Feder on GOP candidates’ changing immigration positions
“For the connoisseur of political hypocrisy, the shifting immigration stands of three GOP candidates are a veritable banquet,”
writes Don Feder, and he proceeds to anatomize them in a long article.
Unfortunately, Feder’s website has been designed with maximum user-unfriendliness in mind. Each article is placed in its own tiny window, so that only a about 100 words of text display in that window at a time, and the reader must keep continually scrolling in order to read the article. When you’re reading a two thousand word article this is a lot of fun. There is a link for a “full screen version,” but that is a pdf document, not a web page. The articles do not have their own permanent hyperlink. What I did was copy the article into Microsoft Word and read it there. Hey, Don, get with it!
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Spencer Warren writes:
Feder writes:
“In the spring of 2006, I warned that the president’s amnesty plan would result in his party’s loss of Congress. (Welcome Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid.)”
This is a crucial point we should make often—Bush is also a traitor to his party. Not a politician engaging in the art of the possible but an ideological fanatic.
Howard Sutherland writes:
Re: Don Feder warned that President Bush’s 2006 amnesty offensive would lose the GOP the Congress. Feder was right, but maybe wrong about Bush’s wishes at the time, because it was inconceivable to his partisans that GW Bush might welcome a Republican defeat.
But Bush wanted his amnesty much more than he wanted a Republican Congress. After the S.2611 amnesty/”guest” worker plan was defeated in 2006, it was clear even to Bush that a GOP-run Congress would not pass his amnesty. For Bush, though, his amnesty is not just another political program. It is a quasi-sacramental act of benevolence and national purification that most benefits those he loves most: Mexicans and other Latin Americans. It transcends partisan politics. Mr. Warren is surely right about that, and don’t expect Bush to give up until the bitter end of his term, or even then.
Even after he leaves the White House, I suspect GW Bush—in cahoots with brother Jeb and Mestizo nephew George P, and perhaps with his father and his father’s boyfriend Bill Clinton as well—will go on shilling for illegal alien amnesties and “guest” worker programs. We may well face an unholy trinity (quartet even, if they rope in Carter) of ex-presidents joining hands to tell us Americans how we must Embrace The Diversity That Is Our Strength and open the borders all the way to consummate Our Propositional Destiny As The First Universal Nation, or some similar nation-destroying liberal nonsense.
After heavily pressured Senate Republicans rebuffed S.2611, I think Bush no longer wanted the GOP to hold both houses of Congress. Bush wanted his amnesty at all costs; a Democrat-run Congress would pass it for him (or so he thought; he couldn’t imagine popular resistance strong enough to defeat amnesty even in a Democrat-run Congress, at least for now). To save face, Bush might have preferred to hold one house, probably the Senate with a reduced GOP majority; Senate Republicans were much more sympathetic to his amnesty than their House colleagues. Nevertheless, after S.2611 failed for Bush it was definitely good riddance to fellow Republicans who had frustrated him.
That said, I don’t think Bush actively plotted with Democrats to secure their victories. But he made no strenuous efforts to help Republican candidates and incumbents in 2006, a year when Republican candidates needed all the help they could get. On some level, much as they profess to despise him, Democrats recognize a kindred spirit and are grateful for his inaction—Madam Speaker Pelosi has declared her House won’t try to impeach Bush, even though his Mesopotamian Misadventure gives Democrats plenty of ammunition and there is still a great desire to avenge the Clinton impeachment among her more partisan members. HRS
Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 11, 2007 10:54 AM | Send