I've thought for a couple of years that immigration is the issue that splits Republicans. Not spending. Not defense. Not religion. Not education.
I came to this conclusion after I was banned from (what I thought was) a conservative blog for stating that I was against illegal immigration, and that if those in favor really wanted more immigration, then change our laws. I was branded a racist for actually thinking we should enforce our immigration laws, a charge I found bizarre and off target, to say the least.
The truth is, there is a large chunk of the Republican party (and quite a few Democrats, as well) who want us to close our borders to illegal immigrants. We aren't people who are against legal immigration. We may even sympathize and understand why illegals come here (I've seen some fascinating films that help explain the desperation of illegal aliens to come here to work). But nonetheless, we see illegal immigration as a huge blight on this country (particularly if you live in a border state, but also elsewhere) that needs fixing, and amnesty--by any other name--won't do it.
For saying this, our own party has branded us as un-American, racist, and worse. This isn't merely a political discussion about the best way to handle immigration. It's personal.
I've watched in horror and fascination as the immigration legislation currently considered has been making its way through Congress. I've become resigned to the fact that President Bush--who comes from a state with an illegal immigration problem--doesn't seem to care that most of his party wants tougher immigration laws, not more lax ones.
Well, the Republican Party will pay a price for this and it's starting with donations.
The Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors' rebellion over President Bush's immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone solicitors, Ralph Z. Hallow will report Friday in The Washington Times.
Faced with an estimated 40 percent fall-off in small-donor contributions and aging phone-bank equipment that the RNC said would cost too much to update, Anne Hathaway, the committee's chief of staff, summoned the solicitations staff last week and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, the fired staffers told The Times...
Fired employees acknowledged that the committee's phone equipment was outdated, but said a sharp drop-off in donations "probably" hastened the end of the RNC's in-house phone-bank operation.
"Last year, my solicitations totaled $164,000, and this year the way they were running for the first four months, they would total $100,000 by the end of 2007," said one fired phone bank solicitor who asked not to be identified.
There has been a sharp decline in contributions from RNC phone solicitations, another fired staffer said, reporting that many former donors flatly refuse to give more money to the national party if Mr. Bush and the Senate Republicans insist on supporting what these angry contributors call "amnesty" for illegal aliens.
"Everyone donor in 50 states we reached has been angry, especially in the last month and a half, and for 99 percent of them immigration is the No. 1 issue," said the former employee.
We might not be able to force Congress and the President to do what we want on this or other issues, but we don't have to fund it, either.
Peggy Noonan has a scathing column at OpinionJournal, which sums up the frustration conservatives feel with this administration.
For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.
But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."
The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."
I frequently note on liberal blogs that the 2006 mid-term elections weren't simply about voters wanting us to leave Iraq; maybe it was about that for Democrats, but the many, many Republicans who either voted for Democrats or didn't vote at all weren't necessarily voting to get out of Iraq. They were tired of the spending spree Congress and the White House had been on for years. They were angry about President Bush's education capitulation to Ted Kennedy. They were angry that, when given the opportunity to nominate a certified conservative to the Supreme Court, President Bush nominated Harriet Miers. In short, enough Republicans said "enough!" to President Bush's policies and to the squandering of power by this administration and Congress.
I've backed President Bush for many, many years, both as governor here in Texas and as president. I have supported the president through 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (I still do), and even policies I disagree with but find to be, at least, defensible (education policies). But the immigration debacle is the place I draw the line. I expect Democrats to support amnesty; it works for them by introducing hordes of new government dependents and voters. But conservatives know that rewarding illegal aliens with legal status and/or citizenship simply encourages more illegal immigration.
As much as I hate to admit it, I agree with Noonan when she says:
One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they'd earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he'd been elected to Reagan's third term. He thought he'd been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance.
Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.
Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it's time. It's more than time.
I only pray that a Republican leader can come forward to reunite conservatives.
UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt has this excellent post on the immigration bill disaster. I listened to much of Hewitt's show yesterday and didn't hear anyone defending this monster. From Hewitt:
At this point I take out my Harriet Miers Fan Club charter membership card and put it on the table: This push for this bill is a disaster, Mr. President. Much much worse than the Miers nomination on which you had many good arguments, or the ports deal, on which you had fewer. On this issue there is no place to stand, and you are asking your friends in the Senate to go down fighting for a bad bill. It is a bad bill because no one believes the government can conduct millions of background checks (many spokesmen for the bill don't even pretend to know where the paperwork will go!). No one believes the bill will halt the next 12 million. No one believes you are going to assure the fence gets built. No one believes that the employer verification system will get done or work when some half-assed version of it does get done. No one believes that the probationary visas don't automatically convert illegal aliens with few if any rights into Due Process Clause covered legal migrants, with a Ninth Circuit ready and waiting to keep them here for decades.
No one believes passing the bill will help catch the jihadist sleepers already in the country. The constituency that has always been with you except on the ports deal --the security voter-- has left the room. If you want them back, act quickly.
Well said.
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