What Hath Scott Wrought

Scott Brown as candidate for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts took particularly strong stands on three issues: opposition to the comprehensive health care bill; opposition to the legalization of illegal aliens (though he is not good on legal immigration); and opposition to treating Muslim terrorists as ordinary criminals with Miranda rights instead of as enemy combatants.

In the twelve days since Brown won the election (he has not yet taken his seat), the following has occurred:

(1) The president’s chief of staff has said that there will be no further efforts to pass the health care bill for a few months while the White House focuses on unemployment and other issues. In practical terms this means that health care reform is very likely dead for this Congress, and, given expected Democratic losses in November, probably for this presidential term as well.

(2) Even though the president had pledged to Hispanics that comprehensive immigration reform, the centerpiece of which is the legalization of all illegal aliens, a.k.a. amnesty, would be a major legislative effort for 2010, the president in his State of the Union address did not even mention the legalization of illegals. This suggests that he is so politically exhausted by the defeat of the health care bill that he doesn’t even want to try to pass amnesty, no matter how much the lack of action will hurt him with his Hispanic base.

(3) The White House has reversed its decision to put the terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial in federal court in New York City and has indicated that it may try him before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay.

Thus three major radical-leftist thrusts of the Obama presidency—government takeover of health care, legalization of illegals, and treating acts of war against the United States as ordinary crimes—have all been abandoned or reversed since the election of Scott Brown twelve days ago.

I’m not trying to build Brown, who seems like a modest and unassuming fellow (and who is not a social conservative), into a hero, and of course there were other factors at work in these developments than Brown’s election. But still, this is the stuff of which songs and legends are made.

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Alyssa writes:

Amen to that!

John Hagan writes:

The election of Scott Brown was monumental. The only way the Democratic party was going to be slapped back into reality was something as far-fetched as losing Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts. I watched a lot of the election coverage in Massachusetts, and Brown seemed to be this whirl of color in this slow-motion, mono-colored landscape of Democratic ineptitude and lies.

It’s as though after a long sleep the state, and then the whole nation, awoke from some kind of sleep, or sickness. Millions of dollars started to pour into his campaign day after day. Brown started his campaign with only forty thousand dollars! By the end of the campaign he had taken in thirteen million dollars !

We almost lost everything without a fight if not for Brown. We may yet lose, but it will not be without a vicious fight. If we go down we will go down like men. Brown’s election gave the nation a chance to find its manhood.

David Levin writes:

Nice piece, Larry

But if you think the Dems are gonna forget amnesty this year, you got another thing coming. The masses of illegals—with or without approval from the DNC—will be out in the big city streets in May, pushing for amnesty. Will the Dems listen and act?

That’s the $64,000 question now that Obamacare is kaput.

LA replies:

Fine, let them try to repeat their series of massive illegal alien demos of spring 2006, some of which seemed to be the largest demos in the history of the U.S. What did it all come down to? It was yet another Transformative Leftist Manifestation that seemed to make the firmament tremble, and then went … nowhere.

There have been an awful lot of these Transformative Leftist Manifestations, these Gnostic Spectaculars, that were supposed to change the universe and ended up going … nowhere. Remember the Copenhagen Climate Conference?

If I were on the Left, I’d be starting to worry that maybe the eschaton is not going to be immanentized after all. You hear me, Hechtman? (joke.)

Evan H. writes:

You wrote:

“It was yet another Transformative Leftist Manifestation that seemed to make the firmament tremble, and then went … nowhere.”

I hope that we will be able to add the Obama presidency to that list in a few years.

LA replies:

Exactly. :-)

Barbara V. writes:

I love your last sentence!!

Sage McLaughlin writes:

It’s just my opinion, but I always thought those huge illegal immigrant demonstrations from four years back were extremely counterproductive for the amnesty crowd, for a number of reasons. First of all, they initially showed up marching with Mexican flags, and by the time their message discipline got straightened out and they started handing out the Stars and Stripes, the jig was already up. More importantly, though, I think it sent entirely the wrong psychological message. It created the feeling among a lot of Americans of a nation completely under siege by foreigners intent on forcing themselves on America by sheer weight of numbers—a phenomenon also commonly known as an “invasion.” And the bigger the demonstration, the more hordes of illegal immigrants that turned up in Washington, the more spooked the public became and the more skeptical they were that the government was even remotely interested in doing its job.

Liberals are famously hard-headed about unintended consequences, and I think these massive illegal immigrant demonstrations were a fatal own-goal to the amnesty bill. So I agree with you—bring it on.

LA replies:

Here are a couple of entries about the huge illegal alien marches. There were others, including one with an astonishing photo of downtown Los Angeles with what looks like the largest gathering of human beings ever seen, but I couldn’t find them without more searching.

Day of national illegal-alien agitation [April 04, 2006]

The end state of liberalism: government by mass demonstrations [April 04, 2006]

LA continues:

The VFR archive for the week of April 2 to April 8, 2006 has a lot on the immigration battle that was going on then: the illegal alien demos (including a link to a Michelle Malkin page with photos); how Protestants, Catholics and Jews stand on immigration; economist Robert Samuelson’s phony column in which he appeared to be decrying illegal immigration but was doing the opposite, and much more.

Jumping into a single week of VFR can be a good way of exploring the vast resources of this site. All of VFR back to 2002, with the full contents of each week on its own web page, is accessible on the archive page.

Lois writes:

All of his foolishness aside, Glenn Beck hoped that the election of Scott Brown would “buy us time.” One can only hope that comes true.

Bill A. writes:

It wasn’t so much what Scott Brown wrought, but what the voters of Massachusetts wrought.

And they were as larger-than-life and game-changing on January 19th as the men of Massachusetts were at Lexington & Concord.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 01, 2010 01:24 AM | Send