The price for gaining Sen. Orrin Hatch’s qualified support for immigration reform was an agreement to double (and eventually triple) the number of H1-B immigration visas for high-tech workers. Meanwhile, Utah’s other senator, Mike Lee, was one of the first to rise in opposition to the bill today. It’s an interesting snapshot into the divisions that are emerging on the right. Dan Balz highlights two other signs of division in the Washington Post. He discusses the political paths of Rand Paul and Chris Christie, both of whom are diverging from the national party in Washington DC. Christie is hoping to maintain his popularity with Democrats and use a resounding reelection as an argument that he can win blue states and capture the Electoral College. Rand Paul is pursuing such unorthodox policies that he appeals to an entirely different subsection of the electorate than a normal Republican. Of the two, Christie is less disruptive to party unity, but he doesn’t seem likely to inspire a revitalization of the party in California, Illinois, or New England.
Still, for a few decades the Democrats believed that they could only win with a southern nominee, and it was true from 1964 to 2008. Perhaps the Republicans can only win with a northern nominee in the Christie mold. That’s what Christie will argue, anyway.
That’s one possibility. But the fact that Utah’s two senators could be so diametrically opposed in their approach to immigration reform points to a potential crack-up of the Republican Party. Sen. Hatch is doing the bidding of big business and actually legislating by making his support contingent on something. Sen. Lee is doing the bidding of the know-nothing base of the party that just hates Latinos. These two approaches have been part of the Republican playbook for a long time, but I think we’ve reached the point where nativism is no longer viable. Big business will always be able to find people to represent them in Congress, but I don’t think they will consign themselves to permanent losses by aligning with a party that is too racist to ever win the White House.
Since it seems more likely that Sen. Lee is the future of the GOP than that Orrin Hatch is the future, I don’t think the Republican Party will long endure as one of our two major parties.
As California, so (eventually)will go the rest of the country…
Back around around 1970 a very perceptive prof at OCLA told us: if you want to know where the country is going, watch California, Florida, and Texas. Wherever they are now is probably about where the rest of us will be in a decade or so.
In the hands of Tea Party crazies? That’s scary.
Read Booman’s article again. I think the crazies have outlived their usefulness. I’m more worried about the Koch brothers buying our elections wholesale.
I think there may be something to Ed Kilgore’s speculation that the Snowden leaks may also put real strain on the GOP coalition, between neocons who can’t get enough of an ominpotent national security state and Tea Partiers who get really upset about the idea of an omnipotent security state if the Republicans aren’t in charge.
I live in hope.
From what I’m seeing in NC, we might be in for the dissolution of both major parties as political intermediaries. The major money in politics goes quid pro quo to candidates, which makes the parties financially irrelevant.
More than conflicts of ideas are involved; you are beginning to see the erosion of infrastructure. In the GOP the party is gradually being replaces by financial intermediaries like GPS Crossroads or any of the variety of Koch-funded political financial intermediaries. On the Democratic side, you have some folks trying to get financial intermediaries going to tap some big money. But you also have a variety of astro-turfing and grassroots efforts contending for small donations.
That might be a situation that could have some positives if I was an optimist. That is, you could get people to support something even while disagreeing with them on everything else.
Of course the reality is that big money will drown out positive voices, big media will distract from them, and us cynics will mock them for their naivete.
It’s one thing to finance individuals, but how many times can Rove fill his coffers for candidates that fill a Koch bros’ bill only to have them lose? Even worse when they win but don’t accomplish anything?
Sooner or later even the Koch Bros are going to walk away from the kind of returns they’re getting now.
Rove draws from separate sources than the Koch Brothers.
The Koch Brothers are getting huge returns at the state level because the Democratic Party never tied Obama’s popularity to state level races. (They tolerated candidates running away from the President even when the President was popular in that part of the state.) So when Kochs put money into state and local races, they rolled right over the Democratic Party — see Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio. And those states rushed to legislate the Koch agenda. That is going to be much harder to reverse because it requires a state-by-state fight.
Rove loses because he’s been focused on nationalizing state and local races. Kochs have been focusing on winning those races they can and building their bench each cycle. Kochs went from controlling zero states in 2008 to two states in 2010 to arguably four to six states in 2012. And there doesn’t seem to be any coherent political opposition springing up for 2014 that could capitalize on backlash to Kochs’ seizure of local power.
The price for gaining Sen. Orrin Hatch’s qualified support for immigration reform was an agreement to double (and eventually triple) the number of H1-B immigration visas for high-tech workers.
…Sen. Hatch is doing the bidding of big business and actually legislating by making his support contingent on something. Sen. Lee is doing the bidding of the know-nothing base of the party that just hates Latinos.
At the voter level, this makes perfect sense, but at the level of government I can’t understand where the disconnect is. H1-B visas aren’t going to Mexican engineers and other tech workers, they’re going to Indian and Chinese workers that will do those jobs at a third of the pay. Simple.
All the Republicans should be on board with this, because it conforms to their bottom-line philosophy that permeates the upper upper crust of the Walton family as well as the most recalcitrant mouth-breathing Ayn Rand adherents in the extreme Libertarian cheap seats.
The fact that they can’t get their base aligned with the leadership on such a no-brainer issue as this indicates that they really are on the shoals.
Yeah, agreed. That’s far too many visas in the first place. I’d probably vote against the bill, but I’d hope that the GOP makes it so I wouldn’t have to. It’s like when you have plans with a friend but don’t want to go, and then they cancel; best feeling ever.
Do you mean “imminent”, as in “happening before my bag of popcorn goes stale, which I keep on hand in anticipation of the very regular Republican episodes of crazy”?
Or do you “imminent”, as in “the dinosaurs are all dead and the emergence of human beings is imminent”?
My fear is that we are really talking about the latter.