The GOP, Trying to Crash Immigration Reform

House of Representatives Chamber

Speaker Boehner (R-OH) has clearly stonewalled immigration reform in the House of Representatives: he has allowed Representatives with no incentives to compromise to push him into a corner with threats to his speakership.  Without Boehner bringing the Senate legislation to the floor for a vote, there is very little chance of the chaos in the House being wrangled effectively enough to get anything passed.  This has lead to a strange disconnection to this simple fact: the Gang of 8 bill started as a right leaning compromise, was dragged further right by the Senate, had an absurd amount of right-wing security goodies in the form of the Corker-Hoeven amendment and was still not enough to satisfy the impossible Republicans in the House of Representatives.

The Corker-Hoeven amendment may as well have been named the “Now you have nothing left to complain about right-wingers” amendment.  It spends billions on border security, and is a bit of a throwback to the Dick Cheney/Halliburton no-bid contracts.  While a few immigration hawks like Jan Brewer applauded the amendment, Democrats and immigrant rights groups could barely stomach it.  It was a dire compromise that was a giveaway to silence the Joe Arpaio’s and heads of the ICE Union; Sen. Leahy called it a “Haliburton Christmas List.”

Even with the “No Excuses” amendment, the bill was not enough to get Boehner to introduce the legislation.  The GOP House now finds itself in a horrible situation: they killed the immigration reform which both sides worked so hard to bring this far, and now they have got to do something, perhaps even just some token effort, before Congress takes off for August.

The problem is that people like Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) and Sarah Palin, while they are looked toward by a minority of their party for leadership, are just celebrities throwing red meat to any cameras available.  Michelle Bachmann recently announced she would be leaving Congress and is trying to capture a small, loyal, Glen Beck-like viewership that has already encouraged the media to give her so much camera time; Sarah Palin quit her job as governor to become a national media personality/reality star (both literally and figuratively) and picked up a more lucrative media career rather than finish her term as Governor; Louie Gohmert knows that, even if Texas turns blue, his district is safe, so he will toss as much red meat as his audience can possibly devour and go watch the GOP sink from his lifeboat until he retires into a media or lobbyist career.

No matter what happens, the irrational minority that these Republicans appeal to are not interested in immigration reform that does not involve giving Joe Arpaio bigger guns, and so neither are they.  The GOP still, however, needs to look like it is at least trying.  This brings us to the KIDS Act.

The KIDS Act, much like the ARMS Act and STARS Act, is a Republican bill to address the situation of DREAMers that the 2010 DREAM Act would have.  Much like these previous Republicans bills, however, it will probably be watered down to the point of uselessness to the DREAMer community, but may still get them a few cute DREAMers to take a photo next to.

The KIDS Act is being drawn now by Eric Cantor (R-VA), the Majority Leader in the House, and Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), the head of the House Judiciary Committee.  Both Goodlatte and Cantor have had kind rhetoric on DREAMers lately, Goodlatte saying “These children came here through no fault of their own and many of them know no other home than the United States” when he confirmed he was working on the bill.

They both, however, voted against the DREAM Act in 2010, as well as DACA, the Obama Administration’s version of the DREAM Act.  The only thing that has changed since then was the 2012 elections, leading to Reince Priebus’ “Autopsy Report” and a newfound respect for the Latino and Asian vote.  Although House Republicans want to stay loyal to their primary voters, they also know that they are turning states like Texas, Arizona and New Mexico bluer every time they publicly criticize immigration reform.

Watching Republican House interviews, they seem to believe that this is the least they can offer to the Latino demographic and still have plausible deniability over the death of immigration reform.  The problem for them is that they are dead wrong: the Gang of 8 bill was more popular and had more media coverage than anything the House will come up with.  The killing of this bill will feed into a narrative that has already formed around the hostile rhetoric and policy the GOP has had towards immigration and, by proxy, toward Latino and Asian voters.

If Republicans allow this narrative to cement, they will lose the increasingly Latino border states, and cease to be competitive in national and state contests for a generation.