May 31 2006
Face Facts: 80%-20% Is Not A Winning Position
I feel like politics in this country has entered the twilight zone. People I respected for brilliant logic and insight and top notch debate have become emotional, simplistically surreal in their proposals. The level of the discussion has dropped way down into fevered accusations in some places and pure denial in others. I was going to title this post “Denial: A Deep River In The Republican Party” because the fact so many people are rushing headlong against popular opinion and destroying the conservative movement. I hate to do this, but I must illustrate this by pointing to Paul Mirnoff’s recent post at Powerline to show the depths of this denial and its implications:
Matthew Dowd, a Republican strategist with an excellent track record, has produced a memorandum in which he argues, based on polling data, that Americans support a “comprehensive solution” to the problem of illegal immigration that includes reform on three fronts: strengthening enforcement at the border, creating a temporary worker program, and providing a way for illegals who are here now to obtain legal status. Dowd concludes that “Republican candidates succeed when they support taking [comprehensive] action on immigration.” He supports this conclusion by noting that, according to the poll, just 25 percent of voters are “more likely” to support a candidate who advocates only sealing the border, stopping illegal immigrants from entering, and imposing criminal penalties on immigrants. By contrast, 71 percent are “more likely” to support a candidate who wants to beef up border security, enforce laws against companies that hire illegals, and create a temporary worker program with safeguards against abuse.
Does this mean that conservatives should stop worrying and support the broad reform package proposed by the Senate and/or President Bush, and are doomed if they don’t? I don’t think so.
First, and obviously, one should not support a bad immigration reform plan regardless of its popularity. The poll results don’t speak to the merits of the Senate plan or the Bush plan.
Second, the poll results don’t persuade me that Republican candidates for Congress are doomeed unless they accede to the Senate’s plan or something similar. Candidates should easily be able to distinguish between the euphemistic “comprehensive reform” posited in the poll questions and the reality of the Senate’s Christmas tree bill. They should also be able to show the inadequacies of that bill’s enforcement provisions. Moreover, they need not embrace the punitive views expressed in the cartoonish alternative to Dowd’s favored position.
Paul’s position is simply denial of reality. The people cannot be right because the bill is ‘bad’. The problem with this logic is most people in this country are not crying fro retribution against people who have worked to make a living and raise a family. The folks who started with “deport the criminals”, and who moved on to “make the criminals felons”, and who have since moved on to “starve them out by making it impossible to get a job”, have rightfully been labled extremists. The anti-reasonable-solutions crowd is motivated by emotion, somne strange combination of a need for retribution and fear of a future they cannot control.
But the second part of the denial is even more stunning if you look at Dowd’s poll numbers:
Dowd’s memo says that an internal RNC poll conducted by Jan Van Louhuzen finds that “pverwhelming support exists for a temporary worker program. 80% of all voters, 83% of Republicans, and 79% of self-identified conservatives support a temporary worker program as long as immigrants pay taxes and obey the law.”
The last time I saw poll numbers this lopsided was when Dick Durbin referred to GITMO by referring to Nazis and the Khmer Rouge. 80-20 is not even close. Read the memorandum (linked in the Powerline excerpt) and realize Paul had to look across numerous questions and various polling sources to come to the conclusion there is not elections risk for going over the top and taking the extreme line here. No matter how the what-we-want-or-else crowd tries to dress up the issue, it is still tarnished with the rantings of people like Michael Savage and Pat Buchanan. Put Pat and Savage together and you get all the makings of a lynch mob.
Dowd said it right at the end of his memo:
“Finally, when discussing immigration reform, tone and language are extremely important. To continue to grow the party, we must conduct this debate with civility and respect for our nation’s heritage — as the President has said, we are both a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants. That is why the American people favor a balanced plan that secures the border, improves enforcement, enhances immigration avenues AND deals compassionately and equitably with those who are already here.”
And this is backed up by poll data itself:
Voters don’t consider granting legal status to those already here amnesty. Seventy percent (70%) of voters say illegal immigrants who have put down roots in the U.S. should be granted legal status after they go to the back of the line, pay a fine, pay back taxes, learn English, and have a clean criminal record; just 25% say that would be amnesty and we should instead impose criminal penalties on illegal immigrants in the U.S.
