Category: Politics

At Least Someone’s Taking A Stand

The editors of RedState single out Congressman Lynn Westmoreland for bucking the House leadership on spending:

On March 14th, aided by 22 Democrats, the Republicans passed a rule for consideration of the emergency spending bill dealing with Iraq, Afghanistan, and hurricane relief. The vote was 218-200. Lynn Westmoreland, along with John Shadegg, Mike Pence, and 25 other Republicans, voted against the rule because, among other things, it failed to offset hurricane relief costs. Leadership had refused to separate out war spending to increase chances of their fiscal recklessness passing.

Westmoreland, along with John Shadegg who was also a deputy whip, was uncerimoniously kicked off the leadership team because, in the words of Roy Blunt, “You need an example every once in a while.”

According to news reports, Westmoreland said he chose principle over the party line. Westmoreland, quoted in Congress Daily AM, said, “I’m not a martyr. You do what you got to do.”

Rep. Westmoreland did the right thing, and the leadership team should be ashamed of themselves. The Republican leadership had damned well better realize that politics as usual isn’t going to fly with the base anymore. Trying to use the cover of our brave men and women overseas for more pork-barrel politics is a deeply disturbing action. Representatives Westmoreland, Pence, Shadegg, and the other dissenting Republicans were willing to put their fiscal principles over political expediency. We need more like them in public service these days.

Say What?!

A group of anti-amnesty Republicans said that prisoners should pick fruit rather than illegal immigrants – one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.

It’s one thing to oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants as being bad for America. However, Rep. Rohrabacher’s suggestion was absolutely idiotic. The anti-amnesty side is going themselves no favors by looking like a bunch of half-cocked loons and using rhetoric that’s needlessly inflammatory.

Immigration splits the GOP more than any other issue, and the President’s plans for what amounts to amnesty for illegals could very well hurt the party in this year’s elections. Bush should tread very carefully around this issue. Rewarding people who have broken this nation’s laws is not sound policy, but neither can we try and retreat behind the walls of Fortress America and simply try to seal the border. As long as people can come through they will, and we can’t prevent all of them.

There are no easy solutions to this problem. We can’t seal the borders, and amnesty would reward breaking the law. A temporary guest worker program might help, but it won’t help enough to necessarily be worth it. If we cap the number of guest workers, people will still stream in illegally. A good fraction of the immigrants who come across the border do so to get social benefits that guest workers do not. Even if we enforce our borders more strongly and provide a guest worker program as the President wants, it won’t do much more than restrict the tide of illegals.

The only way to prevent this problem is to get the Mexican economy to a functioning state, which is a much harder task than any of the other options – and is largely out of our hands. As long as there is a sufficiently strong economic incentive to do so, illegals will cross our borders, even if there’s substantial risk. We can – and should – work to enforce our laws, but the reality is that this issue isn’t going to go away, and when politicians seem more interested in pandering to one side or another, the chances of a sensible policy coming out of this debate seems slim.

Why The Democrats Don’t Get National Security – Part 872

Bill Nienhuis of Pundit Guy takes an axe to the Democratic “plan” on national security. Once again, the Democrats demonstrate quite clearly why they are rightly viewed as the party of weakness on national security. As Nienhuis observes:

The Democrats fundamentally misunderstand the war on terror. To them, terrorism is encapsulated in one person – Osama bin Laden. By promising to find and kill bin Laden, the Democrats push the notion that if you get rid of the man, you rid the world of terrorism. Of course, this position falls flat on its face when you consider there are terrorist cells throughout the world who disagree with bin Laden and act unilaterally even though they consider themselves members of al-Qaeda. Just consider Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. There are global terrorist factions who rally around and take orders from this man. What are the Democrats going to do when Zarqawi replaces bin Laden?

Removing bin Laden is a one trick pony approach to fighting terrorism. It’s a law enforcement solution which might work if we’re talking about cleaning up a neighborhood by taking out the guy who runs the crack house down the street. Unfortunately for the Democrats, terrorism can’t be localized like this. There are other neighborhoods and thousands of guys who run crack houses. There are other countries and a million terrorists.

The Democratic plan is about winning the war, it’s about going home – the same as their plans on Iraq. They believe that if we can just get rid of Osama, then the war’s over and they can quickly change their message and everyone can return to the nice world of September 10. The oft-repeated saying that the Democrats are the September 10 Party isn’t all that far from the truth.

