By Patrick J. Buchanan
On Monday, Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Jeff
Flake and Marco Rubio emerged with an offer of a Republican surrender to
Barack Obama.
We will accept amnesty for 11 million illegal aliens, said the four, but you must get serious about securing the border against yet another invasion. Only after an independent commission agrees the border has been secured will the 11 million be given green cards and put on a path to citizenship.
Get cracking on comprehensive reform now, Obama instructed Marco and John, or I send my own bill to the Hill, granting amnesty to every illegal alien, with no preconditions. Putting the 11 million illegal aliens on a path to U.S. citizenship should begin not after the border is better secured, but the day the bill is signed.
In a pointed lecture to Rubio, the Great Hispanic Hope of the GOP, Obama said, "We have done more on border security in the last four years than we have done in the previous 20."
A graduate of the Saul Alinsky school, Obama can smell the defeatism in the Republican Party. And he knows how to treat supplicants begging for a fig leaf to cover the nakedness of their capitulation.
But why are the Republicans surrendering their "no amnesty" stand, which has been party policy since America rallied to the GOP's opposition to amnesty in 2007, when a national grass-roots uprising routed McCain, Teddy Kennedy, Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush himself?
McCain fears the future. We got 27 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2012, and the reason is our position on illegal aliens, he argues. Until we get this behind us, we will never again get the 40 percent of the vote Bush got. Either we capitulate to Obama and La Raza, or we are doomed.
Why is McCain wrong?
He is wrong on principle. Should a majority of women tell pollsters they are against overturning Roe v. Wade, does the party abandon its pro-life stand and cease calling for Supreme Court justices who might overturn Roe?
What kind of party is that? What kind of people do that?
Who thought in 2007 we could rout the establishment of both parties?
Washington is not invincible. But you cannot rally the people if you are not prepared to lead and fight.
Republican capitulation on amnesty is not going to win Hispanic votes, but it will demoralize the party base. McCain, the amnesty champion today and in 2007, got 31 percent of the Hispanic vote against Obama.
Why is he an expert on what the party should do?
When those 11 million illegals have completed their path to citizenship and become voters, why should they, or the millions more family members they will have brought in by then, vote for the GOP? Hispanics are not small-government people. They believe in and benefit disproportionately from Big Government.
Some 53 percent of Hispanic children are born out of wedlock, and 52 percent of Hispanic families are headed by single women.
Big Government provides their kids with Head Start before school, free K-through-12 schooling, Pell Grants and student loans for college, and two or three free meals a day at school for the kids.
Big Government provides food stamps, welfare for mom and earned income tax credit checks should she work. Big Government subsidizes her housing and provides free health care for the family through Medicaid.
A Pew Hispanic poll found that by 3-to-1, Hispanics would favor a big government with more services to a small government with fewer services.
Why would these folks vote for a Republican Party that promises to downsize the Big Government upon which they depend for sustenance, security and survival? Why would they vote for a party that is going to cut capital gains, income and inheritance taxes they don't pay?
The 11 million illegals, who came with nothing, are poorer than the Hispanics who are already citizens.
When we make citizens of them and the family members they bring in, our welfare state will explode and the social safety net will sag under the weight of millions of new beneficiaries.
Republicans win between 27 and 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. Add 10 million new Hispanic voters, and Democrats will realize a net gain of 2 to 4 million new voters.
There goes the Southwest, and there goes the presidency, forever.
Amnesty would be the greatest victory for mass lawbreaking in U.S. history. It would reward those who broke our laws and make fools of those who waited in line back home to come to America.
And this is about more than economics. It is about our sovereignty, our security, our national culture and our national identity.
This fight is not yet lost, and even should we lose, is it not better to go down fighting than to ask for terms from Barack Obama?
If we are to survive as a nation of laws, Republicans must not only refuse to surrender their “no amnesty” stand, but must become more principled, and more adamant, about conserving the Founders’ principle of “a government of laws and not of men.”
ReplyDeleteReagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43, and not just Clinton and Obama, have been soft-on-immigration-crime and have failed to perform their constitutional obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
As stated in Mission Viejo’s Rule of Law Resolution: “Just as citizens and other residents may not elect what laws they will obey, the executive authority may not elect which laws it will enforce. The duty of the government to enforce the laws is coequal with the duty of citizens to obey them. The executive authority may not pick and choose which laws to enforce such that there results a complete absence of enforcement of one or more laws. The executive may not substitute its own policy preferences for the will of the people as expressed in legislation. The government of the United States was established to get rid of arbitrary, discretionary executive power. Any concept of presidential nullification of disfavored statutes by means of nonenforcement is contrary to the constitutional mandate of Article II, Section 3 that the president take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and to the Article I, Section 1 vesting of all legislative powers in the Congress, and to the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers.”
Rule of law principles require not just making laws but enforcing them to the extent of available resources. A real, permanent deportation and threatened deportation disincentive is essential to any effective national policy of regulating immigration. A deportation policy that comes and goes with the political winds can only undermine the regulation of immigration.
Americans who want to understand and defend the rule of law principles on which our country was founded should read Mission Viejo’s Rule of Law Resolution. Anyone who sends an email to missionviejoruleoflawresolution@aol.com, and asks for it, will be sent the Resolution and the supporting Research Paper by email as a PDF document.