Emphasis mine. The extremists who think any sign of compassion (i.e., any deviation from humiliating people working without the proper papers) is ‘amnesty’ are a small minority. The American People are a smart, caring, reasonable people who have led the world in many areas solving many problems. When I see numbers like these in polls where emotion is not a driver (the Dubai Ports World issue was the one exception in many, many years) I see the wisdom of a great nation. To some they see only the ignorant masses who are simply mistaken because the have not seen the light.
Well, from here it is not hard to see what happens. The 25% who cannot stomach a comprohensive bill will destroy the governing coalition of conservatism. In an 80-20 world you are never going to get what you want. The anger in this minority and being rejected is hot and I doubt these people will ever be able to deal with losing. The fact they have been forced to say democracy should not lead on this issue because there is not majority in the Republican caucus (which is being whipped by special iinterest money, not the national interest) shows the vacuousness of their position. The shifting goal posts from mass deportations to starving them out of jobs indicates these people know, deep down they are losing this debate. They do not have the President or the people on their side. But my feeling is they have invested too much emotion to come back from the brink. Somehow Durbin was able to survive is 80-20 moment. The conservative coalition will not survive this I fear. But if that is the price we pay to retain our humanity and compassion, then that is the price we pay. So be it.
And now, we will see Tancredo, Malkin, and others carry out a scorched earth policy. If they cannot get their bill, then nobody shall.
I sent a letter to my Congressman, Mark Souder, R-IN, this morning in which I asked him to answer several questions, the answers to which will determine whether or not my wife and I can vote for him this fall. One of the questions was: “if you could write the perfect immigration bill, what provisions would it contain, and which of those provisions could you give up in a House/Senate Conference compromise bill?”
I’m anxious to hear his answer.
AJ, why is it you have to slam anyone who doesn’t agree with your view on immigration reform? Is it that you think that others do not have the where-with-all to understand that sometimes no action is better than bad action?
In my very red state no one agrees with you. Not even the Tejanos. We see this bill for what it is, a giveaway program for illegals. A “get out of jail free” card, a get an education free card, a collect from a program that you have not paid into free card. But still you defend it.
You utter such nonsense as those who don’t like the bill would have the CIA go into neighborhoods and round illegals up at the point of a gun in the middle of the night. Now you say that we who do not agree with this bill want to starve illegals out by denying them jobs. Why do you feel that is necessary? Where has anyone, who is against this bill, even suggested that? And just where does our Constitution say that you are guaranteed a job? It doesn’t.
Nothing will be acheived by this bill except to give special priviledges to a special interest group. Not equality, but exception. They will not have to play by the rules that all other Americans have to play by.
Mexico is a mess. S.B.2611 will not change that. But we cannot take every poor human being in the world that was not fortunate enough to be born in the United States. That is just simple reality.
We, the United States, have had our hard times. We have seen periods where there were no jobs for American citizens. Did Americans flock to other nations where there were no jobs, violating the laws of those other nations, expecting for those nations to provide us with what we did not have in our native land? Did we insist on welfare payments, free education, laws to protect our jobs over the citizens of those nations, i.e. special consideration? No. We stayed here and worked it out.
Until Mexico ends it’s corruption, nothing will change for it’s people. That doesn’t mean we are obligated to take it’s huddled masses.
So while you remain upset that illegals do not follow your neighborhood by-laws and have way to many people living in an apartment, there are those of us that realize that giving law breakers the right to break those laws will not make them law abiding citizens.
HH, I agree. This notion that we must have no bill rather than the Senate bill will likely result in the defeat of the Republicans but the far right of the party doesn’t care. I think it is time to stop cowtowing to a self-described “base” of the party and start referring to them as the “curb” of the party. Do I love the Senate bill? No. But I do know that it has more provisions for enforcement than the House bill has and ignoring the migrants already here is silly.