As nice as it would be to have Osama burning in the deepest pits of Hell, what does that accomplish? Would al-Qaeda suddenly say “Gee, I guess this whole jihad thing doesn’t work out. Let’s all go back to Saudi Arabia and grow dates.”? Would it mean that their quest to obtain weapons of mass destruction would magically end? The answer, and the obvious answer at that, is of course not.

For all President Bush’s many flaws, he understand we’re in a long war. A war that requires action on many fronts. A war that we have no option but to win. Just getting rid of Osama is entirely insufficient and may even be counterproductive. We have to undermine the ideology of Islamic extremism at its core – and that means slowly undermining the autocratic regimes that created it in the first place. That won’t be achieved by capturing one man.

For the Democrats, it’s all about changing the subject – which is precisely why they are phenomenally clueless on issues of national security. If this is the best the Democrats can come up with in regards to one of the most critical issues of our time, it’s clear they simply can’t lead.

Will On Immigration And Assimiliation

George Will has a column that supports the President’s position on amnesty for illegal immigrants:

Conservatives should want, as the president proposes, a guest worker program to supply what the U.S. economy demands — immigrant labor for entry-level jobs. Conservatives should favor a policy of encouraging unlimited immigration by educated persons with math, engineering, technology or science skills that America’s education system is not sufficiently supplying.

Which is about as ass-backwards as one can get.

There’s no doubt that America will have a demand for labor – we have an unemployment rate that’s quite close to full employment, and our economy is diversifying more and more with each passing year. No doubt we’d see quite a few more American-born janitors and hotel workers if having those jobs paid more – but at the same time, that would also raise the costs involved in staying at a hotel or cleaning trash. We can’t simply shut down our borders like some may like.

However, the flow of illegal immigrants across our borders makes a mockery of our laws and puts even more stress on our national infrastucture. A guest-worker program would ameliorate some of these downsides, but how much could we broaden our tax base with cheap immigrant labor? How can we assimilate so many people, many of whom are here to get social benefits and send their money back to their families in Mexico? Yes, there’s no doubt that Hispanic immigrants can and do assimilate into American society – and Hispanics are an increasingly important part of American culture. However, immigration without assimilation is a recipe for disaster, and Will seems to blithely ignore the realities of such a general amnesty.

With our culture of political correctness, do we have the will to make guest workers assimilate? If not, guest workers are simply sources of revenue to be exploited. Assimilation is vital towards having a stable polity, and very few on the left or the right seem to be taking that issue seriously.

The Democrats want amnesty to boost their political fortunes. The Bush Administration wants guest workers to hopefully boost the Republicans political fortunes. Other Republicans want to further criminalize illegal immigrantion to boost their standings with the Republican base.

All three parties are considering what’s good for their own political position rather than what’s good for the country as a whole. There’s nothing wrong with people wanting to come to America, work hard, and share in the American dream. That is part of our national story, and should be. However, we have to ensure that those immigrants come to share in the American dream – not simply be free-riders on it. The plethora of Mexican flags at recent pro-immigration rallies seems to suggest a fundamental lack of allegiance to this country.

Unless we can gather the political will to assimilate our immigrant communities, immigration will only dilute our national identity. We have to uphold the rule of law, control our borders, and work towards integrating immigrants into our society and culture first. Only then can we start seriously tackling the issue of immigration in a meaningful way. Fishing for more voters on the rolls isn’t the way of going about it, and the current debate seems to boil down to precisely that.

The Immigration Backlash Myth

Debra Saunders has a piece on why worries of an immigration backlash are unfounded. Getting tough on illegal immigration is not a political loser for the GOP – quite the opposite in fact. It won’t cause Hispanic voters to abandon Republicans either, as Saunder explains:

The Los Angeles Times duly reported, “Some Republicans fear that pushing too hard against illegal immigrants could backfire nationally, as with Proposition 187 (the 1994 ballot measure that sought to deny benefits for illegal immigrants that) helped spur record numbers of California Latinos to become U.S. citizens and register to vote. Those voters subsequently helped Democrats regain political control in the state.”

Call that the Backlash Myth. In fact, Prop. 187 passed with 59 percent of the vote, and GOP Gov. Pete Wilson, who championed the measure, was re-elected in 1994. In 2003, when Democratic Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill that would allow illegal immigrants to get driver’s licenses, he so enraged voters that he sealed his political demise. After Davis was recalled from office, the heavily Democratic California Legislature repealed the bill.

