls the Senate bill an "amnesty bill" designed to give "preferential treatment" to illegals over American citizens. "This bill constitutes treachery against U.S. sovereignty," said Norwood, (and) "allows every illegal alien in America to use the fraudulent document industry they have created in the criminal back alleys of our country to claim they have been here five years and can now stay forever. They have granted blanket amnesty for citizens of foreign nations against tax fraud, Social Security fraud, Medicare fraud, identity fraud, and bank fraud - all crimes for which there is no forgiveness or mercy for citizens of the United States."

That's the real lunacy---giving non-citizens more rights than citizens. We can't deport people who illegally entered this country, or illegally overstayed their visas, but we can and will take the homes of people who aren't loaded enough to meet tax revenue projections. Yet advocating for America being the home of Americans makes you un-American.

Peggy Noonan:

The problem is not that the two parties are polarized. In many ways they're closer than ever. The problem is that the parties in Washington, and the people on the ground in America, are polarized. There is an increasing and profound distance between the rulers of both parties and the people--between the elites and the grunts, between those in power and those who put them there.
On the ground in America, people worry terribly--really, there are people who actually worry about it every day--about endless, weird, gushing government spending. But in Washington, those in power--Republicans and Democrats--stand arm in arm as they spend and spend. (Part of the reason is that they think they can buy off your unhappiness one way or another. After all, it's worked in the past. A hunch: It's not going to work forever or much longer. They've really run that trick into the ground.)

On the ground in America, regular people worry about the changes wrought by the biggest wave of immigration in our history, much of it illegal and therefore wholly connected to the needs of the immigrant and wholly unconnected to the agreed-upon needs of our nation. Americans worry about the myriad implications of the collapse of the American border. But Washington doesn't. Democrat Ted Kennedy and Republican George W. Bush see things pretty much eye to eye. They are going to educate the American people out of their low concerns.

There is a widespread sense in America--a conviction, actually--that we are not safe in the age of terror. That the port, the local power plant, even the local school, are not protected. Is Washington worried about this? Not so you'd notice. They're only worried about seeming unconcerned.

More to the point, people see the Republicans as incapable of managing the monster they've helped create--this big Homeland Security/Intelligence apparatus that is like some huge buffed guy at the gym who looks strong but can't even put on his T-shirt without help because he's so muscle-bound. As for the Democrats, who co-created Homeland Security, no one--no one--thinks they would be more managerially competent. Nor does anyone expect the Democrats to be more visionary as to what needs to be done. The best they can hope is the Democrats competently serve their interest groups and let the benefits trickle down.

Political parties exist to serve the interests of their voters, not the other way around, as Hugh Hewitt and Bill Kristol seem to believe. If the Republican Party will not address the national security, legal, and fiscal concerns of conservatives, they will surely be reduced to a Bob Michel-era rump party once again.

And you can bet Arlen Specter, Lincoln Chaffee, and Olympia Snowe will feel free to switch party alignment to maintain their perks in that event.