What has happened is that so many voices have been raised on this issue in such a wide spectrum of positions that the Congress has stopped listening to us and are forced to go with their gut. There is nobody leading the Republican party on the issue as a uniting force and the voices from the people range from center to far right.
You have the Malkins of the world who would destroy us in order to save us. You have the “send a brick” pinheads (that’s namecalling, FE) along with an apparent bulk of people in the center who support the President’s proposal but who are apparently remaining silent. So polls are telling them one thing but their mailbox and email are telling them something else and so the House apparently puts their earplugs in and does nothing because they are unsure of where the people really are on the issue and nobody is putting their political hiney on the line to take the lead one way or the other on the issue.
Gutless all around. No bill is the WORST POSSIBLE OUTCOME. I beg Congress, stop counting angels on the heads of pins with your positioning for teh camera on Justice Dept. corruption probes and get your butts busy getting us an immigration bill or I think you might find all your butts out in the street, Democrat and Republican alike as we start voting for primary opponents rather than send you back to DC.
But I know in my heart of hearts that nothing would really get done on this issue. There are too many politicians benefitting from billions of dollars in illegal labor and drug smuggling operations to really want to change anything. That is “over the top” cynical maybe but there are literally billions of dollars at risk for some people in the illegal economy that relies on an unsecure border.
Crosspatch, please show me where the Senate bill gives more provisions for enforcement than the House bill. I don’t want your opinion, I want the language from the bill itself.
When 34 Senators say that S.B. 2611 DOES NOT provide for enforcement, perhaps you have read something in bill (614 pages) that they didn’t see. If that is the case, please let me know and I will forward that information to my Senator who voted against the bill on the grounds that it did not enforce even the laws that are currently on the books but rather granted priviledges to illegals that are not given to legal citizens.
The only “compromise” in this bill is the compromise against law abiding, tax paying citizens. The only thing “comprehensive” is the fact that illegals will be eligible for benefits not granted to legal citizens like prevailing wage, in-state tuition, forgiveness of taxes, and the right to have violated our identity theft laws.
Comprehensive sounds good, but amnesty has been done before and failed. Why do that again…
There is something fake about this comprehensive Senate solution.
What everyone seems to agree on is:
Secure the border This means the fence and more agents
Guest Worker Many Mexicans come here to work, and go home their families not to rip off the welfare system and vote Democratic. Make that secure and easy.. These are the best ones from Mexico and will build the economies in both contries. Our friends in Mexico, have a concrete house and 2 sons planning to go to college. Some of the work that built all that was illegal, some was with legal papers in Arkansas forests. The work was hard, but this is how real people build families or countries.
Employer sanctions. This means real secure documents not a wonderland of fake but true phoney social security cards.
The current system is designed to fail. That is what needs reform.
So what is left…. Real immigration reform is something else and should be handled separately.. It might include allowing the best and the brightest from arround the world to come here if they want to obey our laws, learn English and civics etc..
There many hidden agendas advanced under the cover of immigration reform. A lot of it does not make sense. Except in the fantasy world of Washington DC.
I was going by a member of the Senate who said the enforcement portion of the Senate bill is as long as the entire House bill.
Crosspatch, length of text and provisions for enforcement are two different things. As a matter of fact, SB 2611 provides little for enforcement.
But it does give illegals more rights than you have. You will still have to pay higher tuition for your kid to go to a university out of your state, you will still be required to pay your taxes EVERY year, you will still be subject to prosecution and incarceration if you use someone else’s Social Security number.
I agree, the hardliners on this have their own agenda and they do not care what the rest of the country says or does and now they are trying to do for the Republicans what the DU crowd did for the Democrats.
I would like to see a compromise and I think that the assertion of the right that the Senate bill has no enforcement provisions is absurd. That bill calls for a wall, and more technology and an end to catch and release, and more detention centers, and more border agents, and tougher laws against hiring illegals and an ID card …just to mention a few things.
And allowing some people who can meet certain criteria to become legal and maybe someday years and years in the future have a shot at becoming a citizen is not outrageous. On one hand people say they do not want to see mass roundups and at the same time they give the rest of us the distinct impression they will settle for nothing less.