That’s your backlash.

Don’t blame racism. While some in the media may think all Latinos vote alike, the Los Angeles Times poll found that 38 percent of Latino voters in California strongly opposed giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

The GOP has a major chance to make inroads with the growing population of middle-class Hispanics in America today – they’re socially conservative and quite serious on national defense. As many second-generation Hispanic immigrants further assimilate into American society, their voting behavior tends to become more in line with their social views. If anything, an increase in immigration helps the Democrats rather than the Republicans.

The fact that Hillary Clinton has actually tried to outflank Bush on the right on the immigration issue suggests how the political winds are shifting. Amnesty for illegals is not a particularly popular option, the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal notwithstanding. The assumption that there are jobs that “Americans just won’t do” doesn’t seem to hold – chances are that Americans don’t do them because wages have been depressed or they’re jobs that could be accomplished through automation. Bringing in immigrants from Mexico to perform those jobs doesn’t strike me as an economically beneficial arrangement – cheap imported labor tends to lower industrial innovation (see the prebellum South for instance), and it also encourages Mexico to continue its dysfunctional politics since they have a nice release valve for their discontented citizens.

Legal immigrants end up bearing the brunt of the suspicion engendered by illegal immigrants streaming across the border. It’s one thing to make it easier for honest workers to come across the border on a contract basis – sealing the borders to everyone else. But to provide a legal form of support to cross-border human trafficking and the coyotes who are often involved in narcotics trafficking as well as smuggling human cargos is simply bad policy.

If Bush were smart, he’d put a guest-worker program right alongside tough border protection – but Karl Rove is making the political calculation that Hispanics are going to be crucial for electoral success in the US in future elections (true) and that cracking down on immigration harms the GOP’s chances at picking up the Hispanic vote (totally false). This calculation is neither sound policy nor good politics, and if Bush is going to get serious about reforming immigration, he can’t do so unless he’s willing to see beyond the myth of immigration backlash.

Preaching To The Choir

Peter Brown writes on the Democratic strategy of targeting unmarried voters in 2006. Never mind the fact that Democrats already win this category hands down, except for single white men. Kerry beat Bush among unmarried voters by a margin of 58-40. Bush won married voters by a margin of 57-42. Marriage is one of the stronger determinates of Republican voting behavior this days, and that’s been consistantly so for some time now.

Not only is the Democratic focus on unmarried voters not expanding the number of Democratic votes, but it’s playing right into the hands of those who feel that the Democratic Party is hostile to families. As Democratic pollsters have found, the Democratic Party is considered hostile to families among voters who might be predisposed to Democrats on economic and other issues. Respondents in the Democracy Corps focus group went so far as to label the Democrats “immoral” and “anti-religious.”

Unfortunately for the Democrats, those labels aren’t far off. The Democratic base is filled with a sense of anti-religious bigotry. While Democratic politicos still pay lip service to religion, anyone more religious than a Unitarian is frequently labeled a “fundie” by the increasingly hostile Democratic base. There are 60 million Evangelicals in this country, and the Democratic Party’s increasingly anti-religious rhetoric seems bent on alienating each and every one of them. A Democrat can’t win without taking some Southern states, and alienating evangelical voters is a sure-fire way to start with a huge disadvantage in the South.

The Democrats problem isn’t that they don’t do well with urban, young, single, non-religious voters. It’s that they can’t get any traction outside of those groups. Meanwhile, the GOP is continuing to reach out to Hispanics and African-Americans, expanding their voter base. The contrast in strategies doesn’t presage well for the Democrats in the future – the Republicans are looking outward, while the Democrats are looking inward. You don’t win elections by preaching to the choir, and as Brown notes, the Democrats can’t win without winning over Middle America. Yet the Democrats are insistent on running increasingly shrill, increasingly liberal candidates.

Democrats like Mark Warner and Bill Clinton were able to reach out to Middle America and won elections because of it. Yet the Democratic base appears to be revolting against candidates who present a shred of moderation – calling them “Republican lite” or worse. The more power the “progressive” base has in the Democratic Party, the more likely it becomes that the Democrats will suffer a massive and painful split or drive themselves off a political cliff. “Progressives” may have a great deal of attraction to urban secular elites, but they drive everyone else away. The Democrats have a choice here – either preach to the choir or try to win elections. At this point, it appears that the base prefers the former to the latter.

