Chris Cillizza appears to agree with Rush Limbaugh that the House Republicans will be shooting themselves in the foot for the midterms if they agree to do anything about immigration policy.
At least Mr. Cillizza musters some data to support his position rather than sputtering racist bile, like Limbaugh. But what Cillizza shows is not that the Republicans should think twice before passing immigration legislation, but why they will think twice.
The reason I say that is because Cillizza demonstrates that individual Republican members of Congress have little to fear from angry Latino constituents, and that their endangered members are better off juicing their base rather than alienating them in an effort to appeal to Latinos. But what Cillizza doesn’t focus on is that so few Republicans are endangered that their best play is to pass immigration reform and set their 2016 nominee up nicely to compete for the presidency. Making marginal gains in 2014 that come at the expense of a drubbing in 2016 that wipes out those gains (and then some) and hands the Democrats another four years in the White House? That’s a sucker’s game.
The real problem is exactly as Limbaugh describes it:
We ought not be granting citizenship to people who don’t love the country,” he said. “We ought not be granting citizenship to people who don’t understand the history of this country. … But we do, in the interest of fairness and multiculturalism and being nonjudgmental and all this. But the real reason we do is because the people granting citizenship to people like this share that opinion this is no place special. And that’s what’s so damn frustrating and inconceivable about the Republican Party wanting to open the country up to this kind of immigration. It just doesn’t make any sense. It’s the end of the Republican Party. It’s the end of the country as we know it.”
For conservatives, the problem is that Latinos “don’t love this country,” “they don’t understand…this country,” they don’t think America is any “place special.” Letting Latinos have citizenship would be “the end of the Republican Party [and] the end of the country as we know it.”
These conservatives only care about elections to the extent that they think they can use them to slow down history and keep America white for whites. They don’t want to be more accommodating so they can win elections. They want the Latinos kicked out, whether they’re here legally or not, or even if their ancestors were here since before the Constitution was ratified or California became a state.
When you say that a party should do something, you should mean that in a moral sense. I dare anyone to argue that Cillizza’s analysis is based in any kind of morality.