In the past whenever military or law enforcement are forced to move or round up, or go after millions of civilians and force them to go somewhere they do not want to go, the results have rarely worked out very well.
Maybe a compromise and some common sense are in order. Or the loud people can force those Republicans into pursuing a policy that most Americans will not support.
Retire:
More right than I have?? For one thing the provision you discussed are already off the table, for another I do not have to worry about someone kicking in my door and dragging me off to a bus station and putting me on a bus to another country without so much as a kiss my behind.
I am not saying that happens to every one of these people, obviously it does not. But at the same time to assume that these people have more rights than Americans do is silly.
This kind of provision along with the idiotic provision turning illegal entry into a felony are both said to be off the table.
You see, this is how negotiations work. Offer, counter offer and so on.
I am not optimistic. I hear a lot of emotional nuts that would rather have nothing at all. They would rather see no bill than the Senate bill, rather see Democrats in power than the Republicans that would vote for a compromise. I am seeing the exact same nitwit attitude out of the far right that I am so tired of seeing from the far left. They display exactly the same kind of nonsense, their political issues are different but they behave in exactly the same manner. “My way or the highway”. Can we just line them all up and send them to Mexico? I would rather have the illegals than those people.
We need a name for our Right Wing Kos Kids.
I’ve been referring to them at times as the “Apocolyptos” and the “WingDings.”
A guy I know has called them the “Pitchforkers” which is fun because you can shorten it to the “Forkers” and still get around civil language restrictions : )
I prefer “scorched-earth conservatives”, myself.
retire05, you sure have it figured out. I wish everyone could comprehend the situation as well as you do. Both AJ and Crosspatch for some reason seem to almost be in a panic for the Conservatives to buy this “One pronged ‘comprehensive’ ” bill that the senate has put out and that the President has completely misunderstood. Yes, I’ll agree that 80 % of the Repubs want a comprehensive solution, but where oh where can they find one. I certainly am a main stream conservative and I sure wish there were one in sight. But the comprehensive solution I would like to see is: 1. Secure border, current bill, no provisions for that. 2. enforce current laws. 3 Don’t reward lawbreakers, as current bill does. 4 Let all legal immigrants get exactly same as current legal immigrants get. Current bill doesn’t do this.
I keep seeing references to where the Right wing Conservatives want to “round up” people and “starve them out” etc, but I see no links to these things.
“The folks who started with “deport the criminalsâ€, and who moved on to “make the criminals felonsâ€, and who have since moved on to “starve them out by making it impossible to get a jobâ€, have rightfully been labled extremists.”
Just who is proposing this?, Give me a link to Malkin or Buchanan or whoever it is that are saying these things. I read them and I don’t see it. It is not an all or nothing situation. I don’t want the current senate bill to pass under any circumstances because it is much much worse than no bill at all. I do want a bill to pass, but not this phony one. The House bill would be a good starting point.
from AJ above:” The 25% who cannot stomach a comprohensive bill will destroy the governing coalition of conservatism.”
But and this is a big but, the governing coalition of conservatism will be delighted by this bill being turned down, because there is Nothing comprehensive about it except how comprehensively the conservatives would be “sold out” by it. So when you add that ‘ the governing coalition of conservatism’, to the 25%, that will be about 100 to 105% of the conservatives that will be delighted to see it turned down.
quoting AJ:”I feel like politics in this country has entered the twilight zone. People I respected for brilliant logic and insight and top notch debate have become emotional, simplistically surreal in their proposals. The level of the discussion has dropped way down into fevered accusations in some places and pure denial in others.”
Unfortunately, I think that his feeling of frustration is because he is almost always on the right side of conservatism, but for some reason is completely wrong on this one. I think that would be a frustrating feeling.
“have become emotional, simplistically surreal in their proposals.”
What in the world is surreal about a proposal to SECURE the border? That is the one real thing the conservatives want out of this.