They Just Can’t Help Themselves, Redux

It looks like Russ Feingold’s move to official censure President Bush is going over like a fart in church. Senate Democrats are claiming they “need more time” to go over the resolution, which is a polite way of saying “hell no, we’re not putting this up for a vote.”

Feingold has been jockeying into position to be the left-wing Democrat’s poster boy in 2008, and this censure resolution is part of that positioning strategy. The Democratic “progressives” are already facing a backlash against those Democrats who aren’t ideologically extreme enough for them, and the possibility of someone like Feingold running an insurgent candidacy against a centrist Democrat continues to grow the more Feingold shows off for the MoveOn.org crowd.

The Democrats just can’t help themselves – Bush is their white whale and they’re a million little Ahabs trying to go after him. Instead of focusing on the issues in 2006, the Democrat’s rhetoric will be more of the same Bush-bashing that plays only to their base and alienates everyone else. The fact that Feingold is pushing the NSA surveillance issue – one of the few issues Bush has any traction on at the moment is further evidence of just how much anti-Bush tunnel vision exists within the Democratic base.

No wonder Harry Reid is trying to sweep Feingold’s resolution under the rug – but sooner or later the “progressive” inmates will finish taking over the Democratic asylum, and the chances of a Democratic takeover in 2006 will fall preciptiously.

Dubai And Unintended Consequences

Stephen Green notes some very bad potential fallout from the Dubai ports deal:

The UAE’s small move is a warning shot across our bow. In the worst-case scenerio, OPEC could move to the euro. The result? A dollar worth perhaps half of what it is today, along with an inflationary surge like we haven’t seen since Jimmy Carter was President. The Oil States would suffer, too, but not nearly as much as we would.

Of course, that decision would be very bad over the long term unless one believes that Europe will suddenly surpass the US economy – which won’t happen when the Eurozone’s growing at a much slower rate than the US. However, if the OPEC nations wanted to really screw over the US in the short term, a sudden switch to the Euro would cause financial chaos.

That’s why Bush has been playing nice with the Saudis despite the fact that they’re hardly friends of democracy. Partially because the enemy of our enemy is our friend – and al-Qaeda has absolutely no love for the House of Saud. But it’s also because if we start burning bridges with OPEC, we not only screw ourselves over, but also Japan, Europe, and everyone else who isn’t sitting on craploads of crude.

The Bush Administration horribly screwed up the political aspect of the Dubai Ports World deal, but the policy was nowhere near as bad as the more hysterical arguments of its critics. Now that we’ve managed to royally piss off the UAE government, we can expect that getting cooperation from them on stopping the flow of terrorist financing as well as a major potential economic fallout.

Nobody comes out smelling like roses after this. The Democrats and the breakaway Republicans look like they cynically played to crude anti-Arab sentiment. The Bush Administration looks once again like the gang who couldn’t shoot straight and ended up walking around with their pants around their ankles trying to defend a policy issue they’d already lost. The UAE’s actions only further cements the idea that they’re hardly a US ally.

The Bush Administration should have managed this whole issue better than they did. They should have had a war room which A) should have known of the deal, B) should have forseen the political consequences of it, and C) should have started making sure that Capitol Hill was informed and ready to fight on the issue.

For all the talk about how the White House keeps everyone in rigid ideological lockstep, the evidence would seem to indicate the contrary – the White House’s political operations have failed time and time again.

As Green wryly notes:

It’s nice to know that sometimes, politics still stops at the waters’ edge. Sometimes so does our long-term thinking.

Abortion And Imprudence

There were two very good articles on the South Dakota abortion law this weekend: the first of which comes from columnist Steve Chapman:

For 33 years, opponents of abortion have followed the advice of St. Vincent de Paul, who said that if you must hurry, “hasten slowly.” Ever since the Supreme Court made abortion on demand the law of the land, pro-lifers have worked tirelessly to move the court and the country toward allowing greater protection for the unborn.

But today, some people in the anti-abortion movement are running low on patience. They are hastening quickly, oblivious to the risks to those they want to protect.

The people responsible for this bill did not consider what the ramifications would be. This was a horrendously rash decision that was not thought through at all – and the ultimate effect of this bill will be to ensure that abortion remains legal. Anyone who seriously believes that this bill will be a stake through the heart of Roe simply isn’t thinking rationally. As Chapman explains:

Assuming that Alito and Roberts would jump at the chance to scrap Roe, that still leaves five of the nine justices in favor of preserving abortion rights. If the court were to hear this case tomorrow, the chance that the law would survive can be calculated with depressing precision: zero.