Let’s take this quote and these poll numbers:
” Voters don’t consider granting legal status to those already here amnesty. Seventy percent (70%) of voters say illegal immigrants who have put down roots in the U.S. should be granted legal status after they go to the back of the line, pay a fine, pay back taxes, learn English, and have a clean criminal record; just 25% say that would be amnesty and we should instead impose criminal penalties on illegal immigrants in the U.S.”
This is a little bit of semantics.
“don’t consider granting legal status to those already here amnesty”
No, but they do consider granting citizenship(not ‘legal status’) Amnesty. So they have no problem granting legal status, but not citizenship(Amnesty)
I do notice, I think , incorrectly that 25% do consider granting legal status as being amnesty, so of course they like the other 70% are against it(Amnesty)
I notice that none of the polls have a number favoring either citizenship and/or Amnesty. They are quite correctly perceived, I believe, as being one and the same. 70% for legal status, fine, after the border is ‘SECURED’
Wow! Terrye
“I am not saying that happens to every one of these people, obviously it does not. But at the same time to assume that these people have more rights than Americans do is silly. ”
You obviously have no idea what is in this Senate bill.
“I am not saying that happens to every one of these people, obviously it does not.” Are you saying it happens to ANY of these people? Snap out of it.
But at the same time to assume that these people have more rights than Americans do is silly
He’s not making an ‘assumption’ he reading the senate bill, you should check it out yourself.
Enforcement:
I guess that means we can put you and retire in the 20%.
Tell me…. when there is no bill passed and the situation on the border continues to go to hell and the numbers of illegals continue to climb are you still gonna be so proud of yourselves?
Have you people ever heard of a filibuster? In order to get cloture and get the Senate bill to conference there were certain things that had to be in it. Now the idea is to take the two bills and try to fashion a compromise or consensus bill. If all the things you found so obnoxious were not in the Senate bill, it would never have gotten out of the Senate in which case there would no hope of action. Understand?
So…..that means that you do what you can with what you have to work with. The Senate did not say that the House bill was so stupid that they would not even consider debating the issue, they did not say they would kill the whole damn thing if they did not get everything they wanted.
Now it is in the hardliner’s ball park. They can either come up with something for the president to sign or they can act like morons.
Enforcement:
I know what has already been taken out of the bill. I know more will be taken out of the bill. I know I thought there were things in the House bill that were flat out stupid. But, hey I did not give up.
I know that people who have no desire to see a solution to this problem and just like to bitch are cherry picking anything they can to destory the process so that we get spit. Which make me wonder if they really want to solve any problems or if they just want to push the rest of us around.
There is not one damn bill that comes out of Washington that does not have something in it I disagree with.
But I am not the center of the universe. I do not think that I should be able to kill any hopes of legislation getting passed unitl and unless I personally agree with absolutely every thing in it.
You are missing the central issue, the point is not whether or not I like or agree with everything in the bill, the point is to negotiate a compromise that most people can live with.
Most sane grown ups anyway.
Does this happen to any of these people? Millions of people have been deported in recent years. It happens all the time.
That is actually a major part of the problem. Too few people understand how the Senate works. They think that if you have a majority, you should be able to pass anything you want. They don’t realize that you need 60 votes just to HAVE an up/down vote. If 60 Senators don’t agree that it is time to vote, you can’t even have the final vote to begin with. Getting the 60 votes needed to have a vote is the hard part in the Senate when neither party holds 60 seats. They have to compromise to get anything done.
I am sorry but to me it seems like just more evidence that 50% of the population are of below the median intelligence level. And they would probably even want to argue THAT point too!
Terrye, the only thing that was taken off the table with the Senate bill was today Sessenbrenner agreed to take the felony change off the table.
What is still in the bill:
fogiveness of taxes for all but three years and if the illegal is under 20, forgiveness of ALL taxes
in-state tuition for illegals
Social Security benefits paid while using a stolen SS number
Earned income tax credits
Just for starters. Do you have any of those benefits?
Crosspatch:
Even if we wind up with no bill at all, so what? We still have laws on the books that, if enforced, would be a start.
SallyVee and Harold Hutchinson:
Why is it that when someone cannot argue with facts they resort to name calling?