The law also runs the risk of demanding too much of the two new members. Both are conservatives, and both have stressed their due respect for precedent. There are steps a justice might be willing to take after a few years on the court that he might not be willing to take right away. One of those is chucking a major decision that has been on the books for a generation.

The bill’s sponsor says he sees a “strong possibility” that John Paul Stevens will leave the court soon, to be succeeded by an anti-Roe justice. But that’s not counting chickens before they’re hatched — it’s counting them before the eggs are even laid.

The idea that Roe is going to be overturned by this court would require another justice to change their mind about Roe – which doesn’t seem likely. Furthermore, that assumes that the Supreme Court will even grant certiorari in this case – which is certainly not guaranteed. The chances of the sponsors of this bill getting what they want are not just imperceptably small – they’re zero. This bill won’t overturn Roe. It certainly won’t end abortion. What it will do is make the debate even more vitriolic than before and force the pro-life side to either repudiate part of itself or defend a bill that does not even make exception in the cases of incest or rape. That is not a tenable position, and those responsible for the bill have done more to aid the practice of abortion than nearly anyone.

Thomas Bray also considers the need for prudence:

Impatience also could jeopardize the solid progress – abortion declined nationally by 17 percent in the 1990s, and by up to half in states like Michigan between 1987 and 2003, it has been estimated –that anti-abortion forces have made by gradually de-legitimizing abortion while chipping away at Roe. This might be a good time for conservatives to choose prudence over Utopianism.

Bray is quite right. The South Dakota bill and the others like it are incredibly imprudent pieces of legislation. Even if Roe were repealed, abortions would still be endemic in this country. How many lives would truly be saved if Roe were repealed? New York and California represent the largest share of abortions in the country, and neither state would be particularly likely to ban the procedure any time soon. The only way to truly reduce the number of abortions nationwide is not to change the law but change the culture. That had slowly been happening as technology allowed women to see a fetus not as some “tissue mass” but as a person in its own right. Now, because of this imprudent and ill-considered move by the legislature of South Dakota, those cultural shifts will be washed away in a tide of political rancor.

They Just Can’t Help Themselves

GOP pollster and consultant David Hill writes on why he thinks that the Democrats will blow their opportunity for control of Congress in 2006:

While most Democrats won’t give voice to their anxieties, they innately sense that their party stands on the precipice of squandering a political opportunity of historical proportions. When historians one day scrutinize this failure, they’ll doubtless focus on a moment that will occur in the next few months.

In that moment, Democrats yearning for “a message” will seize control of the party, grab its megaphone and let out a primal stream of political obscenities that will drive voters into the waiting arms of Republicans. It will be the equivalent of turning rapper Eminem loose at the PTA meeting, Rotary Club and church social all in the same day. And then it will be over for this bunch of Democrats.

I think he’s right on that. By the numbers, the Democrats should be preening. People are ticked with the direction of the country and the GOP is taking the lion’s share of the blame. The President’s approval ratings are consistant dipping below 40% in every poll. The ports deal had Republicans turning against the President and put Republicans on the defensive on national security for the first time in a long while. Conservatives are annoyed with the GOP’s fiscal irresponsibility, and liberals hate the President with the fire of a thousand suns.

At the same time, the numbers don’t tell the whole story. I have a feeling that the Democrats will instinctively reach for the one thing they really want but can’t strongly support: a politically-motivated impeachment proceding against President Bush. The more radical members of the Democratic Party have already started talking about an impeachment vote, which will instantly alienate all those who don’t suffer from a full-blown case of BDS. They just can’t help themselves – even if they do come up with something that resembles an agenda, it will get blown aside by their Ahab-like fixation with the President.

That kind of partisanship tends to alienate people – the Clinton impeachment didn’t help the GOP at all – they lost seats in 1998 and the fallout ended up taking out both Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston. Impeachment doesn’t motivate support for a party, and if that becomes the centerpiece of the Democratic campaign for 2006, the Democrats might find the political winds less amenable to them than the numbers would show. The fact is that the Democratic base is ravenously partisan, and even if cooler heads try to prevail, the Dean/MoveOn/Kos wing of the Democratic Party is increasingly powerful in the Democratic Party structure.

This election is the Democrats’ to lose, and given their recent history, there’s a good chance that they’ll once again manage to pull defeat from the jaws of victory…